In light of (1) composable and AI technology trends, (2) customer expectations for CX convenience and speed, and (3) privacy and compliance requirements, data strategy has become a primary inflection point for creating differentiated CX value with efficiency and without risk. Customer-facing and technical teams should collaborate on a common data and technology core using a Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW) to best compete and differentiate in the market with data.

This blog covers part of the topics discussed in Tealium’s Era of Data Differentiation white paper. In this blog post, we’ll focus on the powerful Real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP) + Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW) combo. To read more about the CDP + CDW combination, you can also read Snowflake’s Modern Marketing Data Stack report (featuring Tealium!)here (or check out Tealium in the Snowflake Solution Center).

In that report, Snowflake delves into market trends demanding a rethink of your data foundation including Generative AI, Privacy, and Data Gravity, along with how complementing your cloud data warehouse with other technology creates a more powerful and agile modern data stack. Or read about how Tealium enables a composable tech architecture in this blog post.

Multiple Demands on Customer Data Foundation

To architect a suitable data stack solution for CX, it’s important to first recognize the multi-dimensional nature of the use cases for your customer data foundation. For the purposes of customer engagement, we can narrow in on four major applications of customer data: Identity and Personalization, Privacy and Compliance, Analytics and Insights, and AI. Across this diversity of demands, the CDP and CDW pairing offer many benefits.

Overview of “dual-zone” architecture of CDP + CDW

Each of these applications has unique requirements for your data and benefits from a “dual zone” data foundation for enterprise data, similar to how modern computers operate with RAM for speed and agility, and a Hard Drive for long-term, in-depth data storage.

• Identity and Personalization: Mapping data to an individual varies by channel, over time, and sometimes isn’t even required. This means instances where data needs to be assembled and delivered rapidly (maybe without identity resolution) and other instances where it’s more about storing historical insights. If all data must be stored prior to activation, this significantly limits in-the-moment customer experiences.
• Privacy and Compliance: Data that enters enterprise ecosystems comes with a cost. Not only the literal cost of managing the data (from processing it, to storing it, even to deleting it), but the risk costs associated with it. Again, this data must be recognized and managed immediately and long term to maximize value and limit risks.
• Analytics and Insights: Analytics similarly also has real-time and long term requirements for data. Many times analytics will require multiple phases of data cleansing, however these rounds cannot be accomplished at the speed of the customer, underscoring the spectrum of data capabilities required from a modern data foundation.
• AI: The value of AI also depends both on real-time (context) and historical data (customer understanding), with the common refrain “garbage in, garbage out” for data quality. Furthermore, compliance and cost considerations demand that this intelligent filtering of data happen immediately at the point of collection or else risk increases and AI processing costs can become prohibitively expensive.

Managing this range of use cases for customer data, across real-time and long-term applications, is prohibitively costly and time consuming on a technology-by-technology basis— even if data is centralized in a CDW at high enough quality to use efficiently (which is usually not the case).

This was well captured at Digital Velocity 2024 by Mark Loovis, Sr Director of Martech at DIRECTV, who stated, “We have several use cases where we were able to do something in minutes that in an old architecture took us days and took 5 FTEs [full-time employees] all day for a whole week to get done. That’s huge.” And according to a report by Economist Intelligence unit, “3-12 months is the average backlog for planned IT projects, and the situation is worsening as business project demand outstrips IT budget growth.” A central, accessible, and nimble system can help.

A real-time CDP and a data layer can pair with CDWs to better personalize CX, increase operational efficiency by leveraging data for campaigns, improve agility, and reduce compliance risk.

Take a Data Layer Approach with a Real-Time CDP

The diversity of use cases detailed above requires a data foundation that can achieve:

• Management of data from both anonymous and known visitors (and all the shades in between, not to mention transitioning between them)
• Evaluation and control of data at the point of collection— for identity, value, quality, insights, etc. It’s important this control is at the point of data capture because any data that enters the organization’s ecosystem incurs cost and risk to manage. Yet, it may have value to inform an ongoing interaction and you want to harvest this value without risk.
• Interoperability and agility between data venues and types at high speed; including data managed in the cloud (such as through APIs) and on devices (such as 1st and 3rd party cookies), and also event-level (like pageviews and clicks) and person-level data (such as identifiers and customer attributes)
• Long-term, unlimited storage and analysis power
• Automation to handle volumes beyond human capacity
• Enable collaboration across the organization for aligning business goals and technical requirements

This requires two systems with two different sets of capabilities and scopes, managed separately but in conjunction with each other— A deep and long-term storage solution with unlimited analysis horsepower, and a quick and nimble system that can evaluate and filter fast.

Being data driven though, starts at the data layer, irrespective of technology. To build a foundation meeting these requirements means taking a data layer approach that starts outside the technology, but ultimately flows into and between them. The data layer is a specification for the customer interaction tracking that flows from all your customer touchpoints including desktop and mobile website visits, mobile apps, connected devices, contact centers, and offline sources. It standardizes inbound data capture into common terminology and formats for your company that can be consented to, monitored, and audited. This approach produces massive downstream benefits.

The data layer must:

1. Be defined ahead of time— this is critical to enable real-time data processing and delivery, enable filtering of data for cost or compliance
2. Be defined in the business’ own terms, not a vendor schema
3. Be human and AI readable, not in abstract variables
4. Include consent context even if data is event or person-level
5. Come with enforcement and tools to transform and enrich at the point of evaluation

Taking a data layer approach and combining a real-time CDP with your CDW ultimately means you get an agile, secure, and performant engine for your CX that drives differentiation through your own view of the customer.

More Reading

Read more about the powerful CDW + CDP combination, and other insights into how you can use your data foundation as a differentiator, in Tealium’s new white paper, The Era of Data Differentiation.

Also, check out Snowflake’s Modern Marketing Data Stack report for a more holistic look at how other technologies complement the Snowflake Data Cloud.

See how Tealium and Snowflake work better together by checking out:

• Snowflake Partner Solution Center – Collect and Activate Customer Data Using Tealium’s Snowflake Streaming
• Tealium + Snowflake Better Together – Joint Value of Tealium and Snowflake

The post Era of Data Differentiation Fundamentals: CDP + CDW as the RAM and Hard Drive of Enterprise Data for Customer Engagement appeared first on Tealium.

Want all the nitty gritty details? Check out the Moments API documentation here for full details.

To create a magical CX moment, sometimes you just need that one extra little insight right when you need it…but for whatever reason something stands in your way….

• The data isn’t in the right system or database. 
• It takes too long to process and isn’t available at the right time.
• It’s not in the right format. 
• Someone won’t give permission.
• You’re dependent on some little technical requirement to happen first. 

Whatever it is— it’s frustrating. Because you have the data in your ecosystem. You know that data makes a difference to CX. But it’s not accessible at the right time, in the right way. There is nothing more frustrating than tech and data limiting your strategy. And for as much as technology keeps advancing, these pesky little limitations always seem to crop up when met with the unpredictability and speed of customer behavior.

That’s why we built Moments API. Combined with the power of the Tealium Customer Data Hub, Moments API is like having a data Swiss army knife out in the technological Wild West. It means having a bottomless well of water when you’re in the middle of the desert. A dictionary while you’re playing Scrabble.

What is Moments API? What else was released?

The Tealium Moments API powers your customer data stack by optimizing the retrieval of mission-critical data, insights, and next-best actions with blazing speeds for real-time tailored in-app experiences at the most critical moments in the customer journey. This can be done without requiring a live visitor to be in session.

We also released updates to more general API utilities that enable our customers to look up the full visitor profile or to perform a visitor deletion, where real-time speed isn’t as important as function. 

What we released:

• Moments API (docs)
• Visitor Profile API v3 (docs)
• Visitor Privacy API v3 (docs)

Our goal with Moments API is to provide real-time, programmatic access to data inside Tealium to power a wide variety of use cases, including first-page personalization and beyond. Moments API harnesses the real-time capabilities of the Tealium Customer Data Hub and makes that data even more readily available via API and faster than any other option on the market.

