Tim Fletcher is the VP of Product Marketing at Snowflake, a data cloud company focused on driving product positioning and innovation externally for over three years. Previously, he was the CEO and Co-Founder of Stride Software (acquired by Snowflake in 2019), a customer data platform and one of the earliest ISVs powered by Snowflake. He has also worked at notable organizations including Salesforce, McKinsey & Company and more. Tim graduated from the University of Chicago and holds an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Data silos are one of the biggest challenges among modern marketing teams causing a huge impact on the team's performance. Data supports this fact and according to a recent Forrester research, silos cause workers to lose 12 hours a week chasing data.
In this interview we speak to Tim Fletcher, VP of Product Marketing at Snowflake, who highlights the impact of data silos on organizations and shares tips on fixing them.
Tim also discusses the importance of data management platforms for businesses and how Snowflake helps improve operations and decision-making processes.
Spotlight: Accessing and analyzing data from various sources is critical for many businesses. How do data platforms support this? What benefits does it offer for organizations?
Tim Fletcher: Marketers need to acquire customers, retain them and build loyal brand advocates that drive revenue for their business. This need is only heightened by the evolving macroeconomic climate, where brand loyalty and customer-centricity are vital for business growth and organizational success.
However, creating the kinds of experiences that attract customers and keep them engaged requires marketers to deliver highly personalized and relevant experiences that are consistent across all touchpoints. Today’s marketing technology ecosystem is as fragmented as ever and has made customer data available in all kinds of channels and sources — including purchase, point-of-sale, CRM, loyalty programs, website traffic, social media, product usage, email and mobile app data, etc.
On top of that, data management platforms and other third-party brokers offer demographic data, life-event data, behavioral data and more, which can help refine customer profiles and improve targeting but can create an influx of data silos if not merged with an organization’s wider data ecosystem. That’s a lot of data spread across a lot of systems, and a lot of customer experience “surface area” that needs personalizing.
To orchestrate truly differentiated and impactful campaigns and modernize marketing practices that meet evolving customer expectations, marketers must unify all customer data and create a robust Customer 360 in a single data platform. Bringing together disparate data sources to build a strong Customer 360 foundation empowers marketers to deliver truly personalized campaigns and drives the right set of consistent experiences across touchpoints.
Snowflake is one of many data management and analysis solutions available to companies today. How does it stand out from the competition? What unique advantages does it offer?
Today, the Snowflake Data Cloud helps thousands of organizations across industries centralize all of their data to generate a holistic view of their customers, unlocking value for marketing. Snowflake offers organizations a single platform for all their data, instant access to governed data and the ability to seamlessly act on this data to extract maximum value.
First, the Data Cloud is one, single platform that can support various data types and volumes, from high-volume semi-structured ad and website data to highly structured CRM data. It allows organizations a view of their customers across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Having one platform that integrates all data for marketing and aligns with the enterprise source of truth, is a prerequisite for laying the foundation for data-driven marketing.
Beyond centralizing an organization’s own data, Snowflake Marketplace also provides live access to 3rd party data and apps to support enrichment, identity resolution, and other capabilities. In addition, the Data Cloud mitigates data privacy risks by limiting the creation and movement of disparate data copies, as well as through built-in security and access controls so organizations can govern their data and further build trust with their customers.
Last, but not least, the Data Cloud brings with it an expansive ecosystem of MarTech and AdTech vendors building applications around their data as a part of the modern marketing data stack. Snowflake allows customers to work with an open ecosystem that offers best-in-breed platforms. No data-driven marketing is possible without activating the data itself, and the Data Cloud is uniquely positioned to help organizations capture additional value by seamlessly enabling access to data for activation and analytics.
With the Data Cloud, organizations can integrate their data, applications, and systems with a broad ecosystem of best-of-breed partners across CDPs, engagement engines, analytics, media publishers, marketing clouds and more.
What are some common use cases for Snowflake and what industries or businesses can benefit the most from using it?
