Following Oracle’s announcement to wind down its advertising business by the end of September, many brands find themselves needing to plan their next move. For those who rely on Oracle’s BlueKai DMP, they now have a chance to ask themselves: is there a better way to reach advertising audiences, a way that gets better results with less cost and quicker timelines?
While it’s disruptive to have a tool you work with be sunset, brands will actually end up in a better spot if they use the opportunity to transition away from using a Data Management Platform (DMP).
Why DMPs aren’t effective anymore
DMPs began as an essential tool for marketers to gain insights into unknown audiences. It did this by assembling third-party data, or information that it scraped from across the web using cookies, mobile ad IDs, and other identifiers not given directly by the consumer.
But with rising privacy considerations, changes in data regulations, and original equipment manufacturers (OEM) lockdowns, third-party data is less and less effective as a foundation for digital marketing. The lack of support across channels and platforms means it’s much harder for a DMP to find available audiences and insights.
In practice, this means that DMPs are tied to a deteriorating asset. Even with Google backtracking on their plan to phase out support for third-party cookies, the quality of third-party signals for identifying and reaching customers has already diminished substantially.
And while DMPs can incorporate first-party data, they use onboarding processes that take days or weeks to bring offline data into the platform (for example, from point-of-sale transactions), so there’s always a severe lag between customer interaction and media reaction.
How to adapt when your DMP doesn’t work
For those in need of an alternative to BlueKai, there are several elements to formulating a new approach. It can help to think of these as building blocks: put all of these together and advertising will be more effective, less expensive, faster, and lower risk from a regulatory standpoint.
Focus on First-party Data
It may be obvious at this point, but it’s important enough that it bears repeating: the future of customer data is first-party data. By building on a foundation of data shared with consent directly by customers, brands can be sure that it’s more accurate, more compliant with regulations like CCPA and GDPR, and comes with no additional costs as with renting third-party data. Working with first-party data is also more transparent since you know where it came from and you own the asset yourself. This helps with both compliance and understanding customers.
Direct Activation
Activating directly to advertising platforms like The Trade Desk, Google, and Facebook has quickly become the gold standard in first-party data activation. By removing the middle-man dealing in third-party data, brands will reduce costs, improve accuracy, and boost speed. Related, if you have the right direct connectors in place you can make serious efficiency gains by automating campaign activation across multiple platforms from a single place.
Advanced-Data Segmentation
Look for tools that let you create advanced customer segments on your own rather than relying on a DMP. For example, identifying customer overlaps between segments and creating suppression audiences saves money on duplicate marketing and keeps customers from getting frustrated when they get contacted too much. Working from a first-party data asset lets you draw from a wide range of data points, offering a more tailored approach to your marketing campaigns that ultimately drives better media performance.
Appending Third-Party Data As Needed
There is still a place for privacy-conscious third-party data use, it just shouldn’t make up the foundation of a customer data strategy. It can be appended to an audience within a specific ad environment, rather than applied across channels or used as the basis for building audiences. If your tools start from first-party data, it’ll be more efficient and more effective to activate to ad environments, where you can then opt to use third-party data for enriching a given campaign.
Manage your data the way you want to
Oracle’s exit from advertising is one more sign that the ad ecosystem has changed and that the old methods don’t work anymore. It’s not just DMPs either: any tool that was built for the third-party data approach is losing effectiveness, including data service providers, onboarders, and identity graphs.
Now is the time to transition toward other approaches that are grounded in first-party audiences and better reflect the evolutions in digital marketing. Not only will this approach drive growth, it will also put brands in the driver’s seat as they work with their owned data, rather than having to go through intermediaries that add time and cost while reducing transparency.
The bump in the road of Oracle shuttering their ad business presents a chance to demonstrate flexibility, informed decision-making, and strategic adaptation, all toward getting better results.
