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Unify adtech and martech: The power of CDP and clean rooms for modern marketersEstimated reading time: 12 minutes
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Unify adtech and martech: The power of CDP and clean rooms for modern marketers

The evolving marketing landscape and the challenge of disconnected data

Ultimately, brands are focused on one thing: performance.

Getting a customer to buy a product, sign up for a newsletter or join a loyalty program is critical for a brand’s bottom line, but doing so isn’t always easy. To deploy high-performing advertising, brands need to find the best in-market customers, create a relationship with them and keep them engaged as their preferences change.

How do you make that happen? By combining the power of martech and adtech.

Martech solutions, like clean rooms and customer data platforms (CDPs), can unlock deeper insights about current and prospective customers, and allow you to optimize your media activation strategy based on that knowledge. Being able to move that information seamlessly over to the advertising technology is where the rubber really meets the road—that’s where the activation of the data pays off in reaching the right people for your campaign

When adtech and martech can work together, they create a closed-loop system from audience selection to media activation and campaign measurement. And then, that same tech stack combination can take insights from that campaign (and the many before and after it) to apply to future campaigns, starting the cycle all over again. This creates a seamless, personalized customer experience across channels and devices.

Here, we’ll look at the fundamentals for creating a strong martech-to-adtech onramp to help bridge the activation gap across campaigns.

The core technologies: Understanding each component's value

Martech & adtech: The traditional pillars

How do you define martech and adtech? Martech is short for marketing technology—the software and tools that marketers use to plan, execute and measure marketing campaigns. Adtech is short for advertising technology—the software and tools for actual ad delivery and optimization. Both of these technologies use customer data to inform their strategies.

In the face of data deprecation, the customer journey is becoming even more fragmented. The best way for you to control your own marketing destiny is to define (and refine) your data strategy.

Some brands have a plethora of first-party data at their fingertips, others don’t. Martech solutions aim to bridge those data gaps. CDPs can organize a brand’s existing first-party data while clean rooms use a combination of first-, second- and third-party data to help derive audience insights and find prospective customers.

However, it’s not enough to simply have data. The most effective CDPs and clean rooms—like the solutions at Epsilon—will enhance and enrich your data to enable sophisticated marketing insights. Using identity resolution, Epsilon can do this at an individual level.

Customer insights—both of current and prospective customers—drive better media activation. That foundation doesn’t just deliver better ads, it enables:

  • Deeper knowledge: Understand not only whoto target, but with what messages, on which devices and channels, and at the best time.
  • Better customer experience: Connect owned and paid marketing, including insights into the highest performing channels for customers individually and in aggregate.
  • New revenue streams: Create a privacy-compliant environment to collaborate with partners for monetization.
  • Reduced ad waste: Optimize ad spend, get higher returns and reduce duplicate records.

Adtech can use those insights generated by martech to inform campaign deployment. You can use the insights about customer preferences, including individual paths to purchase and channel engagement, and build a deployment strategy inside your adtech solution across channels.

Customer data platform (CDP): The foundation of customer understanding

To deliver personalized experiences, you need to have the best view of your customers. Not only that, you need a view that evolves with your customers.

There are ways to fill in those missing pieces. A CDP equipped with identity resolution organizes your first-party data, helping to unify everything you already have, and cleanses, completes and expands the data by filling in gaps and missing pieces.

This gives you insights into what a customer does outside of your owned channels, so you can go beyond just your first-party data to better understand what people are buying, what they're browsing, what they're watching and on what devices.

They also give you the power to align online and offline data and connect paid and owned channels to natively activate campaigns wherever your customers are.

A persistent, unified view of an individual means you can speak to their customers about the right products on the right devices at the right time. It also illuminates the customers who have perhaps fallen off: people who are seasonal shoppers, people who have gone to a competitor, or people who are strong in-market candidates for a product a brand hadn't previously thought to market to them.

When coupled with AI, you can deliver these personalized experiences at scale. This is a game-changer for marketers: it amplifies results, accelerates outcomes and helps drive real business impact.

Data clean room: Enabling privacy-safe collaboration and insights

A data clean room is a secure environment where data from various sources—including walled gardens, partner data, regulated data and much more—can come together in a privacy-safe way. Clean rooms are important for several reasons:

  1. Ensuring the privacy and security of your data. Clean rooms address this need, providing a safe space for data collaboration while adhering to strict privacy regulations.
  2. Clean rooms offer a centralized environment for integrating disparate data from various sources. This allows brands without much first-party data to aggregate audiences and segments for media activation. The centralization of data also improves their ability to gain insights and make data-driven decisions.
  3. Clean rooms bring data together, expanding access beyond just first-party. You can incorporate data from partners, like paid or social channels, but also incorporate third-party data sets.

Most data clean rooms come as an empty box, but some come pre-loaded with data and identity. Clean rooms pre-equipped with these features give brands a richer view of customers and prospects. They take customer data and augment it with the data already built in, making existing customer profiles more comprehensive and identifying potential buyers based on those insights.

The power of unification: Why one harmonized voice matters

Bridging the gap: Unifying adtech and martech

When adtech and martech work together, it enables brands to funnel the insights derived from a CDP and/or a clean room to deploy hyper-personalized messages. When unified in a single tech stack, and bolstered by a persistent, connected identity, those insights move seamlessly into an activation platform. Campaign measurement is captured in real-time, which provides even more insights into consumer behaviors at the individual and aggregate level that go back into the martech platform.

For example, here's how a CDP (the martech) powered by identity resolution would use insights to develop and deploy campaigns via a DSP (the adtech).

