Snowflake and Acxiom have announced plans to build 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 need to move first-party data — a risky 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 used by more than 11,000 clients globally to build, use and share data.

At a high level, Snowflake and Acxiom want to meet 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 important because of different changes in the digital ecosystem, and the consequences of things going wrong with that data are more important than ever, as well,” said Jarrod Martin, CEO at both Acxiom and Kinesso.

The collaboration also looks to act as a corrective for how tech platforms like Google and Meta use marketers’ first-party data without insights into how their walled gardens work.

“If you're Nike, you want to be Nike. You don't want to be Facebook Nike, TikTok Nike, et cetera, and have a different brand identity, reach and frequency strategy — whatever it might be — in each of those platforms,” Martin explained. “By bringing control closer to the client, that enables them to create that consistency and connectivity on their own behalf.”

Unlocking capabilities

At the heart of the latest collaboration is an integration of IPG’s Interact platform directly within marketers’ Snowflake environments via the Snowflake Native App Framework. Interact, launched last year, 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 use 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 that have traditionally been hampered by data silos.

“Acxiom-Kinesso is going to bring a lot of these AI applications directly to marketers, and they can use it on their own data — that's what's so powerful — and not only their own data, the right combination of external data sources that you need, as well,” said Snowflake CMO Denise Persson.

The partners will also create a joint incubation hub to develop new solutions that combine their shared resources, helping upskill teams at IPG and Acxiom and in turn giving clients advanced access to new data, applications and AI solutions.

Already, the partnership is yielding results. IPG Mediabrands is working with a global toy manufacturer to adopt an always-on investment strategy; Kinesso is analyzing tens of millions of dollars in ad spend to power a proprietary media mix model; and Acxiom is helping major financial institutions modernize their martech stacks.

“We have so many joint customers already. This is going to be easy for them to implement,” Persson said. “This is not a one-year journey here, this is a journey of a couple of months to get going.”

A big bet on identity 

Google’s April decision to keep third-party cookies — despite years of industry work in support of a cookieless future — changed the impetus but not the outlook on the need for privacy-safe identity resolution. Acxiom’s RealID, launched in October 2023, is key to the IPG-Snowflake collaboration and remains one of the company’s “big bets,” Martin explained.

“We can extend the reach of a media platform by creating a better identity solution than what they have today. It allows a media partner to get better reach and command CPM premiums… just through the leveraging of an identity solution like RealID,” the executive explained.

RealID bolsters the new collaboration’s transparency efforts and is part of Snowflake’s data clean room offering, allowing marketers to access identity resolution out of the box without a months-long process that would traditionally take months to set up. RealID is also essential for large enterprise marketers who need to manage campaigns across their organizations.

“Being able to create sequential messaging across the enterprise is super important,” Martin said. “Those things might sound trivial, but they create massive cumulative gains when you're able to recognize the same person across all of your touch points.”

RealID is also helping IPG win large integrated business accounts. While Martin would not name specifics, IPG Mediabrands this week won Paramount’s media account for U.S. streaming, Paramount+ and Pluto TV, as well as CBS, BET, VH1 and Comedy Central from Horizon Media as part of a larger shakeup, Deadline reported. Being able to knit together customers across different platforms within a broader organization allows for better monetization of inventory.

“I've got someone who looks like they're a low-value customer, but then when I connect it to another data asset, I can see actually they are high-value customers,” Martin explained, as way of an example. “I now can command a better price premium for that record, knowing that it's actually a high-value customer based on data that we know over here.”