Tealium AudienceStream: Our Next Great Innovation

We founded Tealium with the mission of solving marketing’s big data challenge — a challenge created by the confluence of four macro trends that we see persisting for at least the next decade. These trends are:

1. Mass Personalization – Purveyors of goods and services are customizing and personalizing physical products, digital content, and other digitally-delivered experiences (games, shopping, etc.). This is happening across ALL industry verticals.
2. The Explosion of (Big) Data – The mass personalization trend is enabled by a dramatic increase in the amount of data businesses have about their customers, their interests, and how these customers interact with their brands. Personalization is driven from unique customer and visitor profiles, which are created by processing vast amounts of data and segmenting customers, including establishing a one-to-one relationship with them
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3. The Mass Migration of Enterprise Applications into the Cloud – This macro trend leads to two important sub-trends: A) the ‘hollowing out’ of businesses’ technology platforms, to a point where much of a business’ data resides in various, distributed, non-integrated databases maintained by multiple cloud-based vendors; and B) a shift of technology budget dollars from the IT side of the house to the marketing and revenue side of the house, where CMOs, CROs and heads of sales can now utilize best-in-class applications from cloud-based vendors without involving IT.
4. An Explosion of Mobile Access Devices – This trend creates a ‘multi-channel mandate’ for marketers and revenue officers. Businesses desiring to be highly competitive in this multi-channel world must be able to engage with customers and prospects across all digital channels and show those visitors a common experience from one channel to the next. The multi-channel mandate leads to a requirement for a multi-channel data model, where businesses can see everything they know about their customers and prospects, across all delivery channels.

As we embarked on Tealium’s big data mission, we focused on the obvious first step of solving the industry’s tag management and mobile SDK problem – where each digital marketing vendor was asking businesses to insert their proprietary code and data variables into websites and mobile apps. We solved this problem with Tealium iQ, our market-leading enterprise tag management platform. This was an obvious first step to solving the larger big data problem because nearly 80% of this data is generated by tags and SDKs. To solve the larger problem, we had to do the spadework of rolling up our sleeves and helping our customers create what we call ‘universal data objects’ across web and mobile channels. This meant building a platform that could take that standard data object and communicate to more than 600 vendors across the digital marketing ecosystem in the format and language they require.

The second obvious step in solving marketing’s big data challenge was to leverage the universal data object (UDO), to create a fully-correlated visitor profile, across all channels, across all vendors’ databases, in real-time. A real-time architecture is paramount because today’s consumers want to engage with businesses at the time of interaction, not through emails or other offers they receive days later. Today’s demanding consumers expect a personalized experience, and if a business has anything special to offer them, they expect it instantaneously. A customer’s propensity to buy drops by more than 80% after they leave a website or mobile app. The value of real-time is immense.

Tealium AudienceStream, which we announced today, is a new service within our Tealium DataCloud suite of products that delivers on this proposition of a real-time, cloud-based, cross-vendor customer data warehouse. Tealium EventStream (already announced) is a datafeed service that allows this rich, real-time data set to be fed to all of the innovative applications being developed by entrepreneurial teams across our industry. AudienceStream is our audience discovery and data distribution platform, which runs atop the DataCloud database and allows marketers to analyze visitor activity across all channels and all vendors, in real-time. AudienceStream goes the additional step of allowing marketers to add their own criteria for adding metadata to the DataCloud database. If a customer does X, Y and Z on a website, badge them as a VIP and add that to the many other data elements you have about that customer. And do this, Mr. or Mrs. Marketer, without writing a line of code or knowing any database query language!

I am incredibly proud of our design and engineering teams that created Tealium iQ, DataCloud, EventStream and AudienceStream. The DataCloud team sat back and looked at the current industry approach of consolidating multiple batch files from multiple vendors and running those files through a data consolidation platform – and they determined that there was a better way. Instead of doing the heavy and expensive lifting of blending together backward-looking batch files, DataCloud goes to the source of the data fragmentation problem – the tags and SDKs themselves – and creates a blended dataset in real-time – at the time and point of data creation. Tags and mobile SDKs, after all, are the headwaters of big data.

Like we did in tag management, Tealium is now investing millions of dollars in R&D and business development cycles to expose this rich, real-time, correlated data set to hundreds of industry vendors who today rely on backward-looking batch files. We are seeing eyes light up and we are looking forward to working with our customers and the vendor ecosystem to see the entire industry advance as innovative vendors take this rich, real-time dataset; access it through our APIs or data feeds; and take their own applications to the next level. Just as we did in solving the tag management problem, we look forward to working with hundreds of vendors to help our common customers enhance the efficacy of the presence they present to customers and prospects across all digital channels.

If you’d like to discuss Tealium iQ, AudienceStream, EventStream, or DataCloud with a Tealium expert, please fill out our contact form, and we will follow up immediately!

Thanks/Regards,

Jeff Lunsford
Tealium CEO / Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Twitter: @lunk18
E-Mail: jeff.lunsford@tealium.com