Hi, folks. I'm Daniel Myers, Developer Relations here at Snowflake.
On today's episode of "Powered by," I'm talking with Adam Woods,
the CTO of Choozle, a digital advertising platform
that leverages a true 360-degree view of consumer data
to deliver a unified advertising campaign across display,
video, mobile audio, TV and, really, a whole slew of other mediums
all built on and powered by Snowflake.
Today, I want to learn a little bit about you, your background,
the history of Choozle, and tell me a little bit more about yourself.
Good. And thank you, Daniel.
Yeah, so I've been ... in the early part of my career,
really started focusing on building enterprise-grade software
for large insurance carriers.
About 10 years ago, I really found a passion inside of advertising.
And really, it was around the type of data that we could use
to really help power better outcomes for publishers, advertisers,
and ultimately the people that consume all of these services.
As I got into that, initially it was really around scalable systems
that could cover entire populations
globally inside of a large holding company,
Over the years, my philosophy in the industry has really changed,
and we have started to prioritize the ethical use of data privacy-friendly approaches.
So, definitely seen a lot of interesting things in terms of the way that,
our ability to take data, consume it, and then have the power to be able
to tag it with the things that we need to really earn the trust ... that has evolved.
You know, personally, I've used all kinds of data systems.
Early on, SQL warehouses that were on-prem,
SQL graph databases, search,
and really have found a love for the cloud Data Warehouse concept.
And some of the things that we're able to do with it.
I joined Choozle about nine months ago, and really came in
with a focus on building our next-generation platform,
and taking some of our product features to the next level.
That's exciting.
So, what stage ... it sounds like Choozle is growing rapidly.
What stage is the company at today and what's the funding status today?
Yeah. So we actually just closed the series seed,
so we're extremely excited about that.
And using that as a way to start really supercharging our growth
even more than the fantastic growth that we have.
You know, today we're right at about 70 people and growing all the time.
Especially focused on developers, data engineers, and data scientists.
That's exciting. So in your role, in the nine months that you've been at Choozle,
what is the key goal for you and your team?
Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, really ... Choozle exists as a platform to help serve the mid-market.
So what we saw was that there was a lot of really great enterprise-grade
technology out there, but that it was inaccessible to our market segment because
there were high barriers to entry in terms of contractual duration
and the cost of the monthly minimums.
So, really what we've always been working on is, how do we
simplify and give better access?
And so, specifically, when I came in, it was really around the notion of
doubling down on data performance and performance-based outcomes
for the advertisers that are working with us.
So we represent about 600, a little bit more than 600 agencies
and advertisers, that together, combined
manage campaigns across 5,000 different brands
that are using our platform and our service.
And so really, the notion is
how do we use data to better inform what they're
doing, and give them better insight into the performance of their
campaigns, and then give them predictive analytics that really
help them achieve better outcomes, based on the different
tactics that are available to them to use through the platform?
That's a tall order.
So that's awesome. That's awesome.
Yeah, very modest.
So can we see a demo of it today?
Yeah, absolutely.
Alright. So what you're seeing here is the new version of our UI
that we've been working on and are getting very close to releasing
over the next quarter.
So as we were building this new UI, one of the things that was really
apparent to us was that we needed an upgraded capability
to power our campaign reporting.
And that's really where we turned to Snowflake and
brought that into our warehousing technology stack.
So what you can see is, as I go into the reporting,
this is at parity with what we would have historically had
inside of our legacy approach, where you can see
that we've got key metrics and then we've got the ability to do
some comparisons of high-level aggregations.
Where we've really been focused on, where we found the power of Snowflake
that gives us an advantage, gives us a boost,
is when we start looking at the areas
where we can go much, much deeper.
So what you're seeing here is essentially the same thing.
But now we've pulled in a lot of more advanced concepts,
so things like looking at cost per completion, or click-through rate,
and then segmenting that by time of day
so that we can understand if there's a better day parting strategy
that one of our advertisers should be adopting.
And then, you can also see that we're able to look now more deeply.
So we're seeing the sites that the placements are being put on.
And then we can also look at things like device type,
and we can take that down to a very deep level of insight.
And then, historically, we would have been able to bring
these metrics through to a customer,
but it was in a laggy experience
where you had to go through an offline badge
and then work with it in a way that wasn't interactive.
And now you can see that because this is all tied into the Warehouse,
I've got the ability to interact with the data sorted any way that I want.
I can do filters, and it gives us an ability to be expressive with data
in a way that we never could before.
And then, again, in terms of how we were able to go deeper,
things like looking at zip codes, right?
There's, I think, 30,000-plus zip codes in the United States.
That level of aggregation inside of our legacy system
would have just been unapproachable. Like this is a visualization
that we would never have been able to do.
We might have been able to grab like the top 10 zip codes.
But as you can see here, this literally is looking at this campaign,
and it's got every single zip code that it's been serving to,
which this one happens to be a national campaign.
So it's serving to a lot of zip codes.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
And then, really, in terms of the other big boulder that we're looking at,
the big functional area, is how do we make data connected better for an advertiser?
And so, what you can see is that we
have now also been able to take our traditional data,
which is media that we're buying through the Choozle platform.
And then for an advertiser,
give them the ability to overlay that with data
that's been synchronized with media that they're buying on other platforms.
So if you think about a balanced marketing portfolio,
you would be doing search, you would be doing social,
you would be doing open web display,
and you might be doing connected TV along with other tactics.
What we've been able to do through our partnerships with Snowflake
and with Fivetran, is really be able to use connectors
to aggregate all of that data into our Snowflake Warehouse,
and then give a customer a specific view of it,
where they're able to see all of their campaigns running
across all of the different media sources that they're buying.
