All data, one platform

The future of personalised marketing is with Customer Data Platforms (CDP)

All data, one platform - CDP is the future of personalised marketing
  • When

    • Wednesday, 2nd March, 2022
  • Time

    • 10AM-10:45AM CET 

  • Language

    • English

  • Speakers

    • Johannes Wali, Senior Data Consultant

      Petr Svec, Senior Data Architect

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All data, one platform - CDP is the future of personalised marketing
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Johannes Wali, Senior Data Consultant

Johannes Wali, Senior Data Consultant

Johannes (“Jonis”) has been working for Merkle since beginning of 2018. During his time at Merkle he has specialized in implementing data collection infrastructures.

After analyzing website data he started conceptualizing and implementing complex analytics infrastructures in websites and mobile apps. While starting off in the Google Marketing Cloud, during his time at Merkle, his projects helped him further develop his skills within the Adobe Marketing Cloud which has since become a major focus in his projects.

Petr Svec, Senior Data Architect

Petr Svec, Senior Data Architect

Petr began his career as a forensic investigator looking for evidence in data to solve economic crime. He then moved to the field of strategic consulting, helping companies make decisions based on internal and public data. 

At Merkle, he designs and develops custom CDP and BI data warehouses in the cloud and integrates data with Salesforce products. 

Q&A Session

What is the SAP CDP you were talking about? Is it an acquisition or internal development of SAP?

This is the CDP provided by SAP. It is based on the SAP Customer Data Cloud Solution and on the data collected there and enhances its already existing capabilities to a fully fleshed CDP. Thus, it is rather built upon already existing capabilities. If in the process of enhancing these capabilities, certain acquisitions from SAP were leveraged, unfortunately, I can’t say for sure.

Regarding ML/AI - what skillset is needed within our company to get the most out of it? Do these solutions use special languages or proprietary AI, or "industry standards" like scikit, tensorflow etc.?

This depends heavily on the CDP vendor:

  • Some of them (e.g. Salesforce) are basically closed to custom model development and offer a set of embedded "Einstein" models that are trained automatically instead.
  • Some CDPs (e.g. Adobe Experience Platform) offer embedded Jupyter notebooks with Python 3. They are tailored to Adobe instance but they offer your standard set of ML/Data Wrangling libraries (Find out more here). They likely don't offer any GPUs to train models so training neural networks will be tricky.
  • And some CDPs (e.g. Treasure Data) are super open to external tools and offer their own integration patterns to integrate with environment of your choice (Learn more here).
  • There is a big trade-off between ease of use and custom modelling/data wrangling capabilities. It is not driven only by Machine learning, it's usually the overall philosophy of the product you are buying.

How to collect the data, like abandon card? Is there a code snipper to integrate to the website to capture data? CDP used code snipper to capture data in the external data sources like website.

This highly depends on the CDP you are using. Some CDPs are steered via tag management systems (e.g. Adobe Experience Platform), while others are ingested on the website by injecting JavaScript snippets (e.g. Thunderhead). In both cases typical behavioral data can be tracked on websites like page views, clicks on buttons, newsletter signups. Based on this data, you would then also be able to track for example cart abandonments and shopping cart values.

What is the most common Unique Identifier that you have come across?

The most common unique identifier is an email or a hashed email. However, depending on the CDP you are using and the data you are ingesting, additional identifiers are useful (e.g. phone number, loyalty membership number, etc.) to stitch profiles that might contain only one of these identifiers or inconsistent values for either of them.

How about the storage of user data? Leading systems for data could be other systems, like CRM. Is it the leading system for Marketing Data only?

Where the data is stored and for how long, depends on the compliance of your company. Integrating data from an existing CRM is very common for CDP projects, as these are usually already part of the infrastructure. In general the CDP brings together all data from additional sources (e.g. CRM, website data, loyalty, etc.) and makes it actionable and flexible. The factor that sets apart CDPs from CRM or other forms of data lakes is the flexibility. The calculations done within the CDP can happen in real-time and trigger marketing capabilities. Thus, the CDP becomes a sort of flexible middle layer between data storage and marketing.

Given the changes in data protection, how do you think this will impact brand manufacturers and eRetailers and how they will collaborate to maximise eCommerce opportunities together?

In general, I am not sure if this approach will have a heavy impact on eRetailers, as you are already most likely heavily relying on first-party data when it comes to monitoring your online shop. A CDP could help to enlarge the identifiable audiences, for example, by incentivising membership signups for the shop if users are not signed up, yet. Thus, the pool of first-party data will become larger and you will be able to use this data to drive marketing efforts.

The point is that email matching on destinations (i.e. FB) won't work anymore, hence orchestration will dwindle in value?

Exchanging IDs via third-party cookies (like currently done with FB pixels) will become harder in the future as a lot of browsers already block third-party cookies. However, these are not entirely necessary anymore when using a CDP. The orchestration itself happens in an orchestration layer, from which information is then forwarded to other systems (like an email marketing tool or FB) based on the user consent. This means that the CDP can send a push to these systems (“Put person with ID XYZ into segment ABC”). The ID can be a hashed email or any other impersonal identifier, that in itself does not hold any personal information. Of course, this also depends on how the data from external systems are ingested in the CDP. In any case, this also depends heavily on the data privacy directives of the vendors and your company.

Learn more about Merkle CX Imperatives for 2022

Merkle 2022 CX Imperatives
Merkle’s 2022 Vision for CX Transformation