Guest · Data, identity and privacy
Dennis Buchheim
Global Industry Lead, Adtech/Martech, Media and Entertainment, Snowflake
Dennis Buchheim is Global Head of GTM for Adtech, Martech, Communications, Media and Entertainment at Snowflake. He has spent over 20 years shaping the infrastructure of digital advertising, from building a proto-AdSense before Google, to leading product and policy at Yahoo and AppNexus/Xandr, to defining standards at the IAB Tech Lab.
About
Dennis Buchheim is a product-oriented leader who has spent more than two decades shaping the infrastructure of digital advertising. He is Global Head of GTM for Adtech, Martech, Communications, Media and Entertainment at Snowflake, where he helps companies unlock the power of data collaboration and AI across the advertising and media ecosystem.
Buchheim’s career traces the arc of digital advertising infrastructure itself. He built ad products at a dot-com before Google existed, leading what was essentially a proto-AdSense. He then spent years at Yahoo and AppNexus/Xandr building programmatic and data capabilities. At the IAB Tech Lab, he served as CEO and shaped the standards that govern how data and identity work across the open web.
At Snowflake, his focus is on the composable data ecosystem that lets companies collaborate on data without moving it, power AI on top of their first-party signals, and navigate a privacy-forward world where consent and transparency are table stakes rather than afterthoughts.
Career24 years
- 2025 to now Snowflake Global Industry Lead, Adtech/Martech, Communications, Media & Entertainment
- 2023 to now ThinkMedium Founder & CEO
- 2021 to 2023 Meta VP, Science & Ecosystem / VP, Advertising Ecosystem
- 2017 to 2021 IAB Tech Lab CEO / General Manager
Show earlier roles: IAB, Yahoo, Microsoft, Yahoo!
How Dennis thinks3 convictions
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Data is the foundation that determines how powerful your AI can be
The companies racing to deploy AI without a coherent data strategy are building on sand. Snowflake’s architecture is premised on the reverse: get the data right, make it collaborative and accessible, and then AI becomes genuinely powerful rather than a capability bolted onto a broken foundation.
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Composable architecture is replacing the all-in-one monolith
The era of the all-in-one marketing platform is giving way to something more flexible. Buchheim’s argument is that companies should build ecosystems of specialist tools that collaborate on a shared data layer, rather than betting on a single vendor to do everything adequately. Composability is the new competitive advantage.
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Privacy regulation is an innovation catalyst, not just a compliance burden
The instinct to treat GDPR, CCPA, and data clean rooms as legal overhead misses the strategic opportunity. Buchheim’s view is that brands and platforms that invested early in consent-based, first-party data infrastructure are now better positioned for AI deployment, partner collaboration, and consumer trust than those that did the bare minimum.
