Tag: CDP

Singapore – Hightouch, a composable data and AI platform for marketing and personalisation, has named Monks, a global, purely digital, data-driven, unitary operating brand of S4 Capital as a certified reseller in APAC, expanding access to and bolstering customer service for its technology in the APAC region.

This partnership enhances Monks’ ability to provide clients with cutting-edge data and AI solutions for personalised experiences and marketing effectiveness.

Monks has an established footprint across the APAC region and deep data and marketing advisory and implementation capabilities. These are a perfect complement to Hightouch’s composable CDP and AI Decisioning technology.

In a statement, both entities note that the journey to successfully becoming data-driven and deploying AI starts with data. However many businesses struggle with fragmented data sources, messy pipelines, and the difficulty of extracting actionable insights. 

Monks helps clients overcome these challenges by offering a structured approach to integrate, harmonise, and analyse data efficiently upon. Hightouch can then activate that foundation with the fastest enterprise CDP and AI deployments in the industry.

Kashish Gupta, CEO of Hightouch, said, “Enterprises in the APAC region are setting the global pace in adopting composable CDP and AI agents for marketing. Monks is the ideal partner to help Hightouch support the rapid deployment of these technologies in the region.”

Meanwhile, Jakub Otrząsek, SVP, Data, APAC at Monks, commented, “Our team of data architects, analysts, and engineers offers services to solve this problem. Monks will work to integrate the entire data supply chain, breaking down these silos and enabling a wider, more holistic view of our client’s data. Once data readiness and wide data is achieved, the Hightouch Composable platform can be applied to activate with their library of pre-built integrations and start to deliver AI-powered personalised experiences.”

Sydney, Australia – Amperity has announced that it has been awarded the ‘Communications, Media and Entertainment Partner of the Year’ Award by Databricks. With Databricks and Amperity, brands such as Paramount and Vail Resorts, have maximized the value of their customer data, lowered costs, and increased data democratization to generate and share insights to their downstream systems and business users.

The award was presented this week at Databricks’ Data + AI Summit 2024 and underscores the impact Amperity has made in developing Databricks competency and helping to solve customer data challenges and break into new revenue streams.

Amperity’s Lakehouse CDP is leading the shift towards composability in the marketing technology landscape. Amperity provides automated cleansing, enriching, and harmonizing of customer data and shares it with Databricks Data Intelligence Platform through Delta Sharing, its open, industry-standard protocol. This allows data to be easily accessible across the tech stack through a shared catalogue. 

Together, Amperity and Databricks enable brands to take a more sophisticated and strategic approach to customer data management, paving the way for a new era of data-driven marketing where insights can be easily translated into actionable strategies for boosting engagement, loyalty, and revenue.

Derek Slager, co-founder and CTO at Amperity, said, “We are thrilled and deeply honoured to receive the Communications, Media and Entertainment Partner of the Year award from Databricks. This recognition is a testament to the incredible value our collaboration has delivered to our shared customers.”

He added, “By combining Amperity’s unified customer data foundation with Databricks’ powerful data intelligence platform, we’ve empowered brands to unlock transformative insights and personalize customer experiences like never before. As we look ahead, we’re excited to further strengthen our partnership by redefining what’s possible in customer engagement and to help our clients turn complex data into business value.”

Meanwhile, Roger Murff, vice president of technology partners at Databricks, commented, “In an era where data and AI are pivotal to innovation, Amperity’s Lakehouse CDP plays an important role in delivering data intelligence. Together, we enable brands to seamlessly share live data sets without the need for maintaining ETLs or copying data. Through this composable and secure data flow, Amperity and Databricks empower brands to fuel the data-intensive demands of Generative AI and deliver highly personalized experiences with exceptional data quality.”

Sydney, Australia – Amperity, the customer data platform (CDP) for enterprise consumer brands, has announced the appointment of Rian Smith as new business director and Sam Bessey as its new lead solutions consultant. The latest senior hires are expected to scale Amperity’s presence in the region amidst a period of rapid growth to meet the strong demand from brands looking to accelerate their digital transformation. 

