 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's day two coverage of Snowflake Summit 22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We are live in Las Vegas at Caesars Forum. Looking forward to an action-packed day here on theCUBE. Our first guest joins us, Bill Stratton, the Global Industry Lead, Media, Entertainment, and Advertising at Snowflake. Bill, great to have you on the program, talking about industry specifics. Glad to be here. Excited to have a conversation. Yeah, the media and entertainment industry has been keeping a lot of us alive the last couple of years, never probably more of a dependence on it than we've seen stuck at home. Talk to us about the data culture in the media, entertainment, and advertising landscape. How is data being used today? Sure, well, let's start with what you just mentioned in these last couple of years, I think, coming out of the pandemic. A lot of trends and impact to the media industry. I think there were some things happening prior to COVID, right? Streaming services were starting to accelerate. And obviously Netflix was an early mover. Disney launched their streaming service right before the pandemic, Disney Plus with ESPN Plus as well. I think then, as the pandemic occurred these last two years, the acceleration of consumers' habits, obviously of not just unbundling their cable subscription, but then choosing what services they want to subscribe to, right? I mean, I think we all sort of grew up in this era of, okay, the bundle was the bundle. You had sports, you had news, you had entertainment, whether you watched the channel or not, you had the bundle. And what the pandemic has accelerated is what I call, and I think a lot of folks call the golden age of content. And really the golden age of content is about the consumer. They're in control now. They pick and choose what services they want, what they watch, when they watch it. And I think that has extremely sort of accelerated this adoption on the consumer side, and then it's creating this data ecosystem as a result of companies like Disney having a direct consumer relationship for the first time. It used to be a Disney or an NBC, it was a wholesaler, and the cable or satellite company had the consumer data and relationship. Now, the companies that are producing the content have the data and the consumer relationship. It's a fascinating time. And they're still coming over the top on the Telco networks, right? They absolutely are. Telco's playing in this game. Yeah, Telco is, I think what the interesting dynamic with Telco is, how do you bundle access, high speed? Everybody still needs high speed at their home with content. And so I think it's a similar bundle, but it takes on a different characteristic because the cable and Telco's are not taking the content risk. AT&T, you know, sold WarnerMedia recently. And I think they looked at it and said, we're going to stay with the infrastructure, let somebody else do the content. And I think I heard, did I hear this right the other day that Roku is now getting into the content business? Roku is getting into it. And they were an early mover, right? They said the TVs aren't, the operating system in the television is not changing fast enough for content. So their dongle that you would, you know, slide into a TV was a great way to get content on connected televisions, which is the fastest growing platform. I was going to say, what are the economics like in this business? Because the bundles were sort of a limiting factor in terms of the TAM. And now would, you know, get great content. All right, to watch Better Call Saul, I have to get AMC Plus. Yeah, your comment, your question about the economics and the TAM is an interesting one, because I think we're still working through it. One of the things I think that's coming, you know, to the forefront is that you have to have a subscription revenue stream, okay? Netflix had a subscription revenue stream, you know, for the last six, eight, 10 years significantly. But I think you even see with Netflix that they have to go to a second revenue model, which is going to be an ad supported model, right? We see it in the press these last couple of days with Reed Hastings. So I think you're going to see obviously subscription, obviously ad supported, but the biggest thing back to the consumer is that the consumer is not going to sit through two minutes of advertising to watch a 22 minute show, right? So what's then going to happen is that the content companies want to know what's relevant to you in terms of advertising. So if I have relevancy in my ad experience, then it doesn't quite feel, it's not intrusive, and it's relevant to my experience. And the other vector in the TAM, just one last follow up, is you see Amazon with Prime going consumption. That's right, right? That's right. I mean, you get it with Prime, sort of there and the movies aren't the best in the world, but you can buy pretty much any movie you want on a consumption basis. Here's just to your last quick point there is we saw last week the Boston Red Sox are bundling tickets, season tickets, with a subscription to their streaming service. So, it's like Prime, and it's like Prime bundling with your delivery service, you're going to start to see all kinds of bundles happen. Man, the sky is the limit. It's like, it just keeps going and proliferating. You talk about on the ad