What is a Data Management Platform (DMP)?
DMP stands for “Data Management Platform.” That pretty much says it all: it is a platform that manages data. But you’re probably still wondering how exactly this type of platform can help you.
According to Digiday, “In simple terms, a DMP is a data warehouse, a piece of software that sucks up, sorts, and houses information and spits it out in a way that’s useful for marketers, publishers, and other businesses.” A data management platform is an execution hub where audiences are collected and marketing campaigns are launched, analyzed, and optimized.
This happens through three steps:
- Aggregating Data: This type of platform imports and houses lots of information (the data). Primarily, they manage digital audience data like cookies, online behavioral data, and look-alike audiences. Most offline data (including your CRM, point-of-sale systems, subscription list, and third-party data providers) can be onboarded onto these platforms, but that requires external technology to do so—like an identity resolution provider.
- Audience segmentation: Segments are built from that data. These segments are the cornerstone of people-based marketing, allowing marketers to group people sharing certain characteristics and target each in specific ways.
- Analyzing and optimizing: After building segments, these platforms are able to manage and present all campaign activity and audience data based on those segments to help optimize present campaigns and establish best practices for future campaigns.
They help enable data-driven marketing strategies, which allow for effective targeting and unique messaging. These principles matter because the more a consumer believes that a company knows their needs and wants, the more likely they are to engage.
Making your DMP more impactful
Make your DMP more impactful with identity resolution. Identity resolution ties unknown IDs back to real people, allowing marketers to know which ID is associated with which consumer, and in turn, to deliver more relevant messaging.
Many confuse LiveRamp for this type of platform—understandably, considering we meet the first two common capabilities (ie. capturing data and activating data for marketing campaigns). While our capabilities are slightly different, they are still very complementary.
We help a number of DMP partners (like Adform, Adobe, Lotame, MediaMath, Neustar, Nielsen, Oracle, Salesforce (Krux), and Turn) ingest more offline data, apply verified, people-based identity to their data feeds, match audiences at a household level, and augment additional integrations for distribution.
By aggregating your data in one platform, DMPs allow you to create and manage audience segments for targeting or building deeper customer insights. They can also build look-alike models. And by working with an identity resolution provider, these can become people-based, adding a heightened level of certainty to your analytics.
Want to learn more? See why identity and connectivity are critical for leveraging your data across the advertising ecosystem.
