'Real-time' CDP, Salesforce & a lawsuit

News broke last week of a lawsuit which pitted Saleforce against one it's former VPs of Product Management. The lawsuit relates to claims made at Salesforce's September 2022 Dreamforce conference that its new customer data platform “Genie” operates in “real time,” despite the technology not having real-time capabilities.

The former VP Karl Wirth states that Salesforce dismissed him following him challenging their real-time claims. According to law.com, Wirth co-founded a technology company in 2010 called Evergage, serving as the CEO for 10 years, before Salesforce bought the company. Following the purchase, Wirth began as a Salesforce executive, working parallel to a group within the company that served the customer data platform product.

"as a rule of thumb, the further the source of customer data sits from the activation point the higher the latency".

This lawsuit brings into focus the gap between the stated capabilities of technology platforms and their actual abilities to fulfil use cases with data latency often the cause. AUDIENCES co-founder Rob McLaughlin states, "as a rule of thumb, the further the source of customer data sits from the activation point the higher the latency".

Many of the marketing cloud vendors such as Adobe and Salesforce have constructed their product portfolios via acquisition leaving significant engineering work necessary to enable data flows across their stacks. In some cases the vendors complete this engineering, in others partners and integration technologies might step-in to bridge the gap however often the capabilities are found to fall short of expectations, leaving client organisations lacking the real-time and similar capabilities they require.

Requirements for real-time customer data activation can come in the form of many use case types. Here are some of the most business critical real-time oriented use cases and requirements which the AUDIENCES team have sort to address:

• Performance focussed acquisition or purchase campaigns - Naturally in search but increasingly across paid social, as planning looks to extend performance forms of campaigning across channels, the ability to remove converted customers immediately from targeting groups. Further, the requirement to do this on an omnichannel digital/physical basis i.e. purchase in store then exclude from digital media (Documented in our recent longitudinal study)
• ‍Betting & gaming compliance (GAMSTOP) - The ability to exclude a user from advertising gambling services, either voluntarily or otherwise, is table-stakes for organisations within this highly regulated and competitive sector. Exclusion needs to be applied within 24hrs or less in most cases however most CDPs and related technologies struggle to achieve this in less than 72 hrs
• ‍Investment or Healthcare Professional audiences for finances and pharmaceutical verticals - Advertising to controlled audiences based on their certification to receive and understand complex information is key to driving digital campaign addressability and performance in regulated industries. Further, there are strict regulatory restrictions to ensure that only members of these certified audiences see the messaging and the general public do not

Because AUDIENCES operates from within your enterprise architecture it lives natively with your customer data, enabling it to immediately activate based on the latest data at source thus making real-time activation a reality. Increasingly marketers are becoming aware of the power from activating customer data directly from their enterprise data.

Leading advertisers are already using AUDIENCES to accelerate activation of 1st party data across advertising with zero compromise to privacy or security.

Contact AUDIENCES to discuss how to accelerate activation of your 1st party data.

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