For years, marketers have been promised a future where data collaboration doesn’t mean data exposure. This week, Adstra, Stagwell’s The Marketing Cloud (TMC), and Databricks took a meaningful step toward making that promise real.

Adstra, a long-standing player in identity resolution, has announced a collaboration with TMC and Databricks that brings its Conexa Identity Network directly into Databricks Clean Rooms. The result: marketers can resolve and enrich first-party data, build high-fidelity audiences, and activate campaigns—without moving, copying, or directly sharing sensitive customer data.

In an era defined by privacy regulation, signal loss, and mounting pressure to prove ROI, the partnership speaks directly to one of MarTech’s biggest challenges: how to make identity useful again without crossing compliance lines.

Why This Matters Now

Clean rooms have quickly become table stakes for large brands, but many implementations still feel more theoretical than practical. Data collaboration is technically possible, yet often slow, rigid, and limited in scale.

This collaboration aims to remove those friction points. By making Adstra’s identity graph available inside Databricks Clean Rooms, TMC clients can “meet” their first-party data with Adstra’s insights in a governed environment—no file transfers, no brittle integrations, and no raw data leakage.

For marketers, that means identity resolution and enrichment can finally happen at the speed campaigns demand, not the pace legal reviews tolerate.

Inside the Integration: Identity Without Data Movement

At the core of the partnership is a zero-copy approach to data enrichment. Instead of exporting customer files or onboarding data to external platforms, brands can run identity matching, overlap analysis, and attribution modeling directly within Databricks.

This is powered by Delta Sharing, Databricks’ open-source framework for securely sharing live data across platforms and clouds. Combined with Databricks Clean Rooms, it enables privacy-centric collaboration that keeps all data governed, permissioned, and auditable.

Adstra contributes its Conexa Identity Network, which brings privacy-compliant attributes such as health and wellness indicators, caregiver status, wealth propensity, and other high-value demographic and lifestyle signals. According to Andy Johnson, Adstra’s Chief Data and Product Officer, these attributes are designed to give marketers more precision without introducing regulatory risk.

The Marketing Cloud adds its AI-driven marketing infrastructure and Stagwell’s proprietary, privacy-first IDGraph, effectively turning identity resolution into an activation-ready capability rather than a back-office process.

From Infrastructure to Addressable Audiences

The most tangible outcome so far: scale.

Through this collaboration, The Marketing Cloud has unlocked more than 365 new addressable audiences. These include high-value segments such as high net-worth individuals and healthcare decision-makers—audiences that are notoriously difficult to reach accurately in a post-cookie world.

Early pilots point to meaningful gains: stronger match rates, faster activation windows, and broader audience reach, all while maintaining strict privacy controls. That combination—performance lift without compliance tradeoffs—is exactly what enterprises have been asking for.

Akram Chetibi, Director of Product Management at Databricks, framed it simply: enterprises want to leverage their own data at scale without compromising privacy. Connecting clean rooms with identity intelligence and AI infrastructure is how that happens in practice.

A Broader Signal for the MarTech Stack

Zooming out, the partnership reflects a broader shift in MarTech architecture. Identity is no longer a standalone product; it’s becoming a shared service layer embedded directly into data and AI platforms.

Instead of marketers stitching together CDPs, clean rooms, and identity graphs through custom integrations, the industry is moving toward native collaboration inside data environments where analytics, modeling, and activation already live.

For Stagwell’s The Marketing Cloud, this reinforces its positioning as an operating system rather than a collection of tools. For Adstra, it’s a strategic move that places identity intelligence closer to where decisions are made. And for Databricks, it further cements clean rooms as a foundation for marketing, not just analytics.

As Mansoor Basha, CTO of The Marketing Cloud, put it, the challenge isn’t access to data—it’s turning that data into revenue without slowing down campaigns or risking compliance. The promise here is reduced media waste, better customer identification, and more precise measurement, all delivered through infrastructure rather than workarounds.

What Marketers Can Do Today

Unlike many clean room announcements that remain aspirational, this integration is available immediately. Brands using Databricks Clean Rooms can already leverage the Adstra–TMC connection to enrich first-party data, generate high-fidelity audiences, and activate campaigns across the programmatic ecosystem.

The practical benefits are clear: faster time to insight, broader audience visibility across identity clusters, zero data exposure, and improved campaign performance. Just as importantly, it offers a blueprint for how identity, privacy, and AI can coexist without forcing marketers to choose between scale and safety.

In a market crowded with identity claims, this collaboration stands out not for introducing something entirely new, but for making something long promised finally usable.

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