The Technology Layer Cake

 

This cake doesn’t look all that appealing, but thinking of your marketing stack in such a way is helpful. Think of the cream filling as helpful client success personnel should you want to extend the metaphor.

I saw a great presentation at this year’s Industry Preview where Brian Anderson of LUMA Partners presented on the future of marketing clouds. His unifying marketechture drawings looked like an amalgamation of various whiteboarding sessions I have had recently with big enterprise marketers, many of whom are building the components of their marketing “stacks.” Marketers are feverishly licensing offerings from all kinds of big software companies and smaller adtech and martech players to build a vision that can be summed up like this:

 

The Data Management Layer

Today’s “stack” really consists of three individual layers when you break it down. The first layer, Data Management (DM), contains all of the “pipes” used to connect people identity together. Every cloud needs to take data in from all kinds of sources, such as internet cookies, mobile IDs, hashed e-mail identity keys, purchase data, and the like. Every signal we can collect results in a richer understanding of the customer, and the DM layer needs access to rich sets of first, second, and third-party data to paint the clearest picture.

The DM layer also needs to tie every single ID and attribute collected to an individual, so all the signals collected can be leveraged to understand their wants and desires. This identity infrastructure is critical for the enterprise; knowing that you are the same guy who saw the display ad for the family minivan, and visited the “March Madness Deals” page on the mobile app goes a long way to attribution. But the DM layer cannot be constrained by anonymous data. Today’s marketing stacks must leverage DMPs to understand pseudonymous identity, but must find trusted ways to mix PII-based data from e-mail and CRM systems. This latter notion has created a new category—the “Customer Data Platform” (CDP), and also resulted in the rush to build data lakes as a method of collecting a variety of differentiated data for analytics purposes.

Finally, the DM layer must be able to seamlessly connect the data out to all kinds of activation channels, whether they are e-mail, programmatic, social, mobile, OTT, or IOT-based. Just as people have many different ID keys, people have different IDs inside of Google, Facebook, Pinterest, and the Wall Street Journal. Connecting those partner IDs to an enterprises’ universal ID solves problems with frequency management, attribution, and offers the ability to sequence messages across various addressable channels.

You can’t have a marketing cloud without data management. This layer is the “who” of the marketing cloud—who are these people and what are they like?

The Orchestration Layer

The next thing marketers need to have (and they often build it first, in pieces) is an orchestration layer. This is the “When, Where, and How” of the stack. E-mail systems can determine when to send that critical e-mail; marketing automation software can decide whether to put someone in a “nurture” campaign, or have a salesperson call them right away; DSPs decide when to bid on a likely internet surfer, and social management platforms can tell us when to Tweet or Snap. Content management systems and site-side personalization vendors orchestrate the perfect content experience on a web page, and dynamic creative optimization systems have gotten pretty good at guessing which ad will perform better for certain segments (show the women the high-heeled shoe ad, please).

The “when” layer is critical for building smart customer journeys. If you get enough systems connected, you start to realize the potential for executing on the “right person, right message, right time” dynamic that has been promised for many years, but never quite delivered at scale. Adtech has been busy nailing the orchestration of display and mobile messages, and the big social platforms have been leveraging their rich people data to deliver relevant messages. However, with lots of marketing money and attention still focused on e-mail and broadcast, there is plenty of work to be done before marketers can build journeys that feature every touchpoint their customers are exposed to.

Marketers today are busy building connectors to their various systems and getting them to talk to each other to figure out the “when, where, and how” of marketing.

The Artificial Intelligence Layer

When every single marketer and big media company owns a DMP,and has figured out how to string their various orchestration platforms together, it is clear that the key point of differentiation will reside in the AI layer. Artificial intelligence represents the “why” problem in marketing—why am I e-mailing this person instead of calling her? Should I be targeting this segment at all? Why does this guy score highly for a new car purchase, and this other guy who looks similar doesn’t? What is the lifetime value of this new business traveler I just acquired?