Smith, formerly head of sales for APAC at Cheetah Digital, will be driving Amperity’s strategic new business initiatives and creating market demand. 

“With the surging demand for a CDP like Amperity in the region, there couldn’t be a better time to come on board and help local brands embrace their messy customer data to drive delightful customer experiences safely and securely while also achieving outstanding business results,” said Smith.

Meanwhile, Bessey, who was previously a senior manager at Accenture, brings a similar depth of experience to his new role. As lead solutions consultant, he will be assisting new and existing clients to unlock value from their customer data, using Amperity’s best-of-breed CDP. 

“As businesses adapt to the challenges and changes presented over the last few years and face new challenges in the year ahead, CDPs can help drive relevancy in real-time interactions to accelerate business growth,” commented Bessey.

“I’m thrilled to be on the ground, helping brands strike a balance between understanding how to engage with customers successfully while, simultaneously, respecting their data privacy to win in this new era of personalisation through the power of Amperity,” he added. 

Billy Loizou, area vice president at Amperity, shared their delight in welcoming the two seasoned hires and believes that both will help accelerate the opportunity brands have to serve their customers by bridging them to Amperity’s expertise.

“Brands are accelerating business transformation to better understand their customers, unlocking the ability to acquire more high-value customers, all whilst driving down their operational costs. The need for brand differentiation, seamless customer experiences, marketing measurement and data governance has transcended a CDP’s traditional function as a marketing tool to that of a central pillar of the entire enterprise software mix,” said Loizou.

New data has revealed the CDP market size is expected to grow from AU$7.18b in 2022 to AU$29.47b by 2027, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 32.4% during the forecast period. APAC is set to hold the highest CAGR which can be attributed to the heavy martech investments in the region resulting in increased demand for CDPs. 

Smith and Bessey are the latest to join Amperity in the APAC region, following its international expansion. The martech company recently opened a new office in the United Kingdom and a data centre in Ireland to complement its current presence in the former.

Washington, USA – Amperity, the enterprise customer data platform (CDP) for consumer brands, today announced Reckitt, the global consumer packaged goods company (CPG), has appointed it to maximise the value of its omnichannel customer data to deliver relevant, personalised customer experiences.

Combining first-party data and third-party data can have an immediate and significant impact on brands looking to truly understand their customers, and deliver highly-relevant experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. Amperity’s integrations with leading platforms like Amazon and Facebook aim to enable companies like Reckitt to reach more users while enriching advertising campaigns through Amperity’s insights on cross-channel behaviour, data sciences scores, and content affinities. 

“Historically, CPGs have had very little access to first-party data making it incredibly difficult to truly know the customer and deliver relevant omnichannel experiences,” said Barry Padgett, CEO at Amperity. “Reckitt understands the need to build their own customer relationships. By embracing a first-party data strategy, Reckitt now has access to accurate customer profiles that will exponentially strengthen their reach.”

Amperity has also announced this month its support for Amazon’s AWS for Advertising & Marketing initiative. The initiative features services and solutions purpose-built for the needs of different players in the industry, whereas Amperity has created a secure, modern data stack that would help brands to maximise the value of their first-party data.

The martech platform has also recently unveiled new key leaders. Megan McDonagh and Billy Loizou were named CMO and area vice president respectively.

I’ve long advocated that businesses need to take data protection seriously and any business that hasn’t already gotten its first-party data act together needs to prioritise that in 2023. Whether it’s Google getting rid of cookies, Apple making mobile ad tracking harder or governments introducing more legislation, things are only trending in one direction with data privacy. 

California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), is going into full effect on 1 January 2023 set to clamp down on B2B data. Meanwhile The Australian Federal Government has recently announced harsher penalties for data breaches, including fines amounting to a whopping $AUD 50 million.

Empowering your business as data privacy tightens

When it comes to the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, ID resolution emerges as a valuable resource. By building a hearty, privacy-compliant, first-party data set, ID resolution provides a buffer against increasingly strict privacy policies that limit the use of third-party data. And even more, it helps improve marketing performance and ROI too with smart segmentation, which helps brands cut down on redundancies.

