LiveRamp Customers Build ‘Foundation of Identity’ With Snowflake Native Apps

The best marketing is truly data-driven, creating powerful product promotions and offers through an understanding of customer needs and preferences. But for many organizations, building this understanding is more akin to solving an ever-growing jigsaw puzzle (with no easy edge pieces!) than reading data insights from a beautiful dashboard.

Every customer store interaction, online transaction, form fill, event participation, chatbot response, text request, like, review, complaint, and click creates another fragment of data tagged by a variety of identifier “keys.” Those fragments must be consolidated, normalized, and analyzed consistently to match back to a unified, 360-degree customer profile and help marketers understand the best way to engage, personalize and influence their audience. It’s a potentially cumbersome and time-consuming process that too often requires moving or sharing access to sensitive customer data. 

The search for an easier way to deploy identity resolution solutions sparked LiveRamp’s creation of some of the very first Snowflake Native Apps in 2022. And their customers liked what they saw, according to Erin Boelkens, VP of Product, Identity at LiveRamp.

“Our clients need to keep privacy at the forefront,” she says. “The Snowflake Native App Framework really helps them give their customers the reassurance that their data is not traveling across the internet, and that they’re able to do all of their data processing within their own environment.”

LiveRamp is an identity solution that helps companies around the world better understand their customers through deeper connections. This includes enterprise identity resolution, transcoding for heightened connectivity, and solutions to facilitate data sharing and activation. The LiveRamp Identity Resolution and Transcoding Snowflake Native App is currently available in Snowflake Marketplace.

Over the past year, LiveRamp has been using its experience and expertise to expand its Snowflake Native App offerings into more of its product suite, adding capabilities around resolving PII touch points, managing customers’ existing custom integrations with LiveRamp, and being able to activate data faster to shorten time to value. 

The result? LiveRamp’s Snowflake Native App adoption has increased by more than 80% over the prior year. 

“We’re adding more and more capabilities, and at the same time, clients are rethinking their data stack and starting to identify the role that the native app can play within that strategy,” says Boelkens. “We’re really excited about the acceleration they're seeing by integrating these capabilities at a foundational level across all of their own cloud workloads.”

Let’s take a closer look at three ways the Snowflake Native App model benefits LiveRamp customers.

The primary benefit here is privacy—data stays within the customer’s environment and LiveRamp never sees it, so there’s less exposure risk. But there’s also a speed-to-value advantage that customers discover along the way. If you don’t have to duplicate data, then you don’t have to pay egress costs or send your data across the internet, which means you can build your connections and get down to business faster.

Cross Screen Media has seen this benefit firsthand. The company is building out a planning, targeting and measurement solution all within Snowflake, and needed to join and resolve identifiers across disparate data sets from a variety of partners.

Building on LiverRamp’s reputation for interoperability, Cross Screen incorporated RampID as the foundation for the planning, targeting and measurement capabilities. The Snowflake Native App model allows Cross Screen to incorporate identity resolution capabilities in a secure, privacy-protected manner—and according to Boelkens, this is inspiring a lot of talk about additional use cases and the art of the possible with Snowflake Native Apps.

The RampID Snowflake Native App unlocks something like an “identity on demand” use case, where customers can customize their identity workflows based on their own requirements. Sometimes they need feedback on touchpoints very quickly, while other pipelines don’t need as much acceleration. Instead of relying on LiveRamp for turnaround times, customers can turn up and turn down their warehouse needs as demands change.

Acadia, a digital media agency, wanted to accelerate end-to-end pipeline for its clients while also enhancing security for clients’ PII. The company is working to bring client audiences through LiveRamp’s identity resolution and activation capability within Snowflake. Their clients don’t need to move data, which helps protect sensitive data. According to Boelkens, Acadia is finding that it’s able to maintain reach and address availability across a variety of partners and on the platforms of its choice.

With the Snowflake Native App Framework, everything needed to resolve or translate identifiers is loaded into the customer’s environment, appropriate permissions are granted so the app knows what database and tables it is allowed to access, and the customer is ready to go. Because the app operates within the customer’s walls, they can maintain control over their most sensitive and valued data. 

One advantage of a Snowflake Native App is that companies don’t have to make a major project out of it. They can start with one use case, get more familiar with the app and how it benefits their workstreams, and then start thinking of other places it could be valuable. As an early adopter itself, LiveRamp is seeing this progression happen within its ecosystem.

“Our customers understand the value of building a strong data foundation that can then be used downstream,” says Boelkens. “So we’re seeing new conversations around different pain points, like being able to have one join key for all customer data tables, or trying to get better connectivity between customer data. And they can connect all of these best-of-breed capabilities together to create a customized solution that meets their business needs.” 

One conversation quickly coming to the forefront is first-party data. With cookie deprecation on the horizon and companies losing that customer-centric signal, organizations that don’t have a lot of first-party data on their own customers are looking for options. Marketers are also being pushed to do more with less and in a shorter time, and they are constantly working with the data team to find a new edge. 

That’s where LiveRamp comes in, and where the Snowflake Native App becomes vital to unlocking the value of data for marketers. By speeding up the process of resolving that first-party data and putting it into a marketing-friendly UI, LiveRamp allows marketers to quickly get their hands on true customer insights that they can turn around and activate into various marketing and media destinations.

“It all starts with the foundation of identity, which is why it’s perfect that identity was our first native app available,” says Boelkens. “As we look forward, we’ll have more first-party identity solutions available in Snowflake, as well as the ability to do segmentation and activation, which is going to be generally available in early 2024.”

Click here to check out LiveRamp’s Identity Resolution and Transcoding app in Snowflake Marketplace, or contact LiveRamp to discuss other capabilities available as Snowflake Native Apps. To learn more about how LiveRamp enables client optimization with Snowflake Native Apps, watch this video.