The Enterprise DMP versus the Digital Marketing Frankensuite
CEO and Chairman
There’s a lot of agreement in digital marketing circles that the status quo isn’t good enough. Enterprise marketers are facing plenty of pain and frustration. No one questions that keeping up with customers in meaningful ways as they move from digital channel to digital channel is a challenging and complex task. But there is a big, unanswered and contentious question hanging out there: what’s the best way to help these marketers work most effectively?
There
are essentially two schools of thought: the first (and the one we espouse at
[x+1]) argues for a complete platform that brings together the data, tools and
channels to manage, or at least orchestrate and synchronize, the full spectrum
of marketing activities. The second is the digital marketing “suite.” This is the
Frankenstein approach: bolting and stitching together multiple tools (sometimes
best of breed, sometimes the runt of the litter) with a hodgepodge of interfaces,
reporting systems – even multiple log-ins – to create a “unified” view of
customer data and media channels. Let’s explore the logic behind these two
approaches.
What’s the best approach for
marketers?
As is
often the case, a few analogies may be helpful to illustrate the differences
between a complete enterprise data management platform (DMP) and digital
marketing “Frankensuite.” Consider music. If you’re like most people, you can
probably access whatever you want to hear using an elegant device that fits in
your pocket. Or take television, where companies like Verizon FIOS are providing
traditional programming, video-on-demand, time-shifted content, apps and more
in a single integrated experience. Now imagine needing a separate remote for every
channel you want to watch, or a different device to listen to every artist.
Nonsense, you say? Of course it’s nonsense! But that’s exactly what the Frankensuite
approach forces marketers to do as they struggle to connect and communicate
with their customers.
Digital
marketers feel this pain every day. They’re also told that technology can/will/might
solve their problems. They’re confused though: “best of breed” Frankensuite or
a complete enterprise DMP? While there are several differences between the two
approaches, one is critical: the enterprise DMP’s defining characteristic is its
unified model. With a DMP, decisions are made based on the customer – not the media
channel. This is the inherent promise of a DMP. The enterprise DMP is able to
determine the right channel based on the unified customer attributes, the
messages they have received and the channel through which they have recently received
them. It allows digital marketers to focus on what’s most important: knowing
and reaching their customers – rather than the mundane: knowing which levers to
pull in which sequence across all of the individual solutions.
By
contrast, a digital marketing Frankensuite is made up of array of siloed
solutions – one for email, one for website, one for SMS and so on and on and on.
Each of them typically features their own logins, quirks, decision models and
reporting tools. Each of them also introduces a new degree of friction and complexity
to the process. While some channel-specific executional overhead is unavoidable,
the Frankensuite approach forces decisions to be made at the channel level
without considering what might be happening in any of the other channels.
This is due
almost entirely to the lack of appropriate interfaces and the inability to
tightly link operational necessity with segmentation and targeting logic. For the
Frankensuite model to work, all of the siloes need to be manually integrated so
information about customers can be shared between them. The reality is that busy
enterprise marketers have too much on their plates to try to connect a set of
disparate dots in the hopes of coming up with a coherent picture. Even if they had
the time, it wouldn’t come into focus at the lightning speed digital marketing
demands; and in most cases it would also be prohibitively expensive.
An
integrated end-to-end solution has certainly been the “holy grail” – not just
for ad tech providers but for marketers in general. While some big industry
players are making a run at this, a successful end-to-end solution requires
more than slapping a suite label on a mismatched set of pieces and parts.
Stitching together the elements of a solution though M&A can only work if
there is an underlying integration framework in place, and the components are
capable of “plugging in” to that framework. No small task and one currently
beyond even the biggest proponents of the Frankensuite model.
Smart marketers
are planning for new touch-points, new technologies, new data sources and new communication
opportunities. Simply adding new “solutions” to a Frankensuite is an outdated and
flawed approach. Lots of innovative marketing tech companies understand this
and build with ecosystem integration in mind, embracing and planning for the rapid
change and innovation taking place all around them. This kind of smart thinking
makes real end-to-end integration a real possibility.
This is
precisely the approach we’ve taken at [x+1]. By combining and integrating data
and decisioning logic with open APIs, companies can “plug in” to the touch
points they use today, and the ones they’ll use tomorrow. The result: central
decision logic and integration framework create a hub around which all digital marketing
activities can revolve. Our platform is nimble and flexible enough to easily
adapt to an evolving ecosystem and marketers’ changing needs – even if we can’t
predict exactly what those needs will be.
At the
core of the [x+1] hub is our Predictive
Optimization Engine (POE™), the central decisioning and intelligence component
of the Origin enterprise DMP. POE enables the execution of complex decisions
and communicates instructions to multiple digital channels, including ad
servers, content management servers, chat systems, email systems and demand-side
platforms (DSPs), to coordinate messaging across all touch points in real time.
With [x+1]
Origin, you will grow by embracing
new channels and innovations as they come; or you could
always brace for yet another major surgical procedure on the Monster.
Posted by [x+1] at 6:10 PM | 1 comments
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