Data clean rooms (DCRs) can also supply advertisers with access to information they otherwise wouldn’t have. And, especially with the impending demise of third-party cookies, every piece of information is gold. 

As privacy rules become stricter, DCRs will skyrocket in popularity. In fact, recent predictions indicate that by 2023, 80% of advertisers with media buying budgets over $1 billion will use DCRs.

However, a DCR is only an extension of a first-party data strategy. Connecting a CDP to a DCR allows first-party data to be anonymised and analysed alongside third-party sources. A CDP can also receive data from the DCR in the form of segments or targeted audiences it can then share with connected marketing platforms for activation.

Think of it this way: You can use Venmo or PayPal without a checking account attached to it, but it’s a much better experience (with better outcomes) if they are connected. Together, a DCR and a CDP allow organisations to manage, process and analyse their data in a way that’s efficient, safe and compliant.

Unlocking the value of customer data to drive business growth

Marketing budgets are under increased pressure. Businesses are continuing to focus on retaining their existing customers rather than spending big to acquire new ones. In relation to e-commerce, it’s not so much that consumers have stopped spending altogether – they are just buying different things. For instance, they’re now picking up a $30 lipstick every month rather than a $60 facial cream.

With supply chains being what they are, it’s crucial to pick up shifts in consumer preferences ASAP. Comprehensive, readily accessible, first-party data also makes it easier for businesses to understand what their customers want when they are feeling unsettled and financially stressed.

This means it’s more crucial than ever to remember customer metrics drive business metrics. Businesses will be more reliant than ever on a first-party data strategy next year to hold on to customers and remain one step ahead of their ever-evolving purchasing habits. 

It’s also important to remember customer data isn’t just for marketers. After building a unified customer database, that data is then available to advertisers, marketers, analysts, IT operations teams and product developers. This is precisely what it means to be customer-centric — using your customer data to inform all aspects of the business, not a single channel or department. When everyone shares the same understanding of customers, the business is equipped to provide the best experiences and the most impactful strategies for long-term growth.

Making the most of ‘messy’ data to make 2023 a success

While centralised data storage systems like warehouses and lakes are great ways to keep all the data together, especially at the scale most enterprises deal with (we’re talking hundreds of billions of data points), they don’t organise and cleanse large volumes of ‘messy’ data so that you can make the most out of it. 

It’s far from a ‘one and done’ solution. That’s where a CDP comes in. It powers up your data warehouse or data lake by:

  1. Cleaning customer data for superior ID resolution, providing teams answers to key questions about customer behaviour
  2. Providing built-in attributes that neatly lay out all the information needed to gain a picture of each customer, so you can perform advanced segmentation to find and reach the right audiences for a given campaign
  3. Managing workflows to activate use cases and bring the data to life
  4. Speeding up time to insights by providing access for non-technical teams
  5. Feeding data seamlessly into a range of different tools

2023 is the year for brands and organisations to embrace a ‘better together’ mentality when it comes to their data needs. 

This article is written by Billy Loizou, area vice president of Amperity.

The insight is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series under What’s NEXT 2023. What’s NEXT 2023 is a multi-platform industry initiative which features marketing and industry leaders in APAC sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share on upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to be part of the series. 

Malaysia – ADA, analytics, data, and AI business in Asia, and Treasure Data, global customer data platform (CDP) company, have announced a strategic partnership to bring end-to-end enterprise customer-centric solutions to 10 markets across South and Southeast Asia, including South Korea. 

The partnership will be helping enterprises enhance and personalise customer experience to improve the customer journey, communicate efficiently, and manage data gaps. To support brands in achieving a successful outcome and getting the most value out of a CDP, ADA and Treasure Data will provide strategic consultancy and create functional use cases with measurable return on investment. This includes setting up and deploying a CDP with a single customer view, supporting design and unifying data, activating platforms from media to mobile to web to CRO (conversion route optimisation), and offering full technical support. 

ADA said that as CDP remains a highly accessible solution only to most larger enterprises, the new offering is able to empower SMEs to connect with their customers whilst scaling up their business.

