• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 18, 2020

MediaWallah became the official onboarding provider Tuesday for users of Adobe Audience Manager (AAM), as privacy standards rolling out in California and elsewhere across the United States create a gap between what brands "know" about customers and how they engage with them. The companies plan to announce the partnership this week.

Closing the gap, MediaWallah built a way to connect CRM and onboarding of data. This partnership is the first time that customers of Adobe Audience Manager gain access to this capability.

“Adobe customers were looking for them to understand the value of first-party data,” said Nancy Marzouk, founder and CEO of MediaWallah. “Clients are getting more sophisticated and want to understand the value in terms of their marketing initiatives.”

MediaWallah sits in the line as a whitebox solution, she said.

When asked when Adobe approached MediaWallah to become a premiere partner, Marzouk said it has been about a year in the making.

The biggest challenge to solve became the ability to quickly get the data integrated with Adobe’s platform. It takes a long time to onboard data, she said.

MediaWallah has developed a ways to onboard the data and have it ready to use within 48 hours, as well as having the ability to check and verify identifiers.

The collaboration is designed to give customers of Adobe Audience Manager better control of their first-party data and onboarding — an issue of particular urgency for brands as third-party cookies go away. This gives them a way to keep hold of their data.

It’s an ongoing struggle for brands to gain better control of their data. MediaWallah’s ability enables data owners to incorporate custom, non-personally identifiable data — such as a loyalty number or Customer ID — to tie onboarding results back to CRM with privacy controls as email and other PII are stripped out from the data.

This capability -- a first for Adobe Audience Manager -- provides a far greater context for measurement and activation.