While the stacks have tons of identity data, advertising data, and sales data, they need a brain to analyze all of that data and decide how to use it most effectively. As marketing systems become more real-time and more connected to on-the-go customers than ever before, artificial intelligence must drive millions of decisions quickly, gleaned from billions of individual data points. How does the soda company know when to deliver an ad for water instead of diet soda? It requires understanding location, the weather, the person, and what they are doing in the moment. AI systems are rapidly building their machine learning capabilities and connecting into orchestration systems to help with decisioning.

All Together Now

The layer cake is a convenient way to look at what is happening today. The vision for tomorrow is to squish the layer cake together in such a way that enterprises get all of that functionality in a single cake. In four or five years, every marketing orchestration system will have some kind of built-in DMP—or seamless connections to any number of them. We see this today with large DSPs; they all need an internal data management system for segmentation. Tomorrow’s orchestration systems will all have built-in artificial intelligence as a means for differentiation. Look at e-mail orchestration today. It is not sold on its ability to deliver messages to inboxes, but rather on its ability to provide that service in a smarter package to increase open rates and provide richer analytics.

It will be fun to watch as these individual components come together to form the marketing clouds of the future. It’s a great time to be a data-driven marketer!

[This post was originally published April 4, 2017 on Econsultancy blog

CPG goes DMP

 

I often wonder how Wayne Gretzky feels when he looks at this photograph. Maybe he’s like, “man, that blazer was totally boss.”

If you think about the companies with perhaps least amount of consumer data, you would automatically think about consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers. Hardly anybody registers for their website or joins their loyalty clubs; moms don’t flock to their branded diaper sites; and they are at arms-length from any valuable transaction data (store sales) until well after the fact. So, with little registration, website, or offline sales data, why are so many large CPG firms licensing an expensive first-party data management platform?

 

While CPG companies will never have the vast amounts of point-of-sale, loyalty-card, app, and website data that a big box retailer might have, they do spend a ton of dough on media. And, as we all know, with large media expenditures come tons of waste. Combine this with the increasingly large investment and influence that activist investors and private equity companies have in CPG, and you can see where this leads. PE companies have installed zero-based budgeting that forces CPG concerns to rationalize every penny of the marketing budget—which, until lately, has been subject to the Wannamaker Rule (“I know half of my budget is working, but not which half”). Enter the DMP for measurement and global frequency control, cutting off and reallocating potentially millions of dollars in “long tail” spending. Now, the data that the CPG marketer actually has in abundance (media exposure data), can be leveraged to the hilt.

This first and most obvious CPG use case has been discussed extensively in past articles. But there is much more to data management for CPG companies. Here are just a few tactics big consumer marketers have written into their data-driven playbooks:

 

The Move to Purchase-Based Targeting (PBT)

Marketers have come a long way from demographic targeting. Yes, gender, age and income are all reliable proxies for finding those “household CEOs,” but we live in complicated times and “woman, aged 25-54, with 2 children in household” is still a fairly broad way to target media in 2016. Today, men are increasingly as likely to go grocery shopping on a Thursday night. Marketers saw this and shifted more budget to behavioral, psychographic, and contextual targeting—but finding cereal buyers using proxies such as site visitation sharpened the targeting arrow only slightly more than demography.

Packaged goods marketers have long understood the value of past purchases (loyalty cards and coupons), but until the emergence of data management technologies, have struggled to activate audiences based on such data. Now, big marketers can look at online coupon redemption or build special store purchase segments (Datalogix, Nieslen Catalina, News America Marketing) and create high value purchase-based segments. The problem? Such seed segments are small, and must be modeled to achieve scale. Also, by the time the store sales data comes in, it’s often far too late to optimize a media plan. That said, CPG marketers are finding that product purchasers share key data attributes that reveal much about their household composition, behavior, and—most interestingly—affinity for a company’s other products. It may not seem obvious that a shopping basket contains diapers and beer—until you understand that Mom sent Dad out to the store to pick up some Huggies, and he took the opportunity to grab a cold six-pack of Bud Light. These insights are shaping modern digital audience segmentation strategy, and those tactics are becoming more and more automated through the use of algorithmic modeling and machine-learning. CPG has seen the future, and it is using PBT to increase relevant reach.