Srinivas Gattamneni, CEO of ADA, said, “Our clients across all industries are craving for solutions that can fully leverage their customer data to enhance their digital customer experience journeys. With Treasure Data, we are truly able to deliver complete marketing solutions that enables usage of customer data across all parts of the marketing funnel from brand identity development to customer acquisition to eCommerce revenue delivery.” 

He adds, “This partnership will connect enterprises in APAC by using CDP to build meaningful connections across their customer journey, thus enhancing the customer experience through data and marketing technology.”

Meanwhile, Kazuki Ohta, CEO and co-founder of Treasure Data, commented, “We are excited to work with ADA to bring this first of its kind partnership to the Southeast Asia market that will allow customers to experience our leading CDP with best-in-class service to clients. Together we can ensure all brands will be able to easily leverage insights to create tailored, relevant and secure customer experiences.”

According to ADA, the partnership is made possible via the strategic investment by SoftBank Corp. Just recently, ADA has also announced that it is now a WhatsApp Business Solution Provider (BSP) in Asia-Pacific, where it’s able to help businesses connect with their customers through the WhatsApp Business Platform. 

As the usage of third-party data gradually moves out of the picture, this affects the way marketers approach industry disciplines, and this is across the board – from changing the way brands implement audience targeting and retargeting, the demands in order to keep every marketing funnel in optimum shape has greatly transformed.

David Harling, the former CMO and now the managing director of MoneySmart, enlightens us on one particular area – growth marketing. In an interview with Harling, he identifies the weak spots as well as strength areas of a brand’s growth marketing strategies now that the digital environment is about to fully transition to a cookieless and first-party data world.

Customer acquisition vs. customer retention

According to Harling, now that the industry is preparing to adopt first-party data strategies, the cost of customer acquisition will now increase, hence where brands are overly-dependent on gaining new customers, they must now shift the focus to customer retention.

“I think one of the main challenges that most brands are experiencing at the moment, and [something] we’ll find more challenging moving into a cookieless world this year is being too overly dependent on customer acquisition, and [not having] put enough focus into customer ownership, retention, and engagement,” said Harling.

This is true and in a particular study of SEA marketers by AppsFlyer, specifically in the area of fintech, it was found that marketers in the region spent over US$244m in gaining new users.

There is no complex reason as to why lessen the focus on customer acquisition other than continued dependence will make the “ability to grow to cost more.”

“And so clearly with third-party data going away, the targeting abilities and the ability to scale and grow customer acquisition will be more expensive. And so the overall unit economics mix of that in order to try and grow would be more challenging,” said Harling.

Balancing performance-based marketing and brand investment 

One of the challenges as well, Harling cites, in growth marketing presently is striking the balance between focusing on performance-based marketing and brand investment, where as of the present, there’s more focus on the former.

In relation to putting more attention to brands’ customer retention efforts, Harling says that it’s important, therefore, to reevaluate ad budget investment to performance-based marketing and brand investment as brands would need to double down on the latter in order to successfully keep and retain customers.

From an internal view, a qualitative study reflects Harling’s insight. According to a report by  NEON leaders, marketers are actually revealing their fears of losing a generation of strategic marketing leaders, all because of the heavy precedence on output-heavy and metric-based marketing.

“I think another big challenge is how do brands begin to be comfortable again with investing into their brand profile. Clearly, that’s harder to account for or to measure, but in terms of future growth, it’s so important to get the balance between performance-based marketing and brand investments,” shared Harling.

He adds that brands must take action despite brand and customer experience taking much more time and being a lifetime value discipline.  

“Being visible and driving awareness around products and brands is as important, but more challenging and difficult to measure. And again, it becomes more important as you move into a customer retention model,” said Harling.

Much like in a sense of doing the big things well so that the small things can take care of themselves–having a good customer onboarding strategy in place, Harling believes, is key, in order to fully make the focus on customer retention work. And effective customer onboarding can be achieved when marketing and user experience work in concert.

According to a recent 2021 study by Qualtrics, poor customer experiences cost businesses in Singapore US$11b annually, where it was found that 51% of customers in the market have cut spending after a single bad experience with a company.

