Content as a Service v3 - Industry analysts speak - Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 08.44
Explore the features and capabilities of Real-Time CDP.
Built on Adobe Experience Platform, Real-Time CDP lets you create high-value audience segments with intelligence for real-time B2C and B2B use cases across the entire marketing funnel, without relying on third-party cookies.
Connect to data from one flexible environment — no matter the source.
Take full advantage of your data warehouse investments and easily enrich first-party data to empower enterprise teams to activate valuable data and drive more personalised customer experiences.
- Maximise the value and minimise the movement of your data with a flexible architecture. Activate customer data directly from your existing warehouse for real-time, personalised experiences without the need to move or copy underlying datasets.
- Build powerful, federated audiences. Create and enrich high-value audiences directly from your data warehouse and combine them with continuously ingested internal and external data sources.
- Unify comprehensive data sources. Securely ingest and unify zero-, first- and cookieless third-party data, including insights from trusted second-party sources for in-the-moment engagement and personalisation.
Connect data to form.
With Real-Time CDP, you can connect and normalise online, off-line and pseudonymous customer data to create unified B2B and B2C profiles and audiences in one platform. From this foundation, Real-Time CDP automatically denormalises and materialises data optimised for real-time decisioning, personalisation engagement with customers and prospects.
- Standardise, clean and monitor data. Ensure data is consistently structured, clean and traceable, enabling accurate insights and trusted customer experiences.
- Harmonise and unify customer profiles. Empower teams across the organisation to access and update a unified customer profile that ensures that they’re working with consistent, current information.
- Get efficient self-serve templates and interactive tools. Help teams to act more quickly with resources that are marketer-friendly and agent-supported.
- Data Engineering Agent. Automate data onboarding, SQL preparation, data collection and troubleshooting with Data Engineering Agent.
Build, activate and optimise audiences at scale.
Stand up and optimise campaigns with tools to create and segment audience and customer profiles in real time — all enriched with diverse data sources and powered with AI insights.
- Create and manage audience insights from a centralised interface. Quickly create, manage and optimise audiences using intuitive tools and natural-language prompts. This streamlines the process of building and refining audiences, reduces reliance on technical resources and accelerates speed to market for campaigns.
- Get advanced audience insights for personalisation. Gather deep, actionable insights into audience behaviour and campaign performance, enabling more precise targeting and personalisation.
- Enrich audiences with flexible input from all sources. Leverage data from multiple sources — including warehouse connections and second- and third-party partner data — to enrich and activate audiences across channels, while keeping management central and internal.
Confidently manage your data with enterprise governance tools.
Manage customer data across all lines of business from one centralised platform.
- Give teams enterprise data privacy and compliance. Create, manage and enforce data usage policies across teams that help ensure sensitive data is only used in approved ways and aligns with privacy regulations.
- Use permissions to control data access and security. Determine which users and teams can access specific data types and actions, limiting the exposure of sensitive information and reducing the risk of unauthorised access.
Deliver relevant, real-time customer experiences across every channel.
Reach new customers, personalise engagement and optimise the entire funnel for measurable impact with real-time engagement.
- Deliver targeted customer experiences and in-the-moment personalisation. Leverage real-time data ingestion and streaming delivery to activate personalised experiences for customers faster.
- Plan, orchestrate and activate cross-channel journeys. Use prebuilt integrations and APIs to activate known and unknown data across channels to build destinations for customers along their journey. Plan journeys using a marketer-friendly, easy-to-use canvas to activate with even more speed.
The latest innovations for Real-Time CDP.
Real-Time CDP is progressing the category with new ways to personalise every moment in the customer journey at scale.
- Expanding the real-time customer profile with AI context and meaning to power customer engagement in the agentic era. Real-Time CDP will power the agentic era by incorporating unstructured datasets such as conversational intent, audio, video, image and documents, with traditional structured datasets such as CRM and owned channel engagement. Introduced first in Adobe Brand Concierge, this expanded profile with a multi-faceted customer view will soon be available for use on owned channels, AI-powered channels, brand assistants and conversational experiences to power personalisation based on context and meaning in real time and at scale.