Optimizing Category Reach

CPG marketers are constantly thinking about how to grow the amount of product they sell, and those thoughts typically vary between focusing on folks who are immensely loyal (“heavy” category buyers) versus those who infrequently purchase (“light” or “medium” category buyers). Who to target? It’s an interesting question, and one answered more decisively with purchase-based sales data.

Take the large global soda company as an example. Their average amount of colas their customer consumes is 15 a year, but that is an immensely deceptive number. The truth is that the company has a good amount of “power users” who drink 900 colas a year (two and a half per day), and a lot of people who may only drink 2-3 colas during the entire year. Using the age-old “80/20 Rule” as a guideline, you would perhaps be inclined to focus most of the marketing budget on the 20% of users who supposedly make up 80% of sales volume. However, closer examination reveals that heavy category buyers may only be driving as little as 50% of total purchase volume. So, the marketer’s quandary is, “Do I try and sell the heavy buyer his 901^st cola, or do I try and get the light buyer to double his purchase from two to four colas a year?”

Leveraging data helps CPG companies not have to decide. Increasingly, companies are adopting frequency approaches that identify the right amount of messaging to nurture the heavy users (maybe 2-3 messages per user, per month) and bring light buyers to higher levels of purchase consideration (up to 20 messages per month). Moreover, by using DMP technology to segment these buyers based on their category membership, creatives can be adjusted based on the audience. Heavy buyers get messages that reinforce why the love the brand (“share the love”), and light buyers can receive more convincing messages (“tastes better”).

Increasing Lift through Cross-Channel Messaging

CPG marketers have some highly evolved models that show just how much lift a working media dollar has on sales, and they use this guide to decision on media investment by both channel and partner. With the power of DMPs for cross-channel measurement, CPG companies are finally able to apply even small insights they can to tweak sales lift.

What if the data reveal that a 50% mixture of equity and direct response ad creatives lifts coupon downloads by 200%? In other words, instead of just showing “Corn Flakes are Yummy” ads, you mixed in a few “Buy Flakes now at Kroger and save!” creatives afterwards, and you saw a huge impact on your display performance? Sadly, this simple insight was not available before data management platforms corralled cross-channel spending and associated it with an individual, but now these small insights are adding up to appreciable sales lift.

In another example, a large CPG company sees massive lift in in-store coupon redemptions by running branded display ads on desktop all throughout the week—but giving a “mobile nudge” on the smartphone on Friday night when it’s time to fill the pantry. This cross-channel call-to-action has seen real results, and only involves grabbing a brand-favorable consumer’s attention on another device to create a big impact. Again, a simple tactic—but also impossible without the power of a DMP.

CPG marketers have been able to achieve a ton of progress by working with relatively sparse amounts of data. What can you do with yours?

 

 

 

Pubs that Want Reach Extension Need to Own the Programmatic Channel

Should publishers go beyond the boundaries of their own inventory to sell “reach extension” packages to their clients? Publishers have long struggled with the problem of how to deliver a $100,000 campaign when they only have $90,000 of inventory. Without a strong partner network, the natural answer to that question used to be click arbitrage, an expensive and risky method of campaign fulfillment that often came with less than desirable site visitors.

These days there are several major factors that make reach extension a great opportunity for publishers, rather than a sales mechanism that strays outside their sore realm of expertise.

Publishers with premium inventory sell in three principle ways: Their best inventory is sold in large, customized “tent pole” sales; their standardized premium IAB units are sold through the transactional RFP process; and the rest is sold programmatically, through their remnant daisy chain. They do the first thing really well, especially for big branded advertisers, where they act like a mini creative/media agency to build custom programs. Publishers are also getting much better at the transactional business by leveraging great tools to bring efficiency to RFP response and enabling better demand-side access to their premium inventory (AdSlot, iSocket). The third thing (“remnant”) is the ball publishers continue to fumble, even though enabling an “owned” programmatic channel is getting easier for publishers every day.

