Teradata brings data management capabilities into its marketing cloud

Teradata has become the latest vendor to introduce data management platform capabilities into its marketing cloud, aimed at unifying advertising and marketing data for real-time customer interactions across all channels.

The new version of Integrated Marketing Cloud comes on the back of the vendor’s acquisition of FLXone in September, a next-generation Data Management Platform (DMP) provider based in the Netherlands. According to Teradata, FLXone provides a data hub comprising integrated solutions that helps marketers drive revenue and improve customer engagement through data-driven integrated marketing.

Teradata said the new capabilities will help marketers unify customer interaction data across paid, earned and owned channels, at scale.

Teradata’s decision to bring DMP capabilities into its marketing cloud follows similar moves by its rivals, including IBM (Universal Behaviour Exchange launched this week), Adobe (via Adobe Audience Manager) and Oracle (through its BlueKai acquisition).

“With Teradata’s acquisition of the Netherlands-based data management platform, FLXone last month, we have all the foundation components of a unified data ‘ecosystem’ needed for our clients to apply customer insights to boost the performance of digital marketing and online advertising through one single view of customer,” Teradata Marketing Applications industry consultant, Umporn Tantipech, said.

“In real-world terms, this means that Teradata’s newly augmented infrastructure can help unify the online world and the offline world for our customers, and give them the ability to deliver a unified message to individuals no matter what the touch-point context.

“With the seamless data management capability, businesses can start linking the anonymous entity with the known individual across various touchpoints, whether it is through owned media or otherwise, so that it is possible to start nudging that individual towards a particular action. And we can do so in real-time across omnichannel when the specific customer’s circumstance demands it.”

As well as providing the data foundation for the Integrated Marketing Cloud, FLXone also brings with it a partner ecosystem of more than 40 advertisers, publishers, agencies and media trading desks. Teradata said it expected these partnerships to let customers further integrate data and applications with the Teradata Integrated Marketing Cloud.

Teradata’s solution will also natively integrate with across Teradata platform offerings, including Integrated Data Warehouse (IDW) and Teradata Digital Marketing Center (DMC).

But Tantipech pointed out that while real-time marketing communications is possible with the technology available today, it may not always be the most effective approach for marketers to adopt.

“What you have to aim for instead is ‘right-time’, and in some instances right-time should be real-time,” he said. “For example, not everyone wants a generic chat pop-up to appear as soon as they land on a website and then the same message interrupting the browsing activities on every page. In many cases, it would be more effective to ‘nudge’ with a real-time message specific to that webpage for that individual customer. In other situations, the business may wait for a while, or even follow up with another form of communication via a different channel further down the track.

“To do this well, you probably want to have some real-time functionality, but it’s not necessary in all cases when going for a right-time approach.”

Earlier this year, Teradata acquired marketing automation vendor, Appoxee, in order to expand the capabilities of its Integrated Marketing Cloud.

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