For someone such as Nick Jordan, director of product management at Adobe Systems, integrating Adobe's DMP, the Adobe Audience Manager, to the in-house suite of marketing solutions is a very exciting prospect for advertisers. Current clients already using their flagship analytics product, SiteCatalyst, will find amazing synergies when connecting to the DMP. "Before this integration," Jordan said, "marketers had to architect their audience strategy and them implement. Now, with a platform that can not only bring data in, push data out, and then also bring back feedback in to reset the tactics, there's a new level automation that can bring exponential power which advertisers have never had before."
There's also a huge need to analyze and evaluate the data that marketers can access. Jordan says Adobe is tackling that problem. "Helping to score and vet data to make sense of it all is also very important to the future of the DMP. With our 'Algorithmic Segments' product, for example, you can analyze the visitors who have completed an action and then figure out the unique data points against the general population to find what attributes make up that kind of user. This helps marketers find the next set of users who are like their most important customers. The kind of ROI you can generate from this depth of analysis is off the charts."
Not just for marketers
AudienceScience is a company that has been providing DMP-like services for publishers before the acronym even existed. Jeremy Mason, VP of strategic operations, took me through the history of his company's deep relationships with publishers over the last decade. Audience Science has helped its clients segment and sell behavioral targeting (a term they coined) to advertisers in order to generate more revenue. But the appetite has grown tremendously in recent months.
"Right now, publishers are learning what data can really do," Mason said. "There are sales teams out there that have only focused on the inventory but meanwhile, they haven't tapped into this. So this discussion has really brought to surface the core value that AudSci has been doing for years. A lot of our partners realize with the competition growing fierce, they need to get involved. They're thinking, 'if we can get efficiency out of this then we can make more money.'"
Mason thinks that the rise of popularity of the term DMP has actually been a great catalyst for the industry to move faster towards a data-driven mindset. "Yes, we've been acting as a DMP for literally hundreds of well-known publishers for almost a decade, but only recently have marketers had direct access to this technology. As more clients use their DMPs, there's more of a market for data. With more of a market for data, it funds more product development for DMPs to manage that data. It's an interesting cycle that is snowballing into everyone in our industry -- brands, agencies, vendors, publishers -- to start leveraging data more and more. There's a bright future for what the digital channel is really right for and that's data-driven marketing."
