Overview of Federated Audience Composition

Transcript

In this video, I’m going to talk about a feature in Adobe Realtime CDP and Journey Optimizer that allows you to extend your audiences with the use of customer data that sits and stays in an enterprise data warehouse.

This feature is called Adobe Experience Platform Federated Audience Composition, but let’s back up a little for a frame of reference. What we’re seeing in the market right now is an expansion from engagement from brand-initiated use cases to in-the-moment and personalized journeys. Now let’s define a couple of terms before moving on. When we say brand-initiated campaigns, we mean a traditional use case where an audience is created and distributed to multiple channels like an ESP, social platform, or other marketing channels. But in this case, it’s always the marketer who initiates the action by creating the audience and then sending it to a destination partner.

Now let’s take it a step further. You actually have a higher chance of converting individuals if you move to in-the-moment and personalized journeys. So what do we mean by that? Well, let’s take for example going to a ball game. What is the right moment to engage you about the concession stand or where you can buy your favorite team’s gear? It’s probably not the day before with a mass market email that’s brand-initiated. It is really about finding the right moment. So the right moment might be when you scan the ticket at the entrance of the game, or maybe it’s actually waiting a couple of minutes for you to go up the escalator to the next level and then receive either a push message or a mobile message to say, hey, go over there and get your 10% off of the gear right now. Of course, all depending on your location, but it’s the right moment to engage. This is one example where the consumer’s action, like scanning the ticket at the entrance, influences when a marketing message is sent and can, along with other variables, affect what message is sent to the consumer. This is also what we describe as a journey.

So whenever a customer talks about a journey, a step of things that can be brand-initiated, followed by an individual set of steps executed by a consumer, you’re talking about an in-the-moment use case. Keep in mind that this is all driven by data. Customer experiences require a lot of data. However, if you already have most of that data in a data warehouse, well, you may or may not want to constantly feed all of that data into the central system of engagement, in this case, a real-time customer data platform. If I want to listen to that card scan operation at the entrance of the stadium, maybe I don’t want to send the data in a round trip to a data warehouse for a couple of minutes delay or maybe even longer. I need to already have the audiences built in the data warehouse and then simply listen for the in-the-moment signal and send it to the engagement system as quickly as possible. This is where federated audience composition can shine. Instead of bringing all of your data into Adobe Experience platform from your data warehouse, you can query the tables right in your data warehouse and simply bring the resultant user list along with the relevant contact info to extend audiences in Adobe Experience platform so that you can send their info to a destination partner as soon as you know they fall into the desired use case.

Over time, you will see that the amount of customer data we deal with is increasing. However, a lot of this customer data will be offloaded into or even retained in your data warehouse. It’s about listening to highly relevant signals and responding to them.

We aim to drive the ideal state of customer experiences in an orchestrated and consistent way. You need a consistent, actionable profile that is lightweight and contains the most recent information about what the consumer did. This profile will only need to be retained for a short time, but we also need the right audience qualifications as an audience signal.

Customer data management is still important. You do need a first-party data strategy, which you have likely already adopted in your data warehouse, but it’s where CRM data and more real-time behavioral data come together that can be very important and powerful. We help you use that view for both inbound and outbound journeys. What can be most challenging when working with your data warehouse is making sure that you adhere to your own privacy and governance policies, especially if not all of the data is labeled or clearly attributed.

Adobe can help with our Data Usage and Labeling Enforcement, or DUAL, framework, ensuring that audiences are labeled appropriately and can be actioned accordingly.

In the standard CDP story, we talk about customer data management, bringing all your data together. However, it’s not about all data, but rather relevant data. Bring your relevant data together into an actionable customer profile. That still stands, but now combines signals that need to be quickly integrated into the system of engagement with signals from the data warehouse.

These audience signals are still very relevant and can be leveraged when we apply generative and operational AI.

The story is a connected set of experiences that deeply understand and respect customers. It happens through using the data warehouse to create audience signals, populating those signals into an actionable customer profile, combining that profile with inbound signals of behavior like website data, call data, etc., to drive in-the-moment experiences, and then delivering those experiences at the right time across any journey. This is Federated Audience Composition.