Engaging with your customer at the exact right moment has never been more critical. In fact, 61% of marketing and technology executives say that boosting customer engagement with more personalized experiences will be a primary contributor to growth in 2025. At the same time, several roadblocks are standing in the way of this end goal. Among the challenges are data security, consumer privacy, and disorganized enterprise data strategies. Snowflake and Adobe continue to co-innovate to ensure we are building and integrating essential capabilities that facilitate exceptional customer experiences, efficiently, quickly, and seamlessly.

Adobe and Snowflake’s latest joint innovation focuses on three core areas:

1. Enhancing our Federated Audience Composition partnership with new profile enrichment capabilities
2. Expanding data composability through secure, bi-directional workflows
3. Synchronizing data between Adobe Customer Journey Analytics and Snowflake with the launch of new data mirroring capabilities in Adobe Experience Platform

What are composable CDPs?

A composable CDP is a data management solution that enables businesses to build customer profiles within their own data warehouse and serves as the single source of truth. A typical composable CDP consists of several aspects provided by different vendors:

• Data Storage Layer: The cloud data warehouse (Snowflake) is the foundation, housing all raw and modeled customer data.
• Data Collection Layer: Tools that get behavioral data from web and mobile applications.
• Data Modeling/Transformation Layer: Solutions such as a data build tool are used within the warehouse to clean, transform, and model the raw data into unified customer profiles.
• Data Activation/Reverse ETL Layer: Vendors access modeled data from the warehouse and push it to downstream operational systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, email service providers, and advertising platforms.

Benefits of composable CDPs.

Businesses adopt composable CDPs to address the shortcomings of previous-generation data platforms directly. Organizations are drawn to this warehouse-native approach for several key reasons, which together promise a more flexible, efficient, and powerful way to manage customer data.

Flexibility and control are two features that composable CDPs offer businesses. Composable CDPs empower businesses to select best-of-breed tools for each specific function, from data ingestion to activation. This "pick and choose" approach allows an organization to assemble a tech stack perfectly tailored to its unique needs, rather than settling for the standardized, one-size-fits-all features of a monolithic platform.

A second major driver is enhanced data ownership and governance. In composable CDPs, all customer data resides within the company's own cloud data warehouse instance. This stands in stark contrast to traditional CDPs that require creating and storing a duplicate copy of the data in a third-party vendor's system. By keeping data within their own secure environment, organizations maintain complete control and autonomy over their data assets. This ensures compliance with data privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Composable CDPs also ensure complete data access. Traditional CDPs often focus on ingesting marketing-related or behavioral event data. A composable CDP sits on top of the data warehouse, providing marketers and data teams with immediate access to the full breadth of available information. This includes transactional history, customer support interactions, product usage data, and even the outputs of complex data science models for building richer, more accurate customer profiles and audience segments.

Bringing bidirectional data access and profile enrichment to Federated Audience Composition.

Federated Audience Composition — available now for customers of Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Adobe Journey Optimizer — empowers marketers and practitioners to manage their data in more flexible ways. Today, joint customers of Adobe and Snowflake can:

1. Easily access the full breadth of their enterprise data in Snowflake without data movement, to create high-value audiences in Adobe Experience Platform — including in Real-Time CDP and Journey Optimizer.
2. Utilize the wealth of enterprise data in Snowflake to enrich existing audiences previously created in Real-Time CDP and Journey Optimizer, leveraging the same workflow.
3. Build and train models with Snowflake’s fully managed service for deploying AI and machine learning pipelines. These complement AI Assistant in Adobe Experience Platform to enhance audiences for targeted marketing.
4. Use Adobe Experience Platform to activate audiences and power engagement use cases in Real-Time CDP and Journey Optimizer based on enterprise data and audiences federated from Snowflake.

To build on these capabilities and ensure we are bringing best-of-breed technologies to address customer challenges and unlock new use cases, Adobe will soon introduce:

1. Profile enrichment: Marketers can select specific attributes and aggregates from datasets in Snowflake that are critical for in-the-moment experiences. A subset or aggregate of these datasets and attributes can now be stored in an actionable customer profile in Real-Time CDP and be accessed via Adobe Journey Optimizer. These enriched attributes can then be used for audience creation, enrichment, and engagement when triggered by user actions and events. This new use case and workflow allow attributes in federated audiences to be available for in-the-moment segmentation and personalization.
2. Bi-directional data sync: Customers will now also be able to use this new workflow to access data stored in the real-time customer profiles in Real-Time CDP and Journey Optimizer without moving data. Edge and streaming event-based audiences from Adobe can be combined with other audiences and tables inside Snowflake to power audience analysis workflows, model training, and more.

With this robust functionality, we are offering customers the ability to determine where datasets should reside for specific use cases. We’re also removing the burden of duplicating data unnecessarily. We are also providing a seamless user experience that puts security and governance at the forefront.

Bridging the gap between enterprise data and customer insights.

We’re introducing a powerful new feature in Adobe Experience Platform that automatically synchronizes customer data between Customer Journey Analytics and Snowflake. This new data mirroring capability enables seamless and accurate synchronization of customer data between a company’s Snowflake instance and Customer Journey Analytics. This eliminates manual, time-consuming syncs and ensures businesses have access to up-to-date, accurate customer data.

Key benefits of this new capability.

1. Data accuracy: Data insertions, updates, and deletions are automatically reflected from Snowflake in Customer Journey Analytics, ensuring customer journey analysis is performed with the most up-to-date and accurate customer data.
2. Improved operational efficiency: This new capability in Adobe Experience Platform automatically keeps data in sync between Snowflake and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, eliminating the need for manual updates or code-intensive data transformations. The data mirroring capability further reduces the risk of human error and saves considerable time for IT and business intelligence teams.
3. Full journey visibility: By integrating Snowflake data into Customer Journey Analytics, brands can more easily unify offline data with digital behavioral data to understand the full customer journey. This holistic view of the customer journey reveals deeper, more actionable insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and trends, enabling brands to design and deliver successful customer experiences.

Driving value for our joint customers.

With these co-developed solutions, we’re unlocking more value, providing greater efficiency across systems, and maintaining a focus on governance and privacy. Adobe and Snowflake continue to keep the pulse on the industry to ensure we are removing roadblocks that get in the way of providing customer-centric, highly relevant experiences in a secure manner.

Justin Merickel is vice president, analytics and business development at Adobe, leading the Customer Journey Analytics, Analytics, and Mix Modeler product lines as well as technology partnerships for Adobe Experience Cloud. He joined Adobe in 2012 through the acquisition of Efficient Frontier, where he was vice president of marketing and new product development. Prior to Efficient Frontier, Merickel was managing director of category development at Yahoo! Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles in analytics and marketing. He holds a B.A. in mathematics from Hamilton College.

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