Merkle Launches Rapid Audience Layer for Data Integration

Performance marketing firm Merkle has launched Rapid Audience Layer (RAL), a public cloud-based marketing data management solution for the integration of multiple data sources to deliver rich audience insights.

RAL offers a centralized way to store multiple data feeds, including CRM, digital, and third-party data. It leverages the latest cloud technologies and shared support teams and is powered by Merkle's Connected Recognition technology. It offers standard data hygiene and identity resolution, allowing marketers to recognize the same individual across several data sources.

RAL drives insights in the following four ways:

• Ingest-Automatically imports data into tables (digital, CRM, third-party, and ad hoc data) for immediate storage by prioritizing, validating, and staging it.
• Identify-Cleanses, matches, and stitches identities to each customer, creating a consolidated graph of customers, prospects, and households.
• Load-Extracts data from the staging area and transforms it into the destination's supported format.
• Analyze-Enables the querying of data and tackles analytic workloads to build insights and data visualization. Ir integrates with business intelligence and data science tools.

RAL includes expandable features. Additional tools and extensions include the Dentsu Aegis Network M1 integration, Merkle DataSource, BI reporting, and customer data platform (CDP) integration. RAL can be upgraded to a custom database solution with client-specific complex business rules and custom consumption processes

"Most marketers agree that data management is challenging and not an area they want to focus the majority of their time on," said Ankur Jain, senior vice president of strategy lead for cloud platforms at Merkle, in a statement. "RAL encapsulates Merkle's decades of subject matter expertise in data management, technology architecture, reporting, and audience insights into a tool that allows brands to start small and build upon the foundation of their data."

In RAL's first release, identity resolution functionality is limited to business-to-consumer (B-to-C) applications.