JUMP TO SECTION
The new era of customer data platforms
How a best-in-class CDP helps marketers activate warehouse data
Understanding the spectrum of warehouse usage
Benefits of a flexible approach to data composability
Customer spotlight: AT&T personalizing journeys with federated and real-time data
Enterprises have centralized vast amounts of customer data in cloud warehouses. Activation, however, often slows under the weight of ingestion delays, governance requirements, and IT dependencies. A flexible approach to data composability helps close that gap — enabling marketers to turn centralized data into meaningful, real-time customer experiences.
Businesses have spent years gathering customer data, thinking that more data would automatically lead to better personalization. However, the real challenge is ensuring data is accessible to the right teams and turning that data into results. The shift from simply holding onto data to actually using it, is where true personalization comes to life.
Customers today expect more than basic personalization. They want brands to truly understand their needs, respond in real time, and provide value on their own terms. To deliver these personalized experiences at scale, marketing teams need to be able to quickly access their stored data.
To achieve this, marketers require a customer data platform (CDP) that can keep pace with ever-changing customer expectations. However, the reality is very different. Only 28% of organizations feel confident their current CDP will meet their needs over the next 24 months, according to The State of Customer Experience in an AI-Driven World report1. This highlights how much of the technology marketers rely on simply can’t keep up, making seamless real-time customer experiences feel like wishful thinking.
For example, a team spots a fresh customer trend and wants to pivot a campaign immediately. But that data lives in a warehouse that can’t be accessed without help. They file a request with IT, wait days for a pull, and by the time the numbers land, the moment is gone. Everyone knows the campaign could have performed better, it just couldn’t move fast enough.
Privacy and security concerns add another layer of complexity. Moving data constantly isn’t an option because every transfer increases exposure and risk to customer information. As a result, marketers end up navigating with limited visibility — surrounded by data, but unable to use it when it matters most.
“With the acceleration of first-party data strategies — prompted by evolving privacy regulations and reduced reliance on third-party cookies — organizations are prioritizing data integration, security, and compliance more than ever.”
Everest Group Customer Data Platform (CDP),
Products PEAK Matrix Assessment, 2025 report2.
While data hurdles slow marketers down, customer expectations keep accelerating. They want dynamic, real-time experiences that adapt to their behaviors and signals, whether they are browsing online, engaging with an email, or interacting in person.
Delivering these requires more than data. It calls for a flexible approach that removes friction and harmonizes enterprise data into unified, intelligent profiles without unnecessary duplication or movement, enabling marketers to act at the speed customers expect.
Many enterprises have invested heavily in cloud data warehouses to consolidate historical transactions, business logic, and analytical models. Despite centralizing this intelligence, marketing teams often struggle to get hold of this data to activate audiences quickly.
Accessing this data is difficult because it often requires technical expertise or may include sensitive information that is highly governed. Even though marketers typically need only a small, relevant subset of this information — just enough to power timely or more personalized experiences — they struggle to extract it promptly. As a result, they can't meet customer expectations in the moment.
Another crucial dimension is privacy. There is a growing need to avoid unnecessary data movement — especially for sensitive or regulated data — driven by customer privacy concerns and tightening compliance expectations. Organizations are making greater efforts to reduce data copying, embrace zero-copy solutions, and ensure sensitive datasets remain secure at the source.
The gap between what businesses know and what they can actually activate is exactly what has pushed CDPs into a third era of evolution. Here’s how:
Audience creation.
Marketers can build net-new audiences directly from enterprise datasets without copying or relocating underlying data and activate those audiences through pre-built destinations.
Example: Build an audience of recently converted customers based on transaction data in a warehouse, then include these customers in a “welcome” email campaign.
Audience enrichment.
Teams can layer warehouse attributes into existing audiences, enhancing targeting and relevance without compromising data governance.
Example: Enrich an audience of logged-in cart abandoners by overlapping these users with the audience of recently converted customers. Send a promotional offer to encourage conversion.
Profile enrichment.
Enterprise-calculated audience values can be retained as attributes within actionable real-time profiles, enabling in-the-moment personalization triggered by live customer behaviors.
Example: Deliver same-page personalization the next time a recent cart abandoner visits the site.
For real-time action and in-the-moment experiences.
Some data needs to be where the action happens. Teams want low-latency decisioning, real-time profile updates, or immediate triggers like a cart event or an app signal. This approach brings curated data from the warehouse into the CDP, allowing marketers to:
For zero-copy access and analysis at enterprise scale.
In other cases, the data can stay exactly where it already lives. With federation, teams can build audiences directly from warehouse datasets — without copying or duplicating anything. This approach is ideal for:
For richer audience creation.
Many organizations take a balanced approach and require ingestion as well as federation — depending on the dataset, use case, and performance needs. This hybrid model allows teams to:
For any enterprise that relies heavily on expansive data warehouses, cloud systems, CRM platforms, and analytical tools — trying to force everything into one platform or one approach can only lead to new problems, process slowdowns, data duplication, and operational bottlenecks.
With a flexible approach to data composability, marketing can work with exactly the data it needs. IT maintains control and governance, and both teams move faster.
In short, here’s what a flexible approach delivers:
Instead of waiting on data by clients, extraction cycles, or new ingestion requests, marketers can now dive into real-time activation faster.
Adobe offers both data ingestion and federation, which in turn minimizes data duplication, while still allowing the ingestion required for real-time, in-the-moment experiences. A CDP that integrates a flexible approach to data composability, like Adobe Real-Time CDP, empowers this balance by treating data warehouses as strategic partners rather than obstacles and by providing a seamless spectrum of connectivity options.
AT&T, one of the world’s leading telecommunications companies, needed a unified platform for core audience creation and segmentation across teams. Its goal was to enable consistent, multichannel targeting of high-value customers and personalized experiences. By using Adobe Real-Time CDP, AT&T empowered its marketers, reduced reliance on multiple teams, and achieved consistent audience management at scale.
AT&T’s key objectives:
Results achieved:
Watch AT&T’s on-demand summit session to learn more about its approach.
A CDP delivers its true value when it becomes the backbone of an enterprise-wide customer experience strategy. Enterprises are moving toward data architectures that cut down on duplication, keep sensitive information safely governed, and make the most of existing warehouse investments. Through a flexible approach, teams can create and enrich audiences in real time while staying secure, compliant, and efficient.
By using this approach to data composability, Adobe Real-Time CDP enables direct ingestion, full federation, or a combination of both to align with the needs of a business. It powers use cases like audience creation, enrichment, and profile activation, meeting enterprises where they are and growing alongside their evolving data strategies.
Explore more about Adobe’s flexible approach to working with data warehouses.
