Traditionally, Data Management Platforms (DMPs) have been thought of as one-dimensional ad tech tools, used by media owners to just identify and categorise audiences to better monetise their inventory. This application has certainly served the industry well. However DMPs, and the data they consolidate, have far wider applications.

The proliferation of programmatic ad trading has put data front and centre, and a DMP can enable an organisation to learn a phenomenal amount about its audience – what they like, the things they do, the behaviours they exhibit and what’s important to them.

Advertisers purchasing media across a wide array of sites, over an assortment of platforms, and via various middlemen (including DSPs, exchanges and ad networks) means the data available to the user can be incredibly siloed and complex.

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DMPs help tie all this activity, and the resulting campaign and audience data, together in a single, centralised location.

Additionally, the rise of DMPs is meeting a growing need for brands to house, sort and activate the large volumes of first and third party consumer data they are amassing. DMPs are the piping that moves data from one place to another, and can allow this to be done intelligently, securely and in line with market regulation.

DMPs can also be hugely beneficial to editorial departments, who have struggled in recent years to monetise their content effectively amid a decline in traditional ad sales revenue, the technology can also be used to drive internal data science initiatives.

DMPs cannot only help make informed ad sales, but also protect company and customer data by tracking suspicious behaviour and protecting against attacks and decreased efficiency that can create vulnerabilities for the business.

In addition, DMPs can decrease the amount of dropped cookies and reduce the number of unauthorised parties, leading to increased onsite engagement.

It’s worth taking a look at a few real world examples where DMPs have helped brands go beyond advertising;

Kellogg Company is a highly complex, highly advanced marketer who employs a wide variety of channels to deliver consumer messaging in the right place at the right time.

Kellogg acknowledges that the world of marketing is data driven and leverages DMP technology for its compelling combination of actionable insights and differentiated technology. Thus future-proofing the business for tomorrow's high velocity marketing challenges.

BBC Worldwide for example, is one of the largest news gathering operations in the world, and it generates about 80 million unique browsers from all around the world using an array of digital platforms including bbc.com.

It uses its DMP to not only allow it to aggregate its digital platforms’ user information and distil that into actionable insights to help its advertising clients, but also assure it’s audience’s right to privacy and protect the data relating to their usage of bbc.com.

It enables BBC Worldwide to closely monitor all activity relating to bbc.com and take action when suspicious behaviour occurs, and at the same time helps it provide its advertisers with the opportunity to target high-value international readers.

Another example is how Totaljobs.com has used its DMP to provide better personalisation for job seekers in niche industries such as catering and IT.

These sectors have unique challenges associated with them; for example, chefs don’t tend to search for jobs in the evening, so by delivering relevant job opportunities earlier in the day Totaljobs.com is better able to serve these niche roles.

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In Meredith’s case, before creating a new raft of online videos, which will ultimately be rolled into their connected TV programming, it analysed over 12,000 videos currently housed on its owned-and-operated sites. It considered thousands of data points, including search patterns, onsite traffic, most-pinned Pinterest items and shared slideshows.

Turning first-party audience insights into new media assets in this way, it has been able to begin producing video content that it knows will resonate with its user base.

The benefits of using DMPs to develop a single, unified view of their customers across all the channels in which brands invest, extend way beyond advertising into; marketing, supporting editorial departments, ensuring audience privacy, and providing the foundation for internal data science initiatives.

This view also helps marketers solve the age-old problem of attribution, enabling them to understand which channels work best for which customer segments, in order to drive the best business outcomes.

Sourced from Joe Reid, MD Europe, Krux