CMP is the hot adtech acronym of 2018. There are actually two meanings to this term: (1) Creative Management Platform and (2) Consent Management Platform. Here’s an overview of both these products and why you may need one.
Creative Management Platform
Introduced in 2016 by Thunder, the CMP acronym original stood for “creative management platform,” a tool for producing and trafficking ad creatives. Rather than just a general purpose creative editor like Adobe Photoshop or Animate, which are applications built for a single designer to use by him or herself, CMPs are meant for an enterprise that has a scale issue with creative.
Many brands, agencies and publishers are increasingly needing to build ads in different sizes and versions for different audiences and media formats. Consequently, creative production demands have grown exponentially while most creative organizations can only scale linearly in their capability by adding more designers and programmers. Because traditional creative editors were built for highly advanced users, a creative bottleneck formed as demand went up and not enough talent or payroll existed to fill the void.
Creative Management Platforms radically simplified ad production by providing easier interfaces and automated production tasks like re-sizing. Forrester began recognizing CMPs in 2017 as part of their broader creative ad tech research which has been timed with the rise in enterprise demand for new marketing creative technologies.
Consent Management Platform
Introduced in 2018, the new CMP acronym stands for “consent management platform.” The European privacy laws known as GDPR required publishers and marketers to obtain explicit consent for certain tracking and targeting data. As a result, a new category of tools emerged to specifically help these enterprises collect and keep track of user consent.
The CMP then feeds that consent information tied to an ID to other selected partners in the digital advertising supply chain. As a result, every party in a publisher’s supply chain understands what data they may use and for what.
Which CMP do I need?
It depends if you’re looking to solve a creative problem or a data privacy problem. Talk to Thunder if you need help with your data-driven creative problems or digital creative production problems. Check out these consent management vendors if you’re looking to solve a privacy preference problem.
