Forrester recently released The Forrester Wave™: Data Management Platforms, Q2 2019. While sharing the same naming as the previous DMP Wave, which included a mixture of marketing centric and advertising centric DMPs, the latest report indicates a fundamentally different focus. The 2019 Wave has been pivoted to focus almost exclusively on pureplay standalone DMP solutions. This has resulted in the removal of all DMP providers with an added specialization providing integrated solutions. At Adform, we don’t believe this reflects the needs of our clients and advertisers in general.
As our DMP is one of our fastest growing products and used as an enterprise-grade stand-alone product by a sizable number of clients, the latest report under represents a key part of the equation for many advertisers. In particular, advertisers’ need for a DMP with specialized capabilities able to service advertising and paid media.
We possess, unlike other competitors excluded from the Wave, a fully standalone DMP built with advertising scale and velocity at its core and believe that it is an important differentiation. We assume that future research will again reflect this broader aspect of Data Management and are looking forward to further collaboration Forrester. Meanwhile, we enjoy the continued success of our Enterprise DMP.
Similar to Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for Ad Tech, where Adform was highlighted as a Leader, Industry trends suggest that integrated advertising platforms are an emerging topic for research in 2019. Further publications underpinning this trend is likely to follow soon.
This only reaffirms that Adform is a first-mover within the emerging Integrated Advertising Platform category and leads innovation in our industry. We believe strongly that a DMP is one of the cornerstones of a full-fledged IAP. As part of this modular approach, the DMP is and remains a powerful stand-alone product, that has advanced privacy controls, audience enrichment tools and which drives best practices for privacy-mindful data practices.
More than that, the benefits of a powerful DMP fully integrated into the wider platform, when compared to stand alone solutions, is a significant reduction in bottlenecks, superior data freshness, and the ability to minimize data loss while significantly improving performance.
With increasingly sophisticated opportunities driving effective creative storytelling, advertisers’ needs are changing. Within the market we see a strong need for added insight and rich campaign data paired with increasingly tight time horizons for identifying, segmenting, and engaging with users. This is forcing a re-examination of the traditional status quo and driving a need for more holistic reviews of DMP setups and how they integrate with the entirety of an advertiser’s technology stack. The need for a robust DMP that fully services marketers' holistic needs while specializing in advanced paid media and digital advertising needs is already strong and will only continue to grow over the next 24 months.