Data management is the obvious solution. With the right tools, publishers no longer have to rely on third parties to understand the composition of their audience. The combination of a publisher’s CRM data and site tag data, ingested into one of a dozen amazing DMPs can enable them to segment and target their audience on the fly. Want “auto enthusiasts” on my site? Not only can I sell you a highly creative, customized program and back it up with a large share-of-voice in standard IAB banners within the site section—but now I can find your own customers right on my site…and on Facebook as well.

The last part of that equation (leveraging the client’s first-party CRM data) is where today’s reach extension differs from sending your excess buy to ContextWeb or AudienceScience, as you would in the old days. Now, publishers can find advertisers’ customers within their own site or publisher network and retarget them.  Better yet, pubs can help advertisers put that same first-party data to work on exchanges, including FBX, where match rates (and performance) are high. Really advanced publishers will leverage their DMP to model the audience advertisers are trying to reach, and build a custom lookalike model which can find “alike” audiences within the publisher network itself, or across the exchanges.

Publishers are acting more and more like agencies when it comes to the big premium sales that take multidisciplinary talent to pull off (sales, media, creative, development). Why shouldn’t they act like an agency (or, more specifically, an agency trading desk) when it comes to helping their clients with reach extension goals? If I am a publisher, and my client comes to me looking for the audience I specialize in, I should be able to tell the advertiser how to reach that audience—starting on my own site, but also across the Web in general. The right data management strategy and tools enable publishers to cover all three legs of the buy: sponsorship, transactional, and programmatic.

[This appeared as part of AdMonsters invaluable Audience Extension Playbook, available here.]

What I Learned Writing Best Practices in Data Management

Today data is like water: free-flowing, highly available, and pervasive. As the cost of storing and collecting data decreases, more of it becomes available to marketers looking to optimize the way they acquire new customers and activate existing ones. In the right hands, data can be the key to understanding audiences, developing the right marketing messages, optimizing campaigns, and creating long-term customers. In the wrong hands, data can contribute to distraction, poor decision-making, and customer alienation. Over the past several weeks, I asked over thirty of the world’s leading digital data practitioners what marketers should be thinking about when it comes to developing a data management strategy. The result was the newly available Best Practices in Data Management report. A few big themes emerged from my research, which I thought I would share:

Welcome to the First Party

Digital marketing evolves quickly but, for those of us working as digital marketers or publishers for the past 10 years, we have seen distinct waves of transformation impact the way we use data for audience targeting. Early on, audience data was owned by publishers, who leveraged that data to control pricing for premium audiences. The Network Era quickly supplanted this paradigm by leveraging tag data to understand publishers’ audiences better than the sites themselves. Buying targeted remnant inventory at scale created new efficiencies and easy paychecks for publishers, who found themselves completely disintermediated. The DSP Era (which we are still in) continued that trend, by completely separating audiences from media, and giving even more control to the demand side. Today, the “DMP Era” promises a new world where publishers and advertisers can activate their first party data, and use it for remarketing, lookalike modeling, and analytics.

The ubiquity of third party data (available to all, and often applied to the same exact inventory) makes activating first party data more valuable than ever. Doing so effectively means regaining a level of control over audience targeting for publishers, and being able to leverage CRM data for retargeting and lookalike modeling for the demand side, as well as a deeper level of analytics for both sides. If there has been one huge takeaway from my conversations with all of the stakeholders in the data-driven marketing game, it is that getting control and flexibility around the use of your own first-party data is the key to success. As a marketer, if you are buying more segments than you are creating, you are losing.

