Forrester gets a sneak peek at Google’s DMP

Most of the information we have about Google‘s data management platform, DoubleClick Audience Center, comes from rumour and speculation. Though the big-name agency trading desks are working with a beta version already, there’s still no official indication from Google when the product is expected to launch and what features it will carry. It’s all been very hush hush.

But Audience Center is more than a mirage — a fact that was confirmed in last week’s Forrester Wave DMP report.

Alongside six other market-leading DMPs (each one scored on 66 criteria), Forrester reviewed Audience Center as a “non-participant” with limited information and customer references. The report was nonetheless able to give some insight into how it stacks up against the competition.

Forrester confirmed that Audience Center offers all the table-stakes functionality of a standard DMP in terms of data collection, sorting and analysis, as well as onboarding first-party CRM data.

But the report also said Audience Center is primarily geared towards buying targeted ads on Google media properties, rather than providing the foundation for a truly media-agnostic technology stack.

“Clients who already bought into the Google ecosystem and wish to hit the ground running should consider Google’s DMP offering,” the report states. Audience Center gives marketers something they’ve been demanding for a while: an easy way to use their customer data to target audiences on Google search and YouTube. In that sense, it will be a “compelling alternative” to Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool, which provides many of the same customer targeting tools across Facebook’s inventory.

What Audience Center doesn’t do well, at least not yet, is integrate with external tools. The authors note that it’s integrated with quite a few third-party programmatic buying platforms, which will mean audiences built in the platform can be applied across programmatic inventory bought outside Google’s ecosystem. But when it comes to integrations with widely used tools for analytics, social listening and email, Audience Center falls short of the competition, the report says.

That may be because Audience Center is still in development and hasn’t yet made a concerted effort to onboard external partners. But Forrester analysts Susan Bidel and Richard Joyce weren’t so willing to let the oversight slide. “[T]his solution’s lack of these integrations calls into question Google’s commitment to a truly open platform,” they wrote, hinting at Google’s persistent reputation as a “walled garden” that squeezes out competing tech vendors.

Adobe, Krux lead the pack

Google will have a lot of work to do catching up with Adobe and Krux, the clear winners of the report. The two vendors’ DMPs led the rankings in “strategy,” “current offering” and “market presence,” followed at some distance by Neustar, which also qualified for Forrester Wave’s “leader” category.

Bidel and Joyce applauded Adobe for investing early in a DMP and maintaining its head start over competitors. Adobe first added a DMP in 2011 with its acquisition of Demdex, and has in the time since developed it into a foundational layer linking together its entire Marketing Cloud. The authors were impressed by Adobe’s wide range of partnerships and native integrations, covering everything from analytics to data onboarding, site optimization, programmatic, social and email.

Krux has a very different story. An independent tech firm founded in 2010 and having raised $35 million in venture funding to date, Krux began as an enterprise data governance tool and evolved into a highly customizeable customer intelligence platform. In a field dominated by big-name tech companies with massive development budgets, Krux has managed to not only keep up but outperform competitors.

It received top marks for strong references from clients and for its far-reaching vision, which sees big data analytics as essential to everything from advertising to online commerce and content publishing.

Forrester chose seven DMPs to review based on scale and scope of their offering. Candidates had to offer a standalone DMP serving both advertisers and publishers and have at least 100 live clients. Oracle, Google, Lotame and KBM Group (a subsidiary of WPP’s Wunderman) were ranked as “strong performers,” while Norway’s Cxsense fell into the lower “contender” category.

One company that was notably absent from the list was Nielsen, which recently acquired a well-respected DMP, eXelate. It wasn’t clear what criteria eXelate didn’t meet.