Just Having APIs Isn’t Good Enough

APIs are an increasingly important criteria when evaluating technology. There is nearly universal acceptance that APIs are a critical consideration at this point:

Over 50% consider APIs a top requirement, with over 95% considering them at least somewhat important. In the age of tens of thousands of martech solutions and numerous centers of data gravity across the organization needing integration, if they’re not already a critical factor for you now, they will be very soon (related: How Customer Data APIs Are Critical to Your Business). This is why we’re so excited about Moments API. It not only puts customer data at your fingertips, but does it in a way that’s performant, flexible, and complementary to our other APIs.

Even though most agree that APIs are a necessity, there is less agreement as to how well these centers of data gravity in your tech stack are doing at providing APIs:

Over 80% of businesses don’t think that the platform at the center of their stack (where APIs are most important) has “great coverage”. That’s a lot of room for growth. 

And it’s worth it too. Below is an example breakdown of the value that APIs can deliver to an organization.

According to Gartner® “APIs can be associated with all the other factors that lead to acquiring new customers and generating new revenue. These could include marketing strategy and execution, other application components, underlying systems of record, and the business processes involved (see figure)”**

**Source: How to Use KPIs to Measure the Business Value of APIs, 27 January 2023, Shameen Pillai, Gartner. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

It’s not only important that APIs are available, but that they do the things you need in the way that you need them done. With APIs it’s not only that they’re available, but that they do the right thing, and that they’re flexible enough to do what you need without unnecessary risk.

How Moments API Boosts Flexibility, Efficiency, and Performance

So what makes Moments API so great? With Moments API and the Customer Data Hub as part of your tech stack, data becomes much more liquid in your ecosystem, ensuring you can use customer data like you imagine it. 

Configurability: Moments API Composer

Moments API comes with an API composer enabling you ultimate flexibility to choose the data that the API returns. Any attribute, badge or audience in the Customer Data Hub is now available to be programmatically accessed and used to power a real-time customer interaction.

On-demand, Real-time Performance

By composing your own bespoke APIs, you narrow in on just the data you need to power the case case you’ve defined. This narrowing is a boon for performance. Moments API has been benchmarked at response times of 40 – 60 milliseconds for payloads under 1kb. This means you can add extra insight to any customer experience interaction without the drawback of slowing things down. This means you can engage customers in the exact instant that is most important on the customer journey— while they are actively engaging with your brand, without any preconditions. No prior event required, no active session required, can be used on web and beyond, just available on demand. 

Composability: Ten “Engines” by Default

An “Engine” is an instance of the API configured to return exactly the data you want (such as whether they’re a VIP, the last product they viewed, etc). By default, Moments API customers get 10 Engines that can be configured exactly to specification for their use case requirements. Want to use an Engine to control access to data geographically? Sure. Want to use 1 Engine to power 2 different use cases? Up to you. Want to limit the Engine to just one tiny data point for maximum speed, security, and control? The flexibility is there for you.

Collect It If You Need It

The full beauty of Moments API is only realized when you consider it within the context of the whole Tealium Customer Data Hub and your tech stack. Tealium not only gives you Moments API for real-time access, but this API is attached to an industry-leading data collection platform. That means that not only is this rich customer view more accessible than ever before, but if the data isn’t already there you have the tools to collect it. That means your data destiny is entirely in your hands. With Tealium complementing your data warehouse and other centers of data gravity in your tech stack, you simply won’t run into ceilings using your organization’s data in the way that you see fit.

Want all the nitty gritty details? Check out the API documentation here for full details

Moments API Use Cases

What can you do with all this data at your fingertips? A lot. And finally in ways that are only inhibited by your imagination.

First page personalization and beyond

Imagine if you could quickly identify your most important customers when they first show up on your website or app? Do you think you could improve their customer journey a little bit? Could you shorten their time to conversion? Moments API gives you the power to do exactly that. Combine current context with historical insights to deliver an experience that not only makes them more satisfied and loyal, but also increases their lifetime value. Cross-sell VIPs on the next best offer, right from the first page view. Give customers who are paying their bill another path to conversion leveraging all your insights when they first show up. Make sure every offer is relevant, right from the first interaction of an engagement.

Augment AI (and other applications) with in-the moment customer context

With all of the recent news on AI, you’d think there’s no limit to its application to CX. In a lot of ways, that’s right. However, in one key way it’s not. It’s often the case that AI does not have access to in-moment context of a customer interaction or full access to the context of the whole customer relationship. This severely limits the value of the intelligence that AI can deliver. And this gap is exactly what Moments API and the Tealium Customer Data Hub addresses . Moments API can be used to deliver extra intelligence and context in-the-moment to improve the output of LLMs, AI agents, and other AI applications.

Customer Service

When resolving a customer issue, the current context almost always holds the keys to the solution. With real-time data at your fingertips, contextual insights into what a customer has most recently been doing or having issues with is often the key to minimizing time to resolution. With Moments API giving insights into actions, attributes, up-to-the-moment badges, and audience membership, customer service can be as painless as possible.

Use Your Imagination

The configurability of Moments API combined with the real-time data collection power of the Customer Data Hub is like a true wild card. It’s almost impossible for us to envision all the creative ways that pulling a real-time insight on demand will drive customer experiences to new levels for our customers. So go ahead and use your imagination for what this might make possible for your organization’s tech stack, and we’d love to help make it a reality.

How to Get Started with Moments API

Moments API is now generally available. Moments API requires Tealium AudienceStream as that is the product used to create the customer profiles accessed by Moments API. If already using AudienceStream, that gives you the quickest path to seeing how Moments API can benefit your organization.

For current customers, we encourage a trial of Moments API. This trial is a limited time test of the functionality of Moments API, so you will want to have your use case defined, including the data that will be accessed during the trial and how that data will be used. You will want to have the data available (collected), and developer resources to build the functionality to access and use the data.

Did you know we’re offering trials for Tealium customers? Talk to your Customer Success Manager to get started.

If you aren’t already a Tealium customer, you can contact us here to talk about how Moments API and the Tealium Customer Data Hub may be valuable for your business.

momentsapi

The post Product Spotlight: MomentsAPI for personalization, AI, customer service, and more appeared first on Tealium.

We explore the key trends in the Customer Data Platform (CDP) landscape. Plus, we cover The 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms.

There’s been a lot of coverage about the CDP landscape this year. Can you talk about what reports have come out and why this year has seen such an increase in coverage of the category?

Specifically, I’ve worked at Tealium for about seven years now and headed up our analyst relations program. It’s been interesting to see all the coverage of the CD P landscape this year. So, IDC has a bunch of market scapes where they cover different types of CDPs and different verticals. Forrester has a B2C CDP wave on their calendar for this year for the first time… And they’ve been doing the B2B CDP wave for a few years now. And of course, this year, the big news was Gartner® finally joined with a 2024 Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms.

The Magic Quadrant is exciting for me personally. When you think about, being a product marketer and kind of building a category is kind of the coolest thing you could do and you always dream about having a magic quadrant kind of covering the categories. It helps people who are looking at CDPs pick the right one.

You mentioned that Tealium was named a Leader in The 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms! What is that and what does that mean? Why do you think Tealium was named a Leader?

I recommend reading the report (available on our website for a complimentary download).

My opinion on why we were positioned well to be named a Leader in 2024 Magic Quadrant harkens back to what our vision is and our philosophy for how we manage customer data.

1) Neutrality and Flexibility: We think about ourselves as the Switzerland of data, we work with everybody. We think the ecosystem needs a neutral player who’s not part of a larger collection of tools because that means we can focus on just managing the data for maximum flexibility. At a certain point in time, we called our product suite “The Universal Data Hub”… So you can see our ambition for having mastery across a large number of different types of data.

2) Expertise in Highly Regulated Industries: Whenever you’re working in a regulated industry, there’s a higher standard for control over the data. We bring that expertise to bear for those industries. Our customers gain the advantage of our expertise around having control so that you can do differentiated things using your unique data because that’s going to separate you from the competition.

