Adobe Becomes A Second-Party Data Matchmaker With The Release Of Its Audience Marketplace

Adobe is today getting more serious about being a data matchmaker.

The San Jose, California-based company announced the availability of its Audience Marketplace, which had been in beta since it was unveiled in March.

“This puts Adobe into the data game,” senior product marketing manager Rakhi Patel told me, at a level beyond what the Marketing Cloud previously allowed.

In Audience Marketplace, which resides within the Marketing Cloud’s data management platform (DMP) called Audience Manager, advertisers, brands and other can buy or sell second- or third-party data.

First-party data is the term used to describe brand-owned info about their own customers or site/app visitors. Second-party data is first-party data sold or traded with someone else. Third-party data is aggregated data like demographics, which anyone can buy.

One typical use, Patel said, is that an airline might have profiles of its best customers and will search for lookalikes in the customer profiles of a hotel chain. By doing this, the airline could find new customers.

In fact, she indicated, facilitating second-party data relationships between brands is one of Marketplace’s differentiators. The Marketplace, for instance, now takes care of legal and billing arrangements, is vetting the quality of the data for things like adherence to data privacy and security standards, and makes the data available on a self-serve basis. During the beta phase, she said, Adobe “facilitated” the access but played less of a role.

Here’s a Marketplace screen of available first-party data:

Another differentiator, she said, is that this is a Marketplace for data, and it is not Adobe’s own data — in contrast to, say, Oracle’s BlueKai and Datalogix. She noted that Adobe is “agnostic” about what data buyers should acquire.

Patel also pointed to the fact the Audience Marketplace is integrated into the end-to-end Marketing Cloud, so second-party data sharing can be utilized with the Cloud’s tools. Or, if a brand prefers, they can simply get the data and go elsewhere for implementation.

Steve Ustaris, senior vice president of marketing at programmatic ad provider OwnerIQ, told me that he’s “glad” that Adobe is emphasizing second-party data sharing in the marketplace. OwnerIQ has been involved in second-party data sharing since 2007.

Ustaris said he doesn’t yet see Adobe as a competitor, because this Marketplace is new and because OwnerIQ specializes in data sharing between retailers and brands, an area Adobe is not yet heavily involved in.

But the emphasis on second-party data sharing by a giant like Adobe, he said, will help make it more commonplace. Soon, he said, it will be regularly expected that a brand like Nike will want to trade its first-party data with another brand — even in another industry — that could have overlapping customer types, like Red Bull.