The modern digital advertising industry has a difficult decision point, with many executives wanting to heed the new privacy imperative whilst nevertheless sharing that audience data with third-party data companies.

That dualism would seem to be intractable – but Bill Stratton doesn’t think so.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the global head of media, entertainment and advertising at data services  company Snowflake, says there is a way for publishers to benefit from ad data services whilst also keeping hold of those important records.

Snowflake’s in the cloud

Stratton’s Snowflake today went to market with a new-look platform, Media Data Cloud, that lets publishers join and interpret data, using ad data services like insights, activation, and measurement, with privacy in mind.

Scooping together several of Snowflake’s existing capabilities, the new platform features include:

  • Snowflake Data Marketplace, including “ready-to-query data products and
    services from over 175 data partners” like comScore, Foursquare, IAS, Merkle and NCSolutions.
  • Joining and sharing of consumer data without copying or export via traditional APIs, using cloud infrastructure.
  • Security administration using data clean rooms and auditing features.

Disney Advertising Sales, Warner Media, Horizon Media and Open X are amongst the early named customers.

Experian’s data services are being offered within Snowflake itself, rather than externally. Likewise, VideoAmp and The Trade Desk offer built-in activation and measurement whilst AWS, DataRobot and Habu power cloud data capabilities.

VideoAmp Joins Data In Snowflake’s Cloud For Privacy-Driven Insights: CEO McCray

No copying

Media companies with subscribers have traditionally collected subscriber information, enabled through an identity graph and powered through cross-device identifiers, Stratton observes.

“As a publisher you would typically have to copy and send that data about your customer to an identity partner, a company like an Experian or a LiveRamp or others,” he says.

“Using the Snowflake Media Data Cloud … (you can do the) identity from within Snowflake itself so that that media publisher or the advertiser who has the customer data doesn’t have to send it anywhere, they keep it where it already exists in their Snowflake environment.

“We’re bringing applications to where your data, is as opposed to the privacy and sometimes governance challenges of copying and sending data out.”

‘Always-on identity’

Snowflake is a cloud data storage company that has been offering data services to media and advertising customers.

Stratton says they can choose to join their own customer data with that of partners by using glue like a hashed email addressed or an anonymous identifier, for example.

Instead of sending data to partners for measurement or enrichment, companies can choose to do it without shipping out data.

“At the end of the day, they don’t have to move or copy their data anywhere, they’re just designing their own collaboration rules,” Stratton adds, calling it “always-on identity”.

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews