Using Metadata to Deploy Successful Enterprise Marketing Systems

Marketers must increasingly combine data from disparate systems to gain a complete view of each customer and to coordinate customer treatments throughout their organizations. This session explores the role of metadata in permitting such data sharing, reviews strategies for developing marketing-specific metadata, and examines several existing implementations. Topics will include the types of data required for different tasks including marketing analysis, operations management and execution; shared dimensions and disparities when using the same data for different purposes; existing formal and de facto metadata standards for selected marketing data sources; special issues related to marketing tasks such as predictive model deployment and cross-channel message delivery; and the promise vs. reality of new technologies such as SOA and XML. Attendees will leave with an understanding of the special metadata challenges posed by marketing systems and of current best practices for resolving them.

Key points:

• Understand the role of metadata in deploying successful marketing systems
• Special metadata challenges posed by marketing systems
• Inventory the major data types required for marketing applications
• Identify best practices for developing and deploying marketing metadata
• Highlight opportunities presented by new technologies

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The key points from the session were:

- there is an important difference between your internal businses processes, which are fragmented by business function, and what the customer sees, which is a holistic view of what it's like to do business with your company. We call this a 'customer process' to distinguish it from a 'business process'

- there is no broadly accepted standard framework or data model for describing customer contacts. But one is needed if you are to gather and then compare different contacts throughout the 'customer process'. The session proposed such a model, which boils down to seeing all activities that a customer perceives as involving a company as 'messages within slots'. A 'slot' is any opportunity to present a message: it could be space on a retail store shelf, a 30-second radio ad during the morning news, a package insert in a shipping box, an ad on a Web page, an offer within a telemarketing script, etc. The point is that every contact represents an opportunity to deliver a message, and thus should be managed to make the best possible use of the opportunity.

- a complete marketing infrastructure include 5 major types of systems: planning/forecasting/budgeting, project management, content management, execution, and analysis/reporting/optimization. Only the 'execution' systems directly touch the customer, but the others are important for internal marketing operations.

- the 5 types of marketing systems manage 11 entities, including company divisions, projects, products, channels, users, offers, segments, promotion materials, delivery systems, customers, and 'context' (the current state of the customer and company, used to determine the most appropriate message at the moment of a given contact). These entities all have standard attributes, and all need metadata to describe their contents and help integrate across different instances.