3) Enterprise Readiness: We put a lot of effort into making our system extremely scalable and reliable. Our Customer Success team is a valuable resource for our customers to get down in the foxhole and solve these customer data challenges which are always unique to every data landscape out there.

Additionally, we have a large partner network that has technology partners, services partners, and systems integrators to surround Tealium’s technology. We’re giving our customers a whole solution, which I think is something that played into our ratings.

CDPs are a hot topic in today’s data landscape as they address several important market forces (AI, data collection/activation, data privacy, and more). What’s happening with CDPs? Are they being touted as a holistic solution to a lot of these topics?

Well, they certainly can’t solve every problem, but it can be part of solving a lot of problems! It’s been an interesting ride since the early days. I’ve been around for most of the ride since the CDP was named as a category around 2013.

For a long time there, there were a lot of doubters. The CDP category was called a passing fad by a major organization. But Tealium’s vision for what we’ve been delivering hasn’t really changed at all. 

If you go back in time, one of the first things our CEO Jeff Lunsford told me was about the five mandates for digital transformation. Those five mandates were:

• Putting The Customer At The Center not only operationally like you hear about from Amazon, putting an empty chair for the customer at board meetings, but also technologically. Your view of the customer should be baked into the center of all of your operations.
• Real-Time Data As A Requirement is one that we’re seeing that amp up these days.
• Data Privacy is important too. When it comes to the above, it means doing it all in a privacy-centric way, and you’re seeing that become more important. Remember, this mandate was before GDPR came out back in 2018. That supercharged global regulations starting in Europe.
• AI and ML Ready means that you manage your data in a way that you’re going to be able to take advantage of… For example, automating the insights from that data, which I think we can all agree is becoming a very important thing in the market today.
• Eliminating Data Silos is part of the idea that data should flow freely through the enterprise. In the early days, a lot of people viewed CDPs as a marketing system. We were a little different! We had the universal vision which we’re seeing play out with more data sources like call centers.

Download your complimentary copy of The 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms.

Gartner®, Magic Quadrant for Customer Data, Lizzy Foo Kune, Rachel Smith, Benjamin Bloom, Suzanne White, Adriel Tel, David Walters, February 14, 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE and MAGIC QUADRANT are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

The post Going Beyond The 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms: Hot News for The CDP Landscape appeared first on Tealium.

This is part 1 of a 2-part blog series exploring the business value of CDP APIs, and Tealium’s approach to APIs in light of our recently released Moments API. 

As APIs are the way for two or more computer programs or components to communicate with each other, there’s no question that developers recognize their value. Study after study has shown the importance with which the vast majority of developers treat the usage of APIs. It’s time for the whole business to get on board.

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and customer data more generally (including the associated API capabilities) are excellent candidates as a vehicle for this collaboration and organizational alignment. The Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms released just this year underscored the importance of business teams taking an active role in something that traditionally has been the province of technical teams stating, “Regardless which department is the driving force for the investment, marketing needs to lead a coalition and ensure that its needs are met in the process.”

In many ways, CDPs are API integration machines. Essentially, all the connectors in Tealium’s integration marketplace are productized, turnkey API integrations that are easily accessible through a simple UI. So CDPs, at a very basic level, help companies take advantage of APIs, but CDPs also make APIs available to drive even more value—operational value and customer value. Maximizing this value takes planning.

For the business side of the house, the value of APIs can be more complex to quantify and oftentimes can get lost in the planning process, or potentially not valued highly enough in buying decisions. With data increasingly becoming the connective tissue of the enterprise (for both non-technical and technical roles), it’s critical to close this gap to build the most efficient and effective technology solution for customer engagement with the data strategy to match. API capabilities are too important to ignore when building the tech stack to power your customer experience strategy.

Example: The New Tealium Moments API

Take Tealium’s new Moments API, recently released for early access. The capabilities of this API drastically improve an organization’s ability to deliver data-driven experiences by making customer data (the type of data that Tealium manages) more flexible, accessible, and safe/controlled. Moments API is a composable solution that enables companies to configure on-demand API access to the data within Tealium. With Tealium’s unparalleled breadth and depth of data collection capabilities across the CX landscape, this is a serious value proposition.

This means that any system that can interface with an API (whether built or bought) can tap into the extensive real-time data in Tealium for additional context and insights to deliver a more personalized experience for the customer. It doesn’t stop with personalization, though. On-demand access to real-time data about a person can serve many purposes beyond personalization— including customer service, sales team enablement, privacy compliance, and more. 

This type of technical capability deserves to be considered in cross-functional business planning.

With real-time, on-demand access to customer intelligence, organizations gain the following benefit:

• Drive revenue with first-page personalization and beyond— Widen every step of the funnel right from step 1 with on-demand, real-time access to customer data for personalization. Identify high-value visitors, product ownership, audience membership, loyalty status, and more, to deliver personalized messages, imagery, offers, etc.
• Improve loyalty with enhanced customer service and support— On-demand, continuous insights into the current, ongoing context of customer engagement to help service and support agents deliver value more quickly and effectively.
• Reduce risk by checking consent— Build safeguards into data flows and activations to better comply with customer preferences and regulations.
• Drive operational efficiency with integration via API— Reduce manual steps and lower the technical bar required to integrate the systems required to deliver customer experiences.

At a high level, it’s clear how APIs can benefit the business: Historically, systems and data have been siloed, limiting their value and causing operational headaches that hinder innovation. Now, with APIs, data and functionality are modular, reusable, and scalable for new use cases. The result is a richer customer experience with more agility and efficiency for the business, ultimately scaling the value that brands can create with customers in the moments that matter most during the customer journey.

Top Three Ways Business Leaders Should Strategize Around APIs

Build Richer, More Data-driven Customer Experiences

The availability of sophisticated APIs increases data liquidity. This liquidity directly supports the use of data from more sources to power more customer experiences across more venues. By leveraging a central, data-rich CDP with robust and performant APIs, organizations can more easily unlock data previously siloed away in a particular technology or team. 

A CDP is an excellent system for collaboration between business and technical teams for strategizing the data foundation powering customer experience. Where a Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW) is typically tightly guarded and most accessible to technical teams, the CDP is ideally placed within the tech stack (well-integrated with customer-facing technologies and systems of record) to provide a critical staging ground for both the business and IT teams.

Improve Operational Efficiency, Time to Value, and Resilience

APIs also provide a very flexible option for integration projects to speed operations, launch campaigns faster, and provide an easier approach to troubleshooting and QA. Instead of building applications with monolithic code bases, ad hoc integration, and laborious efforts to build from scratch, APIs can provide modular building blocks that simplify the process. This is where it becomes critical to evaluate each API capability on its own for how it can impact your strategy.

APIs can be operational in nature, changing the way your organization works by making it more programmatic and less manual. Or they can provide net new functionalities that your development team can call programmatically instead of building from scratch. In this way, some APIs will change your workflows and internal processes, while others will give you new tools that you can use to improve customer experience

Better Govern and Democratize Access to Customer Data

APIs are also especially useful for controlling access to data, whether that control is needed due to geographic restrictions, regulatory concerns, internal business policies around data governance, or other reasons. Organizations often will need to make only a subset of data available to a certain business unit, role, technology, and APIs are an effective mechanism for controlling that access.

In the context of Tealium’s Moments API above, it can be configured to make any data point in the customer profile stored in Tealium available. As such, organizations can set up API endpoints unique to various geographic regions, teams/departments within the company, applications powering internal or external systems, etc. The modular and programmatic nature of APIs is highly valuable to modern enterprises requiring this level of control.

Taking an Intentional Approach to API Adoption

We’ve discussed the value that APIs can deliver and the importance of including API adoption in your business planning, but haven’t touched too much on all the various functionalities that APIs can provide. Tealium Moments API described above is just one example (albeit a particularly flexible example, useful across a broad range of use cases). 