Enhanced customer insights and personalization

The right martech is designed to dig deeper into customer insights and uses that knowledge to drive more personalization based on a customer's behaviors and preferences. And this is critical because in today's digital age, customers are used to—and widely expect—ads that cater to them.

When brands demonstrate that they don't know their customers, their customers notice. According to Epsilon research, "The push and pull of personalization," 76% of consumer respondents said they view brands negatively when they include inaccurate information about them in advertising messages. Compare that to the 91% of respondents who said they see at least one irrelevant ad every single day.

Using martech to build a solid data foundation can reduce this problem. Powered by AI, martech becomes an insights tool and a decision-making mechanism that informs your adtech on what to speak to a consumer about right now.

Picture this:

  • Jane Smith signs up for a brand’s newsletter. The brand is using Epsilon as its advertising and marketing technology partner, with Epsilon Customer as its customer data platform and Epsilon Digital for its digital media activation.
  • Using identity resolution within the CDP, we align Jane to COREid, include her in a modeled audience alongside other in-market customers within our CDP, and then that audience is activated through Epsilon Digital, where she gets an ad.
  • This sets off a series of events that takes Jane from just a newsletter subscriber to a purchaser, and eventually a repeat customer.

Using martech solutions in conjunction with adtech let this brand see Jane the moment she signed up for their newsletter and develop a relationship with her that ultimately led to conversion.

Optimizing media spend and measurement

It's not just customer insights that brands stand to gain, either. When martech is built on a solid foundation of data, and adtech is using that data to deploy campaigns, you have far more certainty when it comes to what's working and why. These solutions are designed to dig deeper into your customers and create better touch points across each person’s journey.

These insights help you optimize your media spend both individually and in aggregate. They discover what channels you need to invest in (or which ones they should pull back from), what campaigns are more effective than others, and discern patterns that can impact overall media buying strategies.

When you have closed-loop insights across all their marketing investments, you can make smarter decisions about how to evolve and enhance your media activation strategy. Because Epsilon has identity resolution at the center, we enable person-based analytics across owned and paid channels.

Realizing growth opportunities with a unified tech stack

Driving customer acquisition and retention

High-performing marketing requires an omnichannel experience for all customers, not just the ones a brand knows. When adtech and martech work together, they bolster not only stronger customer loyalty, but also help with the acquisition of new customers, reviving dormant ones and overall retention.

New customers can become loyal customers if you nurture that relationship. The right martech lays the foundation to be able to understand those customers across all channels and devices, and the adtech side allows the brand to reach them wherever they are in their journey—with brands and in life.

An adtech partner powered by identity can also expand your retention and acquisition efforts by delivering digital media across paid, owned and earned channels, including on the open web. Having a single identifier that can be mapped through martech and adtech provides:

  • Cross-channel personalization: Leverage data integration to personalize messages across both owned and open web channels. This would ensure that customers receive content that aligns with their previous interactions and preferences, creating a seamless experience regardless of the channel.
  • Frequency and timing optimization: Optimizing the frequency and timing of messages prevents overload. You can coordinate the release of messages to avoid simultaneous delivery across channels, ensuring that customers don’t feel inundated with redundant information.
  • Channel-specific incentives: Tailoring incentives based on the channel through which customers are engaged is another effective strategy. For owned channels, exclusive promotions or early access can be emphasized, while open web campaigns could focus on broader brand awareness or highlight unique aspects to capture wider attention.

Future-proofing your marketing strategy

Brands are working against many factors that make reaching their customers exponentially harder:

  • Disjointed channels
  • The reduction of third-party cookies on the open web
  • Reduced media budgets
  • Rising walled gardens

And, as AI becomes integral to marketing, you face an additional challenge of adopting solutions that might be feeding off of bad data or a disjointed tech stack.

Deploying the right martech and adtech helps brands obtain, maintain and understand consumer data to fight against these headwinds.

Brands need acomprehensive, thoughtful data strategy that goes beyond merely collecting data. To understand your best and next best customers, you need a holistic understanding of who each person is, not just how they engage with you. A complete data strategy, powered by connected martech and adtech, uses first-party data, enhanced by zero-, second- and third-party data to drive better customer experiences and higher performing campaigns

This dynamic data strategy allows you to grow with your customers, to fully utilize and develop AI models that are effective and to continually adjust your campaigns across any device or channel as times change.

Epsilon's role: Your partner in unification

If you're hoping to bridge the martech and adtech gap, the options can seem overwhelming. With the right vendor, having a seamless, integrated experience that drives better marketing campaigns and customer insights is possible.

At Epsilon, our suite of products is designed to work together. Our solutions power marketers' ability to harmonize engagement with consumers across paid, owned and earned channels with messages that are personalized for each individual.

When you work with a trusted partner like Epsilon, you’ll activate industry-leading identity to get 1 View of all your customers: what they buy, where to find them and how to engage them. And we’ll help you use that data to identify your entire universe of potential buyers, driving acquisition, retention and growth.

Then, we help brands craft 1 Vision of what matters to each person, engage them with a message they’ll care about and learn more about them with each interaction. That paves the way for conversations with customers that are relevant in the moment and evolve with them to stay relevant over time.

Then, we help develop those messages with 1 Voice, harmonized across paid, owned and earned channels, enabling brands to have a conversation that builds a relationship with each consumer.

Ready to unify your adtech and martech to see customers better, minimize ad waste, and deliver stronger results for brand partners? Read more about Epsilon PeopleCloud.

This article was originally published on October 30, 2023, and has since been updated.

Digital MediaCustomer ExperienceDataClean RoomCDP