A data management platform (DMP) is defined as a software that helps build sophisticated audience/ customer segments to run highly targeted advertising and marketing campaigns.
In this article, Our Editor-in-Chief explains what a data management platform (DMP) is, who needs it and why, the DMP deployment best practices, followed by a carefully curated list of top 10 data management platforms/ software you should consider for 2020.
Table of Contents
- What is a Data Management Platform (DMP)?
- 5 key benefits of a DMP for organizations
- Who needs a DMP?
- How and when to choose a DMP solution
- 3 Data Management Platform (DMP) deployment best practices
- Top 10 Data Management Platforms (DMPs) for 2020! (Plus a bonus section on notable mentions and specialist DMP vendors)
What is a Data Management Platform (DMP)?
A data management platform (DMP) is a software that helps build sophisticated audience/ customer segments to run highly targeted advertising and marketing campaigns.
By definition, DMPs are meant to collect, organize and activate audience data across multiple channels. This customer data could be your own first-party data, collected from your owned channels and touchpoints of customer interaction; it could be second-party data that you have sourced from an exclusive partner (they choose to share their first-party data directly with you), or it could be anonymous third-party data sourced from a data exchange or data vendor.
This data is organized, classified, analyzed and activated- i.e. used to run campaigns to acquire or retain customers – either via programmatic advertising or personalized marketing via various marketing automation platforms.
Data Management Platforms house and organize data in segments, giving marketers the flexibility to use data as they please. While technically, DMPs can help activate customer data for both advertising and marketing, the most popular use case is to build highly customized audiences at scale for use in programmatic advertising campaigns due to the ability of DMPs to integrate seamlessly with other elements of the ad network ecosystem, such as data exchanges and demand-side platforms (DSPs).
When DMPs were born, there was a clear need to aggregate disparate data from sources like emails, website activity, ad exposure, and mobile apps and tie it to other data sources to have a single consumer ID for paid media. With a DMP, marketers derive insights from that unified data set, build audiences, distribute to digital partners, optimize, and measure campaigns.
5 Benefits of Using a DMP for organizations
5 Benefits of Using a DMP for organizations
1. Run cost-effective and efficient advertising campaigns: Thanks to the advanced audience segmentation capabilities of a DMP, the biggest advantage is that every advertising dollar spent on buying media is likely going towards a better targeted prospect, reducing both- media spend wastage and audience irritation at receiving irrelevant ads.
2. Lower capital (technology) investments: DMPs as a technology platform have seen a high degree of adoption from advertising agencies, and this makes it accessible to all their clients, without the capital cost of licensing, deploying and using a DMPs in-house. This is especially useful to mid-size marketers who wish to advertise at scale.
3. Makes targeted advertising accessible to all advertisers: DMPs are useful for marketers who don’t have robust or adequate first party data or don’t want to invest in cleaning through their oceans of data to also run efficient and effective campaigns for customer acquisition, thanks to their ability to layer in 2nd and 3rd party data easily and seamlessly into campaign audience selection and creation.
4. Targeted advertising at scale across diverse channels: One of the biggest benefits of a DMP is its ability to find patterns across current customers behavior and apply that insight to build ‘look-alike’ audiences with 2nd and 3rd party data to run campaigns at scale across various mediums- from websites to social media, OTT to DOOH. This helps advertisers reach beyond their first-party data set without losing out on the effectiveness of the segmentation.
5. Anonymized data: the ability of DMPs to anonymize large data sets helps circumvent some of the constraints of data privacy and consent based regulation.
Who Needs a DMP and Why?
There are essentially 2 user types for a data management platform. These are:
1. Marketers and agencies: Marketers and their agencies use DMPs to build audience segments for their campaigns, as well as to keep a persistent stream of new data about their customers flowing into the system to keep enriching these data segments with more insights and patterns. These highly targeted segments can then be used to run far more efficient and high-performing campaigns since they are based on data drawn from customers’ own behavior, responses and intent signals.
2. Publishers: Publishers are the parties who own the digital channels and properties. It could be the brand owner of a website or publication, a retailer such as Target or Amazon, it could be a social media platform. Anywhere where your audience goes to consume content and where you want your ads to be displayed at the right moment that matters. The richer the data and insights a publisher is able to capture about the audience visiting their site, the higher the premium (or CPM) they can charge advertisers for each ad displayed.
How and When to Choose a DMP
With evolution in the data management technology and vendor landscape, the lines between what different customer data management technologies and platforms offer have started blurring and seem confusion even to the most seasoned marketers. Both CDPs and DMP vendors, for example, claim that their solutions can collect data from different sources, organize and unify it, and then push it out to any marketing platform – from ESPs to marketing automation to CRM – for activation by way of campaigns.
So how do you know if you need a DMP and when? And once you do decide you need a DMP, how do you pick the best one for your unique needs?
