Twins

Digital Customer Twins Boost Marketing and E‑commerce

The article explains how companies use digital customer twins—data-driven, real-time virtual models of customer segments—to simulate behaviour, test "what-if" scenarios and personalise marketing. An (unpublished) PwC survey found 28.2% of large German firms already use customer twins and 14.7% plan investment. Case studies include a kitchenware retailer that raised average basket value by 27% and increased repeat purchases by 18% after tailoring offers, and beverage brand Air up which, with vendor DXI, cut external research costs by ~90% and sped internal approvals roughly tenfold after centralising data into a Data Hub. Reported aggregate benefits from adopters include 73% more interactions, 2.3× higher conversion rates and up to 40% less wasted ad spend. The piece discusses privacy safeguards (anonymised profiles, cookie-consent control) and positions customer twins as a privacy-aware martech approach for more relevant customer experiences.

Rayn Launches Digital Twins to Transform AdTech Analytics

Rayn, an analytics startup led by Tim Geenen (co-founder of Faktor and former LiveRamp privacy lead in Europe), aims to catalyze the market for digital twins. Digital twins are synthetic personas created from first-party data that reflect how groups of consumers with similar preferences think and shop, without requiring personal data or identity matching. Rayn envisions refining these personas using social data collection tools and a brand’s own data from CDPs, CRMs, and call-center records. Generative AI is seen as a key accelerator, enabling marketers to query software-based personas for insights, even though current public AI chat services remain early in development. Development started in January, with the first alpha product slated to ship next month to a small set of clients, beginning with creative agencies and targeting travel, mobility, and ecommerce as potential markets. Geenen argues that smaller data sets can still yield viable models, broadening Rayn’s addressable market.

Embrace Digital Twins: The Future of Customer Data

Marketing leaders face privacy constraints and shrinking third-party cookies while pursuing first-party data strategies. The column argues that pursuing a 360-degree view is costly and not always valuable, and introduces the digital twin of the customer (DToC) as a flexible, probabilistic model that simulates behavior to guide data collection, segmentation, and experience optimization. DToC supports ad targeting and journey orchestration across the customer lifecycle and may be especially useful in uncertain times when historical data is unreliable. Gartner's Lizzy Foo Kune notes that DToC is nascent but worth integrating into long-term plans, with practical steps like cross-functional data collaboration, monitoring model evolution, and privacy-preserving techniques such as synthetic data. The article cites Gartner research showing only 14% of organizations have achieved a 360-degree view and 41% cannot prove marketing value after data integration, and mentions an upcoming Gartner/AdExchanger Industry Preview event in NYC.