The New Computing Paradigm

In order to successfully activate all of the data your company can leverage for success takes a lot of work, and a lot of advanced technology. Whether you are a publisher trying to score audiences in milliseconds in order to increase advertising yield, or an advertiser attempting to deliver a customized banner ad to a prospect in real-time, you need to store an incredible amount of data and (more importantly) be able to access it at blazing speeds. In the past, having that capability meant building your own enormous technology “stack” and maintaining it.  Today, the availability of cloud-based computing and distributed computing solutions like Hadoop has created a brand new paradigm or what former Microsoft executive and current RareCrowds CEO Eric Picard likes to call the “4^th Wave.”

“Being a Wave 4 company implicitly means that you are able to leverage the existing sunk cost of these companies’ investment,” says Picard. That means building apps on top of AppNexus’ extensible platform, leveraging Hadoop to process 10 billion daily transactions without owning a server (as Bizo does), or simply hosting portions of your data in Amazon’s cloud to gain speed and efficiency. As digital marketing becomes more data intensive, knowing how to leverage existing systems to get to scale will become a necessity. If you are not taking advantage of this new technology paradigm, it means you are using resources for IT rather than IP. These days, winning means applying your intellectual property to available technology—not who has the biggest internal stack.

Social Data is Ascendant

One of the most interesting aspects of data management is how it is impacting traditional notions of CRM. In the past, digital marketing seemed to end below the funnel. Once the customer was driven through the marketing funnel and purchased, she went into the CRM database, to be targeted later by more traditional marketing channels (e-mail, direct mail). Now, the emergence of data-rich social platforms had actually created a dynamic in which the funnel continues.

Once in the customer database (CRM), the post-purchase journey starts with a commitment beyond the sale, when a consumer joins an e-mail list, “friends” a company’s page, follows a company’s Twitter account, or signs up for special offers on the company’s site. The next step is an expression of social interest, when the consumer agrees to make public his “like” for a company or brand by “friending” a company’s page, following a company’s Twitter account. Beyond the “like” is true social activation, wherein the consumer actively (not passively) recommends the product or service, through commenting, sharing, or other active social behaviors. The final step is having the consumer sell on your behalf (directly via affiliate programs or, in the softer sense, as a “brand ambassador”).  This dynamic is why Salesforce has acquired Radian6 and Buddy Media.

For digital marketers, going beyond the funnel and activating consumers through social platforms means understanding their stated preferences, affinities, and that of their social graph. Most companies already do this with existing platforms. They real key is tying this data back into your other data inputs to create a 360 degree user view. That’s where data science and management platforms come in. If you are not ingesting rich social data and using it to continually segment, target, expand, and understand your customers, you are behind the curve.

[This post originally appeared on the EConsultancy blog. Get the paper here.]

Choosing a Data Management Platform

“Big  Data”  is  all  the  rage  right  now,  and  for a good reason. Storing tons and tons of data has gotten very inexpensive, while the accessibility of that data has increased substantially in parallel. For the modern marketer, that means having access to literally dozens of disparate data sources, each of which cranks out large volumes of data every day. Collecting, understanding, and taking action against those data sets is going to make or break companies from now on. Luckily, an almost endless variety of companies have sprung up to assist agencies and advertisers with the challenge. When it comes to the largest volumes of data, however, there are some highly specific attributes you should consider when selecting a data management platform (DMP).

Collection and Storage: Scale, Cost, and Ownership
First of all, before you can do anything with large amounts of data, you need a place to keep it. That  place  is  increasingly  becoming  “the  cloud”  (i.e.,  someone  else’s  servers),  but  it  can  also  be   your own servers. If you think you have a large amount of data now, you will be surprised at how much it will grow. As devices like the iPad proliferate, changing the way we find content, even more data will be generated. Companies that have data solutions with the proven ability to scale at low costs will be best able to extract real value out of this data. Make sure to understand how your DMP scales and what kinds of hardware they use for storage and retrieval.