And we were able to do this in a very simple and scalable way,
where we can offer this to all of our advertisers
rather than having to do customized or custom work to get here.
That's exciting.
So as you've been building this, what has been
some of the ... so you mentioned a few of the areas that
this is this has been improved from your legacy system.
What are some other areas where Snowflake has really been able to be a
key differentiator between this newer system
and what you've built in the past?
Yeah, I would say the biggest differentiator is really around
our ability to
experiment without a lot of fear.
We can always start from the assumption of
let's go build the absolute best thing that we can
for our customers.
Let's get the most detailed data.
Let's get the most advanced reporting.
Let's give the best understanding that we can give.
And then we can look at, once we've done that,
we can experiment into that with no
fear of breaking production or having to make big,
upfront capital investments, right?
We can just do R&D and try to find the best products
that we can bring, and then we can treat it as a cost optimization problem,
and just say, "Okay, how do I make this at a price point that we can bring to market effectively?
So it's a very different conversation than what we would have had before,
which is, "should we add this piece of data? Is that too much?
Are we going to break something?"
Those conversations have entirely fallen off, right?
We know that we have the scale to be able to solve any problem that we want.
And so then it's just, how do we be the most expressive version
of ourselves to really bring the best to the market
and then optimize over time?
And so as you move forward on this platform,
what is on the roadmap for Choozle?
What is a challenge are you targeting today that
will bring further improvement for your customers?
Yeah. So the immediate roadmap is really around
rolling out the scale version of this
and bringing up our adoption of the more advanced metrics.
I think further down, what we're really looking at
is bringing in more machine learning, so that we're able to do a better job
of predicting outcomes based on what we're seeing
in the usage of the platform,
and then using that to make recommendations of
enhanced tactics that are going to get a more effective outcome for that customer.
And you know, really, part of that is also shedding some of the
leading indicators that we use inside of our industry, right?
So if you think about something like a click through rate,
that only talks about the engagement of a person
to that advertisement, and the very first interaction that they have.
What we're really thinking about, and really focused on,
is how do we go deeper, right?
What did that person ultimately do?
What was the effectiveness of the media mix?
Are we driving the right type of buyers to our advertisers,
and how are they converting?
So we can really look at, what's their lifetime value?
What's their initial order value?
And really thinking about it in terms of, what did those advertising tactics
and investment that brand made really truly drive in the end to their bottom line?
And that's where being able to have this ability to stitch together data,
bring things together that we might have found hard
to bring together before,
do it in a reliable, predictable, compliant way,
and then really give people the ability to optimize towards
their outcome rather than optimize towards,
things like media spend or something along those lines.
That makes a lot of sense.
And so, you know, one of the common questions that I get from folks is,
how should they go about evaluating and deciding on a data cloud?
So something like Snowflake's Data Cloud. How how did Choozle do it?
How did you go about your evaluation process
and ultimately land on Snowflake?
So I actually ran across Snowflake in 2017,
so I've been using it for quite a while now.
When I first came across it, we were running a process
that was sitting on a very large Oracle data warehouse,
and we had scaled out of that on Prem infrastructure.
We found that we could do the process inside of Redshift,
but that as we were wrapping more and more parallelism around it,
it wasn't keeping up, and it was getting more and more complicated.
And so when I first saw Snowflake and first started using it,
there was less understanding in the market
and it was a little bit more of a risk at that time.
What I ended up doing was basically taking that problem and
then putting it on Snowflake and exercising the kind of limits
of how parallel I could make that problem run.
And I exercised that both on the scale up and the scale out aspects.
So in terms of scale up, it was, "Okay, run the problem on a medium,
run it on a large, run it on an extra large."
And when I saw the linear reduction of time,
that was when I really knew that I'd found something that was different
than anything I'd ever seen before, frankly.
And that gave me a lot of confidence.
And then the ability to run multiple warehouses at the same time,
dealing with different problems on a single set of data.
That really gave me the comfort to say,
I know that I can build something where a UI-facing experience
is never going to be impacted or degraded by
a batch report or an experiment I'm running.
So, that was really where kind of early on. I found that this was something
that was going to be really good.
And we brought it into that company. It was super happy with it,
Did a lot to transform ... when I came into Choozle, literally, on
call it my first day.
I went to one of our media providers that I knew was running data shares
on Snowflake and said I'd like all of our impression data
that we have for the entire reporting window.
And I'd like to get it through a data share.
And so, literally, we put in the formal request to them at 5:00. one day,
and I had every impression we had bought for that entire window
delivered into my Snowflake account by 11:00 the next morning.
And as a by-product of the way the data is stored and they
have their cost on their side, you know, I had literally done that for zero dollars.
So I went to my CEO and I said,
"Okay, go, let me show you some reports off of all of our data at an event level."
And, you know, was able to do the
first evaluation for, literally, single-digit dollars on my credit card
and showed him value on day two.
And then from there it was, okay, now let's formalize the reasons
why we're doing this and really show what are we going to be able to do with scalability.
And then made the decision.
But you know, the proof of concept was literally days because of the technology.
That's awesome to hear. That's awesome.
So, for the viewers today,
if they want to learn more about you and about Choozle,
where should they go?
Yeah. certainly anybody who would like to connect on LinkedIn
can reach out to me directly.
Happy to connect and and share my experiences.
Anybody that wants to learn about Choozle can go to choozle.com.
And anybody is free to contact me
at adam@choozle.com as well.
That's awesome.
And so for everybody else,
if you want to learn how you can build your application
and your business on Snowflake,
check out developers.snowflake.com,
and the "Powered by" program at Snowflake.
Thanks and see you next time.