re of data management platforms in an era of CDPs //

When asked to name the most popular categories in martech, your answer might include customer data platforms, identity resolutions platforms, and data clean rooms.

DMPs have been around for so long that we take them as a given (like “big data”) Do we see DMPs disappearing due to increasing reliance on CDPs for first-party data?

Lotame, a data management software vendor, is betting against this. It is also attempting to be a partner in CDPs.

Future and the past

Alex Theriault is the general manager of Lotame’s new solution suite Spherical. He started by looking in the rear-view mirror. “Lotame’s history has seen it wear many hats throughout the years. In 2008, we started as an ad network that sold data and audiences. This was in 2008. That was back in 2008.

Lotame was faced with a dilemma about its future identity due to the rapid adoption of CDPs and customers’ decision to move more decisively into the digital age during the pandemic. According to Theriault that led to extensive research.

A crisis of identity

Research was conducted to determine which use cases CDPs were best-suited for. Do we want to become a CDP like many other companies? Or are we still in high demand for our technology and future-proofed to navigate third-party cookies restrictions and privacy regulations changes?” These were the types of questions that Theriault suggested.

The answer was simple: The demand for functionality that is not contained in a DMP will continue to exist. Theriault stated that this includes access to third-party information, analytics and modeling capabilities as well as mature pipes into the adtech community.

CDPs play a critical role in activating and managing data provided by customers and site users. This leaves Theriault with a gap when it comes targeting customers who visit the site and place an order, but do not make a purchase or sign up for a subscription.

What a DMP is capable of doing

Third-party cookies may be gone one day, but that doesn’t mean the end of third-party data.

Theriault stated that third-party data and cookies can often be confused with one another. Any company with an identity graph (Lotame is one such; there are a few strong players in this space) is able collect data in environments that third-party cookies cannot be accessed, regardless of whether it’s attached or not to a first party cookie or any other digital identifiers like CTV IDs and customer IDs. It was originally a probabilistic graph. However, we have now made it a hybrid so that we can ingest data tied with email.” “So we support both a declared and probabilistic match.

Theriault suggested that third-party data can be tracked using Lotame’s Panorama ID, which is more efficient than relying upon third-party cookies. “We have conducted case studies in Safari environments that are third-party cookie-restricted and have seen improved results than brands have seen when running campaigns using third-party cookies.”

What a DMP can do with a CDP

It is still unclear how DMPs/CDPs can be integrated to support brand marketing strategies. Integration is one way to go. Some CDPs, such as Segment and Tealium, have on-page pixels (or tags) that can be placed on brand websites. Theriault said that Lotame has a tag on each page, which makes it easy to connect. The majority of the work was done by the CDP to collect fragmented and siloed data from various sources, prepare it, segment it [and] clean it within the CDP.

Lotame tags for the same brand allow you to do a quick look-up that differentiates known customers (with customer IDs), from unknown visitors, where information is scarce or absent.

“In the event that the brand does not have a customer ID, we fill that void. So we create a profile on our platform to help the brand understand cart abandoners better and push that information back to them.”

All this is possible through the Spherical solution. It’s billed as a first party data accelerator.

Spherical and its partner CDPs work in a bi-directional manner. The first-party data is collected by CDPs across all channels: offline, email, mobile, web visits, and CTV. It cleans, segments and sends the data to Spherical for enrichment and modeling using Lotame’s DMP resource. Spherical can send the result audiences to adtech or social media channels. Spherical can also send data to the CDP, such as clicks or impressions.

Is there another layer to the stack?

Customers who have made investments in a CDP or DMP might be expected to oppose this offer. This is acknowledged by Theriault. We wanted to appeal to agencies and brands, so we introduced a variable model. This supports seasonality and allows agencies to learn from and experiment with brands without being locked into monthly minimum fees. We don’t want to sell them an entire platform. Instead, we can plug in and fill in the gaps.

Lotame believes that all of this connectivity has benefits in the ability to bring together data from known and unknown customers, probabilistic and deterministic data. It remains to be seen if this will be the future direction of the DMP space, or if brands will continue to ignore third-party data and target their existing audiences.

MarTech first published the post Data management platforms for the future in an era of CDPs.