Rebecca Kaykas-Wolff, Product marketing for Oracle Marketing Cloud said, “Consumers are prepared to trade personal data for services. There is no such thing as 'free' – something has to pay for services – usually that is advertising,” she said.

Advertisers now use a mix of internet based marketing to deliver highly targeted messages based on what they know about you. Delivery may be via email, search engine marketing, social media, web advertising, content marketing, advertising feeds to mobile devices, and more.

They may also use paid adverting on TV, radio, newspapers, billboards, blogs, PR, and internet news sites.

“Data Strategy and Data Management Platforms are at the centre of an enterprise revolution that is not only placing customer experience at the centre of meeting transformational business goals, but also leveraging data at every touchpoint, via every device, for every customer. To do so, the management and organization of data is key. To that end, data management platforms (DMPs) are a unifying piece of technology for media sellers and media buyers,” Rebecca said.

“How do you know which 50% [of your marketing spend] is wasted,” said Will Griffith, VP Sales APAC.

So begins an interview with two lively Oracle ‘oracles’ about a thing called DMP and its key implications.

To be clear I understand digital marketing a little more than most having been in PR and marketing for decades and my first comments as a consumer were along the lines of ‘Walk softly and leave a small digital footprint.’ Yet I was fascinated at the process and lengths companies go to – ensuring that their spend is razor focused and reaches only those it feels it can benefit.

DMP has three main aims – to understand the audience, to create new business segments (feed the sales funnel) and to spend advertising funds wisely. Advertisers (clients and their agencies) use it to make media purchasing decisions and Publishers (sellers of unique targeted audiences) to recommend appropriate media channels.

Cross-channel campaigns – Omni-channel – are often the result of using DMP.

Rebecca spoke of data sources – the rest of this article is paraphrased.

The client supplies first party data. It can come from its CRM, Email, Social media, web and sales data. We #hash [remove] personally identifiable information. Oracle is a highly ethical company and observes rigorous government protocols.

Next source is second party data that can be similar data from similar organisations - we call it Brand 1 and Brand 2 etc. For example a bank may share with an airline.

Next source is third party data – it can be branded or unbranded. It may include information from Google or anything with an Advertising ID or similar.

Once all that data is in the ‘big-database’ it is tied together by tracking based on content, device, and identity as the ‘core’ of DMPs capability to deliver audience relevance.

Oracle bought BlueKai in 2014, and has integrated it with other acquisitions including Responsys for B2C marketing automation and Eloqua for B2B marketing automation. You can read more about the BlueKai tag system here.

We spoke about the changes over the past 5, 10 and 15 years.

Senior marketers are painfully aware of digital marketing – it is all about results and measuring them.

We spoke about once the data had been ‘activated’ – made sense of.

Oracle can do some things with it – it is fully integrated with our Responsys, Eloqua, and Social Relationship Management platforms to allow for immediate data activation supporting cross-channel marketing.

Marketers can use visualised analytics to analyse and predict success based on the data they have selected and audiences targeted. Marketers can see which audiences will drive, or drove, the most revenue. Those audiences can then be further optimized based on spend and budget to drive ultimate campaign success.

Who are your main competitors?

There are three cloud-based organisations that do some of what we do. Adobe uses DMP, and SalesForce uses more of a CRM based system. We think our acquisitions and our data sources give us the best product.

We think our systems give the best Cost per mille (CPM or cost per thousand – an advertising measurement).

I asked about Google and its analytics.

Google is great at Google Search – not the broad basket of omni-channel that DMP covers. You know we need to be channel agnostic to get the right results.

Will spoke about some of its DMP customers.

Almost every big name I mentioned – Coles, Jetstar, banks and more were Oracle Cloud customers.

DMP is now a mature ‘science’ and is well accepted by B-2-B and B-2-C marketers.

Rebecca finished by saying “Successful brands are executing hard.” Amen.