From Customer Data to Commercial Value: The Business Case for Activation
As we conclude our recent Snowflake blog series following the launch of our native app within Snowflake, Tom Blenkin, our new Commercial Director & Snowflake Lead at AUDIENCES, looks at the commercial opportunity facing CMOs and CTOs that have invested in customer data, cloud infrastructure and AI and why activation is critical to turning that investment into measurable business value.
By Tom Blenkin, Commercial Director & Snowflake Lead
Marketing technology (Martech) as a percentage of overall marketing budgets has hit a five-year low; dropping from 26.6% in 2021 to just 19.4% according to the 2026 Gartner CMO Spend Survey.
Meanwhile, paid media and adtech investments have spiked to a five-year high, capturing 31.4% of marketing budgets (Gartner). This inverse relationship is not happening because marketers are abandoning technology. It represents a structural shift from "buying internal software" (Martech) to "buying performance and results" (Adtech/Paid Media).
This is why I'm excited to be leading AUDIENCES’ relationship with Snowflake and working with the teams building customer data strategies on the Snowflake platform. My background has given me hands-on experience in all flavours of Retail, Brands, and Agencies, and one thing has remained stubbornly consistent: marketers rarely struggle because they don't have enough tools and data.
The challenge is turning it into actionable intelligence that impacts consumer behaviour and ultimately financial results. It’s particularly true of customer data - it’s often scattered across isolated systems, full of errors, and access is restricted by privacy rules. That is at the heart of the problem we are solving with Snowflake.
Snowflake provides organisations with the trusted foundation to change raw data into actionable intelligence. AUDIENCES puts that power directly into the hands of marketers, allowing you to build and activate audiences directly from your Snowflake environment.
Creating customer, transactional and behavioural intelligence in Snowflake is an essential first step but the commercial return comes from what you as marketers do with it.
The aim is simple: turn the rich intelligence created in Snowflake into measurable commercial results. No data lag, no scaling limits, no painfully slow and expensive implementations.
For marketers, that means being able to use your high value first-party customer intelligence to answer very practical questions.
- Where are we wasting media spend?
- Which customers represent the greatest opportunity?
- Who should we retain rather than reacquire?
- Which audiences are actually driving incremental value?
- And, importantly, how quickly can we turn those answers into action?
This is where the combination of Snowflake and AUDIENCES is so powerful. Instead of customer intelligence stopping at analysis, AUDIENCES provides an activation layer directly connected to the data already held in your Snowflake platform.
It’s built by Marketers for Marketers. Your teams now control how that intelligence is put to work across your media ecosystem.
What impact is it making today?
Saga has built its customer intelligence foundation in Snowflake and uses AUDIENCES to turn that intelligence into addressable marketing audiences. The impact is measurable.
Using its first-party customer intelligence across paid social contributed to a 65% reduction in cost per lead.
Across connected TV activity, Saga generated £4.4 million in booking value, £1.1 million in incremental value and 10.9x incremental ROAS. And Saga isn’t an isolated example.
Across AUDIENCES customer activity, we’ve seen an average 33% reduction in CPA and a 22% increase in ROAS. The commercial case is increasingly clear: when businesses can activate more of the customer intelligence they already hold, they can spend more efficiently and generate greater returns from the same underlying data investment.
Those numbers matter because they demonstrate something bigger than an individual campaign. They show what can happen when data infrastructure, customer intelligence and activation work together. The outcome isn’t only better data management. It’s lower acquisition costs, less wasted media and greater return from marketing investment.
Getting more from the Snowflake investment
There's another important commercial dimension to this. Organisations have already made significant investments in Snowflake, they have brought together valuable customer data, established governance and built increasingly sophisticated analytics and intelligence capabilities around it.
Snowflake Intelligence is now making it easier for business users to interrogate that data and identify opportunities. The logical next step is being able to act on those opportunities. That's the role we see AUDIENCES playing within the Snowflake ecosystem.
We're not asking organisations to move their customer data into another marketing platform to make it useful. AUDIENCES is designed to work with the customer intelligence already within Snowflake and connect it to the channels where marketing happens.
The commercial case isn't about adding another layer of martech. It's about generating more return from the data, cloud and intelligence investments the business has already made.
Speed is part of the return
Commercial value isn't only about the final CPA or ROAS number. Customer intelligence has a shelf life.
A propensity signal identified today is more valuable if marketing can act on it today. A churn indicator loses value if it takes weeks to reach the team responsible for retention. An existing customer suppression audience only saves money once it reaches the media platform.
This becomes even more important as AI accelerates how quickly organisations can understand their customers. If Snowflake Intelligence can help a business get to an answer faster, the infrastructure around it needs to make the journey from intelligence to activation to outcome faster too.
Reducing that distance is not simply an operational improvement, it's a commercial one.
From cloud infrastructure to growth infrastructure
Rob, AUDIENCES’ Co-Founder & CEO, has explained in this series why the cloud conversation was no longer just for CTOs. What we're seeing through our work with Snowflake is the shift from tech to commercial growth coming to life at an even greater scale. Your cloud is becoming more than a place to store and analyse your customer data. It’s become the foundation from which you put that intelligence to work. That's what we've built together.
Snowflake provides the data and intelligence foundation. AUDIENCES connects that intelligence to your target consumers.
The outcome is something every CEO, CFO, CTO, and CMO wants: greater efficiency, stronger returns and more value from customer data hitting the top line.
For me, that's the reason I’m thrilled to be joining this team.
The next phase of the cloud isn't about putting more data in, it's about getting more business value out.
