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Hi, this is Nina from the Realtime CDP Product Marketing team. The starting point for beginning to use Realtime CDP collaboration is accessing or building the audiences that you want to use for collaboration workflows. Many collaboration customers will start by using audiences already created in Realtime CDP or using data sources that reside there to build new audiences. For collaboration practitioners, this may mean partnering with a MarTech or marketing team who owns their Realtime CDP investment. Because collaboration oftentimes represents a new practitioner role, such as a paid marketer or agency subject matter expert, there may be new or updated processes or operational models that may be considered to support the ongoing working relationship with technology — Realtime CDP and Realtime CDP collaboration — as well as the people, the marketing ops, and paid media or agency teams. We find that customers that derive the maximum value out of both of their Realtime CDP and Realtime CDP collaboration investments have set up an Audience Center of Excellence. An Audience Center of Excellence is a people-in-process operating model that supports and streamlines the needs of all enterprise teams, users, and helps to integrate their workflows, KPIs, and needs to meet enterprise-wide objectives. Let’s first dive into why an Audience Center of Excellence is so important. If you look at the different components of our entire CDP portfolio inclusive of both Realtime CDP and collaboration, you can see it’s expansive. We’re ingesting and federating data from a variety of sources including non- and synonymous, creating profiles and audiences, activating them for paid media use cases, using and own channels or sending back to enterprise systems, making them available for collaboration, and driving full-funnel customer experiences. Each of these activities can impact a variety of teams.

For example, advertising teams who are touching prospect or synonymous data have their own data sources, processes, and KPIs. As do marketing teams who may use third-party datasets or known customer data for engagement, customer service and support teams may have a stake in the use of this data too to support their use cases, as do advertising and partnerships teams when it comes to activation and paid media. IT teams and privacy or legal teams have their own workflows and concerns when it comes to how and where and for what purpose this data is used, and that needs to be taken into consideration as well. In summary, there are a lot of teams who have reason to use and touch audience data with sometimes conflicting strategies or KPIs that they are driving towards, and this is where the Audience COE, Center of Excellence, comes in. An audience COE can help to streamline and align the different businesses, priorities, workflows, and communications, and use management to support the successful use of audiences across the organization. The audience COE should be responsible for the following set of tasks. Implementation, managing the onboarding of the technology, including identifying initial data assets, use cases, and necessary integrations. Audience ownership, identifying the process and methodology for building and activating new audiences, use for campaign execution and analysis, and maintaining an audience or data dictionary that provides information on built and available audiences for the rest of the organization. This is especially critical for collaboration and ensuring paid media and agency teams have access to audiences needed for new campaigns and partnerships. Integrations, the ongoing management of integrating new data assets, both internal and external to the organization, as well as identifying new outbound integrations necessary for data activation. Project execution, overseeing the execution of the organization’s key objectives as it pertains to data management. This could be executing on campaigns brokering new data partnerships and implementing new platform features.

Roadmap, building and executing on the organization’s audience roadmap. Vendor management, managing the relationship with the data management changes and roadmaps. Governance and usage, managing both how various users and their user groups authenticate and access the platform, as well as managing how data is used and activated. Communication, distributing program process information and updates on key initiatives and other relevant information to interested parties, including stakeholders. Education and adoption, creating a curriculum training plan and knowledge repository for consumers and users of the platform on how the platform itself works. This can include education on program process, governance and general guidance on product usage. Measurement, tracking audience activities against organizational key performance indicators. So what should your audience COE look like? Well, it’s not one size fits all, but most audience COEs will have three key components, a core team, stakeholders and a steering committee. The core team and owners should be driving the key activities we just walked through, such as audience creation, communication and overall program management. An important component to this is governance, identifying what data sources can be used for which purposes, and also what individuals have access to certain data sets and activities, such as audience creation and activation. The stakeholders and executive sponsors should provide support in the form of enterprise goals, use case prioritization, removing roadblocks as needed, as well as budget. For some larger organizations, this wider COE may be comprised of 50 plus people. And for smaller organizations, it may only be a handful of individuals.

But what does matter and is consistent, no matter the size or business goals of the organization, is ownership and representation as part of the COE. The COE must have a clear product owner that is driving use cases, communications, processes and decision.

And representation and access. Paid media teams, agency teams, privacy and other teams should be part of this group. And their communications too, to ensure that they have access to the audiences that they need in order to be successful. In summary, let’s wrap up with some key takeaways and next steps. One, organizations investing in real-time CDP and real-time CDP collaboration should consider an operational model that will serve the enterprise. Two, the model itself for the COE can be flexible, but identifying a product owner and incorporating representation from key CDP and collaboration consumers and users is essential. Three, want to learn more about audience COEs or best practices for setting one up? Check out Customer Data Management Voices for more detail.