Tealium’s Kieran Smith: ‘DMPs No Longer Offer Marketers Value Like A CDP’ But Switching Could Bring Unprecedented Benefits

In the know marketers are starting to sunset their Data Management Platforms (DMPs) in favour of more sophisticated, future-proofed Customer Data Platforms, according to a panel of industry experts.

The world of digital marketing is undergoing a series of significant changes from privacy reforms to the sunsetting of third-party cookies. However, while the ramifications of some of these changes are relatively well understood, there is a bigger change afoot — the quiet switch from relatively unsophisticated DMPs to CDPs, which have the potential to drive change beyond marketing departments to entire organisations.

Speaking at the B&T Breakfast Club, presented by Tealium, in Melbourne Tealium’s Kieran Smith said that while DMPs were once essential for digital marketers using third-party data-based audience personas, changes to the privacy regulations have made these far less useful.

“Organisations think of a CDP as an easy switch for a DMP and it’s a like-for-like change,” he explained.

“Businesses need to think more broadly, from a strategic perspective about DMPs and the partnership options that exist. What can you do with technology? What am I going to do with my team?”

Fellow panellist Nick Laidler, SportsBet’s head of marketing, said that his firm uses Tealium’s CDP to “enrich” its server-side relationships with Meta and Snap. It also uses the CDP to enrich its marketing measurement platforms with customer data to boost conversions. However, while the bookmaker is using Tealium’s CDP to improve the deployment of its customer data, it is still incredibly mindful of consent.

“The restrictions around privacy and consent are continuing to increase. It doesn’t really matter whether the vehicle is the Privacy Act, iOS 14.5 or anything else,” said Laidler.

“If you change your perspective, it’s all about getting your data into a space where you don’t need to be sharing it directly with three social media, two digitals, one CRM, one CSM and all the millions of tools that we have relationships with. If we have one place that we can manage and be aware of how we share that data, it should set us up for a far cleaner future.”

While customer centricity has long been a buzzword in business, Smith added that the changing privacy and consent rules are necessitating brands to change their ways of working.

“Three or four years ago, there was an idea that the customer would be at the centre. But actually seeing organisations structure their teams around the customer has been a noticeable change in the last couple of years,” he said.

“The importance of the customer outweighs the importance of the product. In fact, that can influence the product that businesses sell.”

Laidler was joined on stage by CapGemini’s director of martech strategy and practice lead Jodie Dunkley who explained how the business was facing up to the challenges its clients face by deploying CDPs. These challenges notably included the death of third-party cookies, something for which “nobody has a crystal ball.”

In particular, Dunkley explained how CapGemini is helping one global client roll out CDPs across its different markets, with one “CD Champion” in each region.

“Setting up the CD Champions has been really, really intense,” she said.

“We’ve found that the people getting those roles are not normally from the DMP space but we’re often taking CRO experts — they understand everything from the data and how it’s used to measure and optimise. They then work on the CDP implementation for six months with our team and they train up two or three people in their local market.”

However, rather than being “anxious” about the upcoming changes, Dunkley said that there was “a lot that we can do now to set ourselves up for whichever path the future takes.”

Dunkley explained that marketers need to ensure that they have their customer data stored in a single repository and in a fashion that makes it easy to put that data to work across all their channels. She added that consent and communication preferences were set to become even more important.

“It isn’t simply binary ‘yes or no’ consent but looking at channel preferences and asking what customers want to hear about. Then you need to build yourself up ready to experiment. Are you going to try working with the big publishers, the walled gardens? What will your strategy be? You have to work out how to dip your toe in the water without committing too much.”

Laidler, meanwhile, was on hand to showcase how businesses with strong first-party data could benefit from these shifting digital marketing sands and take advantage of the switch from DMPs to CDPs.

“We’re quite fortunate in the betting category as we have really rich sets of first-party data which is a great asset. When third-party cookies deprecate, we’ll be OK,” said Laidler.

“But, having said that, there’s a part of us looking at our data set and seeing it’s not very clean. We might feel that we’re in a great position but if someone registered 10 years ago, we didn’t validate or verify them. So there are data challenges for everyone.”

In fact, Laidler said that the management and deployment of customer audience data has only become “more restricted” and marketers “can’t expect that it’s going to go back the other way.”

The coming months and years are going to be challenging for digital marketers with rapidly evolving rules and regulations, along with customers becoming increasingly demanding of personalised communications and marketing. But with Tealium’s CDP, brands can align themselves around the customer and set themselves up for success — regardless of any changes in the market.