May 2023 Summaries

At Census, we believe that data activation workflows should receive the same care and attention as production-grade software, without sacrificing governance and observability for user friendliness. Modern data teams already have solutions for quality, but existing data integration platforms like CDPs prioritize user friendliness over these concerns. To address this, Census has launched its Git integration called GitLink, which brings software development best practices to reverse ETL pipelines, enabling version control, testing, and peer review. With GitLink, users can create, edit, and review Census SQL Models and Syncs directly in YAML files, and bi-directionally sync changes between the Census workspace and Git repository, ensuring data activation workflows are completely manageable in code. The integration also enables governance for every use case, automated integration testing, and version control with seamless rollbacks, making it a huge leap forward for data and marketing team collaboration.

Snowflake Summit 2023 is set to take place from June 26-29, 2023, at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. With over 300 sessions and numerous after-hours parties, attendees can choose from various options to build their personalized itinerary. The summit features a diverse lineup of sessions, including fireside chats with industry leaders, data-driven marketing talks, and innovative approaches to delivering personalized experiences. Additionally, there are several parties that promise to turn the Summit experience up a notch, such as Low-Key Data Happy Hour, Chill and Grill, Data on the Rocks, Rooftop Social at Snowflake Summit, and Sigma Disco: Data Meets Dance Floor. To help attendees navigate the packed agenda, a selection of must-see sessions has been curated, including CO305: Collaborate or Die, IN032: What It Means to Be a Data-Driven Organization, ML100: Under the Hood, MA302: Composable CDP, and BONUS: S&P Global and Census Workshop.

The Census team has released its first dbt package, `dbt_census_utils`, which provides six macros to simplify data preparation for activation in over 200 SaaS tools. These macros address common challenges such as identifying personal emails vs. business emails, cleaning names for advertising destinations, and standardizing country codes. The package is designed to be reusable and can be used by anyone, regardless of whether they use Census or not. It was developed in collaboration with Stephen Ebrey, the founder of Sawtelle Analytics and OA Club Data Champion, who contributed his expertise and experience to create a high-quality package that addresses specific pain points for data teams. The package is now available on the dbt package hub and can be used by anyone looking to simplify their data preparation workflow.

Snowflake has accepted Census into its Partner Connect program, a milestone that unifies first-party data and audiences for businesses such as Canva, Loom, Notion, Sonos, and Vistaprint to drive more personalized marketing experiences. This partnership streamlines first-party data integration into downstream business tools, offering benefits like easy accessibility, streamlined data orchestration, data consistency, and enhanced security. To get started with Census on Partner Connect, users can navigate to the platform, configure the connection, activate their account, sign up for a Census account, test the connection, and sync with over 200 business tools, ultimately making data actionable for businesses.

The Reuter's Strategic Marketing Conference brought together high-level marketing executives from brands like Jeopardy, Nike, and Chipotle to discuss key topics such as authentic storytelling, technological innovation, and strategic data utilization. The conference highlighted the importance of cultivating community, creating emotional investments among consumers, and leveraging influencers and ambassador programs. Executives also emphasized the need for a customer-centric approach to marketing, focusing on personalization, storytelling, and authenticity. Additionally, the conference explored the intricacies of managing a martech stack, creating a 360-degree view of customers, and unlocking valuable first-party data insights. The discussions stressed the importance of trust, stakeholder involvement, and focusing on the customer journey as a whole to drive better experiences.

The modern data stack is increasingly seen as a must-have, but implementing these tools still requires buy-in from the business side. Measuring the ROI of the modern data stack involves communicating costs and value to both the tools and people who run them. This includes understanding capital expenses, operating expenses, and the skills required to run the show. Many companies face challenges in attributing value due to varying needs and skill sets across small and large companies. To overcome this, it's essential to research company goals and objectives and focus on tools that make deliverables possible with minimal manual intervention. Ultimately, choosing which problems to tackle ties back to business objectives, and the elements of a modern data stack should directly connect to these goals. Borrowing from agile engineering principles can help stakeholders see the ROI by tackling specific, small goals. Investing in more managed systems can create stability in the entire data ecosystem, while onboarding time is also essential when calculating ROI.

CDPs like Segment promise quick wins with your data but behind the shiny promises are fundamental problems such as incomplete data sets, data you can't trust, and vendor lock-in. These platforms often fail to live up to their promises leaving behind a disjointed and incomplete data set that cannot be put to good use. They also lack control over how data is collected and transformed which can lead to missing key data points or compromised data quality. Furthermore, CDPs are essentially "black boxes" where you have no say in the security and governance of your data, making it vulnerable to outages and data loss events. In contrast, Snowplow's behavioral first-party customer data is rich and granular, delivered in a raw, unchanged format, allowing for a unified view of the customer with unmatched data quality. Snowplow also offers flexibility and total data ownership, enabling users to run their infrastructure natively in their cloud environment. The platform is perfectly suited to work alongside other platforms to form a complete data stack, unlocking opportunities for your data and democratizing it across multiple teams in the organization.

Marketing attribution modeling is crucial for optimizing marketing strategies and improving ROI, but current software solutions are often too rigid and inflexible, leading to inaccurate and incomplete results. Modeling marketing data in plain SQL can help overcome these limitations by providing more flexibility, control, and transparency into the attribution process. By using SQL, marketers can define their own attribution rules and models, integrate data from multiple sources, and analyze the effectiveness of different marketing channels and campaigns. While there are still some limitations to be aware of, such as positional attribution not perfectly representing human decision-making, modeling marketing data in SQL can help gain deeper insights into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and drive better business outcomes.

Marketers have more customer data than ever before, but struggle to activate cross-channel personalized experiences due to lack of access to a unified view of their customers. The traditional Customer Data Platform (CDP) model has limitations, such as rigid data models and redundancies across tools. A Composable Customer Data Platform, built on the Snowflake Data Cloud, leverages existing data infrastructure to power marketing personalization and customer engagement, offering completeness, flexibility, cost savings, faster time-to-value, consistent metrics, and improved privacy and security compared to traditional CDPs. Companies like Canva, Zip, and HOVER have adopted this approach to drive business impact with their data, and the future of MarTech is composable.

The Tableau Conference is back in Vegas for three days of immersive sessions, practical workshops, and motivating fireside chats. With hundreds of sessions to choose from, narrowing down the best ones can be daunting. To help, we've rounded up the hottest sessions, including Main Keynote: A New Day for Data, Applying Equity Awareness in Data Visualization, Demystifying Data: How to Help Your Colleagues Overcome Fear, Think Outside the Box(plot): Intro to Tableau Stats, and many more. These sessions cover topics such as data visualization, statistics, LOD calculations, data culture, and creating a Customer-obsessed COE that inspires and empowers. The conference also features extras like Data + Women Meetup, Dashboard Extensions: More Fun Than the DMV, Get on My Level — Mastering LOD Calculations, Tableau Tip Battle!, and DataPride Meetup. With seven best practices to simplify data preparation, 2023 Tableau Community Awards, and a game-show-style session, The Viz is Right, there's something for everyone at the conference. Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from industry experts and network with like-minded professionals.

In this discussion on Data Teams: A Unified Management Model for Successful Data-Focused Teams, Jesse Anderson highlights the importance of top-down change in organizational transformation, where top management sets the tone and provides necessary funding and resources to support data-driven initiatives. He emphasizes that humans have more influence on change than technology and that creating a successful data team requires understanding human behavior and psychology, including ability gaps and skill gaps. The book stresses the need for mutual understanding between management and individual contributors to achieve synchronicity in building a data-driven organization.