The Marketing Cloud and Adstra deliver identity resolution through Databricks Clean Rooms for secure, privacy-first marketing data collaboration

In 2026, the million dollar question for modern marketers has become: How do you enrich first-party datasets, uncover deeper audience insights, and launch effective campaigns all while maintaining strict privacy compliance and data security?

Stagwell and The Marketing Cloud are addressing this challenge head-on, along with new partners Databricks and Adstra. Let’s take a look at what this collaboration means for your team.

Stagwell and The Marketing Cloud bring AI-driven tools

The Marketing Cloud (TMC) offers a unified, 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 enhances this further by giving brands 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, cutting down on data friction while improving targeting accuracy and marketing measurement.

This results in richer audience insights, optimization of campaigns in real time, and accelerated ROI—while maintaining data governance and marketing agility.

Databricks accelerates data intelligence at scale

In this quest to merge 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 one platform, combining the flexibility of data lakes with the performance of data warehouses for scalable data intelligence.

Databricks brings Stagwell the infrastructure to:

• Seamlessly integrate structured and unstructured marketing data.
• Govern 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 additionally partnered 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 exclusive, privacy-compliant audience attributes, including:

• Health and wellness indicators
• Caregiver status
• Wealth and financial propensity
• Political segmentation
• Additional high-value lifestyle and demographic signals

This wildly expands the universe of audiences available to Stagwell clients, enabling richer insight and more effective audience targeting strategies for marketers.

The collaboration integrates Adstra’s intelligence directly into Stagwell’s ID Graph, providing access to new audience categories and depth of enrichment. It also enhances identity linkages that improve precision and reach from Adstra’s validated digital identity resolution.

Databricks Clean Rooms for trustworthy collaboration

Within Databricks Clean Rooms, brands can securely unify 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 Rooms are purpose-built to be privacy-safe and enable data collaboration between organizations by 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 key technical advantages of Databricks Clean Rooms include:

• Built-in governance and security frameworks.
• Support for identity resolution and audience modeling without data leakage.
• 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 requirements.

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-fidelity audiences, and activate campaigns all while keeping data secure and compliant with privacy regulations.

The data-driven marketing approach delivers:

• Enhanced targeting: Sharper insights for more relevant audience reach.
• Audience expansion: Broader visibility across identity clusters.
• Privacy compliance: Zero data exposure ensures trust and protection.
• Operational efficiency: Faster time-to-insight and reduced manual data handling.
• Campaign performance: Better ROI driven by smarter audience precision.

There’s a lot to get excited about here. With Databricks providing the foundation and Adstra the identity, The Marketing Cloud empowers marketers to gain a complete view of the customer journey, without exposing raw data. This is real marketing intelligence for a privacy-first, compliance-driven era.