ADEX, Adform and Adobe top Forrester’s list of DMP leaders

The ADEX, Adform and Adobe have dominated Forrester’s list of DMP providers for 2017, and continue to lead the way in integrated solutions for marketers. 

The analyst firm’s latest report, The Forrester Wave: Data Management Platform, Q2 2017, put the ADEX, Adform, Adobe, KBM Group, Lotame, MediaMath, Neustar, Nielsen, Oracle, Salesforce, and Turn as the leaders of the pack.

Adform, Adobe and MediaMath also topped the best DSP providers in The Forrester Wave: Omnichannel Demand-Side Platforms, Q2, 2017, along with AOL, AppNexus, DataXu, Google, Rocket Fuel, The Trade Desk, and Turn, while Viant was identified as lagging behind the pack.

According to Forrester, the DMP market is growing because more B2C marketers are tapping into data resources to develop a more holistic view of their consumers.

Marketers focused on delivering on their brand promises across all customer touchpoints now demand DMPs with a full array of integrations, the ability to facilitate second-party data programs, and the strategic understanding of the current and future direction of the enterprise.

In fact, today’s DMP market is almost unrecognisable when compared to the landscape surveyed in the first DMP Forrester Wave evaluation in 2013, the analyst claimed. Adobe, a leader in that Forrester Wave, went on to form its own adtech stack, one of three dominant stacks competing today, along with Oracle and now Salesforce, which entered the fray with its acquisition of Krux in late 2016.

But despite these inroads, more than half of the surveyed clients would like to see Adobe improve its current analytics and audience insights offerings.

Qualified DMPs have also anticipated their clients’ desire to work with their already established partners to deliver consistent communication across channels beyond advertising, Forrester found. So, even when they offer a competitive product or service themselves, these DMPs have established the necessary relationships and prepared the required connectivity to maximise speed and minimise data loss with companies that offer analytics, content management, creative optimisation, cross-channel attribution, customer relationship management (CRM), email, internet of things (IoT), offline, search, site optimisation, and social.

One provider gaining a fresh wave of positive feedback was MediaMath, where customers praised its professional services, change management, data security and leakage prevention, custom reporting, and privacy capabilities. Meanwhile clients also highly valued Neustar’s product road map, affordability, and change management and privacy capabilities. But the company could make improvements in user profile management, analytics and insights, and custom report creation.

 More differentiated omnichannel DSPs

Marketing pros are also looking for more differentiated omnichannel DSPs, Forrester found. According to the analysis, ommnichannel DSPs continue to evolve because marketing professionals are challenged by omnichannel digital media buying.  And as competitive technologies approach product parity and equal scale, vendors that get it rights for today’s marketers position themselves to successfully deliver omnichannel digital media buying to their customers.

 Moving forward, Forrester sees three major forces driving consolidation in the advertising technology (adtech) ecosystem: The marketing technologies arms race, telecommunication overhaul and collaborating adtech consortiums like those being led by AppNexus, LiveRamp, and MediaMath.

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