By pairing a Snowflake based data hub with Tealium CDP, DIRECTV moved from manual, channel specific lists to an orchestrated, identity driven foundation for customer engagement.
What Changed With The New Stack
From manual lists to journeys
Legacy campaigns relied on hand delivered, channel specific lists that quickly went stale.
• Manual lists per email, SMS and outbound telemarketing
• 18 emails in 30 days with 18 different asks
• No shared customer view across channels
Enterprise wide data foundation
After DIRECTV split from its former parent company, it had no martech stack, so the team designed an enterprise wide architecture from scratch.
• Snowflake chosen as independent source of truth
• Identity key ring unifies platform specific identifiers
• Tealium CDP orchestrates activation across channels
By putting our data in an area where we can continually go back to it and move it to a different platform means we’re not dependent on anybody, right. We can be truly independent.
— Mark Loovis, Director of Marketing Technology at DIRECTV
Scaling adoption and use cases
The martech team advocates new data use cases, partners with privacy, finance and other business teams, and uses A/B tests to prove impact and grow adoption.
• Over 1500 connectors and 1,200 attributes configured
• Around 300 reusable audiences power campaigns
• Marketers, not engineers, manage most data flows
Why it worked:
Several design choices made DIRECTV’s approach effective:
• Anchoring data in Snowflake preserved independence from any single platform
• An identity key ring allowed systems to keep native IDs while still translating between them
• Lego block audiences let martech experts manage complexity so marketers could compose campaigns with simple building blocks
What’s next:
DIRECTV is clear about where it wants to expand next:
• Running a live generative AI agent on web and other channels
• Reducing latency so cancellation and retention journeys react in near real time
• Scaling retargeting based on behavior across email and the DIRECTV application
• Consolidating creative assets in a DAM to support faster, more consistent campaigns
