There’s no doubt that marketers need to make every dollar count now more than ever. But to truly be set up for long-term success, leaders must evaluate the core of their modern marketing programs: the data infrastructure underlying all campaign operations and marketing analytics.
It’s no secret that this infrastructure is being pressure tested. Our current economic environment presents one more barrier to marketers accessing the data they need to power better customer experiences—it’s hard to know how to serve your customers better if they’re not engaging with you on the channels you’re connected to in a privacy-conscious way.
Continued loss of data due to consumers exercising their privacy rights and opting out is another factor, as is cookie deprecation. These events were a long time coming, and created the opportunity to rebuild a trusted ecosystem where brands and publishers have an equal stake. This also means that on a practical level, marketers must rethink the investments they have poured into understanding their audiences and decide if and how they can move forward with existing vendors.
To preserve years of hard work, many marketers may turn to their existing CDPs and DMPs, and stand up more clean rooms. These can be useful, but they are not the heart of a stable data infrastructure and do not plug into a robust identity infrastructure. Clean rooms have limited capabilities and are typically owned by walled garden publishers, not brands. DMPs still rely on cookies, even though cookie pools are decreasing daily and the end of browser support is coming fast. And CDPs focus on directly identifiable personal data coming from CRM systems, making them risky for widening use to data across your business organizations.
Building a connected data infrastructure
Limitations to existing technologies and processes tend to fall into four broad categories: data access, addressability, interoperability, and stewardship. To own your data future, it’s imperative to work with a provider focused on data connectivity with the capabilities that enable activation:
- Respect for consumer choice with innovative privacy and security solutions
- Permissioned data access with built-in privacy controls
- Personalization of the customer experience across all touchpoints and the ability to measure the impact of every interaction
- Seamless integration with a wide network of technologies and partners
Many of these capabilities may exist across CDPs, DMPs, and clean rooms, but we believe they should all exist in one platform. We call it a Data Connectivity Platform.
A new name for a new data infrastructure
We believe that our Data Connectivity Platform promotes secure and privacy-first data access, addressability, interoperability, and stewardship, and will be the basis for guiding marketers’ data strategies for the next decade.
In future posts, we’ll share the experiences of first movers who have revamped their data foundation to drive innovation and long-term business growth. While forces inside and outside our industry have pushed marketers to an inflection point, we believe that they have only underscored the importance of owning your data future through data connectivity.
To learn more about what data connectivity can do for you, visit this page.