AARP® Launches Data Transformation to Deliver Personalization

Challenge

AARP® wanted to deliver more relevant content to its customers in real time, while simultaneously capturing new data and insights. By providing the value that customers want, and not just the products the brand wants, AARP® sought to increase responsiveness to its members and engage more directly through the channels its customers prefer.

The organization required a focused, customer-centric mindset, specifically to provide a more personalized experience that empowers customer decisions.

The client's goals required transforming how the business operated and managed its data, insights, and content, while synchronizing messages across multiple channels and streamlining its reporting. It also required deconstructing silos and transforming work through a shared platform that decreases redundancy of effort.

“To power AARP’s customer-centric focus, we needed to deliver more relevant content to customers in real time, while simultaneously capturing new data and insights... This required us to modernize our data approach and build a new enterprise data platform (EDP) in a cloud-based environment to bring data across the organization together in one place. Merkle helped us identify AWS as the right platform for our needs, and apply a product approach to build and run the EDP.”

Bill Gale,

VP, Enterprise Data, AARP

Approach

Working with Merkle, AARP® set out on the journey of building a new enterprise data platform (EDP) in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment. The teams focused on applying a product approach to build and run the EDP, in order to align with the digital platform priorities and ensure solutions met architecture and data principles. Merkle also leveraged multiple partners to speed delivery and transfer knowledge, while establishing the client core competencies necessary to own and manage the EDP.

This resulted in a consolidated, enterprise-wide database in a new AWS Cloud infrastructure that supports campaign management, real-time services, list-sourcing, and analytics capabilities.