How 4 Data Leaders Made Their Marketing Teams Happy (Without Compromising Their Architecture)

Teamwork makes the dream work.

As Data and IT gain more control of buying decisions, their priorities are becoming more important in the buying process for technology — going beyond the flashy features and functionality to understand how the underlying infrastructure works.

Top line priorities like privacy, governance and scalability will beat out a flashy UI every time. But you still need your marketing team to be on board.

Designing a tech stack that satisfies the requirements of each member of your team might seem like a pretty impossible task.

But actually, the modern data stack is simplifying those decisions by bringing a new buying criteria to the table that makes both marketing and data and IT teams happy.

The Foundation of the Modern Data Stack

Your data warehouse is where the magic happens. Whether you have Databricks, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery or Teradata VantageCloud. But composable architecture takes your data warehouse to the next level.

With a Composable CDP, applications sit right on top of the data warehouse to activate identification, real-time interactions, journey orchestration and all with a business-friendly, self-service UI. But the key piece in this is federated query pushdown.

Federated query pushdown allows an application to pull from any data source — data warehouse one, data warehouse two, local data stores and all — to activate customer experiences. Think better data, more speed, more control and governance, better performance.

Below, we’ll take a look at how these data leaders made their way to their marketing team’s hearts through the tech.

4 Data Leaders Who Made Marketing Happy

Data and IT teams at leading brands are making the most of their data cloud platform by pulling applications to the data — not pulling the data to the applications.

Below, we’ll take a look at how technical leaders across banking, telecommunications and more are keeping their data architecture neat while giving marketers the speed (and creativity) they need to self-serve audiences and campaigns.

1. Northwestern Mutual Optimizes Databricks to Activate Campaigns Quickly Without a Backlog of Requests

The team at Northwestern Mutual knew something was wrong when they were seeing fragmented data, with about 200 data labs scattered throughout the organization. They wanted to achieve proper data lineage with all of the classifications of data, and all the security measures — they knew it would be easier to do that and cut down copies by putting it all in one place.

They reimagined their stack with their marketing team in mind for a more modern approach. With a composable architecture, their marketing applications don’t need to copy data out to get things done. Marketers have a handy application that taps straight into their Lakehouse.

Now, business teams can access data directly and quickly, with models that are ready-to-be-utilized for campaigns like cross-sells, upsells and everything between acting on the freshest data available from Databricks.

Not only do the marketing teams enjoy the simplicity of activating their campaigns without waiting months for a request, but data engineers enjoy the simplicity of having their data centralized in their Databricks Lakehouse — without having to deal with backlogs of requests.

2. Liberty Latin America Helps Marketers Create Audiences 75% Faster With Amazon Redshift

The “SQL Guys” at Liberty Latin America didn’t love getting request after request for help automating segments and building campaigns. The marketing team didn’t love waiting.

Rather than keep on that cycle, the team at Liberty Latin America looked for a solution that would help make both teams happy — with unrelenting regulatory management and ease of getting audiences and campaigns to market.

By finding a solution that brought the application to the data, marketing and customer streamlined campaign management, regulatory management and unlocked cost savings.

Automated contact journeys and feedback management made their team more agile, with a reduction in go-live campaigns from weeks to just days. With the ability to create separate environments with market-specific requirements and improved data consistency, the team was able to deliver on their governance goals. And by cutting down on resources from data duplication, the Liberty Latin America team reduced time and effort maintaining multiple data structures, and cut down on storage costs.

3. Saks Fifth Avenue Taps Into Their Snowflake Data Cloud for Secure, Self-Serve Use Cases

Leading retailer Saks’ need to create well-governed data infrastructure, in a way that leaves little room for mistakes, while putting that data directly in the hands of team members that aren’t necessarily well-versed in SQL and programming tools. The answer was composable architecture.

Instead of making copies and shipping it off to a separate customer data platform (CDP), the CDP computes directly where the data lives. Then the marketing team can have self-serve access, with what happens in the background making all the difference with access to more data and better customer experiences.

For Snowflake, composable architecture is giving marketing teams the freedom to test, learn and drive customer outcomes at scale, while giving IT and analytics teams the governance and control they need to keep their data secure — all while saving their teams tons of time.

4. Brightspeed Helps Marketers Get Creative and Have More Fun on Google BigQuery

Leading telecommunications provider Brightspeed needed to give their marketers a solution that would give them more self-serve, without compromising privacy and governance. Brightspeed using Google BigQuery as their Cloud Platform — finding a solution that integrated seamlessly with their data cloud was key.

Marketers had to be able to view a complete customer profile, create and activate audiences aligned to key campaigns, and independently orchestrate across numerous channels, with visibility into performance and incremental benefits to drive continuous improvement — key to maintaining that speed and scale.

So Brightspeed adopted a solution that connects to the data warehouse, with the option to have data either all in in the warehouse, or partially in ActionIQ – giving data flexibility for the real world through federated query pushdown.

By cutting down on copies and giving marketers access to the full breadth of data wherever it’s stored, technology and marketing teams alike get those benefits. With data that’s seamless and quickly activated by marketing teams, Brightspeed is able to move faster and get more creative with the marketing activations they’re launching.

Read more about how Brightspeed moves faster and has more fun with a composable CDP.

Don’t Sacrifice Your Architecture for a Happier Marketing Team

A stack that embraces composable architecture and federated query pushdown can bridge the gap between IT and marketing teams. By maintaining data integrity and governance while empowering marketing teams with the tools they need to innovate and execute campaigns quickly, you can get everyone on board.

Win-wins with your marketing team are rare — but they don’t have to be. Get a solution that brings everyone together by reaching out to our team.

Download The Technical Guide to Composable CDPs to discover the latest insights and strategies shaping the data landscape.