When Six Flags and Cedar Fair merged in mid-2024, the newly combined entertainment giant brought together $3 billion of business but faced a critical challenge: how to unify their customer data and consolidate their marketing technology into a modern, standardized stack to support a more personalized, scalable guest experience. With over a decade-long relationship, Six Flags turned to Merkle to help them through this journey—beginning with the selection and implementation of Treasure Data’s Intelligent Customer Data Platform (CDP).

Six Flags Entertainment’s strategic goals for 2025 are to increase park attendance, boost per-visit spend, and deepen guest loyalty. To flawlessly execute these goals and capture share of wallet in the competitive family entertainment sector, Six Flags is focused on understanding its guests more comprehensively to help shape their park experiences in a fun and relevant way. Treasure Data plays a central role in achieving these aims by unifying Six Flags’ data and providing intelligent orchestration and scalable personalization.

Key highlights:

• Over $1 million in cost savings from tech consolidation
• Rapid implementation for Treasure Data, including Snowflake and Airship integration, in under 3 months
• Improved intelligent orchestration and scalable personalization capabilities

“

Treasure Data is accelerating our journey to become more sophisticated in delivering personalized, cross-channel experiences. Our partnership is much more than a vendor-client relationship — they are an extension of our team helping capture share of wallet in family entertainment.”

Daryle Powers

Vice President – Marketing

Six Flags Entertainment Corporation

Challenges

The newly expanded Six Flags needed a plan to consolidate technology, optimize costs and reimagine their guest experience to prove value for consumers’ discretionary dollars.

CRM and data integration strategies across the enterprise were antiquated and struggled to provide the personalization today’s consumer expects. Lifting and shifting wouldn’t work – developing new strategies that work with a reimagined guest journey were essential.

Solution

RFP and POC

The RFP process included several contenders, but Treasure Data stood out—not for its flash, but for its substance. While the other vendors emphasized sleek interfaces, Treasure Data provided a user-friendly UI along with the advanced data science capabilities and scalability required to handle the complexity of Six Flags’ orchestration goals.

A proof of concept demonstrated Treasure Data’s ease of use with data ingestion from various sources and profile enrichments with strong identity resolution. The POC used Six Flags data to uncover insights on passholder and daily-ticket guest demographics and behaviors with regards to guest visits, in-park spend, and engagement.

The team was able to see the art of the possible and how marketers could turn those insights into orchestrated campaigns that drive profitability and post-park engagement, building deeper relationships with passholders and other guests.

Merkle also proved valuable at what Six Flags VP of Marketing Daryle Powers identified as a foundational requirement for this initiative to be successful – “the right humans running the big machines.” In partnership with Treasure Data, Merkle delivered an optimal org structure, key hires to make, and how to take a crawl-walk-run approach to deliver fast value and increase use cases over time.

Implementation

Treasure Data’s hybrid CDP architecture, enabling seamless integration with Snowflake’s data warehouse, also made it the ideal choice. This provided a flexible framework for driving increased attendance and in-park spend. The decision was also strategic: by decommissioning its duplicative marketing automation platforms, Six Flags could streamline operations and reinvest in smarter, more flexible marketing tools.

The first phase of implementation focused on transitioning legacy Six Flags off its marketing automation platform and into a new orchestration model using Treasure Data and Airship, a customer experience platform.

Despite a tight timeline and the holiday season, the team went live with the project in under three months. The result: a complete shutdown of a costly legacy marketing tool and a new, efficient pipeline from Snowflake to Treasure Data to Airship, empowering more robust and customer-informed strategies spanning data, orchestration, and activation.

Leveraging Treasure Data’s capabilities, including Customer Journey Orchestration, Segment Insights that deliver on-the-fly analysis of potential audience segments, and easy activation across a range of owned and paid channels, empowered marketers to harness Treasure Data for audience insights and campaign strategy with no coding expertise required. 

“

Merkle is one of our strongest strategic partners and thought leaders, providing direction and support as we transform our business due to merger. They are essential to the success of our marketing and organizational future.”

Daryle Powers

Vice President – Marketing

Six Flags Entertainment Corporation

Results

With the strategic guidance and expertise of Merkle and the capabilities of Treasure Data, Six Flags is reimagining how data is leveraged across the organization and laying the groundwork for scalable personalization. Migrating into a consolidated data structure empowers the company to connect the dots of guest interactions with powerful next-best-action experiences. Merkle and Treasure Data are all driving a new way of orchestrating and activating.

While Six Flags first used this tech implementation for simple tasks such as newsletters and surveys, it laid the foundation to support more sophisticated CX initiatives. The next phase of the implementation will migrate orchestration for legacy Cedar Fair customers to the new platform and redesign customer journeys from scratch for both legacy brands, introducing personalization for the new, integrated Six Flags brand.

By implementing Treasure Data CDP and connecting it directly to the Snowflake customer database, Merkle created a flexible foundation for processing and activating customer data that can evolve with shifting priorities and new martech solutions.

