Adobe Inc. is updating its Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform offering with new capabilities that it says will help customers overcome plans by Google LLC to block third-party cookies.

The company said today that Adobe Real-Time CDP has gained newly enriched capabilities around customer profiles and artificial intelligence-powered targeting to help brands deliver personalized experiences to millions of customers.

The platform can now deliver real-time data with more than 24 trillion audience segment evaluations, Adobe said.

Built on the Adobe Experience Platform, Real-Time CDP helps companies bring together known and anonymous data from multiple sources in order to create customer profiles that can be used to provide personalized customer experiences across multiple channels and devices in real time. Adobe has high hopes that the platform can serve as an alternative to advertisers that have traditionally relied on third-party cookies to deliver personalized ads on the web.

Google is planning to phase out support for cookies in its Google Chrome browser and other services in 2023, leaving a big hole in the armory of advertisers. Real-Time CDP is being positioned as an alternative to cookies. Adobe claims that it will help brands gather first-party data and leverage consent-based practices to build rich, actionable customer profiles and segment audiences — and as a result will be able to continue to deliver personalized experiences to customers.

As of today, Adobe Real-Time CDP gains a new feature in beta that allows brands to enrich customer profiles using Adobe Commerce. The idea is that companies can use Adobe Commerce’s insights from shopping and browsing behavior to enhance customer profiles in Real-Time CDP. On the AI side, Real-Time CDP’s Business-to-Business and Business-to-Person editions are gaining pipeline building tools from Adobe Sensei that will enable brands to identify people and accounts that are promising sales leads.

There’s also a new feature called Segment Match that brands can use to manage and activate audience data across multiple channels.

Adobe Experience Cloud Senior Vice President Anjul Bhambhri said companies need to start thinking about moving away from third-party cookies now and embrace a new, first-party data strategy instead. “Businesses that invest in putting their first-party data into action are the ones that will deliver personalized experiences and beat the competition,” she said.

Real-Time CDP is also gaining enhanced privacy and security tools, including a new feature called Healthcare Shield, for customers in heavily regulated industries. Adobe said Healthcare Shield is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and allows brands to leverage more sensitive data to deliver personalized experiences. As the name suggests, it’s primarily aimed at healthcare providers.

Finally, Real-Time CDP is getting new privacy and security enhancements around data management, such as encryption control, tools to automatically honor policies around customer consent and preferences, and attribute-based access controls.

Liz Miller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that Google’s plan to do away with third-party cookies, and other developments such as Apple’s new app tracking transparency rules, have elevated the importance of first-party data, simultaneously increasing the stakes as to how that data is used and also the value brands create in exchange of customer data for engagements.

As a result, Adobe has focused its efforts on delivering both business-to-business-specific CDP capabilities and integrations with its vast portfolio of engagement tools and content solutions, Miller said. The idea is to integrate a multitude of facets that make up a total picture of customers, made up of known first-party data and pseudonymous data from multiple channels to create more robust customer profiles.

Miller explained that with Real-Time CDP, Adobe’s goal is to bring all of this data into a single view without homogenizing the customer intent or consent. In addition, it aims to ease the burden on marketers by enabling automatic updates across data connections without the need for manual data stitching or manipulation, she added.

“While I couldn’t call a CDP a replacement for the third-party cookie, it is definitely one tool that helps the brand and customer relationship to evolve thanks to its capacity to look beyond a tool or a function and  unify and normalize customer data  across a broad range of inputs,” Miller said. “Instead of relying on a third-party cookie for those behavior signals, teams behind customer engagements need only call their internal CDP to create that single pane of glass.”

Adobe said Real-Time CDP has had a positive reception from multiple customers who’ve had early access to the new features, including The Coca-Cola Co., Major League Baseball, ServiceNow Inc. and TSB Bank Plc. Mike Gamble, director of analysis and design at TSB, said the bank needs to maintain a complete picture of every customer that banks with it.

“The rich insights we get from Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform informs our personalization strategy to enrich customers’ experiences,” he said. “Most importantly, we can deliver that richness consistently online and offline because our decisions are based on every interaction in that customer’s past.”

Image: Adobe