Master Marketing Profile: New from Adobe

Just how they do that?

At the Adobe Summit this week several core services (much better construct than 'shared services') were introduced.  While not terribly sexy, they do go to the continuing evolution of an enterprise platform.   One of the new elements is "Master Marketing Profile" described as a single identifier or a 'ring to rule them all.'

Conceptually I'm intrigued since we have a need to look at audiences from the perspective of a publisher as well as a marketing services firm.  And as with any new service the gap between the idea described in the opening session on a 50' screen and the explanation of it on a monitor at the booth was quite noticeable.  We had questions and it felt like the answer was "I know a guy who knows a guy" who wasn't around at the moment.

So I thought I'd post my questions.   And to provide context, let's start with the following scenario.  I want to access an audience based on the following:

• Activity on our owned and operated sites using only content about a category of interest
• Traffic and events on the networks we represent that fit an 'audience extension model'
• Email and print subscription information for that category from a related line of business
• Loyalty and transaction based information from a retailer who promotes items in the category
• Social graph and interests from an advertiser's customer base that has expressed interest in a brand in the category

While going from site activity to testing on the same site seemed to be the emphasis in the beta testing, the above real-life problem generates a series of questions about the Master Marketing Profile.   I've tried to frame then in general terms, but they are biased to specific Adobe products/constructs.

1. Is the identifier built bottom up, e.g. a cookie, or from top down, e.g. total business?
2. Is this the commercialization of the 'universal ID' concept that existed in professional services?
3. If it is the master, is it safe to assume the existing identifiers are slaves and still remain active?
4. Is there one or minimum set of IDs required to build the master? 
5. Must all child identifiers be an existing Adobe ID?
6. As a core service, can I use it without analytics?
7. Can I define the master to be the data management platform ID or even a client or advertiser's identifier?
8. How are conflicts of information handled when dealing with multiple touch points?
9. What is the logic sequence for aligning the above sources into a master?
10. How will we know whether the process works or not?  
11. What percent of a given source can we expect to be mapped?
12. How do we ensure orphans remain viable entities over time if they are not in the 'audience library'?
13. How do we know which sources were used in a given profile or segment?
14. Is there a probability of belonging associated with each source of contribution?
15. How does the mapping process impact the creation of downstream business rules and event triggers?
16. If a map is built with incomplete information, how do we avoid garbage in gospel out?
17. Is membership in a segment based on this identifier a "Yes" "No" proposition, or "Maybe"?  (What is the likelihood that this identifier really does represent what we think we want?)
18. Is this a precursor to another consumer pool and compete with Axciom, KBM and Liveramp for matching services?
19. What information is in the payload when shipping segments?    
20. Does the process provide an audit trail of the mapping such that it can be defended?
21. Where is PII used and then masked in the process?
22. How are cookies, digital fingerprints, and device ID's utilized in the process?
23. How confident should we be we won't piss off consumers because of a technical black box?

If I get answers, I'll post them...