SAS is helping brands prepare for the challenges that will arise from the imminent demise of third-party cookies with unique real-time customer data platform (CDP) capabilities to enable them to act with speed and agility to meet customer expectations.

The SAS CDP helps brands collect, analyse and activate first-party data in real time, instantly embedding insights into customer-facing systems to create value in consumer engagement and business models.

How are SAS CDP capabilities different?

Data ingestion and identity management

SAS has an extensive data collection technology – one that feeds an open and cloud-based, customer-centric data hub. It is an enterprise-scale solution for collecting 360-degree customer views across digital channels, offline channels and third-party properties. Unlike many web data collection applications, SAS can provide granular contextualised customer-level information on user behaviour; capture and send events in real time; and stitch together online and offline information into a single unified profile.

Segmentation and data provisioning

SAS goes beyond simple segmentation capabilities to provide advanced models, clustering and campaign targeting. ‘Do it for me’ options can also provide guided analytics and segment discovery for marketers who are not necessarily data scientists.

Segments can be dynamically updated with digital activity in real time and algorithmic, multitouch attribution lets marketers understand how customers are journeying across all contact points. Predictive models, forecasting, goal-seeking routines, guided analytics, journey analytics and decisioning beyond marketing round out the AI and decisioning capabilities in the SAS CDP.

Streaming data and unique hybrid data architecture

SAS’ streaming data platform provides a real-time, two-way interaction between digital properties and on-premises applications. This eliminates lag time and powers real-time dynamic updates of customer identities and segments. The hybrid data architecture allows marketers to keep their data where they want it and enables them to join online and offline data while also providing a rigorous digital guardianship as personally identifiable information (PII) data is not stored in the cloud. 

SAS Australia and New Zealand head of customer analytics, Justin Theng says in today’s retail environment, it’s essential marketers have access to real-time data to effectively and efficiently meet dynamic customer expectations.

“By investing in customer intelligence and data along with human intelligence and AI, marketers can speed up their ability to predict and test beyond intuition and get a true picture of their customer. SAS’ unique real-time CPD capabilities do just that, by deriving real intelligence from first-party data.”

SAS principal product marketer for CDPs, Lisa Loftis believes traditional CDPs fill a gap in the marketer’s toolkit but it’s not enough in today’s world where customer engagement is constantly evolving, and marketers need to change on a dime.

“Losing the data provided by the third-party cookie places an even higher emphasis on these real-time CDP capabilities. Although Google has pushed back their plans to phase out third-party cookies until 2023 – these will be going away. And the sooner the planning starts for this, the better off companies will be.”