The situation
Assume you're working at an agency that handles digital marketing for several clients. One of your clients hands you the media plan for their summer sale campaign.
The brief is clear: they want to target a segment of customers who showed strong engagement with several pieces of content but haven't actually converted. They decide to run a retargeting campaign across Google, Meta and TikTok, while also reaching the same audience through DPG Media.
More importantly, the client expects the campaign to go live within six weeks.
DPG Media isn't a niche line item in the plan. Its portfolio spans titles such as AD, de Volkskrant and NU.nl and reaches roughly 91% of the Dutch population across more than fifty brands. That's why it's part of the media plan in the first place.
The client already routes its data to Google BigQuery on an hourly basis, where it is transformed into segmented datasets. A US-based Customer Data Platform (CDP) then pushes these customer segments into channels such as Google Ads, Meta and TikTok, where the audiences are used as targeting criteria.
The CDP integrates well with these mainstream channels, but it doesn't integrate with DPG Media.
That makes the main project quite simple: how do you move an audience from Google BigQuery into DPG Media?
The audience data consists of a list of e-mail hashes and several additional attributes. DPG Media only needs the e-mail hashes, so the data needs to be filtered before it is sent. There is also a timing constraint: audiences can take well over an hour to reconcile inside DPG Media, while the source data in BigQuery is refreshed every hour.
The choices the agency is considering
With six weeks on the clock, there are four realistic ways to complete the project:
- File a feature request with the CDP and ask them to build a connector to DPG Media.
- Ask a technical colleague or consultancy to build the connector.
- Manually upload the audiences to DPG Media for the duration of the campaign.
- Remove DPG Media from the media plan entirely.
Each option comes with drawbacks that ultimately work against the client's goal.
| Option | The drawback |
|---|---|
| Wait for the CDP vendor | Even if the connector makes it onto their roadmap, you don't control its priority. There is a good chance it won't be ready within six weeks. |
| Build it yourself | Consultancy or engineering hours go into a very specific coupling, and somebody has to own it afterwards: schema changes, expiring tokens and failures that may only become visible once a campaign starts underperforming. |
| Upload the data manually | This can work temporarily, until volume grows, someone is unavailable, or compliance asks how a file containing hashed personal data moves between systems and who has access to it. |
| Drop DPG Media | That's difficult to explain to the client and means changing a media plan they've already agreed to. |
A route that fits the project
A viable alternative is to use LemonBridge to get the audience data from Google BigQuery into DPG Media.
Instead of building and maintaining a one-off connector, the agency configures a bridge that collects the audience from BigQuery, prepares it for DPG Media and delivers it on the required schedule.
For this use case, that means LemonBridge supplies the pieces that are specific to the data flow:
- Source and destination connectivity: collect the audience directly from Google BigQuery and deliver it to DPG Media.
- Transformation in between: strip out the attributes DPG Media doesn’t need and send only the required e-mail hashes.
- Scheduled delivery: run the data flow on a recurring cadence that follows the way the audience is refreshed in BigQuery.
- Managed operation: avoid writing, hosting and maintaining a custom connector solely for this campaign and destination.
The result is that the agency can add DPG Media to the same audience activation process without asking the CDP vendor to change its product, introducing a recurring manual upload process, or taking ownership of another custom integration.
See the BigQuery → DPG Media bridge
See the video for a full walkthrough.
Connect any tool in your martech stack
From CDPs and warehouses to ad platforms, publishers and internal systems. If the connection doesn't exist or doesn't fit the use case, LemonBridge builds the bridge.
Source or destination: choose any tool in your stack.
The platforms above are just examples. When the integration you need doesn't exist, LemonBridge builds a custom-fit bridge that gets your data where it needs to be and unlocks the use case you're trying to deliver.
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