The Future of Customer Data Management: An Interview with Chris O’Hara, Global Product Marketing Lead, SAP Data and Analytics Stephen Shaw 2 weeks ago <span data-mce-type="bookmark" class="mce_SELRES_start amp-wp-32ab865" data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;"></span><span hidden data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-heig</p> <p><strong>ht: </STRONG> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span><span style=" class="amp-wp-2cf7910"> <p><strong>ht: </strong> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></p></span><span data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-heig</p> <p><strong>ht: </STRONG> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span></iframe></p> <h3><span style=" class="amp-wp-9530d27"><strong> Chris O’Hara leads the customer data solutions practice at SAP and is the co-author of Data Driven: Harnessing Data and AI to Reinvent Customer Engagement. </strong></span> <p>Back when mainframe computers ruled the world customer data at the individual level was kept under lock and key by the high priests of IT.</p> <p>Marketers were usually given only limited access – sometimes no access at all. Computing time was just too precious to waste on non-operational uses of the data. Busy IT staff gave low priority to ad hoc queries or list pull requests coming from marketing. It was the Age of Big Iron – siloed data stores, large and very pricey Relational Database Management Systems (think Oracle) – monolithic legacy applications and systems designed to keep the lights on (think SAP).</p> <p>IT resistance to marketer’s pleas for data began to lessen by the early 1980s as the cost of computing began to drop. Database marketing suddenly became fashionable. And then CRM systems stormed the market in the 1990s (think Siebel), generating new sources of customer sales and service data. By the early 2000s SalesForce had proven that CRM could be served up as a cloud-based software service instead of a costly on-premise system. CRM became more affordable for a broader range of businesses. Now all kinds of personally identifiable customer data was available to marketers.</p> <p>But it was the explosion of Big Data in the mid-2000s, spawned by the Internet, that began to throttle internal data management systems. Traditional data warehouses simply couldn’t cope with the incoming deluge of web-based data in its many diverse forms. So a new form of database came along to deal with the problem: data lakes (later evolving into hybrid “data lakehouses”) designed to serve as vast catch-all basins for raw data that could be directly queried by end users.</p> <p>Yet even with all of these technology innovations, the goal of a “Single View of Customer” – “One Version of the Truth” – the so-called “360 degree” view – remained elusive, more an aspiration than a reality. Marketing had its own view of the data – Customer Service and Sales had their view – Finance and Operations had their view. Separate islands of customer information. Piecing together a common view – a unified customer profile – meant that data engineers had to work across different application siloes, extracting, cleaning, transforming, standardizing and loading the data into a single master database. Often those projects hit a wall due to the enormity of the task.</p> <p>Just over a decade ago another technology came along to make the collection, integration and activation of customer data much easier. Called Customer Data Platforms (think Twilio Segment), they were initially pitched to businesses primarily as an enabler of omnichannel engagement where identity resolution and management is crucial. Soon CDPs won a preferred place in the data management firmament of many companies, highly valued for its integration capabilities. At last, a single view of the customer!</p> <p>Today there is growing recognition that a unified view of the customer, structured around first party data, is the key to competitiveness in an AI-driven Experience Economy. Even the C-Suite is starting to appreciate that a reliable, unified and dynamic profile of the customer, enriched with consent and preference data, is a strategic asset deserving of investment. A properly architected customer data foundation, many companies have finally realized, can in fact drive business growth, in part because it leads to a better customer experience.</p> <p>So once again customer data management technology is evolving to support the need for real-time engagement and personalization as well as AI-orchestrated customer journeys. Rather than function primarily as a point solution, CDPs are being retooled to operate at the enterprise level – so-called “composable CDPs” – that sit astride the modern data warehouse ingesting data directly (think Snowflake). No more copying data from one database to another. The advantage to marketers: a customer data backbone that the entire company can rely upon. One that no longer has a sign on the door saying, “Marketers Keep Out”.</p> <p>At one time Chris O’Hara was one of those data-driven marketers knocking on the door of IT. Today he leads the charge at SAP to transform the marketing data infrastructure. He believes that in order to deliver a more personalized customer experience at scale, organizations will need to link supply management and demand creation. They can only do that, he argues, by creating a “data fabric architecture” that provides a seamless view of customer data across all sources and formats. Chris has spent most of his career as a pioneer on the front lines of customer data management, and is a recognized expert on data-driven marketing. He excels at demystifying the Byzantine subject of customer data management. </p> <p>I started by asking Chris to give an overview of his career path, from onetime aspiring copywriter to data management expert.