Marketing Clouds Have a Data Donut Hole. It Isn’t Sweet

kid sitting on the steps with a donut in hands. little boy is looking forward to eating a donut. copy space for your text

Marketing clouds offer tremendous benefits. As a one-stop-shop, they give you the ability to have all your marketing tools, applications, and data easily accessible and integrated. Also, you don’t have to deal with IT overhead. 

That’s the theory.

In reality, the large marketing clouds of Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce were built by acquiring companies with applications and tools marketers needed, like social, email, analytics, and then stitching them together.

Or not.

In reality, the applications now do not talk to each other well, if at all. The marketing applications don’t pass any fine grain data amongst themselves and speak only in aggregates. However, the Adobe CDP is now being developed to try and remedy this issue.

There is a “data donut hole” in the middle of the marketing clouds. There are gaps in information and it results in inconsistent personas, off-target campaign strategies, lower engagement, and higher customer acquisition costs.

The data donut hole wasn’t deliberate. It came about because integrating disparate marketing tools and applications is extremely difficult — even if they were built using open standards.

Even with the recipe of a master baker, it’s impossible to make donuts in your own kitchen. No matter how closely you follow the directions, lack of experience and lack of technique ensure that you cannot reproduce the original.

 

James Meyers
James Meyers
Head of Martech Strategy
James Meyers is Head of Martech Strategy, coming to ActionIQ from a leading research firm where he studied and advised organizations on customer data platforms (CDPs) and customer analytics. James has unique expertise in data management solutions, having built and operationalized a homemade CDP at Lowe’s Home Improvement in addition to implementing an MDM solution there as a data engineer.
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