Today, Snowflake has strong momentum in the adoption of marketing use cases across every industry and with companies of all sizes. While use cases shift depending on each organization’s specific needs, there are a set of common marketing and advertising use cases that we’re seeing customers adopt broadly.
These include:
- Customer 360: Unifying all customer data in Snowflake, resolving identity and enriching profiles with third-party data in Snowflake Marketplace to create a single view of the customer across all different touchpoints.
- Marketing Analytics: Tracking and analysis of data to improve customer experiences, increase the return on investment (ROI) of marketing efforts and craft future marketing strategies. Marketing Analytics supports campaign reporting, customer journey analytics and ad hoc reporting for the marketing team.
- Attribution: Using historical data to develop machine learning algorithms or custom attribution logic to assign conversion credit to each marketing touchpoint.
- Personalization/Segmentation: Leveraging Snowflake’s leading ecosystem for audience creation, segmentation and data activation. With leading CDPs, engagement platforms and modern activation providers built on top of Snowflake, customers can run effective marketing campaigns by tapping into all of their enterprise and customer data.
- Data Science in Marketing: Using Snowflake’s data science capabilities and Snowpark to deliver a highly personalized customer journey, including Lead Scoring, forecasting, next best action recommendations and more.
Can you walk us through a specific example of how a company in the advertising, media or entertainment space uses Snowflake to improve its operations or decision-making processes?
Snowflake has been able to generate strong momentum across industries and media, entertainment and advertising are no exception. With the launch of the Media Data Cloud, back in 2021, Snowflake presented a vision founded on collaboration across the media ecosystem that has reaped benefits for some of the most innovative and modern organizations in the sector, including Experian, Horizon Media, The Trade Desk and more. Many of these customers are leveraging the power of the Data Cloud to drive growth for themselves and their customers by using Snowflake’s privacy-preserving global data clean rooms.
For example, the Disney Ad Sales team has built a clean room solution with Snowflake to give clients advanced pre-planning insights, activation and cross-portfolio measurement in what Disney has determined is a completely privacy-compliant way. In addition, Roku's clean room is purpose-built for TV streaming on top of Snowflake and its industry-leading Media Data Cloud technologies. Its planning and measurement capabilities make it the only clean room to use audience data and linear TV data from direct consumer relationships on Roku’s streaming platform.
Why do you think data-driven marketing is one of the biggest challenges of businesses today?
On one hand, marketing is seen as a strategic lever for organizations and a critical vehicle for customer acquisition, retention and revenue growth. On the other hand, the deeply fragmented MarTech and AdTech ecosystem has forced marketers to overcome the challenge of having to select from across thousands of available applications to assemble their marketing technology stacks — most of which result in data silos that hinder agility and effectiveness.
While this vast number of applications show a dynamic and innovative ecosystem, it also means that organizations (marketing and peer technical teams together) are forced to build the right set of complex data pipelines that support the data flow throughout the composed marketing technology stack — only if that happens are marketers able to deliver the consistent, relevant and seamless experiences the modern customer demands.
Struggling to overcome this challenge, many organizations have turned to creating a patchwork of interconnected systems and data pipelines to stitch data together. Besides being expensive, time-consuming and ineffective, these workarounds create latency in data and analytics, one-off efforts, poor customer experiences and a lack of agility. There is unanimous appetite for marketing leaders from brands to evolve from these outdated practices and reap the benefits of data-driven marketing. That’s where Snowflake can help organizations thrive.
Snowflake has over 5,500 employees worldwide and is trusted by many notable brands, including AT&T, PepsiCo and Asics. So, what’s the secret to this success?
At Snowflake, we lead with the needs of our customers as our North Star and are consistently innovating to help them drive impact with data. The secret starts with being customer-centric and building a product that addresses the main pain points that have slowed organizations’ progress across a number of departments and use cases.
If one analyzes Snowflake’s journey over the last decade, you can see how the Data Cloud has taken big bets and added critical innovative capabilities that directly add value to customers by addressing core needs. When our co-founders first started Snowflake over ten years ago, they came to market with a platform that supported both big data and data warehouse use cases, supported by elasticity and simplicity that struck a chord with customers. They then realized that there is one other unique attribute in the cloud that didn’t exist on-premises, which was collaboration and enabling organizations to connect to their broader data ecosystem.
