Is the Marketing Database Dead?

The traditional marketing database has evolved as marketers adopt customer data platforms (CDPs) and new ecosystems of activation platforms. CDPs have enabled marketers to manage customer interactions, but they lack certain capabilities, such as collecting zero-party data, integrating second- and third-party data, and managing metadata. For these shortcomings, the audience layer introduces new data capabilities in the modern data management platform. It provides a place to enrich customer data, add prospects, provide analytics across adtech and martech, deliver predictive models, and stitch online behaviors to customer profiles. To capitalize on CDPs, a sound data strategy is needed to build the audience layer and the right resources to execute.

The death of the third-party cookie and increasing privacy concerns are challenging the ability to deliver personalized customer experiences. CDPs are limited in capacity and not built to house all the data needed for marketing. To meet these needs, the audience layer helps to process less data more quickly, create fuller marketing performance insights and trends over time, and hone the ability to address media and complex outbound extracts. It also provides necessary metadata to efficiently drive marketing insights and analytics.

The audience layer fixes many of the shortcomings that CDPs have and allows the segmentation and marketing decision-making functions of the CDP to be more powerful. It is necessary to build a deeper understanding of what the audience layer can do and put the right strategy and plan in place to capitalize on CDPs for successful marketing campaigns.