ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS

Questions You Want To Know

What is a customer data platform (CDP)?

The CDP Institute defines a CDP as “a marketer-controlled system that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems”. Quaero ingests customer data from multiple source systems, cleans and unifies it using a state of the art identity resolution engine and advanced master data management techniques to create a single, persistent unified customer view with clean data.

Quaero distinguishes itself in a number of ways:

  • Flexibility: Deployed on public clouds (e.g. AWS, GCP), on Quaero’s private cloud or in your own data center, depending entirely on your preference.
  • Control: Delivered and supported as a turnkey solution for marketing and analytics teams but can also be managed by our customer’s IT or marketing technology team, with complete control over data flows and access.
  • Transparency: Provides comprehensive and detailed visibility into all your data, transformations, workflows and lineage through dynamic visualization. This is incredibly helpful when trying to understand data elements and their origins while troubleshooting data issues.
  • Access: Includes full-fledged visualization, business intelligence/reporting and drill down functionality for multiple levels of users ranging from senior executives through business and marketing analysis as well as data scientists and modelers.
  • Connectivity: Connects to leading campaign management systems, CMS tools, personalization solutions, ad servers and DMPs.

How does a CDP differ from a DMP?

A CDP is not a DMP and differs significantly from DMPs in several aspects.

  • Unlike DMPs, CDPs do not place or maintain cookies but links to existing cookies on a customer’s website as input sources.
  • DMP cookies are anonymous, whereas records in a CDP can be either anonymous or linked to specific identified individuals, which is possible when the cookie is linked to individuals through emails, device ids or other means. This is possible because data in a CDP is not shared with other companies in any form.
  • DMP data is a list of attributes, whereas a CDP stores very detailed information such as purchase transactions and details of Web behaviors from clickstream logs.
  • DMPs work primarily with web data, while a CDP includes data from offline systems such as CRM, billing, subscription, call centers and loyalty programs.
  • CDPs connect to DMPs and multiplies their display advertising capabilities with rich person level attributes derived from detailed, accurate and longitudinal consumer data. CDPs enable integration of online display advertising with other outbound and inbound marketing channels by maintaining an omnichannel model of consumer contact history, making attribution easier and more accurate.

How does Quaero differ from a data warehouse or data lake?

Data warehouses and data lakes are usually enterprise-wide projects, not usually tailored to marketing, advertising or even customer service needs. They usually do not provide a single customer view, unlike Quaero. While data lakes typically store data at the most granular level with minimal aggregation data warehouses usually store aggregated attributes at a customer record level. Quaero does both while also providing a middle ground/layer optimized for analytic applications. Quaero includes robust data lake and data warehouse capabilities for sourcing data from internal and external systems, and processes this data for usability while managing consumption privileges for users. For companies with existing legacy data warehouses and/or data lakes, Quaero readily sources from these systems, taking what is relevant without re-engineering existing systems or processes. Quaero has built-in features for additional processing to make the data more usable than is usually the case for a data lake or warehouse.

How does Quaero differ from CRM?

Quaero is not a consumer facing system. Its primary purpose is to consolidate and clean data, making it usable for operational CRM systems, which exist primarily to engage with customers. CRM systems capture data generated during customer engagements but do not import or export large volumes of data from/to other systems. They are not built to unify that data by matching different identifiers. Quaero has an open data model, providing both push- and pull-integrations with CRM systems.

Can my company build its own CDP?

Yes, you could. However, it will almost certainly take more time, cost more money, and be harder to maintain, since you would have to replicate a great deal of functionality that comes ‘out of the box’ with Quaero. Even if you did succeed in building the system, it might be harder to upgrade it as technologies, data sources and operational systems change and evolve. Quaero’s platform was borne out of hundreds of person years of experience building custom integrated marketing systems for some of the world’s leading brands before the term CDP even existed. The platform responds readily to the accelerating rate of change in the marketing ecosystem and increasing agility required by marketers. It is a toolkit for rapidly developing, deploying and enhancing a highly customized CDP. Quaero incorporates the most modern and relevant technologies, data sources and business integrations while offering an agility and efficiency internal IT resources find difficult to replicate. Quaero offers a SaaS platform and all customers benefit from frequent enhancements. Quaero differentiates itself from other CDP vendors with a professional services arm capable of custom development. This helps our customers maintain focus on their core business. With Quaero you have the best of both worlds, a system customized to your specific needs but without you having to recreate the foundational elements, such as data hygiene, matching, identity resolution and work flow management that are required to build such a system.

Can Quaero be embedded and bundled into other solutions?

Yes, agencies and other business partners are welcome to OEM or white label Quaero in order to enhance their own offering. We work with technology companies (e.g. ad servers, systems integrators) as well as marketing service providers (e.g. digital agencies) who want to focus on their core competence and leverage Quaero functionality to enhance, complete or complement their solutions and offerings and work together to ensure seamlessly integration.

How much work is needed to install and maintain the Quaero CDP?