Speaking of hardware, be on the lookout for companies that formerly sold hardware (servers) getting into the  data  business  so  they  can  sell  you  more  machines.  When  the  data  is  the  “razor,”   the  servers  necessarily  become  the  “blades.”  You  want  a  data  solution  whose  architecture  enables the easy ingestion of large, new data sets, and one that takes advantage of dynamic cloud provisioning to keep ongoing costs low. Not necessarily a hardware partner.

Additionally, your platform should be able to manage extremely high volumes of data quickly, have an architecture that enables other systems to plug in seamlessly, and whose core functionality enables multi-dimensional analysis of the stored data—at a highly granular level. Your data are going to grow exponentially, so the first rule of data management is making sure that, as your data grows, your ability to query them scales as well. Look for a partner that can deliver on those core attributes, and be wary of partners that have expertise in storing limited data sets.
There are a lot of former ad networks out there with a great deal of experience managing common third party data sets from vendors like Nielsen, IXI, and Datalogix. When it comes to basic audience segmentation, there is a need to manage access to those streams. But, if you are planning on capturing and analyzing data that includes CRM and transactional data, social signals, and other large data sets, you should look for a DMP that has experience working with first party data as well as third party datasets.

The concept of ownership is also becoming increasingly important in the world of audience data. While the source of data will continue to be distributed, make sure that whether you choose a hosted or a self-hosted model, your data ultimately belongs to you. This allows you to control the policies around historical storage and enables you to use the data across multiple channels.

Consolidation and Insights: Welcome to the (Second and Third) Party
Third party data (in this context, available audience segments for online targeting and measurement) is the stuff that the famous Kawaja logo vomit map was born from. Look at the map, and you are looking at over 250 companies dedicated to using third party data to define and target audiences. A growing number of platforms help marketers analyze, purchase, and deploy that data for targeting (BlueKai, Exelate, Legolas being great examples). Other networks (Lotame, Collective, Turn) have leveraged their proprietary data along with their clients to offer audience management tools that combine their data and third party data to optimize campaigns. Still others (PulsePoint’s  Aperture  tool  being  a  great  example)  leverage  all  kinds  of  third party data to measure online audiences, so they can be modeled and targeted against.

The key is not having the most third party data, however. Your DMP should be about marrying highly validated first party data, and matching it against third party data for the purposes of identifying, anonymizing, and matching third party users. DMPs must be able to consolidate and create as whole of a view of your audience as possible. Your DMP solution must be able to enrich the audience information using second and third party data. Second party data is the data associated with audience outside your network (for example, an ad viewed on a publisher site or search engine). While you must choose the right set of third party providers that provide the best data set about your audience, your DMP must be able to increase reach by ensuring that you can collect information about as many relevant users as possible and through lookalike modelling.

First Party Data

• CRM data, such as user registrations
• Site-site data, including visitor history
• Self-declared user data (income, interest in a product)

Second Party Data

• Ad serving data (clicks, views)
• Social signals from a hosted solution
• Keyword search data through an analytics platform or campaign

Third Party Data

• Audience segments acquired through a data provider

For example, if you are selling cars and you discover that your on-site users who register for a test drive are most closely  matched  with  PRIZM’s  “Country  Squires”  audience,  it  is  not  enough  to  buy   that Nielsen segment. A good DMP enables you to create your own lookalike segment by leveraging that insight—and the tons of data you already have. In other words, the right DMP partner can help you leverage third party data to activate your own (first party) data.

Make sure your provider leads with management of first party data, has experience mining both types of data to produce the types of insights you need for your campaigns, and can get that data quickly.  Data  management  platforms  aren’t  just  about  managing  gigantic  spreadsheets.  They  are   about finding out who your customers are, and building an audience DNA that you can replicate.

