Teradata is hoping to boost its Integrated Marketing Cloud with today’s announcement that it is enhancing targeting for advertising and marketing through a newly acquired data management platform (DMP).
This is the first marketing cloud “to bring together in a big way a single digital platform” that stores data in a fully integrated DMP, director of strategy for marketing applications Michael Lummus told me.
A DMP is a centralized storehouse for data that is often employed by a marketing or advertising platform as an outside resource. Teradata recently bought the Netherlands-based DMP FLXone in an acquisition that closed just last month.
Teradata is making a play for its Marketing Cloud to be considered in the same rank as the powerhouse integrated marketing platforms from Adobe, Oracle or Salesforce. Teradata claims as customers over a third of the S&P Global 100, and its platform was cited as a leader in the recent Q3 2015 Forrester Wave report on “Real-Time Interaction Management.”
The newly-acquired FLXone also brings to the party its partner ecosystem of more than three dozen integrated advertisers, publishers, agencies and media trading desks that includes AppNexus, Google DoubleClick and MediaMath.
Teradata is making a play for its Marketing Cloud to be considered in the same rank as the powerhouse integrated marketing platforms from Adobe, Oracle or Salesforce.
In addition to the recent DMP purchase, Teradata has been on a buying spree to beef up its marketing chops. In January, it bought mobile marketing provider Appoxee, and last year it picked up four data-oriented companies: RainStor, Revelytix, Hadapt and Think Big Analytics.
The basic idea with the new DMP is that Teradata customers can now direct marketing or advertising across channels through one set of data which, Lummus said, can also be processed for hidden patterns and relationships via machine learning.
The updated Cloud offers “access to a lot more data out of the box” than before, he said. That includes not only integrated data, he added, but data sources that are new to the Teradata cloud, such as native ad impressions from search and display ads, and a greater granularity of Web behavioral data.
The DMP Battle Front
DMPs are a major front in the competition among marketing clouds. Last year, for instance, Oracle bought DMPs BlueKai and Datalogix, and Salesforce launched its Wave Analytics data cloud. In 2011, Adobe bought DMP Demdex to power its Audience Manager DMP. As functionality between marketing clouds coalesces around a standard set, the quality, utility and accessibility of user data becomes a key differentiator.
Lummus said that Oracle, Salesforce and other marketing platforms maintain “separate stores for separate kinds of data,” such as separate email data and campaign data, and that no marketing cloud DMP “natively collects email opens and response data” as Teradata’s now does.
Separated data is “not as efficient as data living in one place,” he said. Of course, in an age when data can reside virtually anwhere, the “one place” distinction becomes primarily a matter of whether there is some practical difference to marketers.
Among other things, Lummus contends that Teradata’s single data store more efficiently enables machine learning, which can surface patterns and interconnections that, to a marketer, could mean new selling opportunities if made visible quickly enough.
Suppose you’re a bank, he suggested.
“I have your mobile app,” he said. “I’ve just made a transfer of funds [in the bank and] I walk to an ATM.”
What is the best deal on a financial product that the bank’s ATM should present to that user based on interactions over the last few days with its mobile app, ATM and website?
Other New Features
Machine learning that can quickly process integrated data from many sources, he said, can answer that question more quickly and more effectively than machine learning applied across multiple stores of data.
The updated platform also attempts to match anonymous user data with known users. In this way, the system knows an identified user logging on to a particular website at night and an anonymous user of a mobile app the next morning are the same person.
Teradata is using both deterministic (meaning actual log-ins) and probabilistic (meaning inferences drawn from similar locations and such) methods, and Lummus said this new matching expands on the more limited capability that Teradata offered before the updated version.
If the matchups are accurate — and probabilistic ones can be mostly but not completely accurate — then the Teradata platform could give both advertising and marketing functions a unified set of user targets across many channels.
Alongside the DMP’s new starring role, the updated Marketing Cloud also features a new Marketing Resource Management that connects campaign results to spend, a newly unified user interface for planning campaigns across channels, and such additional social and mobile capabilities as barcoded coupons and automated A/B testing.
There are also new features for enhanced segmentation based on users’ website behavior, new support for iBeacon marketing and integration with Instagram.
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