The investment in a DMP technology might turn out to be humanly and financially substantial for a brand. And contrary to common beliefs, data management platforms are not the only tools to grant advertising campaigns success. Working with an experienced programmatic media buying partner, Advertisers can obtain a lot from programmatic buying by capitalizing on their own data. What can you do without a DMP? Let’s adress 3 stereotypes.

Stereotype #1: without a DMP, you can’t identify clients and prospects in digital campaigns.

DMP is supposed to be the only tool allowing to use Brands proprietary data to segment and activate clusters through media. Although most of DMP use is aimed at leveraging loyalty programs, valuable non CRM data can also be very useful in acquisition campains to target new webusers.

As the customer journey already generates many useful data (client/prospect status, marketing cluster, seniority, age…), the only constraint is to define in advance which data will be needed by the trading desk for targeting and message customization. This approach will allow brands, in certain case, to reach almost 90% new visitors on traffic acquisition campaigns, and even to manage campaigns with a different acquisition cost for new and existing clients.

Stereotype #2: without a DMP, it is not possible to scenarize and personalize digital messages for clients and prospects.

DMP are in general used to track and activate identified clients and prospects of a brand. In particular, this allows to have a controlled message over time thought a particular user.

Targeting and scenarization possibilities are however the forgotten promises of programmatic. Complex mechanics can be set up to be sure to reach several times the same (and the right!) individual while control the advertising pressure and the message scenarization according to the internaut lifetime value.

Those mechanics are often used during “Brandformance” campaigns. The first contacts between a brand and a user happen with impactful formats like video or skins. After this “Branding” phase, messages are more performance-oriented and allow to optimize the conversion. This allows, notably, to multiplicate by 2 or 3 the conversion rate on the acquisition step.

Stereotype #3: without a DMP, it is not possible to be coherent and to manage the advertising pressure on all the devices.

The use of a DMP can add coherence to the communication and improve the user experience thanks to a deeper knowledge of the brand client database through different channels and devices. However, a DMP is not the only solution on the market that enable to identify a same user on different devices.

CRM onboarding solutions are growing on the market and allow to “digitalize” offline clients’ databases to identify brand’s clients in programmatic.

It is, for example, feasible to provide a cohesion between the commercial offers addressed to a client in an email loyalty program and in display.

Thanks to the development of the mobile part of the CRM onboarding solutions, it is possible today to control the coherence and the relevance of the messages diffused to the internaut during his browsing in different environments, his computer at work, his tablet at home, his mobile phone… These solutions are integrated to DMP, but can also be used directly by a trading desk, not only in an objective of message coherence, but also in the measure of the conversion between environments, in the control of the commercial pressure of the user and not only of the cookie only.

The options already offered by programmatic media campains, based on user available data without the need of a DMP, are various and rich enough to allow brands to clearly question whether they have to invest or not in a DMP. But, whatever their choice, it is important that marketers keep in mind that the success of a digital campaign do not depend only on a data management platform. Even without a DMP, consumer targeting can be very precise, the pressure can be controlled and the scenarization can be rich and efficient.