Data Management Platforms - Brief Description & Competitive Landscape

In my first blog post I listed the six types of broad products offered in Adobe’s Marketing Cloud. In this and ensuing blog posts, I will expound on those broad product groupings (Analytics, Experience Manager, Media Optimizer, Social and Campaign).

Forrester recently released an assessment of Data Management Platforms (or DMPs) – Adobe’s offering is called Audience Manager a product housed within its “Media Optimizer” suite of products. According to Forrester, a data management platform is “a unified technology platform that intakes disparate first-, second-, and third-party data sets, provides normalization and segmentation on that data, and allows a user to push the resulting segmentation into live interactive channel environments.” The goals of a DMP are ambitious and are not without flaws. Unifying data across channels including websites, mobile, direct mail and television is difficult, but heavy investment in such technology the age of “big data” is an area of significant focus for firms. The simple illustration below is from Bluekai.com (a DMP provider).

The players in this space include: Adobe (Audience Manager), Aggregate Knowledge, Blue Kai, CoreAudience (Hearst), Knotice, nPario, and X Plus One, Acxiom and Turn. According to Forrester, “leaders in the DMP space have demonstrated experience in delivering audience insights and targeting functionality and possess an interconnected suite of tools that make data ingestion and message delivery seamless.” According to the report, which ranks Adobe’s offering as the leader in the field, the “leaders in the DMP space have demonstrated experience in delivering audience insights and targeting functionality and possess an interconnected suite of tools that make data ingestion and message delivery seamless.”

Overall, this is where Adobe stands apart from the smaller competitors especially in a sense of integrating first-party company data. In later blog posts, this will make more sense as I will detail the analytics and targeting capabilities offered by the firm. As far as aggregating data from third party sources, Blue Kai draws rave reviews for its ability to plug into third party sources of data – a clear challenge in the big data world.