Here’s a sampling of Tealium’s other APIs and how they each can deliver value to your business, and as such deserve some attention in your planning:

• Hosted Data Layer API— Supplement the on-page data layer with additional context to add intelligence and deliver more relevant experiences.
• Visitor Privacy API— Satisfy regulatory requirements such as GDPR and CPRA with programmatic access to customer data to retrieve known data about a specific visitor, delete a visitor record, and check the status of a delete request.
• Data Layer Enrichment API— Retrieve an active visitor profile for personalization and to deliver insights to other systems via the data layer.

Tealium is committed to continuously releasing APIs in virtually every aspect and function of our ecosystem. As discussed above, these APIs will provide a range of value from improving workflows and increasing efficiency to providing net new capabilities to your tech stack enabling you to build ever richer and more relevant experiences for your customers.

If you’d like to learn more about how Tealium APIs can benefit your business, please contact us today, or if you’re a current customer reach out to your Customer Success Manager. 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms, Lizzy Foo Kune, Rachel Smith, Benjamin Bloom, Suzanne White, Adriel Tel, David Walters, February 14, 2024. 

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE and MAGIC QUADRANT are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner’s research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, concerning this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

The post How Customer Data APIs are Critical to Your Business appeared first on Tealium.

This is part 2 of a 2-part series about the Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms and takes a deep dive into the report. Part 1 of the Magic Quadrant series took a look at the history of the CDP category leading up to the release of this report.

According to Gartner, “A Gartner Magic Quadrant is a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors.”

And we believe Gartner has some experience to back its analysis. Gartner is a $5.5 billion company, a member of the S&P 500, works with businesses in nearly 90 countries, has over 19,500 associates in 85 offices globally, and has over 40 years of providing insights and expert guidance to clients’ enterprises worldwide. A Gartner Magic Quadrant is a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors.

That’s why we’re so proud of our recognition as a Leader in the first-ever Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms.

Tealium Named 1 of 4 Leaders Out of 17 Top Vendors Included

The CDP market is a particularly diverse one, making expert analysis an especially potent tool for buyers to choose the solution most likely to match their requirements. To illustrate, consider the fact that the CDP Institute lists well over 200 companies on its “Find CDP vendors” page. The Magic Quadrant evaluates 17 of these vendors that meet the inclusion requirements.

By now, buyers have the benefit of an increasingly rich set of analyst reports on the CDP category.  Last year, we covered new reports on the CDP space from Everest Group and Quadrant Knowledge Solutions, among others. Each report offers some unique insights and a unique perspective to view the market, serving to help round out your perspectives.

Alongside Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms (available here), we also have made available reports on the CDP category from IDC here, Everest Group here, and Research in Action here.

Why We Believe Tealium Was Recognized as a Leader

We believe our recognition as a Leader largely boils down to how well our product’s capabilities comprehensively address the challenges that our customers face in the market. Furthermore, it’s our belief that our product strategy positions us well to maintain market leadership and give buyers confidence that Tealium can be the right solution.

After going through the evaluation process, these are the primary reasons we attribute our recognition as a Leader:

The Total Product for Enterprise Best-of-Breed

Adopting a best-of-breed tech strategy comes with great power and great responsibility, especially within enterprise businesses that are complex and geographically distributed. The flexibility to choose the most powerful individual solutions for any use case enables the greatest potential to construct the most powerful tech stack, but it also requires resources and knowledge around the technology to unlock that power.

Tealium’s enterprise-grade customer success organization and partner ecosystem are the secret weapons in unlocking that power. With Tealium’s CS organization, customers get affordable access to some of the most knowledgeable and experienced customer data professionals on the planet. With our robust partner ecosystem comprised of system integrators, consultancies, and agencies, we have a rich support network essentially guaranteeing the best chance of success.

Demonstrated Capability in The Most Demanding Data Environments

Furthermore, Tealium’s ideal customer profile means we work on projects that have the most stringent requirements, whether those requirements are required by law or more simply from customer expectations. Our experience in regulated industries for global enterprises means that we know how to solve virtually any challenge inside complex organizational scenarios. This experience even benefits our customers in Retail or Travel where regulatory requirements might be low, but the bar for customer trust is high.

Comprehensive Vision Matched by Comprehensive Solution

Lastly, Tealium aims to be the industry standard open platform that lets organizations create, collect, enrich, and utilize real-time, consented data to optimize customer relationships and “own the moment” across every touchpoint. This is not a small vision and ultimately requires the product capabilities to match.

We know that to solve for the customer data management challenge, you must have the following in place with your technology solution:

1. Work for a variety of skillsets— any data silos, whether based on skillset or department or use case, will come back to hurt the customer. This means a platform that serves the business and more technical users, often requiring capabilities that may achieve the same end result but for use by a particular role.
2. Work across the customer experience— the customer engages across the business (not just marketing or support), so your view of the customer has to move across departments. Departmental technology often works distinctly (for example, customer support tools function differently than marketing tools), so this means separating the view of the customer from the execution. The breadth of Tealium’s 1300+ integration marketplace, across every tech category from Adtech to Martech and beyond, is a direct manifestation of this requirement.
3. Work across the enterprise— Enterprises are data-rich environments, but the entire customer dataset (not to mention the enterprise data that accompanies it) is way too big to bring to every team and system. This means capabilities that are selective and performant, ultimately giving the depth of enterprise data likely stored in a CDW a performant complement.

With our product capabilities matching this vision of the market, we believe led to our recognition as a Leader.

Magic Quadrant Methodology: How CDPs Were Evaluated

We regularly assist analyst firms in their evaluations of our technology and can confirm that the rigor of the Gartner Magic Quadrant report research process matches the document’s well-earned reputation as a must-read for technology buyers. 

Their evaluation of the market is neutral, independent, thorough, and well-informed. We believe that it is a critical first step to understand how the technology provided by the top vendors in the market matches your requirements.

According to Gartner, “A Magic Quadrant provides a graphical competitive positioning of four types of technology providers, in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct: Leaders; Visionaries; Challengers; and Niche Players.” For more information, read more here

We believe that The Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms is an invaluable resource for technology buyers taking into account data that buyers would otherwise not have access to. Read The The Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms report to learn more.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Customer Data, Lizzy Foo Kune, Rachel Smith, Benjamin Bloom, Suzanne White, Adriel Tel, David Walters, February 14, 2024. 

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE and MAGIC QUADRANT are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

The post Taking a closer look: Tealium named a Leader in the first-ever Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms appeared first on Tealium.

This is part 1 of a 2-part blog series on the Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms. Part 1 (below) looks at the history of the category up until this point and Part 2 is a deep dive into the finding of the Magic Quadrant report itself.

A wise man once told me the CDP category needs no validation, the market has already done that. I couldn’t agree more.

Alas, it’s still good to be recognized! (And, as a vendor, who are we kidding? We’ll take all the attention thrown our way!)

The Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms is meaningful for us! Gartner is a $5.5 billion company, a member of the S&P 500, works with businesses in nearly 90 countries, has over 19,500 associates in 85 offices globally, and has over 40 years of providing insights and expert guidance to clients’ enterprises worldwide. A Gartner Magic Quadrant is a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. 

If you’re in the market for a CDP or own a CDP and want to better understand the landscape, it’s a must-read. If you’re not a Gartner client, never fear! To read the full report, grab a complimentary copy here

With such a milestone for the category, it’s useful to look back and see how we got here. Both as a way of understanding what makes the CDP category unique and valuable to the industry and to think about what’s next and where the CDP fits in for those riding the latest technological wave.

The Early Days

The CDP industry is lucky to have had early and passionate advocates like David Raab, Founder of the CDP Institute. Reaching this moment for the category is in no small part due to his efforts. Heck, he’s credited with coining the term “Customer Data Platform” in the first place back in April 2013, and he continues to tell the CDP story to those who are just joining the crowd today (highly recommended to check out the CDP Institute). 

