The Reinvention of Marketing Infrastructure in the Cloud
As consumer preferences change to incorporate new media and shopping experiences, marketing infrastructure itself must evolve.
Marketers must incorporate new consumer channels while staying compliant with heightened customer data privacy regulations. The proliferation of data across multiple channels, applications, and data stores, as well as the interoperability of previously isolated MarTech and AdTech technologies are additional factors driving significant change in an enterprise’s marketing technology stack.
Cloud infrastructure providers are increasingly providing powerful native solutions for this new infrastructure. From analytics to AI to clean rooms to scalable customer data management, cloud infrastructure providers have brought key services to help marketers understand their customers, interests, preferences and propensities better than ever before.
From Connectivity to Liquidity: A New Era Emerges
Cloud infrastructure providers offer a clear argument about the value of using their native services first in any infrastructure project: Data liquidity.
Data liquidity is the ease by which companies can access, harness, and govern their data. It is vitally important because it enables businesses to increase the value of common data elements by removing the constraints on disparate application access which are a major factor in creating data silos. By enabling multiple applications and teams to simultaneously work with more consistent and updated data, businesses can make better-informed decisions, improve operations, align on a common understanding of business facts, and help create highly desired products and services.
Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) enable customers to achieve data liquidity with capabilities that help them access, harness, and govern their data across multiple systems. However, data silos and challenges persist. It is difficult to link data collected at different times and places. For example, organizations need ways to better understand their customers’ preferences, engagement with specific messages and campaigns, or customer service interactions across multiple channels, often managed by third parties.
So, the cloud has increased data liquidity, but some of the most important business data is still unconnected and therefore unavailable for producing better insights and decisions.
AWS Entity Resolution: A Critical Addition For Warehouse-Centered Marketing Stacks
AWS’s recently launched service helps address this key marketing data need. With AWS Entity Resolution, customers can match, link, and enhance disparate related records stored across multiple applications, channels, and data stores. It offers a variety of matching techniques, including rule-based, machine learning-powered, and data service provider matching, to help organizations resolve related sets of records, including customer signals, product codes, and business information.
For example, a retail brand could use AWS Entity Resolution to link customer records from its CRM system, e-commerce platform, and loyalty program, creating a more connected view of the customer’s records which the retailer can use to improve the customer experience, including developing relevant offers, personalizing the customer store experience, or anticipating customer service needs. Or, a healthcare company could use AWS Entity Resolution to match and link patient records from its electronic health record system, clinical data warehouse, and research database to help improve patient care and conduct clinical research.
By leveraging a cloud native service, enterprises can improve data quality across services that interpret and process customer data in the AWS cloud and take advantage of integrated AMT partner services that can extend the value of that data across use cases.
LiveRamp Integrated Identity Enables External Collaboration and Connectivity
If business strategy is unlocked by having more systems provide more valuable insights more quickly on enterprise data, then identity-driven marketing stacks in the cloud should be the clear architectural target for your business evolution.
LiveRamp is an identity launch partner for AWS Entity Resolution because of our strong interest in creating better data liquidity for our clients, and our experience in extending identity safely across customer data fragments to unify signals from a brand’s partners and accelerate secure data collaboration.
LiveRamp identity resolution and translation capabilities are directly integrated with AWS Entity Resolution, to help customers resolve data to a single, privacy-conscious pseudonymous key — directly within their environment — where it can then be used for a variety of use cases:
- Media measurement and analytics in their cloud environment
- Collaboration in a data clean room, such as AWS Clean Rooms, or with trusted advertising partners
- Campaign activation and orchestration across advertising and marketing platforms and networks
- Programmatic activation across hundreds of destination partners
By leveraging LiveRamp’s cloud-embedded solutions, available on AWS Data Exchange (ADX), AWS Marketplace, and now AWS Entity Resolution, data teams can now take advantage of LiveRamp’s identity capabilities without having to integrate separate applications or write any code!
“AWS customers rely on accurate data to drive better marketing outcomes, and that includes being able to match and connect disparate records and signals from their partners. To do so customers often need to implement custom data integration and rationalization solutions, which are expensive to build and maintain,” said Davor Golac, GM of AWS Entity Resolution.
“With the new AWS Entity Resolution matching workflow with LiveRamp, organizations can now match and enhance their records in minutes, developing a more comprehensive understanding of their customers to help improve their experience. Together with LiveRamp, AWS Entity Resolution makes linking records from multiple sources easier, helping customers minimize data movement, and contributing to a zero-ETL future.”
A Complete Identity-Powered Marketing Stack on AWS
The suite of services that AWS provides for marketers is comprehensive, and the ability to resolve data with identity services when and where you need them delivers strategic cross-channel understandings of customer journeys, needs and preferences.
By integrating LiveRamp identity capabilities with AWS cloud services, an enterprise can now access a richer set of data across their organization, provide more accurate insights, and collaborate with consented partner data, helping them to understand the entirety of the customer journey.
LiveRamp’s enhanced identity resolution and translation solutions for AWS enhance and extend your native cloud infrastructure for marketing and advertising including:
- Unified cross-channel media performance measurement and touchpoint consolidation using LiveRamp identity capabilities in combination with powerful AWS analytic services like Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight. Consolidate complex media logs and performance reports with linked pseudonymous audience identifiers, unlocking data connections to provide cross-channel performance measurement, campaign incrementality and journey-based affinities.
- Enhance and build out a customer 360 view in combination with AWS S3, AWS Redshift Data Warehouse, and AWS Entity Resolution. Translate customer touchpoints or audience files within AWS S3 and output the corresponding RampID – without having to process or move data from the cloud environment, which would weaken the governance required to protect customer data and sensitive personal identifiers.
- Enhanced and secure partner collaboration in combination with AWS data storage services or AWS Clean Rooms. Leverage RampID as the optimized match key for multi-partner data sets, supporting greater data connectivity and analytic accuracy due to the longitudinal and multidimensional match characteristics of LiveRamp identity graph technologies.
- Programmatic Activation. Orchestrate marketing and advertising data workflows, such as resolving data to LiveRamp’s RampID where it can then be activated out to 500 turnkey destinations across the digital, mobile and CTV.
- Media Measurement and Activation with Amazon Ads. Enable a seamless end-to-end workflow to connect your first and third-party data in AWS with Amazon Ads using LiveRamp’s RampID, such as measuring campaign performance on Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and activating brand-specific audiences within Amazon DSP.
Conclusion
By adopting a cloud-centered marketing stack approach, brands, technology providers, and agencies can future-ready their business with a comprehensive data-first infrastructure.
The architecture to win in-market and in customer’s hearts and minds is available today for those enterprises that choose to unlock it.
References
1: “Build Data Liquidity to Accelerate Data Monetization.” MIT CISR, cisr.mit.edu/publication/2021_0501_DataLiquidity_WixomPiccoli..