Essentially it comes down to a set of variables which will help decide what technology to begin with and how to progress as your marketing maturity progresses. These include:
1. Who you are: what business, industry and market you operate in? For example, B2C enterprises have much larger data volumes than a B2B, or industries in highly regulated markets such as healthcare and financial services have far stricter compliance and data protection obligations than others. The size (enterprise, mid-market or SMB) and scale (complexity of market segments, geographies etc.) of your business, as well as security and compliance requirements will impacts your choice of customer data management technology as well as deployment model.
2. The present state of maturity of your customer data management practices and technology; as well as marketing complexity. As Ms. Harkins explains, “a DMP makes sense if you have a complex set of media partners, including multiple DSPs. If so, a DMP will get you insights into campaign performance like frequency, audience performance, optimization opportunities, etc. – all within a single platform that makes data actionable. However, if you have a short list of partners – a single DSP and a couple of other media partners – then you can do all of the needed activities with an onboarding solution and directly with your partners. A DMP in this case is probably unwarrantedâ€.
3. Your specific purpose and priority: some businesses are more focused on acquisition, whereas for others, the single most important priority is retention, especially with the growing prevalence of the ‘subscription economy’. In the former, adtech applications may be more central to the marketing plan, whereas in the latter, it would be more focused on leveraging first party customer data to deliver ever more personalized experiences that retain customer and maximize their lifetime value. Your choice of technology should consider the most important priorities – if scale of reach of advertising for customer acquisition is your single biggest priority, a DMP would be a great option.
4. Dependence on an agency to execute marketing: if you tend to outsource significant amount of advertising or marketing activity to your agency, you will probably want a secure and accessible way to share data with them- especially first party data. Using a DMP that both can access helps with this, though, as Ms. Harkins cautions, “this reason alone does not justify a DMP because there are other simple and secure ways to accommodate data distributionâ€.
5. Available resources: budgets, skill sets and people: no robust customer data management technology comes cheap in terms of either software licensing or manpower and expert skill deployment. Also think about whether you wish to execute the deployment inhouse, via a consultant, or completely outsource to an agency. DMPs lend themselves well to this latter model, where media agencies manage the entire end-to-end process of audience segmentation and programmatic advertising. Your choice of technology will certainly depend on the resources available to properly exploit the potential of these highly advanced platforms.
6. Complexity and scope of data you want to capture and the number of online, digital and offline sources you want to capture from. What is the scope of data structuring, analytics and activation required?
7. Speed, flexibility and dynamism of content and communication you need in your context: some industries, such as travel and airlines, have split seconds or less to serve u the right ad to win a sale, whereas others, such as insurance or automobiles, are more considered purchases and may not need the same degree of speed in the data activation technology deployed.
There are multiple facets to building out marketing capabilities to deliver on [acquisition and retention] objectives—data, insights, infrastructure, strategy, technology, partners, creative to name a few. It’s overwhelming. At the end of the day, the DMP is for marketers who want insights into audiences and campaigns from a single platform. And, while DMP capabilities can be accounted for in other technologies, your organization needs to figure out how the DMP is to be used and if those capabilities exist in the organization yet.
All in all, it seems to me that enterprise scale marketers, especially in the B2C and D2C space – would have acquisition and retention goals, and would need to invest in both – CDPs to manage their first party data and activate it into marketing technology stack components for one to one marketing; as well as a DMP to help scale advertising campaigns to look alike audiences. Both technologies would advance the marketers’ data-driven marketing goals of efficiency, effectiveness and scale – it is more a question of when and not if.
3 Data Management Platform (DMP) Deployment Best Practices
3 Data Management Platform (DMP) Deployment Best Practices
Once you have decided to invest in a DMP, it is also useful to remember these 3 best practices when it comes to deploying a DMP for best outcomes:
1. During the data onboarding stage: ensure the right technical team members are involved to ensure your data structures are set up and organized for optimal and persistent data flows. This avoids the data stagnating with time as new data doesn’t refresh in the system as it should. Data onboarding is not a one-time activity but an ongoing one for as long as you wish to communicate with customers who are constantly changing and doing new things.
2. During the audience segmentation stage, (once you have onboarding sorted), work with strategy and media planning teams to ensure the right taxonomies are built to anticipate delivery and scalability. He cautions against overextending segments and build out groups so small as to be un-targetable in practice; or leaving out entire classification trees that force you to ‘shoehorn important audiences into ill-fitting segments down the line’.
Also Read: How to Differentiate Between CDP and DMP in the Age of PII?