Back then he said, “It has taken me a while to connect the dots, but I’m now pretty sure I see a new type of software emerging. These systems gather customer data from multiple sources, combine information related to the same individuals, perform predictive analytics on the resulting database, and use the results to guide marketing treatments across multiple channels.” There are a few things we’d quibble with from this early coverage, but this is remarkable foresight that has only proven more true over time. 

Not coincidentally, this was the same year Tealium released a product called AudienceStream, featuring many of the capabilities that became the hallmark of the CDP category. It’s crazy to think that was over a decade ago!

Just a few years later in 2016, the CDP Institute was founded and clear patterns emerged as to the types of CDPs that were coming to market. This is also when CDPs first appeared in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising, 2016. Tealium was recognized as a Sample Vendor in the report. Tealium has been working to orchestrate data between systems with a heavy focus on data quality ever since.

Entering the space, you had a variety of companies. You had data-centric vendors like Tealium working to be a neutral data layer for the enterprise. You had campaign management tools that ran campaigns and centralized data across multiple channels with a heavy focus on marketing channel execution. You had systems that were similar to mini data warehouses with analytics built on top and a heavy focus on data visualization. To this day, the heritage of the various systems as they entered the CDP market persists in the way they approach managing data for the benefit of customer experience.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows for the category back then. The category has been under assault from all sides for its entire existence. Whether it’s unrelated vendors trying to position around a hot term, or proponents of old technology taking potshots at the new kid on the block, or even some industry analysts questioning the value of “mere pipes” between technologies, the CDP category has had a baptism by fire and come out stronger on the other side.

The head of product for one vendor who did very well in the report (and who shall remain nameless) even said this about CDPs on June 18th, 2018, “I think it’s a passing fad.” Ouch. Think about that! 5 years into the category’s existence, and just over 5 years ago from where we sit today, this is what the SaaS vendor was saying. Fast forward to today and now a proud and leading participant in the market. 

But the promise of the category, and the expertise of the vendors within it, would not be denied. I think that speaks to the strategic value of the category’s promise: using customer data as the differentiator for your business.

It didn’t come without learning along the way. We, for example, called our platform, with our newly fangled CDP capabilities, the “Universal Data Hub”. Maybe a tad ambitious, but you get what we were going for. There’s an argument to be made that maybe we should go back to that at this point in our product’s evolution. Today, you commonly see commentary about CDPs “going beyond” marketing into customer service, sales, and other use cases. 

I mention it, because way back then you could very distinctly see the seeds of a vision planted. Seeds that have matured today and blossomed into a category that’s proven its worth.

Coming of Age

When the category started gaining traction, skepticism remained. Analysts had a common refrain that at some point the category would have to do more than just cart abandonment campaigns. And vendors would have to become more than “just pipes”.

Of course, I think it’s safe to say that any vendor whose vision stopped at cart abandonment campaigns and/or who merely viewed themselves as a collection of integrations did not last long. Then again, the “dumb pipes” category seems to be just now re-emerging on the market, albeit with a different name than CDP. 

If you want a funny juxtaposition of the product vision of the various vendors competing in the data space as the CDP category emerged, compare that article above about CDPs being a passing fad with this interview with Tealium’s CEO, Jeff Lunsford, 2 months after the one above.

In the interview, Jeff said, “We believe there are 5 mandates for successful digital transformation”: 

1. Put the customer at the center of your business. Technologically and operationally. 
2. Do this in real-time. If you ingest data in a manual, batch way it could take 24 hours to get the data in and you’re now trying to create a personalized experience based on what someone was interested in yesterday. That doesn’t work in the long term. 
3. Follow the privacy laws. With all this data comes great responsibility (i.e. GDPR in Europe and privacy regulations in California). 
4. Machine Learning (ML) ready. A human cannot process this data alone because of the sheer volume of data today. It needs to be programmatically managed and able to leverage sophisticated ML algorithms. 
5. Data should flow freely across the enterprise. It needs to be accessible and real-time for all teams that are accessing it (i.e. when a customer calls into a call center that department can see any actions that same customer just took on the website), while still following privacy laws.

I can personally confirm the vision that Jeff shared then in 2018 is remarkably similar to the founding principles of Tealium in 2011, and virtually a carbon copy of what we still use today. Ultimately, it’s staying true to this type of vision that led CDPs to the promised land despite all the noise and the perception of volatility. Customer-centric, real-time, build trust with privacy, be ready for AI/ML, and enterprise-wide are the tenants upon which Tealium believes this is just one small milestone for the customer data movement.

CDPs Make It to The Big Show

Is it a coincidence that we sit here on the precipice of an AI revolution and that’s when CDPs finally get a Magic Quadrant? Precisely at the time when the value of data is about to get its hockey stick moment? I think not. And that’s to say nothing of the value being scaled by going “beyond marketing” with your CDP that’s quite a popular trend today. 

It’s this scale of value that has brought us to this point today where I think it’s safe to say that CDPs have gone mainstream.

Do we need an MQ to tell us CDPs are important? Absolutely not.

According to our 2024 State of the CDP (which is a massive, market-wide, global survey of 1,200 professionals), the results speak for themselves:

• 90% of companies with CDPs are very satisfied with their investment
• Companies with a CDP showed high levels of satisfaction in meeting their business goals over the past 12 months (89%), significantly higher than those without a CDP (60%)
• 48% of CDP adopters reported observing ROI within six months, a significant majority (79%) achieved ROI within the first 12 months, and an even higher proportion (91%) reached this milestone within 18 months

However, even though they say we live in the “post-truth” era, we still think expert opinions matter. And we couldn’t be happier for the CDP category, and customer data management overall, to have Gartner covering the space with it’s preeminent Magic Quadrant report.

So as we sit here today proud to see such a prestigious inaugural report for the category, we look forward to further growth for CDPs expanding the scope of data under management, increasing the intelligence represented within this data, reducing the amount of time it takes to manage, all while better connecting the ecosystem for the benefit of customers.

If you’re interested in reading the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms, you can download your copy here.

As you ponder the CDP category, be sure to check out our latest product vision for 2024 so you can see what exciting capabilities are in store for the future.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Customer Data, Lizzy Foo Kune, Rachel Smith, Benjamin Bloom, Suzanne White, Adriel Tel, David Walters, February 14, 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE and MAGIC QUADRANT are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

The post Natural Born Leader: Tealium named a Leader in the first-ever Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms appeared first on Tealium.

Building differentiated customer experiences using customer data depends on trustworthy data quality, insight discovery, and reliable actioning. Simultaneously, all organizations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the value of their data and tech investments. These are all forms of insight into data management activities. 

We’re happy to highlight a recent addition to our industry-leading data management capabilities bringing these insights to the forefront, right within the Tealium Customer Data Hub.

Initially releasing as part of our DataAccess product, Tealium Insights delivers benefits supporting these mission critical goals by increasing visibility into data operations and the performance of customer data initiatives.

With Tealium Insights you get the following benefits:

• Enhanced Operational and Performance Insights – Get insights into what’s happening with your data and where your data is making a difference.
• No Additional Data Wrangling Required – Analytics available at the point of real-time customer data improves time-to-insight and insight agility.
• No-code/Low-code Dashboards and Reports – Built for business and technical users alike to create shareable, accessible insights.
• Templated and Customizable (authoring requires DataAccess) – Operational reports out of the box for default attributes (w/DA only right now) with capability to build custom visualizations. Free Insights dashboards coming soon.
• Shareable by PDF, CSV – Reporting can be easily exported to provide better visibility across teams, or used for further analysis.

As a system responsible for unifying and activating customer insights, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) occupy a uniquely effective location to deliver this value, in combination with dedicated systems of insight like business intelligence platforms and analytics tools. However, due to the sheer complexity and diversity of tech stacks, and the existence of these other dedicated systems of insight, planning how these insights are generated and acted upon requires intentional planning and a flexible solution to adapt to an evolving ecosystem.