- Re-envisioning audience creation and management with agentic capabilities in Real-Time CDP. With enhancements to Audience Agent — powered by Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator — customers will now receive proactive alerts with explanations that reduce troubleshooting efforts and minimise repetitive tasks. Audience Builder will now include agent-powered field discovery to help find the right audience definitions, using natural language and provide agent powered recommendations so that marketers can get to high value audience creation and optimisation more quickly.
- Increased scale, visibility and flexibility that ensures personalisation during peak business periods. Harness new monitoring and visibility dashboards and the ability to scale critical capabilities like streaming and edge segmentation to support personalised customer experiences during critical peak business periods.
- Expanded data composability. Use expanded approaches for leveraging enterprise data warehouse datasets to complement Real-Time CDP workflows. Utilise bi-directional zero-copy data sharing with additional partners and enhance audience building with relational data objects from enterprise systems such as household relationships and product descriptions. Maximise efficiency with embedded agentic capabilities within existing composable workflows to accelerate validation, connection steps and audience creation.
Advancements coming to Real-Time CDP Collaboration.
- Real-Time CDP Collaboration for Agencies. Agencies can now use Real-Time CDP Collaboration on behalf of their clients to action on client and agency data for campaign planning, activation and measurement with publishers, media networks and other brands. In addition, bi-directional integrations with media agency holding companies are now available to help brands connect owned media to paid advertising for fully integrated and measurable engagement.
- New solutions for commerce media networks and publishers. Powered with Adobe GenStudio, Adobe is developing a purpose-built solution to unify audience management, measurement and creative into one solution underpinned by AI. This self-serve portal enables brands and agencies to engage their high-value audiences in new innovative ways.
- Real-Time CDP Collaboration Starter — now available. Invite, invest in, and collaborate with any brand, publisher, agency or data partner — without licensing requirements for the invited party. Build a limitless and frictionless ecosystem without barriers to entry.
- New partner integrations. New integrations with TikTok, The Trade Desk, Amazon Ads and Amazon Marketing Cloud, Acxiom and Experian inside of Real-Time CDP Collaboration are helping brands derive audience insights, power audience enrichment to activate at scale and close the loop with outcomes-based measurement to drive intelligently personalised experiences across channels that perform.
Adobe Real-Time CDP use cases
Engage new audiences.
Discover and engage new audiences without relying on third-party cookies.
Convert unknown prospects.
Recognise and remarket to unknown visitors with personalised experiences for better conversion.
Create customer profiles.
Build unified profiles that power more targeted and relevant omnichannel experiences.
Retain customers.
Connect data faster to enhance your customer profiles, unlock deeper insights and retain customers.
Govern customer data
Earn and maintain customer trust through responsible data governance, management and usage.
Industry analysts speak.
Additional Real-Time CDP offerings.
Adobe Real-Time CDP Collaboration
A purpose-built data collaboration application that lets you connect with brand partners, advertisers and publishers — from connected TV to commerce media — to find high-value audiences in a user-friendly environment, all while prioritising privacy.
Adobe Real-Time CDP Connections
Streamline how data is collected and distributed to Adobe Experience Platform and other systems and endpoints — such as Facebook and Google — while improving site performance. Adobe Real-Time CDP Connections uses server-side forwarding to enable you to instantly deliver powerful marketing experiences.
Driving results for some of the world’s biggest companies.
“By unifying our data, we started waking up to the fact that our customers' trust is an extraordinarily valuable asset. They were telling us exactly what they were looking for and we needed to be more aligned with ways to help them.”
Melanie Babcock, Vice President of Integrated Media at The Home Depot
Learn more about Real-Time CDP.
Better together.
Connect Adobe products to create experiences that are right on time and just right for your customers.
Real-Time CDP + Adobe Journey Optimizer
Build unified profiles and actionable audiences while also creating and delivering personalised customer experiences.
Real-Time CDP + Adobe Customer Journey Analytics
Supplement customer profiles with cross-channel behavioural insights for enhanced audience creation and activation.
Personalisation at scale
Adobe can help you to make personalised experiences a part of every customer moment.
Real-Time CDP FAQs.
