• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 18, 2012

BlueKai on Wednesday officially launched the Data Activation System, a platform combining the company's Data Exchange amd Data Management Platform with its media insights tool, Audience across Media (AxM), now officially out of beta. The company will create a third-party app network to support the platform.

The trio of products brought together in one platform lets marketers pull data to scale campaigns across 300 million unique users, but also use the data for more than just campaigns: site optimization, creative optimization, CRM, email marketing and more. Marketers can confirm audience targets and build profiles based on varying engagement levels.

"In the future, you will need data to inform all aspects of your marketing campaign and use several different platforms," said Cory Treffiletti, BlueKai's SVP of marketing. "You don't want to deal with activation fragmentation, which means working with many different companies. You want to work with one that can do it all."

The advertising industry isn't the first to live by this mantra that one company can do it all. The electronics industry tried something similar in the 2000s. Some ended up migrating back to specialty services, rather than jack-of-all trades.

Treffiletti said prices shouldn't change but will follow the company's "legacy models," a combination of volume and data ingested.

Think of DMPs and demand-side-platform providers as the middleware of the advertising industry. The companies and their platforms connect pipelines transferring data similar to the middleware used in enterprise applications or radio frequency identification technology networks.

The analogy works because BlueKai's technology can speak the individual languages of each platform and translate the commands as the data moves through the system.