Cloud-Based Marketing Data Solution Enables Centralized Data Storage and Unifies Audience Insights

Merkle, a leading technology-enabled, data-driven performance marketing agency, announced the launch of Rapid Audience Layer (RAL), a public cloud-based marketing data management solution. As an entry-level data management offering, RAL enables the fast integration of multiple data sources to deliver rich audience insights.

“Most marketers agree that data management is challenging and not an area they want to focus the majority of their time on”

RAL offers a centralized way to store multiple data feeds, including CRM, digital, and third-party data. Leveraging the latest scalable cloud technologies and shared support teams, RAL is a quick-to-implement solution that provides marketers with the benefits of a preliminary data management environment through a user-friendly platform. Powered by Merkle’s Connected Recognition™ technology, the RAL solution offers standard data hygiene and identity resolution, allowing marketers to recognize the same individual across several data sources.

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Since transitioning to the RAL solution, Merkle clients have seen a 50 percent reduction in time spent on data management and manipulation, with additional results showing 25 percent quicker onboarding and a 32 percent decrease of duplicative customer and prospect records after customer data integration (CDI) processing. RAL quickly drives insights in four key ways:

• Ingest – Automatically imports data into tables (digital, CRM, third-party, and ad hoc data) for immediate storage by prioritizing, validating, and staging it.
• Identify – Cleanses, matches, and stitches identities to each customer, creating a consolidated graph of customers, prospects, and households.
• Load – Extracts data from the staging area and transforms it into the destination’s supported format.
• Analyze – Enables the querying of data and tackles analytic workloads to build insights and data visualization. Easily integrates with business intelligence (BI) and data science tools.

“Most marketers agree that data management is challenging and not an area they want to focus the majority of their time on,” said Ankur Jain, senior vice president, strategy lead, cloud platforms at Merkle. “RAL encapsulates Merkle’s decades of subject matter expertise in data management, technology architecture, reporting, and audience insights into a tool that allows brands to start small and build upon the foundation of their data.”

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The RAL solution includes expandable features that can be enabled to meet marketers’ needs. Additional tools and extensions include the Dentsu Aegis Network M1 integration, Merkle DataSource, BI reporting, and customer data platform (CDP) integration. When clients are ready, RAL can be upgraded to a custom database solution with client specific complex business rules and custom consumption processes. In RAL’s first release, identity resolution functionality is limited to business-to-consumer (B-to-C) applications.

Merkle will be hosting a webinar on February 27 to roll out RAL, sharing details on how it can be implemented and added to an organization’s marketing technology stack and strategy.

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