Launching GM Financial's first customer data platform

The problem

Customer data lived in multiple systems, so no team had a complete view of a customer, and building audiences depended on a few specialists. Personalizing service and marketing at GM Financial’s scale needed one profile per customer that every team could use.

What I did

• Hired and managed the team that would own the platform
• Guided the vendor implementation from the client side
• Architected data flows from multiple source systems into unified profiles
• Integrated the CDP with Adobe Journey Optimizer, Meta, and Salesforce for real-time segmentation and activation

Results

• 10M+ unified customer profiles serving service and marketing personalization
• Audience segmentation opened up to teams across the organization
• The data foundation for migrating from Adobe Campaign to Adobe Journey Optimizer

What I'd tell a team starting a CDP

• Design identity first. How you match a person across systems decides how useful every profile is.
• Hire the team that will own the platform early, while the vendor is still there to transfer knowledge.
• Pick one or two activation use cases that pay off quickly, and build from there.
• Move to Journey Optimizer after the profile data is reliable, not before.

Stack

• Adobe Real-Time CDP
• Adobe Experience Platform
• Adobe Journey Optimizer
• Adobe Campaign
• Meta
• Salesforce
• REST APIs