Tealium’s newly upgraded DataAccess product with Insights delivers built-in business intelligence capabilities to the Customer Data Hub. Insights is a customizable dashboard and reporting tool enabling customers to build custom reports visualizing any data that they choose to store in the Tealium Customer Data Hub. 

This includes operational data like the volume and quality of data collected or the success/failure of triggering actions, alongside customer behavioral data such as traffic to CX channels or the population of various audience segments. 

This initial release brings out-of-the-box operational reporting on events, visits, and visitors, along with a no-code/low-code report builder (that will be familiar to any business intelligence professional) for custom insights into customer data management. Future releases will build on this capability with more report templates (specialized by use case, task, etc), vertical reporting, and customer journey insights.

Our goal with Insights is to more efficiently generate and communicate the insights necessary to optimize the value of customer data management for CX. The following will be included upon initial release:

• Out-of-the-box operational reports on events, visits, and visitors utilizing the default attributes that come with the Customer Data Hub
• Custom no-code/low-code report builder with automated drag-and-drop data visualizer to build reporting that’s unique the organization’s data
• Automated and on-demand report exports via CSV, PDF, to better communicate insights and value across multiple roles and teams

By bringing analytics to the data foundation powering customer experience, organizations maintain a more reliable data foundation, save time generating insights, and better optimize the value of customer data management initiatives. Analyses in dedicated analytics or business intelligence tools can also be focused more on high level insights and attribution by offloading data insights that are better handled within the CDP.

Check out the following resources to learn more:

• Take a look at the Insights webpage for an overview of features
• Already a Tealium customer? Check out the launch blog in the Tealium Community for details on activating
• Get the docs to see how it works
• Want to see it in action? Request a demo here

The post Feature Spotlight: Tealium Insights— Built-in Business Intelligence Tool for Dashboards and Reporting appeared first on Tealium.

Introducing our newly enhanced Audiences feature

Tealium’s enhanced Audiences feature streamlines the process of putting your customer data to work through audience segmentation and activation. With our new version of Audiences, you can build segmentation more strategically, in less time, and with better visibility over the whole process. 

Starting with today’s unified and optimized audience management workflow, and continuing with enhancements that bring more insights and quicken time to value by populating new audiences at creation, our Audiences improvements are game changing within the Tealium Customer Data Hub. Users now have more of an exploration and workbench experience to delve into their customer data.

Over the next few months, Audiences will be enhanced as follows:

• Today: Streamlined UX with reusable segments, new flexibility in rule building, and a more centralized view of activations (skip ahead to demo video)
• Q3: Built-in Audience Sizing to unify audience discovery and building
• Q4: Populate Audiences to quicken time to value with new audiences
• Next Year: Scheduled Audience Refresh & Activations to calculate and populate an audience on a recurring schedule

Enhanced flexibility and visibility for a more streamlined workflow

What’s Included?

Streamlined UX – Phase 1 Released Today

Enhanced workflow and increased flexibility for rule-building

The new audience workflow with expanded rule-building allows marketers to create audiences and segments with a simplified and flexible UI, stackable AND/OR rules, ability to exclude segments, and easy access to frequently used segments. Audience building is much easier for non-technical business/marketing users to quickly and easily create audiences with nested rules and exceptions.

Reusable Segments with enhanced duplication and saving

Copy/Paste might be the greatest invention of all time! Audiences now brings this functionality to marketers to ease audience duplication and reusing audience segments in campaigns and operations. This enhancement adds the ability to save and reuse audience segments (for inclusion or exclusion) without having to recreate them – saving time, effort and reducing manual errors.

Embedded insights for better context and collaboration within the audience building workflow

• Attribute insights – Simply hover to see more details and insights about each attribute you might want to include in an audience (usually created by Marketing Ops or Data Engineering). This streamlines the process (no hopping to other screens), helps avoid errors, and reduces dependency on technical teams for building audiences.
• Segment insights – With the new Reusable Segments feature, one key aspect is the ability to see the makeup of the segment so you’re sure who is and is not included in the segment— while making sure you are choosing the right segment while building an audience. The redesign will make this information available on hover right in the audience builder.
• Consolidated view for audience insights – Each audience has several steps that are required to organize, validate, measure, and activate. The new consolidated view will make all relevant insights and information about your audiences available in a one-click tabbed interface. This means easy and central access to – 
  • Configuration – details about the segments and rules making up the audience 
  • Insights – visualization about the activity and details on visitors joining and leaving the audience 
  • Activations – access to list already defined with a quick way to build new activations
  • Functions – showing any actions or transformations that are implemented against that audience

User-level Favorites

User-driven favorites to provide personal labels, organization and quick access to frequently used audiences— saving time in everyday tasks for power users, and making it much easier to collaborate. 

Demo Video

Audience Sizing – Phase 2 Early Access Coming in Q3

Built-in sizing and audience details to streamline audience discovery and validation. With information about the targetable size of the audience at every user’s fingertips, and in real-time, audience building becomes an exploratory, yet efficient, process. Now users can play around with different rules and segment combinations until the targetable size meets campaign strategy criteria.

Audience Population – Phase 3 Early Access Coming in Q4

In real-time activation systems like AudienceStream, audience membership builds up based on customer behavior meeting conditions over time. This commonly means value builds until the audience reaches critical mass as prospects and customers qualify for the new rules. This feature adds the ability to create a new audience and immediately populate it with existing visitors that meet the criteria from the dataset, meaning quicker time to value and quicker decision-making when testing new audiences.

Scheduled Audience Refresh & Activations (formerly known as Scheduled Jobs) – Final Phase Coming in 2024

Integrating this feature will enable marketers to effortlessly schedule an automated refresh and activation of audience segments on demand, without requiring a customer engagement or event. This makes it easier to run recurring campaigns like Birthdays or Anniversaries, where the trigger for the campaign isn’t based on a customer engagement. 

This capability provides marketers with precise control over when their audience data is updated and made ready for campaign targeting. By automating this process, marketers can ensure that their campaigns always target the most current and relevant audience profiles, enhancing the overall effectiveness of their marketing efforts while saving valuable time and resources.

What Can You Do with the New Audiences Enhancements?

Integrated Audiences represents a whole new user experience in Tealium AudienceStream CDP, deepening the experience of managing cross-channel audiences. Here are the top use cases and values, now and in future phases:

NOW

1. Build new audience segments – A one-stop-shop for audience management, giving you a central cockpit to save time setting up cross-channel campaigns.
2. Optimize audiences – A workbench with insights at your fingertips to make fine adjustments to improve campaign performance without hopping around the interface.
3. Implement new audience logic – Inspect current setups, collaborate with other users, and combine different segments to see what combo is the best.
4. Better collaborate and coordinate audience building – Save your own favorites to make sure you see the audiences most important to you.
5. Get improved visibility for governing audiences – Better visibility means fewer mistakes and less potential downtime.
6. Reduce IT bottlenecks – A business-friendly interface to help avoid dreaded backlogs.

FUTURE PHASES:

1. Explore new audiences in the same place – Better visibility and easier exploration of possible audience makeup will lead to more effective audiences. 
2. Launch populated audiences for quicker time-to-value and testing – Retroactively add audience members based on brand new criteria without having to wait for the audience to build up, so that your audiences perform better, and faster.
3. Automate audience refreshes and activations – Schedule audience refreshes without requiring an engagement, like for birthdays or anniversaries. Automate campaigns to save time and complement real-time triggers to have a more powerful targeting strategy.

Conclusion

These improvements to Audiences give Tealium users a richer, more centralized, and easier-to-collaborate audience building experience. Future phases will bring even more power to the experience by surfacing insights in real-time during the audience building workflow, and enabling audiences to be populated— or scheduled for creation— to save time and achieve value more quickly with new campaigns. 

Looking to dive a bit deeper? 

• See all AudienceStream features like Audiences on the AudienceStream features page
• Or check out the AudienceStream overview to see more use cases and value
• Want to see the nitty gritty configuration details? Jump into Audiences documentation!
• Are you a Tealium customer already? Check out the announcement in the Tealium Learning Center
• Ready to see it in action? Request a demo here

The post Feature Spotlight: Audiences— a streamlined and more powerful audience management experience appeared first on Tealium.