Over the years, Snowflake has continually evolved to be at the forefront of the data world by first rapidly transforming data analytics in 2014, then data collaboration in 2018 and is now zeroed in on disrupting application development with the Data Cloud. When we release a new product feature, instead of passing the integration problem on to our 7,800+ customers (as of January 31, 2023) to solve 7,800+ different ways, we take time on the front end to deeply integrate it into our single platform and solve the overhead for all customers, so they don’t have to.
As our product offerings continue to evolve and become more complex, we prioritize end-user simplicity and make sure that we maintain an ‘it just works!’ sentiment.
Data security is a big concern for many businesses, especially when it comes to storing data in the cloud. How do you fight against security threats and potential data loss?
One fundamental principle that we have at Snowflake is that security shouldn’t be bolted on, and it shouldn’t be a separate add-on that organizations are required to pay for. That’s why security was baked into the Data Cloud from the very beginning. This includes multiple layers of data protection so customer data stays secure.
Snowflake also provides a rich set of capabilities for customers to better know and protect their data, including, granular-role-based access controls, automatic data classification and dynamic data masking so your organization’s data can be consistently protected, regardless of cloud or region.
For marketers, keeping customer data secure, private and confidential is always top-of-mind. The ability to protect, store and access all customer information, including transaction data, account data, portfolio data and other third-party information like reference, market, and risk data, is critical for how they’re able to meet compliance and risk needs. Privacy regulations have added additional hurdles for companies to collaborate and derive value from their data. Snowflake’s proprietary data sharing technology supports secure function and secures join capabilities, the foundation needed to run a data clean room.
Why are data silos a key issue among organizations, what is their impact and how can companies fix them?
Data silos have long been identified as a core challenge for organizations and can significantly hinder business operations and performance. Siloed data increases the complexity and cost of getting a complete view of the business, making informed decisions, and driving growth and innovation. For marketers, the most severe issue with data silos and data fragmentation is restricting teams from obtaining actionable insights into their consumers, which can have a drastic impact on experience, campaign effectiveness and marketing ROI.
As more and more marketing departments evolve into advanced use cases that depend on automation and AI, the inability to operate from a single view of the customer also prevents machine learning algorithms from gaining complete knowledge of customers, resulting in lower-quality insights and ineffective practices.
To break down data silos, organizations should first execute a diagnosis of what data is critical to address priority business use cases, where that data currently lives, and analyze how it is collected. The most crucial step is to decide which platform has the needed capabilities to act as your enterprise's single source of truth and that’s where Snowflake differentiates itself.
With Snowflake's rapid growth, what do you think the future holds for the company and the data cloud industry as a whole?
As Snowflake continues to innovate and help customers transition into truly data-driven organizations, there are some trends that we are seeing across the ecosystem that we believe will catalyze Snowflake’s and our customers’ growth.
First, the standard will be a single source of truth for all data. No longer will organizations, and marketing departments within those organizations, allow data to be imprisoned by the various applications and solutions that exist within their data stacks. To meet the needs of their customers and deliver the most powerful and personal campaigns, we will continue to see marketing departments gravitate towards modern marketing data stacks on the Data Cloud. The death of the data silo is upon us today, and it will only pick up pace going forward.
In addition, we’re at the start of a renaissance in software development where developers will bring their applications to central combined sources of data, rather than the traditional approach of copying data into applications. Every single application category, whether it’s horizontal or specific to an industry vertical, will be reinvented by the emergence of new data-powered applications — leveraging massive amounts of data to personalize their products and optimize their services. This holds true for the MarTech and AdTech ecosystem, as they continue to build powerful applications faster, leveraging Snowflake’s availability, sharing, monetization, and security infrastructure, so they can focus on their differentiated functionality to power the next era of modern marketing.
Thank you for your time, Tim Fletcher. Best of luck to you and Snowflake!
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