What Is a DMP (Data Management Platform)?

A DMP, or data management platform, is a software tool used primarily in advertising and marketing to build profiles of anonymous individuals, store summary data about each individual, and share their data with advertising systems.

DMPs are used to store, manage and analyze data about ad campaigns and audiences. A DMP connects to a DSP (Demand Side Platform) or SSP (Supply Side Platform) to purchase ads through ad networks. A DMP ingests anonymous identifiers for your customers, matches these against third party lists, builds a look-alike model with summary data, and selects similar anonymous individuals from third-party lists, and sends those lists to advertising systems.

In short, a DMP is a platform for audience data. It’s useful for audience segmentation, building lookalike audiences, and optimizing paid media spend. It doesn’t store first-party data—most of the data it uses is third-party data stored in the form of cookie IDs and based on user behavior.

Marketers who are getting started with audience segmentation for digital advertising can get the most utility out of a DMP. The platform is good for building look-alike audiences based on a few key data points: For example, people who live in Albuquerque and own an iPhone.

Most marketers aren’t focused exclusively on digital ads, of course. That’s why it makes sense to integrate a DMP with other parts of the Martech stack, in order to cover the entire customer journey. Instead of the two data points above, a full stack would enable you to identify John Wick, who lives in Albuquerque, owns an iPhone, is currently researching Android handsets, and who recently bought a set of bluetooth earbuds from your online store. That type of granular data isn’t possible with a DMP.

A DMP can be a useful tool to have when building your marketing strategy. It’s certainly a good first step to becoming a more data-driven marketer. But it works better as part of an ecosystem, not as a stand-alone solution. Let’s compare with a similar-sounding platform that is often equated to a DMP: the Customer Data Platform, or CDP.

While DMPs are focused on anonymized audience data, a CDP is built for all types of customer data. A DMP is for audience segmentation, while a CDP is for building a comprehensive, 360-degree view of named, individual customers.

The platforms have different capabilities to support their respective functions. DMPs, for example, don’t store first-party data or personally-identifiable information (PII). They are generally cookie-based and rely on anonymized data to create audience segments.

By contrast, a CDP can aggregate data from a host of different sources, including first-party data and PII. CDPs are built with security and privacy features that make them a safe repository for individual customer data.

The differences extend to how each platform stores and retrieves data, as well. DMPs retain data for just 90 days. CDPs rely on long-term data retention to build robust customer profiles (thus the extra security).

DMPs work well for the function they’re intended: Short-term tasks involving broadly-defined audience segmentation. For a detailed view of individual customers and intelligent orchestrating of the customer journey, a CDP is essential. See our list of DMP companies here.

Fortunately, most CDPs can work together with any DMP. As long as the CDP can use the DMP identifier for its ID resolution, the third-party data from the DMP can be used to enhance the customer profiles in your CDP. See this article for more specifics on CDP vs. DMP.

Credit Saison is one of Japan’s leading credit card companies. In 2016, they created a proprietary in-house platform—SAISON DMP. As data management was in its early stages, SAISON DMP was ahead of its time—first in the industry, in fact.

However, as the company looked to integrate more closely with financial technology, and to pursue storage of unique customer data, they found a DMP was inadequate for their needs. Even though their in-house solution was custom built to their specifications, it couldn’t handle the data inputs or the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that a CDP could offer.

Treasure Data’s CDP helps Credit Saison collect, consolidate and store customer data, including PII, in a secure intelligent platform.

“The ability to build marketing profiles based on accurate customer and purchase information that only a credit card company can provide is a major value proposition,” says Manabu Yoshida, head of digital marketing for Credit Saison’s digital division.

Since they adopted Treasure Data’s CDP, Credit Saison has consolidated 5 trillion data points into 27 million individual demographic profiles.

Learn more about how CDPs make data-driven marketing smarter and more effective: Visit the CDP Academy.