Providing Data Governance for Real-Time Marketing Campaigns

Nudged along by pandemic lockdowns, consumers have moved to digital interactions with marketers at a rate even faster than the already accelerating pace that prevailed before the health crisis emerged. According to the latest Digital Economy Index from Adobe, U.S. consumers spent more than $66 billion online in July 2020, 55% more than one year earlier.

Marketing organizations were already responding to this increase in digital interactions, with many of them moving to processes that enhance the customer experience in real time. The problem, they soon discovered, was that such processes make it nearly impossible to manually manage data governance. Becoming a real-time brand is great, but if governance can’t keep up, the advantages could be lost. Avoiding the loss, misuse, or inadvertent use of personally identifiable information (PII) and other restricted data is becoming more pressing as new statutes and compliance regimes like GDPR and CCPA keep coming.

Enterprises know that meeting the demands of new privacy legislation and industry standards is not optional and that failure to do so could be costly, both financially and reputationally. However, marketing and regulatory compliance are very different activities conducted in distinct branches of most organizations. Data governance is a highly complex and specialized skill set, and most marketing professionals don’t have the detailed knowledge to ensure that a real-time campaign or activity is designed from the start to ensure it doesn’t contravene any governance rules. In short, marketers can end up with a lot of great data, but no certainty that it can be used.

One thing that would greatly assist marketers is to have governance features bundled into the real-time customer data platform. That’s exactly what they get with the new Data Governance capabilities in Adobe’s Real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP). The platform now provides a unique and first-of-its-kind framework that enables brands to optimize CX data collected across the business with defined usage policies that meet the data governance policies of the enterprise. And data governance can be implemented to support real-time CX by using the Data Governance functionality within CDP.

Using the Privacy Console function within Adobe’s Real-time CDP, it is now possible to:

• Apply appropriate data usage labels. This enables marketers to stay compliant, since they now have visibility on data privacy issues. Adobe provides out-of-the-box labels, and CDP also supports the creation of custom labels.
• Set usage restrictions for labeled data. Once data has been labeled, restrictions for the use of that data can be created so that there is consistent adherence to governance demands. It’s immediately apparent to marketers how specific data can be used in campaigns.
• Simplify data policy management. Data governance rules and compliance demands frequently change. With this new Adobe solution, data governance policies can be centrally managed, updated, and followed.
• Enforce data compliance. With this centralized approach to data governance, compliance becomes part of everyday processes. Further, using the Data Governance capabilities, it’s simple to demonstrate brand adherence to data governance rules.

Ensuring that marketing programs comply with data governance is non-negotiable. Brands need to move beyond manual, after-the-fact evaluation of data governance for campaigns. As inefficient as that is, it isn’t even feasible as organizations move to real-time marketing processes. Adobe now provides a solution that delivers what marketers need both today and tomorrow.