“And so whatever user journeys or platform experience, or product experience you’re providing, you know, marketing and user experience need to work tighter. Once you have a good discipline to get customer onboarding, you’re making the efficiency of your customer acquisition costs stronger because you won’t need to recruit customers somewhere else,” said Harling.

Driving CRM and loyalty initiatives

Within growth marketing, Harling also shares his insights on the top strategies in successfully building CRM and loyalty initiatives. And he swears by the power of the basics –  understanding your customer better.

“Investing into good customer profiling and looking at the exchange of value that you provide to your customers in order to make them comfortable to provide you with certain things,” said Harling.

Certainly all the pivot in marketing disciplines will take place in accordance with the shift to a cookieless digital environment, and Harling believes that investment in tech such as customer data platforms (CDP) will be one of the best approaches as it puts more emphasis on first-party data as a strategy.

“CDP underpins that first-party strategy and drives good sort of contextual engagement, which again, allows brands to become more dependent or I guess grow their customer base and clearly grow their business based on retaining customers,” said Harling.

“The customer experience and customer relationship discipline – I think if you get that right, you have a good ability to profile your customers and get to know them, and I think your engagements in your CRM become more contextualized and more meaningful to get an outcome,” he added.

In addition, Harling also advises that moving forward, there will be much stronger need for the integration of marketing and product teams. While a lot of companies have jumped into the said unification, many are still not doing it right such as having disconnected KPIs and lack of common goals.

“There’s a lot of brands that say, hey, my product team is so integrated with my marketing team. And actually, if you look at it, it’s nonsense, right? And so this [needs] proper integration [and] accountability, and having common goals. I mean, you’d find a lot of these teams don’t have a joined-up or shared KPIs [and] they’re very separate in the way that they’re accountable,” Harling says.

Harling concludes that among targeted marketing strategies that brands can focus on at this period, it is starting to define their first-party data strategy that would prove to lay a strong foundation.

“And so I think any advice I could give any marketer moving into [2022] is really [to] get their heads around first-party data as a strategic driver, and really understand the relationship between good media activation of that data and also good customer onboarding,” Harling said.

He continues, “And then [figuring out] how do you use that data [to] profile your customers, and really begin to prioritize retention-based marketing, to grow your business. And I can assure any brand that takes that strategic direction, although it’s not easy, and requires a bit of time, you’ll find that you’ll grow your business based on good customer engagement.”

“Good loyalty in terms of customers coming back and driving repeat behaviors and repeat purchases – it will be less dependent on the cost of acquisition model, which I think a lot of brands are still strategically dependent on,” adds Harling.

This article is written based on an interview with David Harling, managing director of financial comparison platform MoneySmart.

The article is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series What’s NEXT. This features marketing leaders sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year. The series aims to equip marketers with actionable insights to future-ready their marketing strategies.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share with regards to the upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to have your thought-leadership published on the platform.

Singapore – Varnish Software, a content delivery software technology company, has opened a new regional headquarters in Singapore and appointed Peter Löfling (pictured) as General Manager for operations in the Asia-Pacific Region.

Earlier this year Varnish Software established an office in Tokyo, Japan, and is now taking the next steps in expanding its APAC organization with its new commercial headquarters.

Peter Löfling, joins the business as Regional General Manager for APAC having amassed more than 20 years of experience in building and deploying successful streaming and CDN businesses, with previous roles at the likes of Cisco and Ericsson.

“I am really excited to join Varnish and build our APAC Operations. The company has seen a phenomenal profitable growth of the past few years and has a portfolio of best-in-class content delivery solutions that are highly relevant to help enterprises in the Asia Pacific region create competitive edge and enhanced end-user experience”, says Peter Löfling.

Singapore was chosen as the location for the APAC headquarters due to its impressive pool of technical talent and strong international trade and transport links.  By having offices based in Japan and now Singapore, Varnish is able to easily serve customers across the region with locally-based support teams.

“The timing is perfect for Varnish Software to increase its focus on the APAC region. The content delivery market is growing here and the introduction of 5G will change the game completely. Varnish Software is very well positioned to be one of the companies that will help spearhead this change”, concludes Löfling.