Snowflake and Acxiom have announced plans to construct and deploy a marketing function powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and built natively in the cloud, per details shared with Marketing Dive. The pair hope to break the “black box” model that underlies most agency-brand relationships by enabling Acxiom parent Interpublic Group of Companies (IPG) to bring its proprietary data, identity and collaboration tools directly into brands’ Snowflake environments.
The collaborative offering will eliminate the have to move first-party data — a dangerous endeavor on the privacy and competitive fronts — and gives brands more transparency into and control over their data and marketing operations. It represents the next step in a long-standing partnership between IPG’s data arm and the data cloud company, which is utilized by greater than 11,000 clients globally to construct, use and share data.
At a high level, Snowflake and Acxiom want to satisfy brands’ expansive data needs and address challenges around enabling security and compliance, real-time insights, precise audience segmentation, improved personalization and — increasingly — a foundation for AI experiments and activations.
“First-party data is becoming more and more necessary because of various changes in the digital ecosystem, and the consequences of things going incorrect with that data are more necessary than ever, as well,” said Jarrod Martin, CEO at each Acxiom and Kinesso.
The collaboration also looks to act as a corrective for the way tech platforms like Google and Meta use marketers’ first-party data without insights into how their walled gardens work.
“If you are Nike, you wish to be Nike. You don’t desire to be Facebook Nike, TikTok Nike, et cetera, and have a unique brand identity, reach and frequency strategy — whatever it is likely to be — in each of those platforms,” Martin explained. “By bringing control closer to the client, that permits them to create that consistency and connectivity on their very own behalf.”
Unlocking capabilities
At the heart of the latest collaboration is an integration of IPG’s Interact platform directly inside marketers’ Snowflake environments via the Snowflake Native App Framework. Interact, launched last 12 months, is a marketing engine powered by Acxiom that serves as a framework for data flow across the entire campaign lifecycle. The integration allows for marketers to make use of tools like Snowflake’s collaborative data clean rooms without transferring sensitive data.
Interact includes AI features, powered by Snowflake Cortex, that help brands optimize campaigns, predict performance and generate personalized content — three key parts of many marketers’ AI-focused transformation efforts which have traditionally been hampered by data silos.
“Acxiom-Kinesso goes to bring a number of these AI applications on to marketers, and they’ll apply it to their very own data — that is what’s so powerful — and not only their very own data, the right combination of external data sources that you just need, as well,” said Snowflake CMO Denise Persson.
The partners may even create a joint incubation hub to develop latest solutions that mix their shared resources, helping upskill teams at IPG and Acxiom and in turn giving clients advanced access to latest data, applications and AI solutions.
Already, the partnership is yielding results. IPG Mediabrands is working with a worldwide toy manufacturer to adopt an always-on investment strategy; Kinesso is analyzing tens of thousands and thousands of dollars in ad spend to power a proprietary media mix model; and Acxiom helps major financial institutions modernize their martech stacks.
“We have so many joint customers already. This goes to be easy for them to implement,” Persson said. “This will not be a one-year journey here, this can be a journey of a few months to get going.”
A giant bet on identity
Google’s April decision to maintain third-party cookies — despite years of industry work in support of a cookieless future — modified the impetus but not the outlook on the need for privacy-safe identity resolution. Acxiom’s RealID, launched in October 2023, is essential to the IPG-Snowflake collaboration and stays considered one of the company’s “big bets,” Martin explained.
“We can extend the reach of a media platform by making a higher identity solution than what they’ve today. It allows a media partner to improve reach and command CPM premiums… just through the leveraging of an identity solution like RealID,” the executive explained.
RealID bolsters the latest collaboration’s transparency efforts and is an element of Snowflake’s data clean room offering, allowing marketers to access identity resolution out of the box with out a months-long process that might traditionally take months to establish. RealID can also be essential for giant enterprise marketers who need to administer campaigns across their organizations.
“Being capable of create sequential messaging across the enterprise is super necessary,” Martin said. “Those things might sound trivial, but they create massive cumulative gains if you’re capable of recognize the same person across your whole touch points.”
RealID can also be helping IPG win large integrated business accounts. While Martin wouldn’t name specifics, IPG Mediabrands this week won Paramount’s media account for U.S. streaming, Paramount+ and Pluto TV, in addition to CBS, BET, VH1 and Comedy Central from Horizon Media as part of a bigger shakeup, Deadline reported. Being capable of knit together customers across different platforms inside a broader organization allows for higher monetization of inventory.
“I’ve got someone who looks like they are a low-value customer, but then once I connect it to a different data asset, I can see actually they’re high-value customers,” Martin explained, as way of an example. “I now can command a greater price premium for that record, knowing that it’s actually a high-value customer based on data that we all know over here.”
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