October 26, 2016
By Sam Del Rowe, contributing writer

Oracle Updates Its Marketing Cloud with Data Management Features

Today, Oracle updated its Marketing Cloud with a series of data management features designed to help marketers segment audiences based on device, channel, and media environment. The new additions aim to assist marketers in an increasingly crucial goal: providing relevant experiences to customers based on their context.

With consumers engaging companies on a range of channels and devices, the task of unifying consumer IDs has loomed ever larger. With this challenge in mind, Oracle has enhanced the Audience Builder interface of its Data Management Platform with a number of features: Users can improve the effectiveness of their engagements by breaking down audience composition by device and environment and customizing their strategies accordingly; and they can manage advertising dollars based on targeting environment, ensuring that prospecting and retargeting efforts are relevant.

These features are the latest in a series of enhancements Oracle has made to its Data Management Platform. Earlier this year, the company introduced self-serve tools for custom audience creation, as well as embedded offline onboarding functionality. Furthermore, enhanced personalization provided marketers with access to first-, second-, and third-party data, and enhanced partner integration enabled partners to self-integrate into the platform.

"The Oracle Data Management Platform (DMP) is the audience expert," said Karen Kokiko, senior product marketing manager, DMP for Oracle Marketing Cloud, in an email. She says that the platform includes solutions that can help marketers turn their own website and CRM data into an actionable segment, construct custom segments to meet exact targeting needs, and choose from thousands of prebuilt segments to add more scale and speed. "The Oracle DMP comes preloaded with the largest third-party data marketplace comprised of more than 50 branded data partners and nearly 200 total data partners. Marketers use third-party data to piece together detailed profiles about their users' tastes and behaviors," she goes on to say.

Kokiko also notes the importance of segmenting audiences in various ways. "Understanding the audience composition by device and environment increases the effectiveness of engagements. It enables marketers to personalize campaigns against the source ID for relevant retargeting and prospecting," she says via email.