CDPs and DMPs a story of Advertising platforms

Customer Data Platform and Data Management platforms are some of the components of a data-driven marketing technology stack. They provide tools for marketers to target different segments of the population effectively.
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
The Customer data platform is meant as a data store for all internal attributes and events related to a given customer. It is intended to provide a way to unify data across multiple data sources, with potentially different types of customer identifiers, and, as such, needs to offer a way to resolve identities.
Use cases for a CDP:
Single Source of Truth: The customer data platform aims to act as a single source of truth for customer data, offering a 360-degree view of customer behavior across the different touchpoints and identities.
It enables to also structure and standardize the inputs and data models of customers, for instance, with mParticle’s commerce events which structure different product action onto the same schema. Besides the standardization component, part of the CDP’s role during the data integration phase is also to provide better data quality by cleansing and de-duping the data.
Advertising: Since CDPs are able to collect data from the different touchpoints of customer interactions and resolving their identities. It is also able to harmonize the communication with the customers across the various communication channels.
Empower Personalization: Personalization can be empowered to the highest level by the use of a customer data platform. Customer data platforms allows for the creation and utilization of data from a merged identity, through means of a) Attribute retrieval b) segment creation c) machine learning score. These data points can then be used to power advertising campaigns, website recommendations, or to empower personalization across the full user journey.
Ease Integration: One of the roles of customer data platforms is to facilitate the integration of different data sources, both inbound or outbound. The customer data platform needs to be able to integrate data sources such as web analytics, e-commerce data, email behavior. It also needs to export to the different endpoints that can make use of the data such as advertising platform, marketing automation tools, or a data warehouse.
List of CDPs
There exists quite an extensive list of CDP vendors out there, usually each with a different focus.
- CDPs that are originating from a Tag Management systems provider such as Tealium, or Ensighten. These systems tend to have pivoted into Customer Profile by leveraging their common data model used for tag integration.
- Pure Play Oriented: such as Segment, one of the few CDP offering a free developer trial version, mParticle, a CDP focused on providing data integration, offering a unified data model, ingesting different types of events such as commerce events onto a common data model and exporting it to different endpoints.
- Campaign Management Oriented: Lytics is a CDP with a strong focus on campaign management, customer journeys, and of enrichment of profile from 2nd party data. Agile One is a CDP with both campaigns and analytics capabilities. SessionM is a CDP focused on providing loyalty management as part of their offering.
- Personalization Oriented: Qubit, although it does not sell itself as a CDP, but rather as a personalization platform. It shares several functionalities with them, such as an ability to deduplicate customers across identities, storing of data at the user level, ability to segment audiences and some possibilities for integration with other platforms (eg, Salesforce Marketing Cloud).
- Open Source: Unomi is an open-source CDP, some of its drawbacks being the lack of UI, the need to have to host it, and the lack of an extensive integration ecosystem.
Caveats
Seeing a CDP as a golden record for Customer needs to be taken with a grain of salt, ingested data is usually persisted with attributes, for instance, product information is usually persisted at the same time as the events triggered. The backend of most CDPs don’t usually allow for the kind of merging activities necessary to maintain dimensions such as a product category dimension.
Data Management Platform (DMP)
What’s the purpose of a DMP — the use of a data management platform is the collection, enrichment of data, and management of data for digital marketing purposes. One of the principal value of a DMP is the ability to provide a consistent experience across different marketing channels.
Data collection and enrichment:
The DMP collects data from a clients’ first-party sources, for instance, from the users visiting its websites. From second party sources, i.e., data that is obtained through collaboration, this could be targeting settings for a Facebook campaign that can be identified when a user visits the website, and from third party sources, data that is obtained from other activities.
At the heart of the DMP is the notion of an anonymous user identity, typically identified through cookie ids, these cookies can be matched through rule base systems or probabilistic matching.
Use cases for a DMP:
Advertising: The primary purpose of DMPs is to offer a cohesive audience targeting. This is done through segment building and the creation of different segments for different types of personas. DMPs typically provide different kind of segments:
- Static Segments: Segments are run once based on a snapshot of a visitors’ attributes.
- Adaptive Segments: Segments are continually being updated based on the data being provided to the platform. For instance, an adaptive segment can be “website visitors 30 days”.
- Segments obtained from Machine Learning models for Lookalike modeling.
These segments can then be exported to DSPs or other activation channels.
Audience Insight: DMPs also provide insights on the behavioral patterns of your customers, as well as learn more about who your customers are by leveraging information provided by third parties.
List of DMP
- Salesforce DMP (Krux): Salesforce integrated Krux as part of their marketing cloud platform, offering a way to target “unknown” visitors on your websites and enhance the information you have on them with third party data.
- Adobe Audience Manager: is Adobe’s DMP, well-integrated into adobe marketing cloud, it enables marketers to get a better grasp of the different audience segments, interacting with their ads or the website.
- MediaMath: an independent ad tech vendor in between a DMP and a DSP solution, benefiting from over $600M of funding.
- Oracle BlueKai: Oracle’s DMP with a heavy data enrichment slant, it boasts over 200 media partners.
Wrap up
At their core, CDPs and DMPs have an overlap in functionalities, but also some differences, which mostly resolve from their treatment of identity. CDPs also have an overlap in functionality with other systems such as Tag Management, Master Data Management, and Marketing Automation tooling.