Partner Spotlight: Acxiom Helps Brands Optimize Their Treasure Data CDPs

Recently we announced a strategic partnership with Acxiom to help brands generate new opportunities by optimizing the use of their data. Now working in close partnership, Acxiom’s customer data platform (CDP) experts can help plan, implement, enhance, and operate your Treasure Data CDP.

With complex technical stacks, brands often struggle to fully capitalize on their CDP investment. You need access to experts who can help you gather use cases, design architecture, and workflow, implement the platform, and ensure the right metrics are being tracked. External service partners like Acxiom offer the technical and marketing experience to help brands implement, manage, optimize, and scale their martech stacks.

When every department in your company has the data and insights they need, they can work together to create connected customer experiences and improve business value – that’s a reality with a Treasure Data CDP and Acxiom.

Treasure Data interviewed David Skinner, Chief Strategy Officer, Acxiom to get a better understanding of this new strategic partnership and how their experts can optimize your Treasure Data CDP.

Treasure Data: Tell us who you are and what Acxiom is about. 

David Skinner:  I’m David Skinner, Chief Strategy Officer for Acxiom. As part of my role, I head up our technology partnerships and a very important partner that I’m here to talk about today is Treasure Data. 

To tell you a little bit about Acxiom, we help brands understand their customers. We work with enterprise brands in customer intelligence, and ultimately what that means for me is we help them acquire, retain, and grow the customer base.

So, by helping brands through the use of data, through the use of a high fidelity identity of their consumers or prospects, and then modeling and analyzing that data and ultimately putting a marketing message in front of them, we help them drive higher return on ad spend, higher performance of their marketing, and ultimately help them grow their customer base.

Treasure Data: Tell us about Acxiom’s partnership with Treasure Data.

David Skinner:  Our Treasure Data partnership goes back about four years. Treasure Data was one of the first CDPs and was the first CDP which Acxiom partnered with. Our thinking behind CDP partnerships is that we’ve been managing our bespoke technology environments in support of these marketing data outcomes throughout our history. The change we’ve seen in the marketplace in the last five to seven years has been that the buying decision for the CMO has shifted to the technology platform first. We’re now seeing the CMOs thinking about technology partner decisions first and technology provider decisions first. So with that change in the market, we’ve actively taken what we do well and surround Treasure Data with those capabilities.

We find the flexibility of Treasure Data has been a nice combination for our businesses. And then another real differentiator is just the breadth and depth of the Treasure Data ecosystem. So the number of integrations that Treasure Data has means that our joint customers can get their data where they want it to easily without a lot of overhead.

Treasure Data: Where do you see the CDP industry headed?

David Skinner:  The future big trend is data in the cloud. Moving to the cloud is a trend that we’ve embraced. And if you think about the digital advertising industry for the first 15 or so years of the industry’s lifespan from the late nineties through the early-mid two thousand, it was about applications moving to the cloud. And we’re now in this next phase of data moving to the cloud. We’re now seeing that it’s not a matter of if data’s going to the cloud, it’s a matter of when data’s going to the cloud and then how the marketer and the IT organization can most seamlessly manage that transition. So that’s a trend we feel we’re still in the early innings of that data to the cloud trend, whereas perhaps the marketing tech and applications in the cloud, the growth is starting to slow a bit there.

Treasure Data: How does Acxiom’s partnership with Treasure Data support customers in regulated industries?

David Skinner:  In the more regulated industries where the importance of either industry self-regulation or in cases like healthcare or financial services where there are country-by-country regulations around how customer data can be used in financial services, there are attributes that you’re prohibited from marketing with to acquire new credit customers. As an example things like race and gender and where someone lives. These are all highly regulated in terms of what data you can use.

And of course, in healthcare, HIPAA regulations around the use of customer data are also highly regulated. So we’ve found that Treasure Data has been a robust platform for us to be able to manage those harder challenges around regulated data in regulated industries. And also the ability to easily manage differences across geographies or countries because again, to the point of complexity, we’re seeing that different regions and different countries have different rules around how the data can be used. Treasure Data has been a great platform for being able to manage that complexity with efficiency and seamlessly.

Treasure Data: What does CDP data readiness look like?

David Skinner:  We work with our clients and prospects on something we call data readiness or CDP data readiness. And what that’s looking to help them address is, look, a CDP will not be your system of record for all data. You will still have a data warehouse, you’ll still have data lakes and CDP fits into data you want to action with to drive a marketing campaign, a personalized website, or a paid media campaign. 

So you want to know you have your arms around which data you have today, be able to map that up against what the use cases are that you’re trying to drive, and look for gaps between the data you have and use cases you’re trying to drive. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to supplement your data with data from companies like Acxiom or other third parties. So going down that journey of data readiness is where we tend to really start a CDP discussion because though this is a technology decision, it is heavily a data decision as well.

And those really are two different worlds. Customer data really is a different world than SaaS. There are a lot of SaaS companies that’ve gotten into the space, but a strong SaaS engineer will struggle to bring a lot of value to customer data. Just like a strong customer data engineer would struggle to build a high-performing SaaS platform. So understanding your data and being able to have a core set of customer data that will then allow you to execute on the campaigns that you want to execute on is really the starting point.

And that can be a great place to start to then go down the CDP path and roadmap. But you do want to ensure you have that core data to begin with. Otherwise, you can spend a lot of time just spinning your wheels.

Meet Our Partners

A customer data platform is made even more powerful by the strength of its partnerships.

Treasure Data CDP Partners Program enables service providers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to take full advantage of Treasure Data resources and establish a firm footing in what is fast becoming the foundation of marketing technology.

Learn more about Treasure Data’s partners through our partner spotlight blog series, see them all here.