Data management platforms (DMPs) were heralded as tools to help businesses make better sense of all the data surrounding them, But are they achieving everything they set out to? Lindsay McEwan (pictured below), VP & managing director EMEA, Tealium believes the DMP has been mis-sold. Writing exclusively for ExchangeWire, McEwan explains how 'data management' needs to become 'data action'.

Step right up to get your hands on the ultimate digital marketing tool. It can store all the data you’ll ever need, build a complete picture of each customer, and make your targeting more effective.

With such a compelling sales pitch, it’s no wonder marketers have been convinced to invest substantial chunks of their budgets in the miracle tool they believe will transform their campaigns: the DMP.

But, like most must-have solutions the title of ‘miracle tool’ is a misnomer for DMPs. As many of the marketers who rushed to adopt the technology have found, if something sounds too good to be true; it probably is.

The DMP promise

When DMPs first emerged, their manifesto was the stuff of dreams for marketers grappling with ever-growing tides of data. Not only did they promise to be an all-purpose insight superstore — gathering first and third-party data about individual interactions across every channel and device, and blending it with internal customer information — but also to then put that data into action.

Armed with a DMP, marketers would be able to efficiently categorise and understand their audience, and use this knowledge to make better planning and targeting decisions — all within one centralised platform. But, the dream has turned into a disappointing reality and marketers have ended up with more of a local village shop with limited data stock.   

The key problem with DMPs is that they talk a bigger game than they were ever meant to. Initially, DMPs were only built to work with ad networks and were highly successful in that narrow field. Through cookie-based tracking, they traced non-personally identifiable online activity and enabled websites to deliver tailored, impactful messages. With the rise of programmatic came a significant increase in their usage, as marketers began to use DMPs to reach specific segments of website audiences at scale.

But this is as far as DMPs go: they can’t identify individuals and track them across channels, which means they don’t have the capacity to offer full customer profiles — and in the age of personalised, omni-channel marketing this is an issue.

Nowadays, marketers have a very long wish list: to be able to instantly access all relevant data for their existing customers and prospects, to make anonymous users known users, to retarget content in real-time, and to minimise the number of applications they use. The DMP just isn’t enough.  

Changing times

Marketers are also starting to realise that their window of opportunity to influence customers is rapidly shrinking. To achieve cut-through amid infinite media variety and constantly evolving individual interests they need to move from being data analysts to data activists, and ensure insight is instantly leveraged to produce results.

This means that DMPs — because of their inability to produce a unified, real-time view of consumer journeys and requirements — are now outmoded and due for an upgrade.

Indeed, according to Gartner the wheels of change are already in motion. In a report released earlier this year, Gartner predicted that over the next five years DMPs are destined to become data management hubs (DMHs) to meet demand for “standardised access to audience profile data, content, workflow elements, messaging and common analytics functions for optimising multichannel campaigns.”

So how can marketers equip themselves with better, faster, more actionable tools? 

Consider your goals

The time has come for marketers to re-think their objectives and the technologies they are using to achieve them. Instead of considering the concept of influencing consumer decisions as they are being made to be a powerful but unattainable illusion, they need to work towards making it happen — and the best way to do so is by reconfiguring their data strategy.

By aggregating all of their first-party data into a central point and activating it in real-time, they can create a system that is primed to engage as soon as the opportunity arises. After all, modern customers know exactly what they want. By the time they visit a brand website, they are likely to have researched their desired product, compared prices, and read reviews. Smart brands will be ready and waiting to turn that visit into a conversion.

Choose the right partner

Over the next few years, it will be the marketers who can provide instant gratification for consumers on any touchpoint or channel that succeed, and using the right technology to be able to do that will be vital.

Marketers will therefore need to select vendors that offer more than the anonymous, third-party, and often inaccurate data produced by DMPs, and find a mechanism that enables them to do more with their own data, such as a real-time data action engine.

By harnessing first-party data and connecting it with insights from every area of the consumer journey, such technologies enable marketers to create detailed, real-time individual profiles and deliver messages that immediately hit the right spot.

The DMPs which were purchased for their miracle promises were sold under a misnomer. There is no marvellous platform to end all marketing woes — and even if there were, it would not be the DMP. Marketers must instead centre their attention on consolidating high quality data and putting it straight into action because if you can’t provide information to consumers at exactly the right moment then your business is going to face a huge challenge.