In a market as novel, diverse, and dynamic as Customer Data Platforms, there’s real value in market commentary from trusted 3rd parties, like analyst firms and review sites. Comparing the commentary with the perspective of each firm gives buyers a three-dimensional view of the market, ultimately leading to better decisions and quicker time to value with new solutions.

In that vein, we’d like to highlight some recent reports helpful for buyers evaluating CDP solutions, some of which we can make available in their entirety. We’ll cover the following reports:

• Everest Group CDP PEAK Matrix Assessment (Complimentary copy)
• Quadrant Knowledge Solutions CDP SPARK Matrix
• Research in Action’s Vendor Selection Matrix: Customer Data Management (Complimentary copy)
• IDC Marketscape: Worldwide CDPs Focused on Data and Marketing Operations Users (Complimentary copy)
• Trust Radius “Top Rated” Award in 3 Categories (Customer Data, Tag Management, and Streaming Analytics) 
• OMR Leader Batch for “Customer Data Platform” Category

Everest Group CDP PEAK Matrix® report

Everest Group’s CDP PEAK Matrix evaluated a wide swath of the market (complimentary copy available here), noting “Government regulations regarding privacy, the impending demise of third-party cookies, and the increasing demand for personalized experiences have propelled the widespread adoption of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).” The report names Tealium one of six CDP Leaders and the only one with a strong focus on data collection and activation.  

“This achievement is attributed to Tealium’s exceptional technological prowess, extensive range of tools and solutions, and its strong roadmap for innovation. Additionally, Tealium’s strategic partnerships with technology and system integration firms, along with its global footprint across diverse industries, have further solidified its position in the market.” – Everest Group Practice Director, Nisha Krishan [within the Information Technology Services group]

Read the full report here.

Research in Action’s Vendor Selection Matrix: Customer Data Management

A unique analyst report relying on a market survey, as opposed to analyst opinion, for a significant portion of the analysis, named Tealium the #1 Global Leader for Customer Data Management technology. This Vendor Selection Matrix ranks the top 15 customer data management companies, with over 140 total companies across the world analyzed. Rankings were primarily determined through an in-depth global survey of more than 1,500 senior marketing and business leaders, complemented with expert analyst research.

“Tealium is one of the few vendors that provide messaging and functionality to all three customer CDM communities: marketers, data analysts, and developers. It spans the CDM world from gathering the ‘breadcrumbs of identity’ right through to real-time activation of marketing campaigns,” stated Peter O’Neill, Research Director at Research In Action, in the report.

The top criteria analyzed included the company’s market presence, growth rate, and customer traction, in which Tealium ranked the highest across the board. Each company was ranked based on product, company, and service quality; in addition to their approach to strategy and results-driven execution. 

Tealium received the highest score overall for ‘strategy’, specifically for its ‘vision’ and ‘go-to-market’ capabilities, and received a 98% within the ‘recommendation index’. Additionally, Tealium scored #1 in ‘customer satisfaction’ and ‘price vs. value ratio’ categories.

Read the full report here.

Quadrant Knowledge Solutions CDP SPARK Matrix

Quadrant Knowledge Solutions CDP SPARK Matrix was another major study covering many of the major players in the market, positioning Tealium as a leading solution. The report noted the rise of composable approaches in the CDP market saying, “The market is witnessing a growing adoption of the composable CDP approach, reflecting the industry’s focus on flexibility and customization.” 

Tealium occupies a unique position in the market as a packaged CDP enabling a composable approach that maintains flexibility, without the headaches of cobbling together numerous data technologies to achieve the CDP value proposition.

IDC Marketscape: Worldwide CDPs Focused on Data and Marketing Operations Users

This detailed report examines the capabilities and go-to-market strategies of a dozen CDP vendors who focus primarily on users in marketing technology and operations, data science and analytics, IT, data operations, and privacy and compliance. This was a novel way of organizing vendors, splitting the market between CDPs more focused on channel execution, versus CDPs more focused on the data itself.

Tealium was named one of five leaders, with ‘Leader’ being the highest classification of vendors in the assessment, followed by Major Players, Contenders and Participants. Including an examination of the ‘Build vs Buy’ decision, this report includes a rich set of considerations for those in the market for a CDP. The ratings highlight Tealium’s data management, customer support, and compliance capabilities.

Read the full report here.

TrustRadius “Top Rated” Award in 3 Categories (Customer Data,Tag Management, Streaming Analytics)

Tealium claimed the top spot in three paramount categories: Customer Data, Tag Management, and Streaming Analytics. These awards are given based on customer feedback regarding overall satisfaction and service.

“TrustRadius awards are based directly on customer feedback and help software buyers make better-purchasing decisions by highlighting products that provide high levels of customer satisfaction,” said Megan Headley, VP of Research at TrustRadius. “Tealium’s Customer Data Hub has won Top Rated Awards in Customer Data, Tag Management and Streaming Analytics.”

TrustRadius is one of the most widely-used technology decision-making platforms for software buyers. Tealium has an overall TrustRadius score of 9 out of 10, the highest in all three recognized categories.

Check out Tealium on TrustRadius.

OMR Reviews “Leader Batch” in the Category “Customer Data Platforms”

Tealium has been named Category Leader for Customer Data Platforms for the fifth time in general and the third time in a row in Q3 2023. These quarterly awards are given based on customer reviews and engagements with the tool. Once again Tealium was able to prove that customer satisfaction is at the heart of its strategy.

OMR Reviews is one of the most relevant technology decision-making platforms for software buyers in the DACH market. The OMR Reviews Leader Batch aims to help decision makers to navigate the buying process and select the best technology for their needs. Tealium has been rated with 4.5 out of 5 stars and is again leading the way for the Customer Data Platform category.

Check out Tealium on OMR Reviews.

The post Tealium Named Leading CDP in 2 New Analyst Reports— Rounding Up the Latest Awards appeared first on Tealium.

You simply hit fewer dead ends generating value with data when you’re using Tealium. 

The same can be said for the concept of a composable architecture for your tech stack. Gartner defines composable as follows: “Composable business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks.” And further adds, “Composable business is a natural acceleration of the digital business that you live every day. It allows us to deliver the resilience and agility that these interesting times demand,” said Daryl Plummer, Distinguished VP Analyst.

Recently the buzzword, “composable CDP”, has emerged as a promotional term for vendors offering one component of an overall CDP solution. The use of this term can be confusing and implies that packaged CDPs do not enable a composable architecture. This enables these vendors to compete in a hot market with a solution that delivers incomplete value, but comes with the promise of maximum flexibility. While some packaged CDPs may lack the flexibility to enable a composable approach, that is not the case for Tealium. And ultimately, having access to modular capabilities from one vendor, instead of many, comes with some serious benefits.

With any Composable architectural strategy, it’s important to understand the scope; how far should the modularity and interchangeability go? If Compute workloads run more efficiently on other platforms, then certainly a multi-vendor “Composable CDP” may benefit through the Profiling and Audience Building capabilities being a component of an external system, such as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) or Lake. The same can be said for Storage; if Storage volume is available on external platforms, doesn’t it make sense to store the CDP data on those platforms instead of paying for additional Storage through a CDP?  

Tealium’s Position on Composable Architectures for Customer Data Management is that the Component Modules Should Include:

1. Data Collection: Technology that automates and governs data collection should be independent of the CDP.  Tealium fulfills this composable aspect in that its Event Data Framework (Tealium iQ Tag Management + EventStream API Hub) is indeed interchangeable.  Tealium clients may choose any Tag Management, File Management, API Streaming solution that they like, including the capabilities that Tealium offers OOTB in the Customer Data Hub (CDH).
2. Profile/Audience Management and Activation: Some Composable CDPs advocate the CDP Compute to reside outside the CDP itself; in other words, the SQL querying that takes place to calculate profile changes and Audience criteria fulfillment happen on external systems.  While this may make sense economically, it draws into question as to how real-time identity resolution on the Devices/Source would take place (an EDW will not be able to connect to a device in real time). It also draws into question what the Composable CDPs role actually is, if it’s not Profiling or managing Audiences. This should be verified, because many proponents of a Composable CDP do not consider the real-time use cases as being mandatory, they view it more as a separate Identity Resolution process that can simply resolve outside of the EDW and update it later. 
   
