Piano is a leading provider of software and services that help organizations better understand their audiences across digital channels. With these insights in hand, Piano customers can intelligently serve audiences with personalized experiences that keep them engaged and drive revenue, all through a single unified platform.
Speaking at Snowflake’s recent Media Data Cloud Summit, David Restrepo, vice president of partnerships at Piano, walked attendees through the most recent chapter in Piano’s incredible growth journey: the creation and integration of Piano Analytics, powered by Snowflake.
Designing channel specific analytics
“As we built out and grew Piano, we increasingly recognized the importance of data—both to our customers, and to ourselves—in helping to inform audiences and present them with the right next actions,” Restrepo said. “So, it really made sense for us to stand up and offer our own world-class analytics package.”
The goal for Piano Analytics was to create an analytics package that’s truly able to meet the demands of modern organizations across diverse industries. That meant not just supporting a broad range of channels and media, but being designed around those channels. It meant creating a solution built for the multi-channel, multimedia, multi-cloud era of content delivery and consumption.
Piano acquired AT Internet in February 2021 after learning they had already built the capabilities that could bring this vision of a strong media and content analytics package to life. This milestone represented the first time a world-class digital analytics solution was combined with journey orchestration and personalized commerce to transform data into customer experiences. Following several months of integration and onboarding work, Piano Analytics was launched in the fall of 2021.
How Snowflake brings speed, efficiency, and ease of use to Piano Analytics
When Piano began adapting AT Internet’s capabilities to build Piano Analytics, Restrepo and the team chose to re-architect Snowflake for three key reasons:
- Fast and efficient querying
- Flexible, unified data model
- Unified user view
“One of the first things that really compelled us about Snowflake is that it separates the compute from the query,” Restrepo said. “When we’re running queries, Snowflake can calculate the optimal amount of resources needed based on the size of the data set. As everything is pay-per-use, that optimization keeps our costs low, so that in turn, we can keep costs low for our partners.”
Snowflake’s rapid time-to-insight also plays a critical role in turning audience data into the right next actions at speed. “Because we’re built on Snowflake, when an event launches on a page, the results of that interaction can show up in our tool within 2 minutes—offering near real-time insight across audiences of millions,” Restrepo explained.
Finally, with so many devices, channels, and media platforms to support and gather data from, Snowflake’s platform helps take much of the challenge out of uniting and sharing the data generated by Piano and its partners.
“Snowflake makes sharing data from across solutions, across organizations, and even across clouds, much easier,” Restrepo said. “Secure Snowflake connectors mean that our partners don’t have to spend huge amounts of time and effort managing Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) projects, or maintaining pipelines.”
As a final note, Restrepo emphasized the value of being part of the Snowflake ecosystem, and what that means for Piano customers. “One of the big reasons why customers don’t see strong ROI on their software investments is that data gets locked into silos in their solutions, where its value is limited,” he explained.
“With Snowflake, we’re in good company. We’re joining an ecosystem of many of the biggest software providers out there, and by enabling greater interoperability and data sharing between our offerings, we’re going to be able to create value in a way that the software industry has never seen before.”
Unifying data insights for Piano customers
Closing out his session, Restrepo shared a short case study, detailing the value that Piano and Snowflake have delivered for a global multimedia broadcasting organization.
The company reaches more than 450 million households across more than 200 countries. Prior to working with Piano, their analytics landscape across those operations was highly fragmented. Different channels and territories had their own platforms, which limited global audience visibility, and restricted how the organization could operationalize its data.
“By bringing all of their data together under the Piano Analytics umbrella with Snowflake, they now have a unified model that incorporates granular data from more than 100 sites, and offers incredibly detailed insights into exactly how its global audience is engaging with its diverse media offerings,” Restrepo explained.
So far, that’s resulted in an 11% increase in the organization’s global reach—a figure that equates to millions of additional views and plays, and higher engagement and revenue across the globe. But Snowflake also has a broader impact on the organization itself.
“Snowflake is really helping the customer become a more data-led organization,” explained Restrepo. “Because of the scale this broadcaster operates at, they would have had to invest heavily into their own infrastructure to do the kind of querying that’s easily done with Snowflake. By enabling that deep querying, Snowflake has helped them learn so much about their audience and content, influencing everything from how they produce content, to how their web pages are optimized.”