Lytics becomes first customer data platform to add campaign coordination

The customer data platform (CDP), which is gaining a foothold as the central repository of all customer data, is now evolving.

Last March, email automation provider Campaign Monitor bought the CDP Tagga, beginning the Vancouver-based company’s transformation into a CDP-centered marketing platform.

Earlier this week, CDP Amperity emerged from its stealth phase, offering a muscular platform where a deterministic identity resolution across devices is a key feature, in addition to customer data collection and segmentation.

And, this week, CDP Lytics announced Orchestrate, which it said is the first marketing campaign management tool from a customer data platform.

The Portland, Oregon-based company noted that CDPs typically serve as a “neutral data hub” of user profiles and audience segments that are delivered to external marketing and ad tools, where campaigns are conducted and managed.

With Orchestrate, Lytics is taking the next step by providing a dashboard that can coordinate campaign activities taking place in other tools.

For now, Lytics is offering integration only with email marketing tool SendGrid and Facebook Ads, plus it has its own Web content prioritization tool — appropriately called Lytics Personalization — that can work directly with sites.

The Personalization tool pushes an overlay of content, such as a Halloween Recipe campaign overlay in mid-October on top of what would otherwise be Vegan Recipe Recommendation content.

Within the near future, VP of Marketing Jeff Hardison told me, as many as 50 external tools will be integrated.

Orchestrate allows a marketer to track customer journeys from one phase to another, not as the time-based journeys that Salesforce and others enable, but as groups of campaign steps that relate to marketing goals within the journey.

For instance, the goal in one phase of the customer journey for one segment of users might be “converting anonymous users to buyers,” and one of the marketing tactics to accomplish that could be Facebook ads encouraging users to add items to their shopping carts. The dashboard shows when that tactic is in progress or has been completed.

Although Lytics campaign management only offers some basics, it points to ways in which CDPs can become the hub for a new kind of federated campaign dashboard, with all collected customer data at the center.

Hardison acknowledged this as a destination for his company, noting that point solutions or multipurpose platforms like Marketo first emphasize their own solutions even if they have APIs and other integrations with additional applications.

“CDPs are well positioned as this neutral Switzerland,” he said.

[Article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.