Data management is core to digital strategy today. Sophisticated marketers know that proper usage of their data is key to customer retention and upsell, and also provides the foundation required to gain new customers and grow business.

As a result of significant advances in technology of late, activating marketer data across every digital channel just got a great deal easier.

The reason data is so powerful is the scalability and effectiveness of its application to media: where once marketers could target customers’ post boxes, today, marketers can target their customers precisely across every digital marketing channel. We see the adoption of data management solutions by large global brands seeking to target their customers with dynamically produced and bespoke messaging with great success.

As adoption has increased, so too has complexity. Marketers have needed to consider:

Consumer notice & privacy: How can marketers meaningfully control and inform users about how data is used to provide useful and relevant advertising?

Data ownership & use: Who owns data within the many targeting technologies traditionally needed to scale data use? How can marketers both protect their assets and uniquely capitalise on their use? How to reckon with the third-party cookie – that reigning snippet of code that is routinely deleted or otherwise dismissed.

Data access: It’s fundamental, but speak to your friendly neighbourhood IT department about connecting your digital media strategies to your customer data. Even getting a simple pixel on the right page can be a year-long process involving numerous entreaties and promises of lavish gifts.

Solutions to these issues mean a step-change in how data can be used to grow business through digital channels. Recent ad tech moves suggest that weaving together the fabric of a marketer’s website with that of media is the solution.

With the acquisition of Akamai’s Advertising Decision Solutions business, MediaMath has made great strides towards solving these issues. Akamai is the leading provider of cloud services for delivering, optimising and securing online content and business applications, and powers the web for top brands including Apple, Audi, NBA, Sony, Verizon Wireless and Best Buy.

Marketers who use the service can now activate the same infrastructure that they use to power their web environments to extract (anonymous) customer data and decision their media for retargeting without the need to deploy or maintain pixels on site. So, in the same way that a user who visits your site and is recognised as high-value by the underlying CRM, that user can then be targeted with the same precision across advertising channels using MediaMath’s pixel-free technology – all seamlessly and at scale.

Let’s geek out a bit and see how this solution solves the challenges laid out above:

Consumer Notice & Privacy. Marketers now have the same control over external media messaging as they have over the messaging on their own websites. They don’t need to rely on dozens of third parties, and their respective privacy policies, to make targeting decisions any longer. This empowers the marketer to own their data usage and privacy policies, enabling a clear, one-to-one conversation with consumers.

Data Ownership & Use.The ownership of client data resides very clearly with the marketer. Marketers rightly want to protect information in the same way as they do on their own website where a customised message can be delivered. The same protective infrastructure can now be applied externally without the potential for sharing valuable targeting data to other marketers.

Data Access. Activating data is immediate. No more waiting for IT. Your customers are available for segmentation and targeting immediately and across media channels. Also, there is no additional page latency typically brought about by third-party pixels.

Activating your data and communicating with customers can be greatly simplified, and impact on business growth greatly magnified. This surely is a significant leap in the evolution of programmatic buying, bringing to bear powerful and relevant messaging across all programmatic channels.