Medibank uses data cloud to hit and maintain "gold standard" for marketing

Medibank is using a multi-year investment in Salesforce’s data cloud to optimise its marketing, with a goal of consistently delivering the right message on the right channel at the right time.

Medibank's Brendan Lucas, right, speaks at the conference.

Marketing enablement manager Brendan Lucas told the Agentforce World Tour Sydney conference that the insurer’s initial deployment of Salesforce’s Data 360 was “marketing use case-driven”.

Data 360 was formerly known as Salesforce Data Cloud. It allows companies to build a data-driven “360-degree view of customers”, using data from across the Salesforce stack and stored in third-party systems.

One of the initial use cases for Data 360 was for audience management, which had previously been run out of Marketing Cloud Advertising Studio, which is being retired by the vendor mid this year.

“To be honest we had a pretty narrow view of what Data 360 could do in the beginning - it was really around audience targeting [and] campaign orchestration - and it wasn’t until we joined the pilot [for Data 360] back in 2020 that we really started to see that bigger picture,” Lucas said.

“On the journey from there, we had our DMP [data management platform] in about 2021 which we then sunset, and we were really starting to centralise audience management out of [Marketing Cloud] Ad Studio into Data 360. 

“The real unlock there for us was being able to not only do that, but also to centralise and unify our customer profile and insights which Data 360 gave us, [and] really set that baseline for media performance and activation.

“With the [media] landscape constantly shifting, maintaining media effectiveness is really challenging, so that was a key unlock for us as well.”

The insurer now uses Data 360 to unify data to segment its customer base and optimise advertising campaigns, and Lucas said that time and cost savings had followed.

The company is continuing to use Data 360 as the “cornerstone of designing strong marketing experiences,” Lucas said.

“I think at the crux of it is making sure that we’re delivering the right message on the right channel at the right time. 

“That’s the gold standard of customer experience. That’s where we want to get to as marketers, and I think that’s the key reason why we want to continue to evolve, to continually reach that gold standard, because our customers expect that of us.”

But Lucas also said that Data 360 usage at Medibank is evolving beyond marketing use cases only.

“That was our initial focus, but it’s grown from there,” he said.

“We’ve now moved to more personalising service experiences and onboarding journeys, and we’re also looking at how we can start to better collaborate with partners, obviously all in a privacy-safe way as well.”

Ry Crozier attended Agentforce World Tour Sydney as a guest of Salesforce.