   With respect to Activation, a case can be made that the no-code API Activation system benefits from being a modular piece to the puzzle. This would only be true if the modular choice for no-code APIs were less expensive and had more functionality. Neither one of these items resonates with respect to Tealium; in Tealium’s case, the no-code API is offered at no cost to our clients, and Tealium’s management of those APIs is fulfilled by an enterprise-class set of personnel organizations in Business Development, Engineering, Technical Education and Support. This makes the notion of composing an external vendor for Activation moot for many, if not most, enterprise clients.
3. Storage:  The Composable CDP premise to have Storage managed by an external vendor is appropriate. Tealium does allow other platforms to store the data that is first collected, then continually collected and enriched over time. Tealium offers this composable technique at no cost; the routing of both the Event Data and Audience Data can be directed to any EDW, Data Lake, or Lakehouse. Tealium will retain a copy of the most current Profile state and Audience state in its CDP database to ensure real-time capability, but this is not to be confused with the cost of the larger storage needs.
   

Tealium will offer a licenseable solution for the necessary “CDP Data Retention” in a separate pricing model than its “Historical Data Storage”. The Historical Data Storage can indeed be licensed from Tealium (this solution is called DataAccess and provides storage in S3 and Redshift, plus additional features such as Data Insights for analysis and reporting and Integrated Audience Building at no extra costs), or any of our clients can choose their own storage endpoint.

How does the Tealium Customer Data Hub compare to a “composable CDP”?

Tealium’s modularity is composable in nature. The capabilities in Tealium are modular, interchangeable, cloud-based, and increasingly accessible via API. This enables us to construct solutions that make sense for our customers’ unique data landscapes and internal skillsets, thereby ensuring both maximal utilization of the owned components of Tealium, but also maximal utilization of the systems integrated with Tealium. While Tealium’s solutions are, of course, designed to work best in concert, the goal is value. The modularity of Tealium enables our customers to take a composable approach to construct their tech stack in a way that makes sense in the context of their own diverse data ecosystems.

Let’s compare a “composable CDP” (as defined by vendors using this term) to a composable approach powered by Tealium.

The schematic below explains how the Packaged CDP solution by Tealium compares to the functionality from 6 different vendors comprising a “composable CDP”:

What a composable CDP vendor would show you (click to zoom in):

A breakdown:

VENDOR 1

Vendor 1 is the Compute and Storage functionality of the Customer Data itself, and for all intents and purposes represents what people think of when they think of a CDP.  It is important to note that the Compute and Storage of Customer Data is not the same thing as the Compute and Storage of the historical datasets (see Vendor 5).  Tealium’s fit as a Packaged CDP most closely aligns with the fact that Customer Data Storage and Compute is a real-time capability, and that real-time capability is “composed” as separate from Tealium’s historical data processing and storage technique. Tealium is a single CDP technology platform that manages only the most recent datasets that apply to the profile and Audiences for efficiency, in concert with the historical data from the data warehouse.

As a supporting anecdote: Most CDP vendors do not isolate the Compute and Real Time Storage of the CDP itself, because the value for doing so is negligible (i.e. the cost savings do not make sense in most cases).

VENDOR 2 and 3

Vendor 2 and 3 are completely modular within Tealium just like in a “composable CDP” scenario; for example, Tealium works with clients who choose alternate Tag Management, File Ingestion, and Streaming data collection technologies. However, there are significant advantages (ever heard of garbage in, garbage out?) to have collection natively integrated with activation….or in other words, always having “connect” with your “collect”.

VENDOR 4

In a composable solution, this is generally very technical tools only accessible to technical resources. However, business users have a stake in identity resolution and customer modeling, and silo’ing this away can ultimately lead to poor experiences and inefficient operations. 

VENDOR 5

This is the historical data storage of the CDP system and with Tealium, this is composable.  Tealium offers DataAccess as a means to perform BI use cases upon a Warehouse or Lake (S3 and Redshift are the platforms used with Tealium); alternatively, clients may choose any Warehouse/Lake/Lakehouse for this purpose and Tealium provides built in integrations for Data Sync and Webhook templates at no cost.

VENDOR 6

This is the data activation component of the CDP.  Tealium offers its own set of Data Activation APIs, no-code interfaces, and direct Event and Audience integrations out of the box at no cost, which should alleviate the perceived need to compose this piece.  Tealium is a leader in Activations, and the Reverse ETL approach is a technique that can be used if desired, in addition to using Tealium’s Activation marketplaces.  In many cases, Tealium’s integrations will be found to be superior to outsourced ones due to the fact that this is a discipline within Tealium managed by a dedicated group of engineers, Business Development, and Education personnel that independent vendors have great difficulty in matching output with.  

Although the Tealium Connector marketplace isn’t considered Composable because it can’t be used outside of Tealium’s platform, Tealium clients are free to use any integrations from any platform they want.  Data from Tealium’s CDP can be routed to any platform in real time for this purpose, or alternatively, the client may choose to have its chosen integrations platform simply source the data from the Warehouse that Tealium has designated as Storage.  Either choice comes at no cost, making the choice of using Tealium’s built in integrations a more compelling one due to the ease of use, and the downside of unnecessarily complicating a business application of this nature.

What does a composable approach with Tealium look like?

Hopefully it’s clear from the above that the answer really is, ‘it depends.’ Tealium’s modular, componentized architecture means that there are a variety of configurations based on the unique ecosystem where we are adding value. For the sake of simplicity, let’s look at 2 scenarios. One where we are only leveraging Tealium’s real-time event data infrastructure and one where the full suite of Tealium’s Customer Data Hub are included.

First, in an architecture where Tealium’s Event Data Framework is being leveraged for real-time data collection and distribution:

Tealium can function directly as a no-copy event data pipeline to unify event data collection and management

In an architecture leveraging the full Tealium Customer Data Hub for customer data management, we would advise taking an approach like the diagram below that ultimately provides the similar capabilities to the “composable CDP” above, but without sacrificing real-time data and a trusted partner to work with that can become a support nightmare:

Additionally, Tealium has the inherent flexibility to also perform customer profiling and experience orchestration with or without leveraging Tealium’s infrastructure products.

Ultimately, we believe the composable approach that Tealium enables offers a number of benefits over the “composable CDP” constructed of 5-6 or more vendors. These include:

• Full Pipeline Accessible to Business Teams – The component systems of a composable CDP are technical and complex, creating new silos.
• Power Real-time Use Cases – A composable CDP system cannot deliver true real-time use cases, thereby decreasing flexibility to accommodate customer expectations.
• Faster Time-to-Value – Instead of cobbling together 5 or 6 systems, work with a single vendor that can deliver end-to-end value.
• Increased Operational Efficiency – Governance across systems should not be under-estimated.
• Flexibility to Optimize, Grow Value – A “composable CDP” approach means swapping in and out new systems versus growing maturity over time in a single ecosystem.
• Less Risk for Consent, Identity, etc – It’s not worth it to take risks in a world of increasing regulatory requirements and high expectations for privacy. Tealium comes with purpose-built consent management capabilities.
• Trusted Partner for Strategy and Support – Setting a solid strategic course and troubleshooting issues across 5 or 6 vendors can be complicated and downright impossible at times.

Just like it’s always been in the diverse and fast-changing CDP landscape, picking the right vendor can be harder than it would seem. Make sure you consider the skillsets on your team and the use cases you ultimately hope to empower (not only now, but in the future) in the selection process.

Related Reading: How To Leverage Your Cloud Data Warehouse with A Real-Time CDP

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