By Pailin Srukhosit and Tyler Jessop
Recently, we attended Liveramp’s RampUp 2019 Conference in San Francisco. This event is one of the premiere summits for MarTech in the United States and featured over 100 thought leaders, thousands of attendees, and a number of updates and developments in the marketing technology space.
Meet CDP: The Newest Player in the MarTech Space
One of RampUp’s big focuses was the Customer Data Platform, or CDP, one of the most recent developments in MarTech. This emerging technology promises a universal view of each customer through centralized long-term storage, as well as unification and segmentation (based on advertiser’s needs) of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data, which is accessible to external delivery systems. All essential for superior performance marketing services. The CDP is an evolution of the more frequently used Data Management Platform, or DMP, which enables anonymous, views of target segments based mostly on 2nd and 3rd party data, and sometimes 1st. However, due to data retention limitations, maintaining accurate user profiles with DMPs can be challenging. That’s where the CDP comes in.
In contrast, CDPs’ consolidated, longer-term offering could allow advertisers to better target users in different stages of the customer lifecycle and deliver a more personalized marketing experience. The promise of an operative CDP could enable more effective multi-funnel media strategies to accurately target relevant business decision makers at the right stage of product consideration with the right type of information and with the right type of product.
Although this is an exciting prospect for marketers, with the promise of large amounts of data that could fuel informed decision-making, there is still work to be done before the CDP is ready for its theoretical functioning. Data solutions are currently driven by vendors who may not be incentivized to cooperate with a CDP. Additionally, DMPs provide a certain amount of anonymity and combining 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data into a CDP could create data privacy issues. A viable comprehensive CDP solution is yet to exist, but it is an evolving space that should not be ignored.
Accessible Identity Graphs for Cross Device Targeting
At RampUp, LiveRamp announced they will begin offering their identity graph for free to all DSPs. This will better help marketers target audiences across devices. Previously a paid offering, this identity graph could enable stronger people-based marketing through aggregation of deterministic and probabilistic audience data, portable to over 500 partners. For programmatic advertisers looking to invest in cross-device strategies for clients, this could be a great opportunity.
Partner Categories and More
A final announcement from RampUp is that LiveRamp will now have access to 3rd party Partner Category segments previously available on Facebook, plus additional audiences, all portable to the social platform. Many marketers that rely on social channels to scale efficiently have had to wrestle with increasingly murky waters since privacy concerns have led Facebook to incrementally limit marketers’ access to audience data for targeting and segmentation (with the recent roll back of Partner Categories, and soon to come release of a Clear History capability). While work arounds can still enable access those audiences, Liveramp’s promise of a one-stop shop could save marketers & advertisers invaluable time and effort
To discuss new technologies, targeting, cross-device strategies and more, get in touch today.
