Determining how to shift the company’s media spend was key. Given its portfolio of luxury and mid-range hotels, Wyndham needed to reallocate advertising dollars in light of softer demand for its products. And as demand begins to increase over time, Wyndham will use the CDP to identify new trends and consumers who are the most likely to begin traveling again.

For example, the brand noted that consumers were driving to nearby attractions at the end of the summer. Using information like location, destination and the distance they were traveling, the hotel chain was able to personalize its communications toward these consumers.

Another factor that has determined Wyndham’s success with the CDP: With a loyalty program of 85 million customers, it had a decent grasp of its data and personalization prior to implementation. Given its flexibility, Amperity was a good choice for Wyndham because it complemented the brand’s existing martech stack.

For a deep dive into Wyndham’s CDP strategy, read more in AdExchanger.

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Executives claim the platform’s differentiators are its data governance features and customer experience functions that extend beyond marketing objectives. Commenting on the latter in a virtual press conference, SAP President of Customer Experience Bob Stutz said the CDP can support additional scenarios beyond marketing, including commerce, service, support and supply-chain management. The idea is to connect front end functions with those in the back end, he said. The platform is also compatible with third-party technology providers, allowing for a more personalized buying experience for customers by enabling a seamless flow of data.

Moreover, as privacy regulations continue to heat up, marketers are required to comply with consumers’ data access preferences. SAP’s customer data platform will take into account local legal requirements as well as consumers’ data management requests. For more on SAP’s new CPD offering, read on in AdExchanger.

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Oracle’s CDP now supports real-time data collection and personalization through its digital streaming technology, according to reporting from AdExchanger. That means that real-time data can be used to build customer journeys without the use of A/B testing, which had been the only option previously. Machine learning provides marketers with predictions and insights without having to perform one-off activities.

As an example, marketers can use these new capabilities to provide the right discount to a customer or reduce the amount of touches required to make a purchase. Oracle means to set its platform apart from other marketing clouds’ products by weaving AI consistently across platforms, regardless of where those signals come from—even if they are outside of marketing departments and emanate from, say, Oracle’s logistics platform that manages supply chains. The idea is that owning customer intelligence requires collecting data from a variety of sources beyond marketing.

Meanwhile, Microsoft added enhancements to help marketers be more agile, understand customers better and increase the efficacy of engagements—all of which have become critical during the pandemic. The company announced in a blog post this week that its Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights platform will soon have new engagement insights capabilities to better understand customer intent and behavior through integrating data from clients’ websites, mobile apps and connected products.

Also new to Microsoft’s CDP is an integration with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics resulting in access to prebuilt AI templates that will help marketers predict churn, provide product recommendations and determine customer lifetime value. It also promises to be vendor agnostic in that it’s able to use data from third-party platforms and have additional data classification and permissions capabilities supporting privacy and security concerns.

For more on Oracle’s CDP announcement, read on in AdExchanger.

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Like other CDPs, Salesforce’s platform aggregates customer data from a variety of sources so that marketers can build segments and profiles for targeting purposes. Salesforce’s own data sources, including data from Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud, will flow into the platform automatically for the most part, according to executives.

When it comes to external data sources, the platform can pull in data from enterprise resource planning systems, POS systems and offline sources. Moreover, additional integrations from third-party developers are being built on top of the CDP, enabling integration with Salesforce’s app ecosystem.

The company’s move into the CDP space follows recent CDP launches from both Oracle and Adobe in 2019. The need for aggregating data from a variety of sources has drastically increased due to the pandemic, executives said, accelerating the pace of digital transformation. For more on Salesforce’s CDP, plus details on the company’s new business unit, Digital 360, read more in AdExchanger.

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Ancestry began in 1983 as a publishing company, offering physical books of genealogy records. In 1996, the company moved online with its first website, where people could order CD-ROMs of their family information. In 2012, the digitized version of Ancestry launched, followed by the DNA product in 2015. Today, the company has three million subscribers, and 15 million consumers in its DNA network. It’s files include 100 million family trees and 20 billion historical records.

Creating an organized approach to its data flow was a challenge. Data had been collected in numerous ways and stored in multiple platforms, including the website, transactions, the CRM systems, subscribers for family tree products and other channels.

Much of the technology fueling the legacy systems was antiquated, and the company wanted to create more value for customers. “We were lacking the ability to bring data back in to inform marketing decisions and improve the customer journey,” says Jonathan Roman, global lead of data and technology at Ancestry.

The multitude of data sets coming in from different sources slowed down the brands ability to do agile testing, he adds. “We had the data, but the challenge was activating it. Could we do it ourselves as marketers, or did we need to rely on other teams? Marketers want to move fast.”

Working with different teams in the organization, to educate them on what marketing needed to work efficiently was crucial, as was an assessment of the martech stack to see what was (and wasn’t) working, says Roman, who spoke at the recent MarTech East event in Boston.

A Lytics customer data platform, integrated with other solutions became a foundational piece of technology in helping Ancestry move at a more agile pace, he notes. “We were skeptical at first, but once we had the right data flowing into it, it made a big difference.”

Having a CDP in place enables the company to aggregate data sources and move data more efficiently into multiple sources, including its CMS, a CRM system for email and member service initiatives, and media platforms like Google, Facebook and Taboola.

“We can keep track of data across platforms and channels, and enable testing, to see how different channels work together,” says Roman.

Ancestry also established a standardized account structure, to improve tagging and taxonomy across its website. Governing councils were put in place to oversee products that were considered to be of great importance and/or highly involved, and automated quality assurance processes were put in place.

“Understand the data your vendors are collecting and why they are collecting that data,” notes Roman.

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