The Trade Desk on Thursday announced its first native app built for use with a separate cloud or data warehouse. It’s called the Connector App on Snowflake.
The idea is to more readily connect sales and conversion data from a brand or merchant with campaign optimization happening on TTD.
“Until now, a lot of what we’re talking about was present in Snowflake, but definitely required resourcing of a data engineering team in order to make it actionable,” Gabe Richman, TTD’s GM of global identity and platform strategy, told AdExchanger.
What’s different now, he said, is the data is immediately live. It never leaves the Snowflake account and can be operated by most ad tech or agency execs, he said.
Or, as put by David Wells, Snowflake’s industry principal for its Media, Entertainment & Advertising vertical, the data is now “accessible to non-technical personas.”
So, what’s the point?
Aside from simplifying the data science to be serviceable for people who don’t know the SQL coding language, there is one killer use case advantage with the new Connector App, Wells said. Retail conversion data can now be returned at the SKU level. Rather than having an aggregated view of sales in, say, the orange juice category, he said. Now, an advertiser or retailer might target the kinds of shoppers who prefer high-pulp OJ.
It’s a feature that more retail media advertisers are calling for, he said. So retailers are doing more to provide the “the granularity of insights in terms of what’s working.”
It is also the second time this week that TTD has announced a new data integration that is relatively innocuous, except for the fact that SKU-level sales information is being passed to the DSP. The other example being a new tie-up between TTD and Instacart and Ocado.
The Connector App goes beyond a typical data onboarding setup, something Snowflake and TTD have had as an integration for years. Onboarding is just a data dump and match, but with this live app native on Snowflake, live TTD campaigns can receive feedback on what types of media or targeting led to those sales.
And for Snowflake it’s a useful tool because, within its internal structure, Media, Entertainment & Advertising is a totally separate vertical as Retail. Many retailers use Snowflake as their data warehouse for planning and inventory management, or as a martech ecosystem hub, Wells said. But they don’t think of Snowflake as a natural conduit for their retail media network businesses.
But as TTD goes out and wins more business among retailers, their number of “mutuals” (which is to say, customer overlap) increases, Wells said. And then those retailers will see the use cases Snowflake has outside of the retail category, and within the ads vertical.
