Over 11,000 attendees experienced the Snowflake summit in Las Vegas earlier this summer. If anyone is wondering if the industry is ready to attend in-person events, the answer was a resounding yes as evidenced by this event.
Why Snowflake
The pandemic has accelerated brand’s need for digital transformation, and many are choosing Snowflake as part of their tech stack to modernize their data architecture. Merkle has seen a rise in migrations from on-premise solutions like Terradata and Netezza for hosting an enterprise data warehouse to the Snowflake data cloud. Snowflake is an attractive solution since it can work on any of the three major cloud platforms; AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. And a brand is not locked in to only one of the three major providers.
If you’re a marketer, you may not have heard about or paid attention to Snowflake…yet. But all great marketers understand that data is the key to success, even though it is often difficult to access within their own organization. Technical teams, however, seem as excited about Snowflake as a six-year-old kid who just won a jackpot of tickets at the arcade.
Data Sharing
If marketers desire easier, faster, more accurate data to activate, they just won the jackpot too because the next iteration of data-driven personalization will rely on efficient data sharing, a key principle of the Snowflake data cloud. This includes sharing within an organization, but also with vendors, agencies, distributors, marketplaces, media, and more in a privacy-safe way. Snowflake is bringing technical and marketing teams together by enabling data sharing in a fast, secure, and efficient (one copy) manner.
This is powered in part by the Snowflake Data Marketplace. With Merkle’s DataSource on the Marketplace, brands can bolster their owned first-party data with accurate third-party data, building complete views of customers to fuel hyper-personalized customer experiences. The Marketplace allows this to be done in a privacy-safe and fast manner via a secure sharing platform that does not require setting up additional secure portals to support personally identifiable information sharing.
Snowflake + Tableau
In addition to acting on data, Snowflake makes it easier to interpret the data too. Merkle’s analytics team is creating powerful dashboards using Salesforce’s Tableau visualization tool and accessing the data in Snowflake. The more data that is shared, the more impactful the insights can be. For example, Merkle recently launched an Inflation Resiliency Dashboard using Snowflake and Tableau. This data allows brands to see how different markets are impacted by rising inflation and adjust accordingly.
Soon, this indicator will be available as a value through the DataSource third-party data offering from Merkle to be appended at the individual level for even more relevant segmentation, messaging, and offers. For more ideas on how to leverage this data in today’s market be sure to listen to the recent webinar How Inflation Impacts Marketers, Brands, and Consumers.
Industry solutions
Snowflake has recognized that reaching marketers, in addition to its technical audience, is more effectively done through an industry lens. Merkle is already aligned to those of Snowflake’s, including retail, CPG, financial services, healthcare, and entertainment. The blending of technology and marketing for a specific industry is the premise of Merkle’s Retail Data Accelerator, built on Snowflake and Tableau.
Merkle is uniquely positioned to advise technical and marketing teams on architecting your data migration to meet your business goals by also meeting the needs of your customers. Contact Merkle today to start taking advantage of Snowflake to modernize your tech stack!