3. At the activation stage is when you witness the real power of a DMP in action. With rigorous testing and layering on of 2nd and 3rd party data, the audience segments start building up at scale, giving you endless sources of segments to play with. Here, due to the sheer volume of data, this kind of testing and scaling can very quickly become overwhelming, so it’s best to work with an expert who has the experience to help identify which data segments are driving the best results. It is also useful to remember that a crucial deliverable of a DMP is advanced media measurement capabilities to help marketers better quantify audience performance across media assets.
Top 10 DMPs (with a bonus list of 5 ‘specialist’ DMPs)
There are several robust stand-alone DMPs to choose from, also several marketing clouds that offer strong DMPs as part of the suite. This alphabetically arranged list includes the most popular DMPs from both categories, and later you will also find some notable mentions and specialist DMPs that focus on certain areas.
1. Adobe Audience Manager resides within the Adobe Experience Cloud and offers to help marketers connect their consumer data ingested from various diverse sources with brand experiences across multiple touchpoints — both online and offline. Marketers can identify their most valuable audiences, and then deliver targeted advertisements with a greater chance of conversion, thanks to Adobe Sensei, their AI and machine learning framework, which helps estimate audience-segment reach with higher confidence. A highlight of the platform is that it is able to match data to a persistent ID, for ongoing audience segmentation that stays relevant and current. (almost doing what a CDP does to build stronger first-party customer profiles). Thanks to its advanced analytics capabilities and of course its integration with Adobe experience cloud, its mostly enterprise customers can tie in audience management to the larger marketing stack.
2. Dataxu OneView: identity & data management platform empowers agencies and marketers to identify individuals and build a more complete picture of their behavior across devices by layering on information about the consumer’s behaviors and interests to build a 360-degree view. It also combines first-party data with third-party data sources to build out a more accurate understanding of customers and prospects. On the measurement end, OneView can map even the most complex omni-channel, multi-touch consumer journeys to arrive at true attribution.
3. Google Audience 360 helps brands build and execute a cross-channel media plan in a single tool. Display & Video 360 has the end-to-end campaign management features you need — like creative workspaces and automated bidding — to deliver faster insights, improved collaboration, and better results. It integrates with Analytics 360 to reach specific audiences with greater precision, and advertisers can also view the performance of Display & Video 360 campaigns in Analytics 360 for a more complete view of results. Being Google, media inventory from Google Preferred, YouTube Reserve and TrueView are all available to buy in Display & Video 360 itself, as well as the ability to bid on or exclude impressions from dozens of third-party exchanges. Within the Google universe, this tool allows marketers to apply advanced insights and automation to reach viewing audiences more effectively.
4. Lotame: offers what it calls an ‘unstacked DMP’ which can collect data, build audiences, deliver campaign analysis, and provide scale audience sets with one of the most comprehensive data marketplaces in the space. Unlike some of the other leading DMPs listed here, it is an independent DMP, and not part of a larger marketing cloud. Among its best capabilities are its dynamic and hierarchical segment building which enables a greater flexibility in responding to market signals, predictive analytics, and second- and third-party data availability. It is heavily focused on DMPs core use-cases but is also working on its identity resolution and security standards. It also offers publishers a great platform to monetize first-party data and is actually deeply focused on helping publishers, marketers and agencies find new customers, increase engagement, and grow revenue through audience data.
5. Neustar IDMP or identity-DMP claims to comprehensively ingest data about media events, audience behavior, and consumer engagement across the marketing ecosystem – online and offline – with their OneID system. By normalizing across first, second, and third-party data, marketers can activate personalized experiences across all touchpoints and strive to deliver contextual experiences. Neustar is built around a flexible data science environment to optimize audience segmentation, media spend, resource allocation, and attribution, and empowers marketers to know exactly how marketing is impacting sales and conversions with advanced analytics and measurement capabilities. With access to over 200 data sources, including caller ID, wireless, and directory assistance data and is therefore able to offer high-quality person-, household-, and device-level identity resolution and customer data onboarding capabilities.
6. Nielsen DMP: Nielsen’s traditional strengths in media planning are further extended with their DMP which provides a single view of customer data across all offline, online and mobile channels. It enables marketers to access their first-party data as well as Nielsen’s own rich set of audience data to help develop detailed insights across thousands of consumer attributes. With over 60,000 built-in segments to help customize key audiences based on a marketer’s exact filters, and the ability to automate audience model creation with Nielsen Artificial Intelligence (Nielsen AI), the platform helps marketers stay real-time, flexible and at scale to activate data across hundreds of integrated search, social, email, website and content personalization platforms. The DMP sits within Nielsen’s Marketing Cloud, and user identity resolution, data segmentation and syndication, data analysis and of course, best-in-class measurement to track true media effectiveness.
7. Media Math Terminal One DMP helps marketers onboard, segment, understand and activate their audiences in real time and in omni-channel environments. Users can match audience data sets from first- and third-party data sources, target audience interactions in and across devices, explore log-level audience data with powerful and intuitive data mining tools, and adapt their segments in real time to match the speed of online customer interactions. The DMP is particularly popular among large agencies handling some of the biggest brands in the world, delivering higher ROI on media spends.
