Beyond the Warehouse Wars: Building Marketing Data Stacks That Actually Deliver ROI

Many marketing teams claim to be "data-driven," only to end up overwhelmed by a £100k data platform bill—without gaining any real clarity on attribution. This talk aims to cut through the vendor hype and showcase what a truly effective, modern marketing data infrastructure looks like in practice. You'll see real-world performance benchmarks comparing Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery for marketing workloads, and learn about the critical—but often overlooked—tools beyond the data warehouse, such as dbt, Fivetran, Reverse ETL, and CDP integrations. Through case studies, we’ll explore how one large mobile app client reduced data costs by 75% while tripling query performance, and how Paired leveraged real-time multitouch attribution to unlock new revenue streams. The session also offers a decision-making framework to align platform capabilities with your actual marketing analytics needs, particularly around attribution. You'll learn why most marketing data platforms fail to deliver value within the first year—and how to avoid those common pitfalls. Attendees will leave with clear criteria for choosing the right data platform, a complete blueprint for a modern marketing data stack, a cost modeling framework to estimate total cost of ownership, and practical migration strategies for moving away from legacy systems.