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

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.