2017 Predictions #12: Combining CRM and DMP Solutions

To give you a jump start on the new year, we asked industry experts about their predictions for the future of location, marketing, and technology in 2017. We'll be posting their responses over the next month here on the Yext blog. Follow us on Twitter @Yext for new posts, and tweet at us with your own predictions.

Luis Martinez
Digital Marketing Lead, Denny's

As marketer's knowledge of their consumer base continues to grow via their always-improving CRMs, brands will want to more effectively leverage this and all available data to make deliberate, automated, and addressable marketing and media decisions. Expect to see companies emerge that explicitly work on providing a data layer to brand's CRM. Weather, location, and consumer confidence measures will quickly become married to stored customer and transaction data. Sophistication in location in particular will form the basis of better and more impactful targeting and useful triggers for media placements and execution.

Due to the glaring limitations of the current programmatic buying environment, more brands will begin to consider and review their DMP and targeted media solutions, ultimately deciding to bring much of this practice in-house, under one enterprise solution. Expect the major players (Adobe, Salesforce, etc) to bring forth new CRM/DMP/media buying products and smaller players to combine forces to offer similar full-service capabilities to verticals that are not currently in the market for a top-tier solution. Media agencies will also want to get in on the action by acquiring more ad tech shops and creating custom enterprise-level products for their clients. This competition will ultimately be to the benefit of the brand (via lower cost to entry and increased control and ease of use), but also to the customer – as more brands can better leverage data, the customer should see an increase in relevance of ads in 2017.

This post is part of a series of 2017 predictions from industry experts.