text: It's your first cruise holiday and you're ready to board. You check one last time to be sure the smart wristband the cruise line sent you last week is securely fastened. Then you join the rest of the crowd on the dock. As you calculate which boarding line is shortest, a crew member glances at your wristband and directs you to a special entrance. No waiting. Once at your room, a sensor verifies the ID in your device and the door opens automatically, saving you from having to juggle bags to find a key.
  Later, as you walk down the hall, you notice several giant touch screen portals on the wall. You log in to one. Because the cruise line knows your interests, the portal recommends tonight's Rio Carnival on the upper deck and a group tour of the Royal Botanical Gardens when you reach the Port of Spain in a few days. Next stop: the pool bar, where the waiter starts to mix up your favourite drink before you even arrive.
  Princess Cruises, a California-based cruise line, understands that providing customers with unforgettable, personalised experiences like these means getting to know the people behind the devices they use. With the help of their data management platform (DMP), the company combines email, web, social media and customer relationship management data to piece together a picture of how their most valuable customers interact with their brand. This could include anything from how much time a visitor spent browsing cruise packages on their website to the kinds of questions they asked the customer support team.
  Combining this information, the DMP creates audience segments — those people most likely to be interested in a particular message. The cruise line can then push audience segments out to the appropriate marketing channels so they can deliver a personalised message and reach them at the exact moment their customers want or need it.
  "A DMP is like an oil refinery for your data," says Matte Skinner, product marketing manager for Adobe Audience Manager. "Just as it takes work to extract oil from the ground, refine it and turn it into something like gasoline that everyone can use, a DMP refines data into a single view of the customer for better personalisation and great experiences."
  This single view is important because it follows a customer from mobile to desktop to smartwatch and back again. So instead of creating promotions and offers with each of those devices in mind, a DMP helps you to deliver the most relevant experiences to the person behind the device. And when so many brands are clamoring to be noticed, that makes a DMP the most competitive tool you can have.
  77% of marketing and IT professionals believe that an experience-based DMP is important to their organisation's success.
  71% of organisations expect their audience management budget to increase and 51% are likely to switch to a best-in-class DMP.
  79% of marketing and IT professionals say that DMP skills will be essential for any digital marketing in the next 5 years and that DMP skills will rise in the next half decade.
  Like oil, data is a valuable resource — the most important one your company owns. For Princess Cruises, data helps them to anticipate what a customer wants for dinner, what time is best for their massage and whether they'd rather relax with a film under the stars or dance the night away in the ship's nightclub. And while the customer sails through their activities effortlessly, connecting these experiences behind the scenes takes some work.
  As customers choose to interact with yet one more device, it gets harder and harder to keep track of how they communicate with your brand — whether on holiday or in everyday life. Data shortage isn't the problem. With every visit and every click, your data stash grows.
  But when multiple teams with different goals manage that data using disconnected systems, your customer never comes into full view — only their devices do. And when you only get half the story around who your customers are and how they behave, it's almost impossible to carry on a personalised conversation, let alone win customer loyalty.
  The fight for customer attention is a daily struggle, but it doesn't have to be. With a DMP, you can be confident that the experiences you deliver are the ones your customers want and expect. For example, MGM Resorts International uses a DMP to help them automatically tailor messages based on the last time customers visited their site and how often they visit.
  A DMP gathers data that is spread across different business functions and technologies. It helps you to organise and process that data into high-value audience segments, like cruise passengers most likely to make an onboard store purchase. Then, you can send them coupons through your mobile app.
  Collects first-party data from channels and devices (web analytics, CRM, device data, e-commerce etc.).
  Unifies data into audience profiles, giving you a complete customer view across devices and channels. Create look-alike models, build audience segments and groups of profiles and supplement with second- and third-party data sources.
  Recognised by Forrester as a Leader in data management platforms, Adobe Audience Manager helps you do the following.
  Understand customers across devices. Adobe Audience Manager uses identity management tools and device graphs to tie device IDs to individuals or groups. If a customer starts using a device you don't recognise, you can use second-party data available through a network or co-op to supplement your own, building a complete view of your customer. This allows you to send consistent messaging across devices, whether your customers log in to your site or not.
  Integrate with existing systems. Native integration with Adobe Experience Cloud allows Audience Manager to ingest data from Adobe solutions and dozens of third-party providers for use in creating audience segments. Those segments can then be exported to other Adobe products for use in personalisation and campaigns, multiple DSPs and server-side platforms (SSPs).
  Activate your best audiences. Reach more of your highest-value customers by pushing your audience segments to the platforms you choose. Segments can include information about how recently a customer has visited your site or mobile app and how often they do so, helping you to make sure you always send the most relevant messages.
  Get more value across the enterprise. Adobe Audience Manager plays an important role in paid media targeting, but the real value comes when everyone in your organisation can use customer data as a single source of truth to provide consistent, compelling experiences.
  Deliver real-time experiences. Ingest data in real time from onsite and off-line data sources, such as call centres or in-store purchases. Then export segment qualifications in real time to marketing platforms.
  Balance transparency and privacy. Protect your brand and data partners and build customer trust by getting a clear view into how your technology works so you can ensure you're not violating company, regional or national policies around data privacy.
  Adobe Audience Manager Customer Check-In Survey, October-November 2016.
  Alison Weissbrot, "Why MGM Resorts International Brought Programmatic In-House," AdExchanger, 26 April 2017.
  Ben Beard, Adobe, personal interview, 8 February 2018.
  Matte Skinner, Adobe, personal interview, 8 February 2018.
  "The Rise of the Experience DMP: Adobe Audience Manager Announces New Survey Results," Adobe Press Release, 13 March 2018.
  Susan Bidel, Samantha Merlivat, Melissa Parrish, Arleen Chien and Laura Glazer, "The Forrester Wave™: Data Management Platforms, Q2 2017," Forrester Research, Inc., 1 June 2017.