Using Tag Management to Go on Offense with Data (For Your CDP)

What would football be like if coaches didn’t have stats (or had wrong, incomplete or incorrect stats) to put the right player in the right position to succeed? Sure, some coaches may be good at guessing based on eyeballing it (just like some marketers are savants at predicting customer behavior), but it’s pretty much a no-brainer to say the overall quality of play would decline.

This is what it’s like to run your Customer Data Platform, or any system being powered by data, without a Tag Management System (TMS).

Let me explain…

TMS + CDP = Data-Driven Touchdown

With the number of technology acronyms out there, it can be bewildering to figure out where one technology starts and the other begins. Yet, this is a critical consideration for organizations building best of breed tech stacks as part of a digital transformation project (the hottest project out there). The recent emergence of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) category is a prime example.

Simply scanning Google Search results about CDPs, you come across articles like “What is a CDP?,” “What’s the difference between a CDP and a DMP?,” “Why Customer Data Platforms are Gaining Traction,” and on and on it goes…

TMS + CDP = Data-Driven Touchdown Share on X

Just yesterday, the CDP Institute commented on a recent Gartner hype cycle that “noted the confusion created by the variety of vendors using the CDP label.” So it’s no wonder that we get questions about how/why we offer our Tealium iQ Tag Management product alongside our Customer Data Platform, AudienceStream.

What’s the deal with Tealium offering a TMS and CDP?

Simply put, it’s about going on offense to get your data and not passively sitting back and letting data come to you from legacy implementations that are typically outdated, incorrect and insufficient for today’s needs.  

Most CDPs take this passive approach (don’t get me wrong, simply trying to unify in any way is an improvement…it’s just not the smartest approach at this point). They ignore the data foundation and sell the sizzle of a single view of the customer and some flavor of upstack functionality like personalization, analytics, predictive intelligence, omni-channel campaign management, etc, etc, etc….without first making sure that the plumbing, the data foundation, is robust. It may seem like the upstack functionality is where the value is because that’s the customer-facing part, but the true value is in the data foundation.

Basically, most CDPs passively “accept” data from other systems using integrations and store it all in one place. Some will go a baby step further and give you (yet another) tracking tag so that maybe you’re not totally dependent on an integration with another tool. But, in reality, that just exacerbates your data collection problem.

When you think about the definition established for a CDP, it’s easy to overlook the foundation upon which all that capability is based….the DATA itself. And that’s what a good TMS is all about…the data. Clean, correlated, standardized, actionable, and flexible data. In all honesty, calling Tealium iQ a TMS really sells it short and is just a reflection of the acronym-laden world in which we live. A more accurate name would be a Data Governance System…with the capability to manage client-side javascript tags, amongst a whole host of data management capabilities.

So, as the football season kicks off, just remember that all those remarkable plays you see are the visible result of an invisible foundation. Just like your marketing…

If you want to score ‘data touchdowns’ for your team, get a powerful, enterprise Tag Management System partnered with an industry leading Customer Data Platform.