Merkle Improves Customer Experiences While Providing Data Governance and Security

Today, consumers can interact with companies in so many ways, from chatting with a bot to receiving personalized recommendations in a loyalty program. These myriad avenues pose a challenge for brands seeking to deliver effective customer experiences. Merkle, an integrated experience consultancy, powers the experience economy and provides data, technology, design and strategic expertise to help hundreds of clients — including many in the Fortune 500 — drive outcomes. One of its secret ingredients? Its Merkury solution. Merkury is a leading data, identity and insights platform that consolidates consumer data into a single, persistent “person ID” for hyper-personalized campaigns.

Managing massive amounts of first- and third-party data for global brands requires scalable technology and rigorous data governance. Merkle prioritizes innovation, collaboration and compliance, and combined with Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, ensures clients get more value from their data.

GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and other regulations have reshaped data practices for countless organizations, including those involved in marketing and advertising. Despite regulatory change, brands still depend on data to identify, engage and support customers. “Data in the marketing industry is incredibly important,” says Morten Lileng, Global Head of Merkury Engineering at Merkle. “We have to make sure we have enough quality data to send the right marketing message to the right person at the right time and with the correct frequency.”

Seeking to respond faster to clients’ evolving needs and improve compliance, Merkle migrated to Snowflake. “Snowflake makes it incredibly easy for us to do the right thing with data,” says Lileng. “To make sure we’re treating data in the correct way, to iterate and bring value to clients fast and at the right cost.”

Centralized data in the AI Data Cloud streamlines data access and unlocks innovative solutions for Merkle’s clients. Merkle offers multiple data products on Snowflake Marketplace for identity resolution. Using Snowflake Tasks and Streams also simplifies Merkle’s data stack so it needs to rely less on third-party data orchestration tools, leading to up to 20% in cost savings. Snowflake’s near-infinite scaling of storage and compute puts Merkle in a better position to support clients with data. 

Merkle’s governance-centric approach to handling sensitive data, including clients’ PII, aligns directly with Snowflake Horizon Catalog. “Merkle is obsessive about data privacy where our customers are concerned,” says John Gajewski, Senior Vice President Architecture at Merkle. “Being in Snowflake, which was built from the ground up architecturally with security first in mind, has made so many conversations easier for us.”

Since going all-in on Snowflake on AWS, Merkle has been able to securely manage, analyze and leverage data, reducing costs, mitigating data exfiltration risks, and strengthening the company’s reputation as a data privacy leader. The team saves more time on workloads, including the development cycle for data pipelines, which has improved by 64%, contributing to the timely delivery of customer data.

With Snowflake’s AI features at their fingertips, the team at Merkle can more readily improve audience modeling, segmentation and process improvements. For example, Merkle’s request for proposal (RFP) response solution, built with Document AI in Snowflake Cortex, reduces data entry for at least 25 team members while enabling faster response times.

A growing number of Merkle’s clients and partners have adopted Snowflake, which opens up new opportunities to collaborate. “When I joined the customer-facing side of our business three years ago, we were frequently having to consider competing offerings,” Gajewski says. “Now the conversation has pivoted a lot to using Snowflake first.”

It used to be the case that working together securely across organizations, clouds and regions required moving data — and introducing unwanted risk. Merkle now can use Snowflake Secure Data Sharing for live access to data for Merkle’s clients and partners with reduced extract, transform and load (ETL) processes or SFTP. And Snowflake Data Clean Rooms — on which Merkle’s Merkury Clean Rooms are built — allow multiple parties to have appropriate permissions and can analyze data without exposing PII and other sensitive information. 

Snowflake Horizon Catalog is key for ensuring governance across Merkle’s data. Key capabilities such as Snowflake’s data access policies and role-based access control (RBAC) help Merkle comply with internal governance policies and external regulatory requirements, such as the aforementioned GDPR and CCPA.

By streamlining data management, governance and collaboration with Snowflake, Merkle is better equipped to surface insights for clients’ audience-targeting and campaign optimization activities. “The next step in our journey with Merkury for Snowflake is to bring our capabilities into a native app to provide even more valuable data for clients,” Lileng says. “Being able to install native apps in our clients’ own Snowflake environments means we won’t move their data to our app anymore.” The team also expects to yield tangible savings by enhancing its AI-driven marketing solutions with Snowpark.

Merkle is committed to extracting more insights from their wealth of data to create more value for their customers. Expanded use of Snowflake Cortex could simplify data hygiene and help monitor ongoing data quality. Cortex is also on the roadmap for numerous other initiatives, including using Document AI for contract management, internal document management, training and the marketing journey, all important innovations that can help Merkle continue delivering the most valuable experiences for their customers — and their customers’ customers.