A brief introduction to AAM
01 Jun 2015 » AAM
The concept of a DMP (Data Management Platform) is not new in the digital marketing arena. However, there are still many marketers who do not know of this type of platform and what it can do for them. I will explain what is a DMP and what is Adobe Audience Manager.
In today’s digital life, visitors give a lot of information about their traits. However, that information tends to be siloed. The two main sources of information, CRMs and web analytics, do not “talk” to each other. Your web analytics tool just gives information about on-line visitors and your CRMs only knows about static data. Ideally, we would like to have all that information combined in real time so that we could provide the visitor with the best experience.
Think about these scenarios:
- An airline wants to offer credit cards to frequent fliers between London and Paris.
- A retailer would like to retarget visitors to their website, who have just moved to a different website without purchasing.
- A media company is interested in selling ads on their own websites and wants to show mainly relevant ads.
- A car manufacturer has created a series of ads, which should be shown in sequence.
All these scenarios and many more can be fulfilled with a DMP. Without getting into much detail, a DMP uniquely identifies a visitor and tries to get as much information from that visitor, using different sources and marrying the data from each of the sources. One other key property of a DMP is that it should be completely anonymous; in other words, no Personal Identifiable Information (PII) should be managed by the DMP.
Demdex was one of the companies that offered a DMP. Adobe acquired Demdex a few years ago and included the DMP in the Adobe Marketing Cloud. This product is now known as Adobe Audience Manager (AAM). What are some of the differentiating features of AAM?
- It integrates nicely in the Adobe Marketing Cloud.
- It can be natively be delivered through DTM.
- It supports Adobe’s Visitor API. As a consequence, you can use the Master Marketing Profile (MMP) in AAM.
- It captures natively all Adobe Analytics variables (eVars, props, events…)
- It can be used in conjunction with Adobe Target to create personalised experiences.
I have been working with AAM now for a while and I can see a lot of potential in it.