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Part I: Exploring the Advantages of Centralized Audience Management
If you are attempting to manage data from multiple sources including online, offline, and first-, second-, and third-party data, you’re not alone. According to Forrester Research, today’s interactive marketers need “a centralized intelligence engine” (or CIE) that “allows for a unified view of the customer, regardless of channel.” (Although this metaphor may bring to mind some of the CIA’s unflattering activities in the world, please dismiss those. Instead, when you hear CIE, think data and intelligence management.) Today in the world of digital marketing, a CIE has been created in the form of a data management platform (DMP). Forrester defines a DMP as “a unified technology platform that intakes disparate first-, second-, and third-party data sets, provides normalization and segmentation on that data, and allows a user to push the resulting segmentation into live interactive channel environments.”
With the use of a DMP, you can better coordinate and utilize your data for the best return on your investments. A DMP can strengthen your marketing strategies by helping you to segment your audience for more effective, targeted communications.
Understanding and Segmenting Your Audience
Do you understand your audience? If you don’t, you should.
Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and former head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, predicted that “the power of the individual” would “be huge in the digital age.” As you know, every company, from the lowest to the highest profile, has an “audience” comprised of hundreds to thousands to millions of individuals. These audience members range from voyeuristic web browsers to customers who click “buy now.” With a better understanding of this audience, you can create and convert browsers into customers. You can also group together new audiences according to their natural tastes and preferences and create new markets with new messages.
Forrester suggests that marketers “struggling with data fragmentation, underused data assets, and a hunger for more audience insight” should consider investing in a DMP. A DMP allows you to analyze and normalize your “disparate data sets in order to create relevant messaging and further achieve your organizational goals.” Through its centralized system, a DMP gleans audience insights by accessing and “combining different data sets together to create unique, meaningful segments that can be made actionable across digital channels like display, on-site, and email.”
Today, DMPs are helping businesses make sense of the information coming from all available sources such as Facebook, Twitter, websites, offline sources, and more.
Audience Power in the Digital Age
How should businesses be thinking about audience or data management today?
Joseph Turow in “How Should We Think About Audience Power in the Digital Age?” explains that our current communication technologies allow our audiences to “become the captains” of their own attention, focusing their interests on what they care about. What are the implications for businesses that want to respond to these “captains”? How can you command their attention, directing it toward your business, product, or event?
Since its inception, segmentation has always served as the foundation of traditional marketing. Because individuals have the power to filter what they see today, you want to ensure that they don’t filter you. Forrester notes that today, DMPs offer marketers “a chance to much more effectively roll out segment- or audience-based marketing programs than ever before.”
Instead of becoming overwhelmed by the amount of data at your fingertips, you can learn to coordinate and segment it for effective planning and targeted communications.
From Fragmented Data Silos to Coordinated Intelligence
Unfortunately, fragmented data silos are all too common in today’s world. This means you’ve got information coming in from online and offline sources. How do you tie them together into a cohesive understanding of what’s being said? How do you interpret and make sense out of the data?
Often, IT is the solution, but few in-house IT departments have the time to implement the complex solutions required to solve this challenge. This is where a DMP can help.
DMPs take the vast, growing repositories of customer marketing data (which are currently fragmented) and help you interpret, understand, and apply it to your marketing strategies and campaigns. Once you understand what all your data sources are saying, you can plan appropriate action.
And when you act, your customers will actually respond because you’ll be communicating a message they want to hear. You’ll be converting browsers to buyers, creating even more data to run through your DMP.
If you’re working in digital advertising today and not losing sleep over your data management strategy (or lack thereof), climb out from under your rock and join the rest of us trying to figure out how to leverage the mountain of consumer intent and behavior collecting on the doorstep each day. From both the marketer and publisher perspective, data isn’t the problem, access is the problem. Each party has access to vast amounts of data, either directly or through3rd party channels, but centralizing, organizing, analyzing, and segmenting are very difficult for all but the largest companies. Unless you have a pedigreed team that speaks SAS and Oracle, understands how to use an IBM supercomputer, or has a team of PhDs on the payroll, building your own solution to this problem just isn’t realistic. It just doesn’t exist in the DNA of most advertising companies today, at least not yet.
But that doesn’t mean a solution doesn’t exist. Enter the Data Management Platform, or DMP, a very smart, very fast cookie warehouse with analytical firepower to crunch, de-duplicate, and integrate your data with any technology platform you desire. Data management platforms are designed to help both marketers and publishers make the data they have actionable, and are the fundamental tool for any data strategy beyond the elementary level. Pretty much anyone that can set a cookie can do some level of data collection and then repurpose that cookie for an ad campaign, but DMPs offer intelligence that goes beyond just the cookie or even just the data. They offer technology can can find trends, help you scale and understand your audience, segment and target your audience in complex ways based on user attributes, consumption habits, recency, and more. At the core, this analysis is what DMPs offer that other cookie-based solutions cannot.
A data management platform might let you understand what your site analytics tool says about users that open your newsletters. They can let you know how many users that bought a big screen TV also searched for high end digital cameras in the past week. You could even overlay1st party information with3rd party sources to tell you what the average buyer’s credit score and household income was. In fact, you could use a DMPs to help you figure out which users are most likely to buy a big screen TV next week. It all comes down to how much data you can provide the system, and how deep you want to go into the data.
Data Management Platform Companies
Like most aspects of ad tech, this is a crowded space right now, with plenty of companies offering a solution. Demdex (now owned by Adobe), Core Audience and Krux are what I would consider pure-plays, while Lotame, Collective, and Turn offer similar services but with another (potentially conflicting) core competency. All have various levels of service and complexity that you’ll have to look at yourself to determine the right way forward for your business. The purpose of this series is to review what DMPs do, how they do it, and key features to look for as you evaluate potential partners.
For me DMP doesn´t resolve totally my advertising needs, but give´s me some good and accurate tips/leads that can drive my tasks to achieve my goals; mainly gives me a good, higher and accurate segmentation.
