[Product request] Add support for date values in Audi...

[#1]

Good afternoon,

Was discussing a current limitation of Adobe Audience Manager with our Adobe consultant, and she suggested raising a feature request with you (to then pass on to the product / engineering teams).

Context:

NOW TV is a digital TV streaming service  (part of the Comcast family).      Our users can pick and choose from a variety of content passes:   CINEMA / ENTERTAINMENT / REALITY TV / KIDS / SPORTS – and are not tied to any contract. They can select monthly subscriptions and cancel them whenever they like.

To make data processing and compute as efficient as possible, we store every user action within our service into our data lake as an event (with corresponding event timestamp)

Challenge:      

Since we operate as a subscription business, a lot of things we do require us to use dates, e.g to know when a subscription expires, to calculate our customer lifetime value, tenure, etc.

However, unlike Adobe Campaign, Audience Manager does not understand the concept of a date (or a timestamp).

The impact for us is that we then have to create very complex logics to make the data work specifically for Audience Manager e.g  instead of using the date a pass expires, every single day we have to calculate the number of days until a pass expires.

We have more than 11.5 Millions of accounts in the UK alone, and this example is only one attribute out of dozens of customer attributes that we use that do require such date calculations.    (We also operate across 6 EU countries)

Adding support for date values would be extremely beneficial for us and speed up our release cycles.

Ask:    Could we add support for date values in Audience Manager as a roadmap candidate?  (would benefit all subscription businesses, independent of vertical)

Cheers,

   Robin

[#2]

Hi there,

This is a limitation in AAM and is a good candidate for a feature request.

Adding some more context in below:

Date/Time data in Audience Manager:

Regarding the dates to be passed as “key”=”value” pairs in Audience Manager, there is no date/time data type in AAM.

The trait rules rely on Comparison and String-Matching operators: https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/aam/data-explorer-supported-operators.html

Broadly, there are only numeric and string data types, but there is no place in AAM to define any data type for incoming “key”=”value” pairs in flat file or while defining the trait expression.
Whether the value is of type string or numeric, that depends upon the operator and values used in trait expression.

The best way to send date/time related data to AAM is to first convert into number of days, months or years and then send it as “key”=”value” pairs in flat file for AAM.

For example, for date of birth, convert that to age in years or months first.

Example: Sending age signal for a record to AAM via flat file.

[CRMID]<tab>“age”=”25”

Matchregex for Date/Time data:

The issue with using matchregex is that there is no way to convert that date into days in relation to another date or current system time in AAM.

Also, there is no re-evaluation or daily date change re calculation in AAM.
Whatever data values we send to AAM using flat files are static, and they only update when you resend another flat file with changed/new values.

Example: If a person has “age”=”24”, and we send this signal in a flat file today, then AAM will not increment the age to 25 next year. We would need to send another flat file to AAM, as their details change.

[#3]

Hi Varun, That's correct - this is what we tried doing as a workaround, but is extremely compute intensive in our data lake as we have to refresh billions of attributes daily + Audience Manager still does not "understand" these values so no calculations on relative date values possible.