profile ... and bringing those together via DMP
and ID Graph integration. We think of this [Ora-
cle’s suite of tools] as a customer intelligence
platform that spans ad tech and mar tech.
JANIA Brands are recognizing that they need
to put the customer at the center of every
interaction, which means that mar tech and
ad tech have to leverage the same customer
profile. A brand can’t meet today’s customers’
expectations without mar tech and ad tech
campaigns being aligned.
ADWEEK @Arun Kumar, @Suzanne O’Kelley,
from your insights, would either of you care
to elaborate with observations from your own
experiences?
O’KELLEY It’s hard to underestimate the
challenge at hand in actually pulling together
consumer insights across all the various en-
gagements and making sure the resulting view
is clean and complete.
It’s extremely complex to ensure that allthese different ways marketers are interacting
with their consumers are being captured and
synthesized in one source-of-truth system in
a hygienic and privacy-safe fashion. Because
that’s so much to try to cast a net around,
there is truth to the observation that many
mar tech and ad tech companies have chosen
smaller channels to try to get right end to end.
So you can give a marketer a pretty goodsense of their email marketing engagements
over here, and a pretty good sense of their
digital advertising engagements over there,
and maybe there’s even connective tissue (like
we offer with Xandr Invest) to enable cross-en-
gagement between an email marketing effort
and a digital advertising campaign.
But despite there being grand aspirations to-ward unity, in practice the ecosystem is still in
the early days of being able to pull all the other
touch points together and enable a marketer
to influence (and prove they’ve influenced) the
user holistically across the full journey.
KUMAR There are some truths in these
generalizations. However, the two do operate
with differences in speed as well. It’s not just
culture alone.
Mar tech has been associated historically
with greater regulation, while ad tech has been
more agile and a little less concerned around
privacy and other issues. There is a greater el-
ement of distrust in some parts of the ad tech
ecosystem which needs to be dealt with.
CAHILL Enter GDPR ...
KUMAR @Des Cahill, bingo.ADWEEK I’d be interested to hear your
thoughts on GDPR/CCPA, etc., and the effect
such regulations will have on the space. Do you
all believe that such regulations are playing
into the hands of the “big tech” platforms—i.e.,
walled gardens?
JANIA I think privacy regulations will propel
the convergence of ad tech and mar tech.
CAHILL Organizations want to provide better
experiences while also ensuring compliance
and brand safety and measurement. ... Easier
to do that with centralized customer data
governance.
KUMAR If we are not careful, then, yes, badly
drafted legislation can make it onerous for
smaller companies to comply. ... And while I
am on my soapbox, we have publicly stated
that we need one federal set of regulations
around privacy and data protection.
O’KELLEY Ideally, industry collaboration
resulting from privacy regulation could enable
greater interoperability between marketing
solutions, in order to meet market needs and
requirements, which would be a positive for
marketers.ADWEEK What do you all think are the down-
stream effects of the dominance of walled-
garden players in the space?
O’KELLEY From my perspective, walled
gardens may tend to dominate specific media
channels (search, social, video). But we haven’t
yet seen the rise of walled gardens that have
achieved the breadth of footprint across
channels that would enable them to be the
single source of truth for a marketer looking
to understand all their engagements with their
customers.
KUMAR You will have an ecosystem which
optimizes toward the interests of the walled
gardens as opposed to the interests of con-
sumers or businesses. It will lead to a situation
where only those with valuable and/or uniquedata assets will thrive and negotiate from a
position of strength with the gardens.
CAHILL Forcing better management of first-
party data, for sure. Otherwise, companies
have to pay a toll to walled gardens to connect
with their own customers—not sustainable.ADWEEK As my final question, what stage are
we at in the intersection/merger of ad tech and
mar tech, and what is the next necessary step,
in your opinion? And would you care to put a
timeline on any of this?
JANIA To use a sports analogy, I’d say we’re
probably in the first half of the game. The
convergence of ad tech and mar tech has been
going on for a little while now. In the past sev-
eral years, Salesforce has acquired Krux and
Datorama. We’re now in the stages of integra-
tion and execution.
CAHILL We’re in the early stages, but we
are consistently hearing this need from our
customers and partners. So this is very real.
This will be the most interesting vendor and
customer growth space for the next five years
in the enterprise market. We’re going to see the
emergence of the customer intelligence plat-
form (CIP—new acronym. Heard it here first!)
that brings together ad tech and mar tech
capabilities around a single customer profile.
KUMAR In the next year or two at best, we
should not be talking about ad or mar but just
about the application of technology. Making
this work best will ultimately require an open-
garden framework and transparent approach
to data, tech and partnerships to ensure mar-
keters can realize the biggest benefit of their
tech and media investments.24 SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 | ADWEEK
®‘It’s hard to
underestimate
the challenge
in pulling
together consumer
insights across
all the various
engagements.’
SUZANNE O’KELLEY, VP,
PRODUCT FOR BUYERS, XANDR
‘Suppression in
media is hugely
important.’
ARUN KUMAR, CTO/CDO, IPG
COVER FEATURE