</p> <p><strong> Chris O’Hara (CO):</strong>: I’ve been in AdTech and marketing tech for a really long time and probably, you know, I don’t want to say too much about my age, but started in print, right? A very long time ago where you know, we were actually selling ad pages and then the Internet happened and we could sell banner ads and special web publications. And back when I was at Nielsen, you know, we had a department for digital, you know, E-media we called it. So it’s totally separate from everything we were doing in print. So I really grew up with the Internet.<br> And in the very early days of banner advertising and sponsorships and then was in marketing, during the dot com boom where I remember trying to buy the homepage from Yahoo. And these guys came in and they wanted, you know, 2 million bucks because they were the front page of the Internet. And Google hadn’t really taken off at the time, so always been in it, but didn’t really get a lot of traction in my career. And so I got really deeply into the data topic. And I was kind of running a company that did like a programmatic marketplace for advertising. And we were going to have like publishers post their, you know, remnant inventory in a marketplace and let agencies come in and buy the inventory. And we thought we were really cool and slick. And then we built all this technology around it and third party data was something new. You could sort of append your audiences with all kinds of different third party data.</p> <p>And then, you know, kind of really smart guys who knew the Internet a lot better than us came in, developed AppNexus(1) and it was Brian O’Kelley and all these guys from the really old days of DoubleClick, right, who came in and we looked at that and we said, oh my god. They built the thing we were trying to build, but we just didn’t know how to build it. </p> <p>So during that time, knowing a lot about technology and meeting a lot of other companies, I started writing for a publication called Ad Exchanger, which was starting to become popular as programmatic media grew up. And I had a data, uh, driven thinking column that, and I just post like stuff I was thinking about all related to like data and data management. For some weird reason it became a really popular column and people would like be like, oh, are you Chris O’Hara, the guy who writes this thing? And I’d be like, wow, like, yeah. </p> <p>And it got a big readership and , you know, I caught on with that and it caught the eye of a guy named Tom Chavez who was founding a company called Krux(2). And that was a data management platform. And it became really popular with big publishers like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. And he was like, we’re selling all these publishers, but we think there’s a marketing use case for these data management, uh, platforms. What do you think? Do you want to run this part of the business? And I was like, sure. We didn’t really have any customers. I think, Kellogg’s was our first one. We got really lucky with timing and we figured out a really cool use case for Kellogg’s. And essentially Kellogg’s had always suspected that they were getting ripped off, right? Losing a ton of money. Like, they were doing well online, right, with their banner advertising, but they just had a suspicion that they weren’t being as efficient as they could. </p> <p>So we put all these tags on their site, tracked all their advertising, and of course, based on our publisher, like, we had billions of hooks on the Internet, right, billions of profiles built up. And when we looked our data up, we’re finding out at the end of the month, Kellogg’s was serving 400 to 500 ads every month to the same people. And then when we really dug in and we clicked into the campaigns, we were like, any exposure after about 12 ads is wasted. No one cares. They get banner blind. They don’t even see the ad anymore. And we went to Kellogg’s and we said, you know what, if we just suppress every single person who’s seen 12 ads already, you probably save $20 million a year. And they were like, holy crap, that sounds good. And it worked. And we actually hired their head of marketing, this guy, Jon Suarez-Davis(3), JSD, who’s kind of a sort of semi famous guy right now. He and I went around the country with our sales team and we literally convinced every big CPG company to buy this Krux, this data management platform. </p> <p>And then it was off to the races. Salesforce bought our company for $800 million. And then at Salesforce, I ran data and analytics for them. And, you know, we acquired five or six companies at the time, really cool stuff. We built a CDP. I wrote a book about CDPs with your friend Marty(4), who I know you’ve interviewed before. And then, I got a phone call from SAP, which I really didn’t know too much about, but they had a marketing arm, the CX arm, and they had built a CDP and they wanted me to come run marketing for that. And I’ve been there for about three years. Interesting story there, but I’ll stop there because I’ve been speaking for a while. (11.39)</p> <p><strong> Stephen Shaw (SS):</strong>: Well, that’s all right, go ahead. Now you have me on the edge of the seat wondering what that story is.</p>
