The Zeta Marketing Platform Powered by Snowflake:
Learn how Zeta delivers data-driven marketing analytics
By Ryohei Okabe and Brad McNeely
As part of the Powered by Snowflake program, Zeta is one of many organizations that have chosen to develop solutions built on the Snowflake Data Cloud to deliver value to their customers. This allows Zeta to be unburdened from the constraints and limitations of traditional database solutions by focusing on delivering data-driven value for their customers.
Zeta maximizes outcomes for marketers by simplifying the complexities of customer data, bringing together data from multiple sources in a variety of formats. Through the Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP), clients have the ability to:
- Bring their disparate data sources together
- Enrich their data with Zeta’s proprietary Data Cloud
- Gain insights from that data
- Build customer experiences using visual workflows
- And activate and measure audiences across all channels using a direct data share from your Snowflake cloud to the ZMP
By leveraging Snowflake as a central part of the ZMP architecture, Zeta has been able to take advantage of Snowflake’s elasticity and unique architecture, which removes obstacles present in traditional on-prem and other cloud-based systems.
The ZMP, like other Powered by Snowflake solutions, benefits from the ability to isolate workloads to dedicated compute resources to remove contention present in legacy systems. Snowflake gives Zeta the ability to scale compute resources vertically to right size the computing power to meet the needs of their users — as well as horizontally to accommodate periods of high concurrency. Because of Snowflake’s elasticity, these configurations are easily, instantly, dynamically, and non-disruptively changeable as needed to ensure the ZMP meets the needs of its users while allowing Zeta to manage costs by sizing the compute layer appropriately. When there is no activity in the ZMP, the compute layer suspends until needed. By leveraging these capabilities, Zeta is no longer spending time tuning queries or managing infrastructure. The infrastructure is there when it’s needed and can be resized on demand without interrupting the user experience. This allows Zeta to focus on maximizing the value of their customers’ data.
Zeta also leverages Snowflake’s data sharing capability to exchange data without the need to physically move the data. Combined with Snowflake’s elastic architecture to deliver performance, data sharing speeds time to value for the Zeta customer by processing data in a data share powered Zeta clean room that eliminates the need to send copies of data to cloud storage or upload to a FTP server for processing. When the source data is refreshed or updated, it is instantly available in the share without the need to create new extracts.
Throughout 2018 Zeta rigorously tested a number of different solutions and selected Snowflake. Zeta migrated the ZMP to Snowflake in early 2019. Prior to this, different data sets were in siloed locations which made it extremely challenging to have a unified view for various use cases involving querying or machine learning modeling. Zeta was also suffering from performance issues with the older data stores and the price to performance ratio was becoming less optimal with each successive iteration.
Drivers and deciding factors to migrate to Snowflake include:
- Support for semi-structured data with no preset schema
- Support for importing/exporting multiple data storage types (e.g. ORC, Parquet, JSON, etc.)
- Eliminate concurrency limitations
- Strong support for the frameworks Zeta already used (Spark, Java)
- Automatic and rapid scaling both up and down with virtual warehouses and time-based, pay-per-query pricing allows Zeta to optimize costs.
The ZMP delivers value at scale by taking advantage of Snowflake’s flexible, real-time storage and elastic compute. Snowflake’s secure sharing changed the paradigm of data connectivity for Zeta by allowing data to be accessed on demand outside of the walls of the ZMP. The power and scalability of Snowflake enables the ZMP to present insights and opportunities to guide marketers while providing all the tools to match the right message with the right customer at the right time in a seamless UI. Zeta leverages Snowflake in multiple AWS regions for high availability.
Zeta also provides rich insights to clients by matching their customer data against Zeta’s proprietary Data Cloud with a clean room solution. With the escalating need of organizations to protect not only their own, but their customers’ sensitive data, Zeta has recently started leveraging Snowflake’s data secure sharing capabilities as a means to perform customer matching without requiring clients to expose the data to Zeta. A Zeta Clean Room is established by having the client share their match tables with Zeta to a double-blind environment where Zeta makes matching logic (functions) available in the clean room to perform the matching process.
To see a demo of the ZMP and learn more about how Snowflake and Zeta partner to maximize customer experiences for marketers, check out this video.
*Ryohei Okabe is Senior Director of Product at Zeta Global and Brad McNeely is a Senior Partner Sales Engineer at Snowflake