8. Oracle DMP: Oracle acquired BlueKai and made it a part of its Data Cloud, calling itself a ‘big data platform that enables marketing organizations to personalize online, offline, and mobile marketing campaigns with richer and more-actionable information about targeted audiences’. With access to a large third-party data consortium, Oracle’s stand out feature is its ability to scale data to widen audience segments, as well as deepen segments with curated vertical-specific audience creation. However, the impact of globally tightening data protection and privacy regulations on this large third-party data ecosystem, and Oracle’s steps to safeguard marketer interests in this regard are still playing out. Acknowledging the explosive growth in connected devices that has created immense opportunities for marketers to engage with consumers at the moments that truly matter, Oracle offers robust cross-device audience management and enables both – audience segmentation and optimized media buys by device.
9. Salesforce Audience Studio: sits under its parent Marketing Cloud platform and offers among the most comprehensive capabilities to execute data-driven audience selection and segmentation. The most notable feature is the built-in consent controls that are important to marketers who respect consumer privacy and value data quality. While activating data for programmatic advertising is a strength, it also allows for activation into email, and other extensions are planned across the marketing tech stack. Formerly known as Salesforce DMP, Audience Studio can help marketers create complete audience profiles by combining all of their data from any source to deliver more personalized marketing experiences.
10. The Trade Desk: another independent DMP, The Trade Desk’s fully integrated DMP helps marketers reach relevant audiences, make informed, real-time decisions, and maximize the power of cross-device insights. They are integrated with leading data providers and provide exclusive access to The Data Alliance and offer a closed-loop technology stack that includes an ad server, bidders, and data management tools. Their motto is ‘target anything and measure everything’, and they offer all core capabilities of a DMP including advanced audience segmentation, lookalike modeling, and the ability to map offline to online audiences.
Other notable mentions with strong DMP offerings include (in alphabetical order):
1. Amobee DMP: delivers the data you need to know your customers intimately—and to understand what it takes to engage with them. With the best analytics in the industry, Amobee delivers robust consumer profiles, advanced analytics and rich insight into which marketing initiatives are working and why.
2. AdForm Audience Base: collects, combines, categorizes and converts first-, second- and third-party data into astute consumer insights. Brands, agencies and publishers can leverage these insights to enhance campaign performance, create granular audience segments for targeting and tailor messages in support of personalized marketing initiatives in today’s omnichannel environment.
3. Admixer DMP helps advertisers improve digital marketing effectiveness with precise audience targeting, on-demand custom built audiences, and a ready to use programmatic ad buying platform. Heir custom build algorithms helps marketers scale advertising campaigns with look-alike audiences. The DMP is part of Admixer’s full stack of AdTech solutions including on the demand and supply side for advertisers and publishers.
4. Carbon DMP: Carbon is an intent & AI driven Data Management Platform that matches online customer behavior and scored intent to create high value audience segments, fueling more profitable outcomes. Carbon processes 260m+ monthly uniques adding to the 2bn customer signals collected each month, that can be exported to multiple channels for marketers to drive revenue.
5. Djax DMP Manager enables efficient segregation of audiences based on specific products, markets or attributes and deliver tailored adverts. Marketers, Publishers and Agencies can focus on improving customer experience across channels and turn user data into valuable business insights for better and higher ROI. The DMP Manager offers customizable solutions helping businesses in the AdTech industry with data-driven marketing and advertising. It also offers the MarTech industry an edge over data-driven personalization to accomplish their goals with ease.
6. Zeta DMP (which acquired Sizmek) offers a powerful DMP that works seamlessly with their AI-enhanced DSP. Marketers can collect and synthesize data across all marketing technology solutions, gain rich new insights and build diverse audience segments to take the best actions across the entire customer journey. What stands out is their dynamic creative capability that helps optimize creative decisioning in real-time.
We hope you find our listing of the most sought after DMPs useful. If you operate in a more specific space, a ‘specialist DMP’ may be more suited to your needs. There are several DMPs in the market that offer more focused solutions for more specific requirements.
For example, Permutive DMP is focused on the needs of publishers, ClicData is focused on the needs of SMBs, Tubular addresses video advertising and 4info addresses mobile AdTech. Others like Adtheorent (mobile targeting) and Proximity DMP (proximity devices) are both focused on the upcoming wave of mobile, device and location-based marketing, while Cinchy pegs itself as the DMP for highly regulated industries. Merkle and Conversant are both audience management focused agencies that help you deploy and execute the best data and audience management solutions for your needs.
Did we forget a vendor that should be mentioned? Please write to us at [email protected]Opens a new window and tell us who/why we missed, so we can get it into the next article update!