Domain CMO Rebecca Darley: Tealium’s CDP Allowed Us To Personalise At Scale

Domain’s chief marketing officer (CMO), Rebecca Darley, said that without Tealium’s customer data platform (CDP), her business would not have been able to achieve the personalised marketing success that has made it one of the leaders in data-driven marketing in Australia.

Speaking at an exclusive breakfast event hosted by B&T at Sydney’s swish harbourside restaurant, 12-Micron, Darley explained that Tealium’s CDP — recently named a leader in the first-ever Gartner Magic Quadrant for CDPs — has taken on a far greater role than simply being a marketing tool.

“This is not a marketing tool. This is a business tool,” she said.

“This touches so many parts of the business — product, data teams, tech teams, commercial teams.”

Domain has been on a transition and centring its operations around the needs of its disparate customer base. While most Australians will encounter Domain when looking for somewhere to call home, it has a sprawling and equally competitive business-to-business side to its operations. The company works with real estate agents, enterprises and the state and federal governments which require very different levels and types of engagement.

Rebecca Darley, chief marketing officer, Domain

Darley explained that servicing the needs of these customers effectively would not have been possible without the far-reaching ability of Tealium’s CDP.

“It’s wonderful to have transitioned to a very customer-led model that really understands those customers’ needs, desires, wants and how we’re meeting them in those moments,” explained the former St George, Westpac and IKEA marketer.

Even within those three broad customer groups, Darley said that each has different subsects that operate across Domain’s platforms in wildly different ways.

“It’s everyone from those who are actively seeking to buy all the way through to the nosy neighbour, like myself, and even those wanting to engage in a bit of property porn — we all have a vision of an amazing property that we would love to live in one day,” she said, laughing.

Even Domain’s agent community is not homogeneous, with some 55,000 using the platform across support teams, real estate agents themselves, as well as principals and owners.

With a customer-facing app processing millions of interactions every week, Domain’s data pool is mammoth. Bringing all of this information together, identifying actionable insights and operationalising it, however, requires some seriously impressive technology.

Darley’s colleague, Ben Karpin, director of personalised marketing and marketing technology, was also on-stage with Tealium’s Vice President & General Manager APJ, Will Griffith, to explain how the company was able to turn its data from unactionable numbers on a screen to the defining factor in its operations.

“A CDP can’t be siloed within your business,” he explained.

“But we took it up a level and activated and had a consistent view of audiences everywhere. So the product team doesn’t have their own view of segmentation compared to the marketing, data or technology teams.”

Ben Karpin, director of personalised marketing and marketing technology, Domain.

Tealium’s CDP also stands businesses in good stead given the changing shape of the online world. The third-party cookie is finally deprecating (and for good, this time) and sweeping privacy changes around the world — not least in Australia — can make operating in the area challenging, to say the least. Fortunately, Tealium’s CDP is designed with international best practice baked in.

“Our CEO, Jason Pellegrino, recognised a number of the challenges that the business was facing — cookie depreciation, changes in privacy policy, all of those things are incredibly important. But at the heart of it are our customers,” said Darley.

Given the number of different data points that Domain pulls into its Tealium CDP, being fit for purpose on the data and privacy side was absolutely essential. Karpin explained quite how significant Tealium’s CDP is in driving decision-making within the business.

“From a customer side, we’re looking at things like the levels of engagement and communication, time spent with our products and how that changes as we’re able to become more personalised in what we’re showing to people. We also have a customer engagement score,” he said.

“We aggregate a lot of these measures and we’ve worked on ascertaining how important different actions are relative to each other and have agreement on that across the product, marketing and data teams. We use that as our North Star when looking at incremental impacts.”

What’s more, the ease of integrating Tealium’s CDP into a range of other platforms — and using those insights to drive marketing actions — has had a demonstrable impact on Domain’s bottom line. Karpin explained that Domain through its integrations with GAM and Facebook had seen a 29 per cent reduction in CPC and a 19 per cent reduction in CPMs as a result of plugging its first-party data to inform its off-platform targeting, via Tealium’s CDP.

“A great example is our Price Finder product. There are 60,000 agents in Australia who we target across LinkedIn advertising and we were never able to suppress people who already had our product before, which sounds crazy to advertise a product to someone who already has it. But that’s the thing we’ve been able to unlock with Tealium,” said Karpin.

By generating results like that and tying the disparate parts of the business together, Tealium’s CDP has become more than part of the furniture at Domain. It is the foundation upon which the business continues to build its success.