side for a second, you mentioned the relevance, and we expect that as consumers. We're so demanding, excuse me, we don't have the patience. One of the things I think that was in short supply during COVID and probably still is as patients, I think with all of us, but we expect that brands know us enough to surf up the content that they think, we watched better call, well, we watched Breaking Bad, better call Saul. Don't show me other things that aren't relevant to the patterns I've been showing you. The content creators have to adapt quickly to the rising and changing demands of the consumer. That's right. Some people even think, as you go forward and consumers have this expectation, like you just mentioned, that brands not only need to understand their own view of the consumer, and this is going to come into the snowflake points that we talk about in a minute, but the larger view that a brand has about a consumer, not just their own view, but how they consume content, where they consume it, what other brands they even like, that all builds that picture of making it relevant for the consumer and the viewer. Where does privacy come into the mix? So, you know, we want it to be relevant and personalized in a non-creepy way. Talk to us about the data clean rooms that snowflake launched. That's right. How is that facilitating from a PII perspective? Yeah, great question. So I think the other major development, in addition to the pandemic driving people watching all these shows, is the fact that privacy legislation is increasing. So we started with California, with the CCPA, we had GDPR in Europe, and what we're starting to see is state by state roll out different privacy legislations. At some point, it may be true that we have a federal privacy legislation, and there's some bills that are working through the legislature right now. Hard to tell what's gonna happen, but to your question, the importance of privacy and respecting privacy is exactly happening at the same time that media companies and publishers need to piece together all the viewing habits that you have. You've probably watched already this morning on your PC, on your phone, and in order to bring that experience together, media company has to be able to tie that together, right? Collaborate. So you have collaboration on one side, and then you have privacy on the other, and they're not necessarily normally go together, right? They're opposing forces. So now though, with Snowflake and our data clean room, we like to call it a data collaboration platform, okay? It's not really what a data warehouse function traditionally has been, right? So if I can take data collaboration and our clean room, what it does is it brings privacy controls to the participants. So if I'm an advertiser and I'm a publisher and I wanna collaborate to create an advertising campaign, they both can design how they wanna do that privacy-based collaboration, because it's interesting. One company might have a different perspective of privacy on a risk profile than another company. So it's very hard to say one size is gonna fit all. So what we at Snowflake do with our infrastructure is let you design how you create your own clean room. Is that a differentiator for Snowflake, the clean rooms? It's absolutely a very big differentiator. Two reasons, or probably three reasons really. One is it's cross-cloud. So all the advertisers aren't gonna be in the same cloud. All the publishers aren't gonna be in the same cloud. One big differentiator there. Second big differentiator is we wanna be able to bring applications to the data so our clean room can enable you to create measurement against an ad campaign without moving your data. So bringing measurement to the data versus sending data to applications then improves the privacy. And then the third one is frankly our pricing model. We don't, you only pay for Snowflake what you use. So in the advertising world, there's what's called an ad tech tax. There is no ad tech tax for Snowflake because we're simply a pay-as-you-go service. So it's a very interesting dynamic. So what's that stack look like in your world? So I pulled up Frank's chart, took a picture of his, he's called it the new modern data stack. I think he called it, but it had infrastructure in the bottom. Okay, that's AWS, Google, Azure. And then a lot of you, live data, that would be the media data cloud. Workload execution, the specific workload here is media and entertainment. And then application development, that's a new layer of value that you're bringing in. Marketplace, which is the whole ecosystem, and then monetization comes from building on top. So that's, I got AWS in here and other clouds. You got a big chunk of that. Where do your customers add value on top of that? So here's the way you described it, I think, with Frank's point is right on. You have the infrastructure. We know that a lot of advertisers, for example, aren't gonna use Amazon because the retailer competes with Amazon. So they might be in Google or Azure. And then sort of as you go up the stack for the data layer that is Snowflake, especially what we call first party data is sitting in that Snowflake environment, right? But that Snowflake environment is a distributed environment. So a Disney, who was on stage with me yesterday, she talked about, Jaya talked about their first party data's in Snowflake, their advertisers data's