The Myth of “Zero-Copy” Data

Where should your customer data live and why does it matter?

Marty Kihn, SVP of Strategy at Salesforce, recently penned a post describing how “Zero Copy” data works on Salesforce Data Cloud. In it he makes two bold claims: “1) There is no copy - that is what we mean by "zero", and 2) It is the same mechanism used by composable CDPs.”? There is a good clarification/rebuttal from Apoorv Durga at Real Story Group. You should read them both.??

The bottom line - and I don’t think Marty would disagree with me on this - is that Salesforce Data Cloud wants to own the system of record of your customer data (at least for marketing use cases), Snowflake data sharing capabilities make it easier move customer data from Snowflake to Salesforce Data Cloud (if you use Snowflake), and it also allows you to access data that you need, as he states “from time to time,” from your own Snowflake instance without copying that data.? Whether this makes Salesforce Data Cloud zero-copy, near zero-copy, or not zero-copy is frankly beside the point.??

Importantly, Salesforce will be the system of record for your customer data, and they will STILL additionally need to copy from SF Data Cloud to SF Marketing Cloud for any email or mobile channel execution. This isn’t zero-copy, it is multiple copy by definition.

This is my biggest issue with the marketing term “zero data copy” because it implies that:

1. Customer data, or other personalization data,? ideally shouldn’t move or be replicated across your Martech vendors (I agree)
2. Vendors with “zero-copy” technology enables this to happen (which it doesn’t!)??

Where should your customer data live?

This should be a binary question for brands going forward. Do you want to own your customer data, or should your customer engagement vendor - be it Salesforce, Braze, or other - own the customer data needed for your marketing use cases? The answer shouldn’t be both.? If your company isn’t data mature, and/or you don’t have a healthy relationship with your data team, then you probably should use Salesforce or Braze or a packaged CDP for your customer data storage. But if, like most enterprise brands, you are investing in modern data platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks, then there are real advantages for both brand marketers and their data teams to leverage that data directly for their marketing efforts.?

You can copy your data to your engagement vendors, but should you?

Martech: The Modern-Day Rube Goldberg Machine

Vendors like Salesforce are using language like “zero-copy” for a reason, because the implications of that terminology are rightly resonating with marketers and data teams. Marty lays out good reasons for not duplicating data. So then why does he and Braze and others skip the part where you need to duplicate the data into an engagement platform to actually use it as a marketer??

What’s glaringly missing in Marty’s article is the alternative to copying your data to SaaS marketing solutions. In a truly zero-copy architecture, brands invest in building their enterprise data source of truth directly within their data cloud warehouse. Zero-copy should mean much more than a workaround to access more data, or maintain less complex pipelines. It should look like a singular source of truth for cross-functional use cases, customer profiles, and enterprise data.

Why is this important? Using your data directly by leveraging composable, warehouse-native solutions gives you access to more data, in more real-time, is more secure, and has significantly less total cost of ownership.

Look, creating copies of your customer data isn’t illegal, it isn’t immoral, and as David Raab of the CDP Institute says, “It isn’t like killing kittens.” The question you should be asking yourself is should you. And at what cost?

MessageGears’ works exclusively with enterprise consumer brands that market to millions of customers. We talk with marketers and their data teams at these brands every day about how to give them total command over their customer data and necessary personalization and context data.??

I can’t overstate how difficult it is for the marketing operations teams at big brands to execute the simplest of new campaign ideas given the unneeded complexity of today’s Martech stacks. It doesn’t need to be this way.??

As an industry, what are we even doing?

Finally, A Warehouse-Native Data Activation and Engagement Platform

The industry needs to truly fulfill the promise “zero data copy” by allowing marketers and their data teams to leverage their existing data investments across the entirety of their Martech needs.? MessageGears is the only composable, warehouse-native data activation and engagement platform that lives directly in your data cloud warehouse.??

Let me make this clear: MessageGears’ data activation capabilities can turn your data warehouse into a composable CDP. MessageGears enterprise engagement capabilities also enable you to send billions of personalized messages at scale without needing to move your customer data, ever, to an external vendor.??

Don’t get sidetracked by “zero-copy” marketing gobbledygook. If you are entertaining a composable, warehouse-native architecture for your customer marketing, don’t make a decision without talking to MessageGears.?