By 
Publicis Groupe-owned Epsilon has been in the CRM business for 30 years, but the agency only launched a self-service digital CDP for enterprise clients late last month.
Epsilon noticed more of its clients were interested in doing a better job of storing, managing and unifying first-party data, said Chief Product Officer Joe Doran. It already offered services related to identity, data onboarding, activation and proprietary data management.
From talking with industry pundits, Epsilon also learned that most marketers have contracts with more than two CDPs but had only implemented one.
“A lot of times they’re doing data collection off first-party sites in silos,” Doran said. “They’re not unlocking new insights for the client, and very few are activating [customer insights] on their own media or paid media.”
Despite its late(ish) arrival to the CDP party, Epsilon sees its CDP as an opportunity to fill this unmet need in the marketplace. And the company is confident its data chops and focus on driving marketing outcomes will set it apart.
Doran spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: What distinguishes Epsilon from other CDPs?
JOE DORAN: We help clients do the data collection and onboarding. We can do data hygiene and we can handle data from both internal and external sources, which helps clients get a more well-rounded view of the data. We don’t charge clients additional fees to do the data onboarding and unification. We have that native in our platform.
We also provide demographic or psychographic attributes from our proprietary database, which the marketers may not have been able to collect or associate with users themselves. You get a more holistic view of who that customer is.
Who’s using your CDP?
Our typical customer is an enterprise marketer, such as retailers, CPG and hospitality brands. They also tend to be marketers that have a portfolio of brands. They have to navigate and be able to provide a single view across that portfolio.
What types of customer insights have come out of the CDP so far?
A lot of marketers get very limited registration data and may not be able to discern much outside of simple demographics. They may not even know gender, age or geographic location. We can provide that level of data.
We also see browser behavior across the internet that may uncover intent signals important to the customer journey, or what happens before someone comes to a website. That will help marketers answer questions like: How should I do my marketing? When should I be messaging people? When is someone on the path for a repeat purchase? Can I activate a lapsed customer?
What data sources are you drawing from?
First and foremost, it’s the client’s data sources where they’re collecting first-party data. It’s their registration system, their transaction or point-of-sale system, their app. We connect to all the digital touch points, as well as offline touch points, that the client has, and we manage the data that comes in.
The data we have is all based upon the Core ID, which is our underlying identity solution. We map and attach the customer to the Core ID, which allows us to see the full digital footprint of that consumer.
How will you maintain your competitive advantage?
Every one of the big marketing clouds has a customer data platform, and there are also a lot of independent CDPs. They were built as empty databases to store first-party data and not much more, or they’re custom analytics toolsets that morphed into the CDP space.
But they don’t have a robust identity layer. We can attach first-party data to the Core ID and activate and measure against that at high scale and with high fidelity at a high degree of accuracy.
We’re a data onboarder. With most of these CDP platforms, you basically push data in, but there’s no data cleansing, no data enrichment. You have to buy that as an add-on service. Our competitors would have to make a significant investment to do what we do.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