in their own Snowflake account in their own infrastructure. And then what's interesting is that that application layer is coming to the data. And so what we're really seeing is an acceleration of companies building that application natively on Snowflake to do measurement, to do targeting, to do activation. And so that growth of that final application layer is what we're seeing as the acceleration in the stack. So the more data that's in that massive distributed data cloud, the more value your customers can get out of it. And I would imagine you're just looking to tick things off that where customers are going outside of the Snowflake data cloud, let's attack that so they don't have to. Yeah, I think these partners, excuse me, and customers, it's an interesting dynamic because they're customers of ours, but now because anybody who is already in Snowflake can be their customer, then they're becoming our partner. So it's an interesting dynamic because we're bringing advertisers to a Disney or an NBCU because they already have their data in Snowflake. So the network effect that's getting created because of this layer that's being built is accelerating. In 2013, right after the second re-invent, I wrote a piece called How to Compete with the Amazon Gorilla. And it seemed to us pretty obvious at the time, you're not going to win an infrastructure against it, you've got to build on top of it, you've got to build ecosystems within industries and the data, the connection points, that network effect that you just talked about, it's actually quite thrilling to see you guys building that. Well, and I think you know this too. I mean, Amazon's a great partner of ours as well, right? So we're in, they're part of our media data cloud as Amazon, right? So we're making it easier and easier for companies to be able to spin up a clean room in places like AWS so that they get the privacy controls and the governance that's required as well. What do you advise to say the next generation of media and advertising companies who may be really early in the data journey? Obviously the competition right here in the room here, but we've seen services that launch and fail. What do you advise to those folks that maybe are early in the journey and how can Snowflake help them accelerate that to be able to launch services they can monetize and get those consumers watching? I think the first thing for a lot of these brands is that they need to really own their data. And what I mean by that is they need to understand the consumer relationship that they have, they need to take the privacy and the governance very seriously, and they need to start building that muscle. It's almost a routine and a muscle that they just need to continue to kind of build up because if you think about it, a media company spends two, three hours a day with their customer. You might watch two hours of a streaming show, but how much time do you spend with a single brand a day? Maybe 30 seconds, maybe 10 seconds, right? And so their need to build the muscle to be able to collect the data in a privacy compliant way, build the intelligence off of that, and then leverage the intelligence. We talked about it a few days ago and you look at a retailer is a really good example. Retailer is using Snowflake and the retail data cloud to optimize their supply chain, okay? But their supply chain extends beyond their own infrastructure to the advertising and marketing community because if I can't predict demand, how do I then connect it to my supply chain? So our media data cloud is helping retailers and consumer product goods companies actually drive demand into their reconstructed supply chain. So they both work together. So you have a big focus obviously on the monetization piece, of course, that's a great place to start. Where do you see the media cloud, media data cloud going? Yeah, I think we'll start to expand beyond advertising and beyond marketing. There's really important sub segments of media. Gaming is one, you talk about the pandemic and teenagers playing games on their phones. So we'll have an emphasis around gaming. We'll have an emphasis in sports. Sports is going through a big change in an ecosystem and there's a big opportunity to connect the dots in those ecosystems as well. And then I think to what we were just talking about, I think connecting commerce and media is a very important area. And I think the two are still very loosely connected today. It used to be, could I buy the Jennifer Aniston sweater from Friends, right? That was always the analogy. Now media and social media and TikTok and everything else are combining media and commerce very closely. So I think we'll start to see more focus around that as well. So that adds to your monetization. Right, right, yeah. And you can NFT that. That's right. There you go, you can mint an NFT on that. Tip of the iceberg for so much more potential to go. Bill, thank you so much for joining us, Brighton, early this morning, talking about what Snowflake is doing in media, entertainment and advertising. Exciting stuff relevant to all of us. We appreciate your insights and your forward-looking statements. Thank you for having me. Our pleasure. Thank you, bye now. For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're up early with us, watching theCUBE's day two coverage of Snowflake Summit 22. We'll be back in a moment with our next guest.