Quaero implementation staff install the system. Standard built-in connectors for common source and execution systems help reduce the time and effort since the only customization required is for proprietary internal systems and specific reports. We typically need a point of contact who is familiar with source systems, can provide access to documentation about the data fields and to end users who can explain major use cases and test the system after implementation. Quaero usually handles ongoing support and maintenance. If you choose to maintain the system with your own resources, we will train them. Quaero is responsible for all upgrades and ensures compatibility between these upgrades and any customizations deployed for a specific customer.

What skills will I need to run the Quaero CDP?

Quaero handles all of the technical work to run the system, unless you want us to train your staff to do it- this includes analytics, reporting and visualization features as well as data management. There are different levels of access and interfaces for developers, IT/data operators, marketers, analysts, data scientists and executives. Of course, users in each of these levels will need to have the appropriate skills to perform their tasks. We offer separate training on the system to each set of users.

What are the resource needs to maintain and run the Quaero CDP?

Typically a shared resource. For particularly complex or highly dynamic environments (e.g. dozens of feeds from unreliable or non-standardized source systems), a full-time resource or more may be needed. Routine tasks are automated, so the operator simply monitors the processes and ensures they are running smoothly.

How much does it cost?

We offer on premise, Quaero hosted, or cloud hosted deployments. Cost varies based on the option. The volume of data, variety of sources and the velocity of inputs as well as the number of applications and users all play a role in pricing. Monthly fees range from $ 7,000 to more than $ 100,000 depending on these and other factors. AdVantage integrates with a variety of marketing applications as well as marketing cloud providers. This enables customers to buy what they need to complement their existing ecosystem and not duplicate existing costs.

Professional services covering analytics/modeling, business intelligence/reporting and program execution are available on a time and materials basis to help customers who need to augment staff to achieve their objectives.

How long does it take to implement?

Implementations typically range from six to sixteen weeks with incremental functionality becoming available over the deployment in phases.

Who does the implementation?

Quaero installs and implements, since it is the fastest and most efficient approach. For enterprises with a large number of business units or a large number of secondary data sources, Quaero leads implementation for the initial, highest priority data sources and business units. At the customer’s option, Quaero provides training for the customer to onboard the remaining business units and data sources. Marketers and marketing operations staff need to provide guidance and corporate IT needs to provide access to company systems.

We collaborate with direct marketing agencies and systems integrators who want to leverage AdVantage to serve their clients. In these cases, the partner may lead the implementation.

What is the level of experience required?

No technical expertise is required for marketers to realize the full value of Quaero.

For customers who are new to the world of integrated person level marketing and need to augment marketing staff to achieve objectives, we offer professional services covering customer strategy, analytics, business intelligence/reporting and program execution.

For customers and partners who want their IT or marketing technology resources to internalize ongoing maintenance and custom enhancements, an understanding of fundamental ETL concepts and reporting/dashboard development is required. Quaero provides training on administration of the back-office data management application and the Explorer tool.

Who defines the data requirements?

The marketing and marketing operations team usually identify sources. The Quaero CDP comes with a comprehensive consumer data model, which is extensible and can be adapted to specific customer requirements. The standard data model is a good place to start and can make it easier to identify and map the right sources. Quaero also has built-in standard, ongoing aggregations and the ability to add to this library through an easy to use web-based GUI. This is useful for defining complex KPIs and supporting unified reporting across disparate data sources.

What does maintaining the Quaero CDP look like?

Our CDP offering was borne out of a long history of building, maintaining and extending custom, complex consumer databases. Therefore, ease of administration and agility were primary design considerations. The CDP includes an intuitive interface to the back-office data management that makes it very easy for a mid-level IT resource or senior data analyst to understand how all processes work, track workflows and then monitor and adjust as needed. This work is staffed by Quaero but can also be staffed by the customer, if you so choose. Data ingestion occurs through APIs and batch loads. Data preparation processes such as cleaning; standardization, transformations, and identity resolution are built-in and run automatically.

How does Quaero integrate with marketing automation?

Quaero offers standard connectors to major omnichannel marketing automation systems and clouds for pulling and pushing data with options for both batch and API transfer. The unified, persistent consumer database within the CDP has more history, detail and derived metrics than typically found in marketing automation systems. Also, since the database is decoupled from the marketing execution, true integration and coordination across marketing channels based on ALL available data sources is possible – whether the company employs one of the major marketing automation clouds or has built a best of breed of marketing technology stack across multiple vendors.

How are analytics integrated?

Quaero enables predictive tools to query data directly, in an ad-hoc fashion, or to access extracts built and maintained for the particular analytic use case. Analytic processes, once developed, are orchestrated by the CDP, in-line with the rest of the data management processes. This occurs independent of whether the process runs natively within the environment or in an external dedicated analytics environment. Outputs of analytic processes are ingested, processed and made available to external systems in the same seamless manner as any other data source. The wide array of data management frameworks that come pre-packaged within the platform (e.g. asynchronous job dispatch, automated QA, data trending, alerts for unexpected data or data out of bounds, automatic expiry of old data, etc.) are all available for use in implementation of analytic processes – regardless of whether or not the base analytics tool has this advanced functionality. This greatly reduces any friction between analytic development and operationalizing analytics for production use cases. Our customers have demonstrated seamless execution of analytics using both open source and proprietary approaches including SAS, R, Python, Spark and Scala.