Real-Time CDP is the customer data platform application; Adobe Experience Platform is the foundation it runs on, so a Real-Time CDP licence includes the platform services it depends on rather than being a separate purchase you bolt on. Experience Platform provides the shared data plumbing: ingestion, Experience Data Model schemas, Identity Service, the Real-Time Customer Profile, segmentation and governance. Real-Time CDP is the application that turns those services into a marketer-facing workflow for unifying data, building audiences and activating them. If you are comparing Adobe against stand-alone CDPs, Real-Time CDP is the product to compare and it inherits the platform's identity, governance and AI rather than reinventing them.
Real-Time CDP standardises, validates and connects data from online, offline and pseudonymous sources into one real-time customer profile that every team can act on. Incoming data is structured to a common Experience Data Model, validated as it is ingested and resolved to a person or account through Identity Service, so records that arrive from your website, mobile app, call centre, point of sale and CRM become one profile rather than five disconnected ones. That unified profile is what makes downstream audience building and activation consistent, instead of each team working from its own copy of the customer.
Usually yes, because they do different jobs and Real-Time CDP is designed to unify their data rather than replace them. A CRM manages relationships and transactions with your known customers and leads; a DMP works with anonymised third-party audience data for advertising; a CDP builds a persistent, unified profile by harmonising data from across all of those systems and your own channels. In practise Real-Time CDP ingests CRM data and other sources into one profile, then activates audiences from it, so your CRM stays your system of record for customer relationships while Real-Time CDP becomes the system that makes that data actionable across channels.
The three are sibling applications on Adobe Experience Platform and they divide the work: Real-Time CDP unifies data and builds and activates audiences, Journey Optimizer orchestrates the multi-step journeys and messages those audiences receive and Customer Journey Analytics analyses how those journeys performed. Because all three share the same Real-Time Customer Profile, an audience you build in Real-Time CDP is directly available to Journey Optimizer for orchestration and to Customer Journey Analytics for measurement, with no export and re-import between them. You can start with Real-Time CDP alone and add the others as your use cases grow into orchestration and cross-channel analysis.
Real-time segmentation qualifies a person into or out of an audience the instant their behaviour or attributes change, rather than on a batch schedule that can be hours or a day behind. Traditional segmentation evaluates against static or historical data on a recurring run, so a visitor who abandons a basket is not reachable until the next batch completes. In Real-Time CDP, streaming segmentation can qualify that visitor in the moment and make them available for same-session personalisation or immediate activation, which is what makes "in the moment" use cases possible rather than next-day ones.
Choose by the kind of profiles you manage: B2C for consumer profiles, B2B for account-based profiles (people and the accounts they belong to) and B2P (Business-to-Person) when you need both in a single CDP to target the same person across all lines of business. All three are editions of the same product, each offered in a Prime and an Ultimate package, so the choice is about data model and use case, not about buying a different platform. The B2B edition adds B2B-specific schemas, account and people identity resolution with account hierarchies and a purpose-built Marketo Engage connector; confirm the exact edition and package with your Adobe account team, since guardrails and included capabilities vary by tier.
They are additional Real-Time CDP offerings for two specific jobs. Real-Time CDP Collaboration is a data clean room application that lets you discover, activate and measure high-value audiences with advertising and publisher partners in a privacy-safe environment, without relying on third-party cookies and without exposing underlying customer data (it is currently in limited availability by region, so confirm availability for your market). Connections is the data-collection side, capturing streaming behavioural data through Adobe's Edge Network so profiles update in real time. Both extend the same Real-Time CDP profile rather than being separate platforms.
Getting started centres on connecting your data sources, mapping them to Experience Data Model schemas, configuring identities and merge policies to build the real-time profile and setting governance labels and policies, after which you build audiences and connect destinations for activation. You do not have to move everything at once: Real-Time CDP supports ingesting the data you need for real-time use cases while federating other data from your warehouse, so most programmes start with one or two high-value use cases and a subset of sources and expand from there. Teams typically pair a data engineer or architect on the connection and identity set-up with the marketing owners of the use case.
Let us show you the full power of Adobe Real-Time CDP.
cardTitle
Adobe Real-Time CDP for unified customer profiles.
Description
Unify and harmonise customer data to build AI-powered audiences and real-time profiles for personalised engagement across the customer journey.
cardDate
2024-03-26
cardImage
primaryTag
caas:content-type/product-page
Tags
caas:content-type/product-page, caas:products/adobe-real-time-cdp
Let's talk about what Adobe Real-Time CDP can do for your business.
