AWS re:Invent wrapped up earlier this month in person in Las Vegas. The week was packed with knowledge-dropping sessions and networking opportunities with over 50,000 industry experts. The keynotes shared AWS’s plans to build end-to-end data and AI offerings in the new year as well as the company’s heavy investment in industry solutions. Pushing further up the software as a service (SaaS) stack, AWS also debuted its AWS Supply Chain offering, which we are excited to see in action in the new year.
Overall, it was a great event for marketers and technologists alike. Merkle contributed to the happenings by hosting happy hour with our CDP partners ActionIQ and dinner with Tealium.
Going into 2023, here are a few highlights that we took away from the event that your organization should know:
1. AWS Investing in Clean Rooms
We’ve seen the evolution and onboarding of data clean rooms explode in the last few years, so it’s no huge surprise that AWS formally unveiled its new Clean Room technology. AWS Clean Rooms helps customers and their partners more easily and securely match, analyze, and collaborate on their combined datasets in a privacy-safe way without revealing underlying data. According to AWS, users will have the ability to create clean rooms in minutes with the perk of better collaboration without the need to share raw data.
2. Ads and Marketing Brand Building
AWS for Advertising and Marketing, a new initiative to help accelerate advertising and marketing transformation, held several events at re:Invent to promote their work and start establishing themselves at the conference. AWS for Advertising and Marketing features services and solutions purpose-built to meet the needs of advertising agencies, marketers, publishers, ad technology providers, and analytics service providers. It helps customers deliver personalized ad experiences, optimize ad serving performance and cost, and innovate on audience segmentation and attribution. This area of AWS’s business is going to grow rapidly in 2023 and Merkle is excited to be a key partner in this category.
3. Focus on Cost Optimization and Custom App Development
Cost optimization and modernization will continue to be a flagship tenet of AWS into 2023. AWS allows customers to take control of cost and continuously optimize spend. AWS's breadth of services and pricing options offer the flexibility to effectively manage costs and keep the performance and capacity required by only paying for the space that’s used. This is an attractive point for brands looking to save on data management costs, or even looking to remove physical data center space.
App modernization also appears to be a key area of focus as customers look at serverless to re-platform mainframe and applications as a means to optimize.
Merkle is excited about our growing partnership with AWS and the innovations they are driving. We’re an Advanced Tier Services partner and can help your brand modernize data management efforts to serve world-class CX to your customers and prospects. Contact our team here to learn more.