This is a fast-moving trend in which companies are licensing large enterprise stacks and using systems integrators to manage all marketing—not just online advertising.

As detailed in Ad Age (Marketing clouds loom), the days of turning to an agency trade desk or demand side platform (DSP) to manage the “digital” portions of advertising are fading rapidly as marketers are intent on having technology that covers more than just advertising.

Building consumer data platforms

A few years ago, a good “stack” might have been a connected DMP, DSP and ad server. A really good stack would feature a viewability vendor and start a dynamic creative optimization (DCO). The focus then was on optimizing for the world of programmatic buying and getting the most out of digital advertising as consumers’ attention shifted online, to mobile and social, rather than television. 

Fast forward a few years, and the conversations we are having with marketers are vastly different. As reported in AdExchanger, more than 40% of enterprise marketers license a DMP, and another 20% will do so within the next 12 months. DMP owners and those in the market for one are increasingly talking about more than just optimizing digital ads. They want to know how to put email marketing, customer service and commerce data inside their systems. They also want data to flow from their systems to their own data lakes.

Many are undertaking the process of building internal consumer data platforms (CDPs), which can house all of their first-party data assets—both known and pseudonymous user data. 

We are moving beyond ad tech. Quickly. 

Today, when those in the market are considering licensing a “DMP” they are often thinking about “data management” more broadly. Yes, they need a DMP for its identity infrastructure, ability to connect to dozens of different execution systems and its analytical capabilities. But they also need a DMP to align with the systems they use to manage their CRM data, email data, commerce systems, and marketing automation tools.

Data-driven marketing no longer lives in isolation. After I acquire a “luxury sedan intender” online, I want to retarget her—but I also want to show her a red sedan on my website, e-mail her an offer to come to the dealership, serve her an SMS message when she gets within range of the dealership to give her a test drive incentive, and capture her e-mail address when she signs up to talk to a salesperson. All of that needs to work together.

Personalization demands adtech and martech come together 

We live in a world that demands Netflix and Amazon-like instant gratification at all times. It’s nearly inconceivable to a Millennial or Generation Z if a brand somehow forgets that they are a loyal customer because they have so many choices and different brands that they can switch to when they have a bad experience.

This is a world that requires adtech and martech to come together to provide personalized experiences—not simply to create more advertising lift, but as the price of admission for customer loyalty. 

So, when I am asked, what is the future of DMPs, I say that the idea of licensing something called a “DMP” will not exist in a few years.

DMPs will be completely integrated into larger stacks that offer a layer of data management (for both known and unknown data) for the “right person;” an orchestration layer of connected execution systems that seek to answer the “right message, right time” quandary; and an artificial intelligence layer, which is the brains of the operation trying to figure out how to stitch billions of individual data points together to put it all together in real time.

DMPs will never be the same, but only in the sense that they are so important that tomorrow’s enterprise marketing stacks cannot survive without integrating them completely, and deeply.