In 2026, the million dollar question for modern marketers becomes: How do you enrich first-party datasets, uncover deep audience insights, and launch effective campaigns while maintaining strict privacy compliance and data security?
Stagwell and The Marketing Cloud are tackling this challenge with new partners Databricks and Adstra. Let’s see what this collaboration means for your team.
Stagwell and The Marketing Cloud bring AI-powered tools
Marketing Cloud (TMC) provides an integrated, AI-powered platform for marketing, research, and media-activation. It connects creative assets, marketing data, and media operations through modular products that can easily plug into existing martech stacks.
TMC further enhances this by providing brands with privacy-safe access to high-quality, multi-source datasets that can be blended with their own first-party data for advanced audience targeting.
This approach streamlines data ingestion, normalization, and omnichannel activation, reducing data friction while improving targeting accuracy and marketing measurement.
This results in rich audience insights, optimization of campaigns in real-time, and instant ROI – while maintaining data governance and marketing agility.
Databricks Accelerates Data Intelligence at Large Scale
In this quest to combine marketing effectiveness with airtight privacy, Stagwell partnered with Databricks, the industry leader in open data lakehouse architecture for enterprise marketing analytics.
Databricks unifies analytics, AI, and governance on a single platform, combining the flexibility of a data lake with the performance of a data warehouse for scalable data intelligence.
Databricks brings infrastructure to Stagwell:
- Seamlessly integrate structured and unstructured marketing data.
- Control data at scale with built-in privacy and compliance controls.
- Activate insights faster using native AI and ML capabilities.
The partnership aligns around a mutual vision: enabling data-driven marketing and advertising success without compromising consumer trust, data privacy or transparency.
Adstra unlocks high-value lifestyle and demographic signals
To further strengthen audience understanding, Stagwell has entered into an additional partnership with Adstra, a leader in composable identity solutions.
At the core of Adstra’s offering is the Conexa Identity Network, a validated framework designed to unify and resolve consumer identities across online and offline signals for omnichannel activation.
Through Conexa, Adstra unlocks a diverse portfolio of unique, privacy-compliant audience features, including:
- Health and Wellness Indicators
- caregiver status
- money and financial trends
- political division
- Additional high-value lifestyle and demographic indicators
This wildly expands the universe of audiences available to Stagwell customers, enabling richer insights and more effective audience targeting strategies for marketers.
This collaboration integrates Adstra’s intelligence directly into Stagwell’s ID Graph, providing depth of reach and enrichment to new audience categories. It also enhances identity linkage which improves accuracy and accessibility with Adstra’s validated digital identity resolution.
Databricks Clean Room for Trusted Collaboration
Within the Databricks Clean Room, brands can securely integrate their first-party data with Adstra and Stagwell Intelligence for a unified, privacy-safe view of the customer journey, ready for activation across channels.
Databricks Clean Room aims to be privacy-safe and enable data collaboration between organizations using Delta Sharing and Unity Catalog to ensure no raw data is exposed, only mutually approved analytics can be run, and all activity is fully auditable.
Some of the key technical benefits of Databricks Clean Room include:
- Underlying governance and security frameworks.
- Support for identity solutions and audience modeling without data leaks.
- Integration with existing AI/ML pipelines for faster campaign personalization.
- Support for multi-party and multi-cloud collaboration.
- Seamless integration with AI/ML pipelines to support complex modeling and reporting needs.
What this collaboration enables at scale
Brands, publishers and partners can immediately leverage the Adstra-Stagwell ID connection within Databricks to enrich first-party data, generate high-loyalty audiences, and activate campaigns while keeping data secure and compliant with privacy regulations.
A data-driven marketing approach provides:
- Advanced Targeting: Sharper insights to reach more relevant audiences.
- Audience Expansion: Wider visibility across identity groups.
- Privacy Compliance: Zero data exposure ensures trust and security.
- operating efficiency: Faster time-to-insights and less manual data management.
- Campaign Performance: Better ROI is driven by better audience precision.
There’s a lot to be excited about here. With Databricks providing the foundation and Adstra providing identity, Marketing Cloud empowers marketers to gain a holistic view of the customer journey without exposing them to raw data. This is real marketing intelligence for a privacy-first, compliance-driven era.