Making it Work
At the end of the day, it’s  not  just  about  getting  all  kind  of  nifty  insights  from  the  data.  It’s   valuable to know that your visitors that were exposed to search and display ads converted at a 16% higher rate, or that your customers have an average of two females in the household.  But  it’s   making those insights meaningful that really matters.
So, what to look for in a data management platform in terms of actionability? For the large agency or advertiser, the basic functionality has to be creating an audience segment. In other words, when the blend of data in the platform reveals that showing five display ads and two SEM ads to a household with two women in it creates sales, the platform should be able to seamlessly produce that segment and prepare it for ingestion into a DSP or advertising platform. That means having an extensible architecture that enables the platform to integrate easily with other systems.

Moreover, your DSP should enable you to do a wide range of experimentation with your insights. Marketers often wonder what levers they should pull to create specific results (i.e., if I change my display creative, and increase the frequency cap to X for a given audience segment, how much will conversions increase)? Great DMPs can help built those attribution scenarios, and help marketers visualize results. Deploying specific optimizations in a test environment first means less waste, and more performance. Optimizing in the cloud first is going to become the new standard in marketing.

Final Thoughts
There are a lot of great data management companies out there, some better suited than others when it comes to specific needs. If you are in the market for one, and you have a lot of first party data to manage, following these three rules will lead to success:

• Go beyond third party data by choosing a platform that enables you to develop deep audience profiles that leverage first and third party data insights. With ubiquitous access to third party data, using your proprietary data stream for differentiation is key.
• Choose a platform  that  makes  acting  on  the  data  easy  and  effective.  “Shiny,  sexy”  reports  are   great, but the right DMP should help you take the beautifully presented insights in your UI, and making them work for you.
• Make sure your platform has an applications layer. DMPs must not only provide the ability to profile your segments, but also assist you with experimentation and attribution–and provide you with ability to easily perform complicated analyses (Churn, and Closed Loop being two great  examples).  If  your  platform  can’t  make  the  data  dance,  find  another  partner.

Available DMPs, by Type
There are a wide variety of DMPs out there to choose from, depending on your need. Since the space is relatively new, it helps to think about them in terms of their legacy business model:

• Third Party Data Exchanges / Platforms: Among the most popular DMPs are data aggregators like BlueKai and Exelate, who have made third  party  data  accessible  from  a  single  user  interface.  BlueKai’s  exchange approach enables data buyers  to  bid  for  cookies  (or  “stamps”)  in  a  real-time environment, and offers a wide variety of providers to choose from. Exelate also enables access to multiple third party sources, albeit not in a bidded model. Lotame offers  a  platform  called  “Crowd  Control”  which  was  evolved  from  social   data, but now enables management of a broader range of third party data sets.
• Legacy Networks: Certain networks with experience in audience segmentation have evolved to provide data management capabilities, including Collective, Audience Science, and Turn. Collective is actively acquiring assets (such as creative optimization provider, Tumri14) to  broaden  its  “technology   stack”  in  order  to  offer  a  complete  digital  media  solution  for  demand  side customers. Turn is, in fact, a fully featured demand-side platform with advanced data management capabilities, albeit lacking  the  backend  chops  to  aggregate  and  handle  “Big  Data”  solutions  (although  that  may   rapidly change, considering their deep engagement with Experian). Audience Science boasts the most advanced native categorical audience segmentation capabilities, having created dozens of specific, readily accessible audience segments, and continues to migrate its core capabilities from media sales to data management.
• Pure Play DMPs: Demdex (Adobe), Red Aril, Krux, and nPario are all pure-play data management platforms, created from the ground up to ingest, aggregate, and analyze large data sets. Unlike legacy networks, or DMPs that specialize in aggregating third party data sets, these DMPs provide three core offerings: a core platform for storage and retrieval of data; analytics technology for getting insights from the data with a reporting interface; and applications, that enable marketers to take action against that data, such as audience segment creation, or lookalike modeling functionality. Marketers with extremely large sets of structured and unstructured data that go beyond ad serving and audience data (and may include CRM and transactional data, as an example), will want to work with a pure-play DMP

This post is an excerpt of Best Practices in Digital Display Advertising: How to make a complex ecosystem work efficiently for your organization All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

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