Future plans: AI and the future of the guest experience

Generative AI is on the horizon for Six Flags as they continue to define positioning and use cases for their business. The amusement park corporation will explore Treasure Data’s AI Agent Foundry capabilities—such as natural language querying and AI-driven campaign creation—in 2026.

Six Flags is laying the groundwork by organizing their assets and data structures to support smarter segmentation, more personalized experiences, and a shift toward customer-centric marketing that balances automation with emotional resonance.

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The post Six Flags Entertainment | Case Study first appeared on Treasure Data.

Implementing a customer data platform (CDP) takes careful planning. Getting your entire business onboard with using it is a critical component of that plan. After all, adoption drives success. 

In the 2024 CDP World session Driving CDP Adoption: Lessons from Informa’s Success Story, Informa shared its journey from legacy systems to the creation of IIRIS, Informa’s proprietary first-party data platform, which uses Treasure Data CDP. They have scaled the CDP to 28 markets and a known audience of 43 million, with adoption across the global business. 

If you’re looking to drive global growth with agentic AI and data within your organization, don’t miss CDP World 2025, register for free.

Read on to learn key lessons from Informa’s success story.

Creating IIRIS: Informa’s proprietary first-party data platform

Informa is an international business with a network of companies across 30 countries. Some of its brands include Monaco Yacht Show, Black Hat, and National Restaurant Association Show. It has two main markets: B2B and academic research. Its B2B Markets businesses deliver Transaction-led B2B events, Content-led B2B events and Experience-led events, alongside specialist content and media and digital services..

Sangeetha Parsan, VP of Customer Data Solutions and Services, said that Informa is all about connections – with people, ideas, and knowledge. Data is a key part of their business.

In July 2021, Informa created IIRIS and began standardizing data at all levels, including products and demographics. Four months later, they selected Treasure Data CDP as its B2B customer data platform.

IIRIS has evolved as the central CDP for Informa, delivering a consent-driven and enriched B2B data ecosystem. With this platform, Informa businesses can engage better, create new products, and improve overall marketing effectiveness.

Mary Wallace, Senior Director, Marketing Technology IIRIS, and Thomas Devos, Martech Strategy Manager, explained the strategies they put in place to overcome challenges and drive adoption across the company.

The building blocks of successful adoption

It’s one thing to acknowledge the challenges they faced. 

It’s another to find ways to reduce or eliminate them and drive true adoption of the CDP. Wallace and Devos walked through eight keys to Informa’s success that you can also implement to drive the success of a CDP in your organization. 

1) Onboard new businesses strategically

The IIRIS team onboarded businesses one at a time. This allowed them to focus on the needs and business drivers of each one and understand what marketers and the business needed. By working this way, the team could take learning to the next business. 

One thing they did was start a change management process that involved working with marketers and the business before they migrated them into the Treasure Data CDP environment. Part of this process included helping the business change some processes and ways of working so that they weren’t using the new tech stack the old way when they did move.

2) Involve the business from the start

Moving into Treasure Data CDP is more than moving to a data platform. It’s about doing things better and solving problems. The IIRIS team partnered with each business to define needs, issues, and goals upfront. While they built out the platform, they brought the businesses along with them. For example, they held daily scrum calls, during which questions were asked and answered, and had the businesses test the data to ensure its accuracy.

When a business was activated on the platform, they switched roles, and the business became the owner of the platform, with the IIRIS team supporting them.

3) Provide easy access to documentation

It’s not enough to provide documentation on how to use the platform. Devos said you need to market the product proactively. So, they created a website that provided everything needed to understand and use IIRIS, including complete documentation and a set of communities.

4) Implement a structured training program

A structured training program is essential for successful adoption. From how to use the platform to understanding data to marketing best practices and change management, Informa ensured that training was aligned with business strategy. 

Also, every business has employees at different technology maturity levels, so training needs to support everyone from the expert to the beginner. Informa provided a training program that would work for everyone, including on-demand and individual training for new hires.

5) Create a communications strategy built around transparency

How do you get the business to trust you? The IIRIS team did two things. First, they took a top-down approach, conducting quarterly business reviews (QBRs) with senior leadership. These reviews focused on strategy and learning what the business wanted to do (e.g., more personalization, targeted segmentation, cross-channel). 

Next, they took a bottom-up approach and talked to advanced users of the platform. What do they struggle with? These sessions aim to get more tactical feedback on how the platform works for them. 

Devos said that when you combine these two communication tactics, you can define a good roadmap that people will trust.

6) Connect through community

QBRs are great, but the IIRIS team also wants to stay in touch with platform users on a daily basis, so they created three forums (or communities).

1. Marketing Forum: For senior leadership, this forum covers strategic aspects such as industry trends and long-term vision.
2. Power Hours: This is a more tactical forum where they showcase work and use cases that are easy to implement.
3. Show and Tell: This forum showcases new innovative ideas and projects.

7) Provide tools to demystify data

Devos said that CDPs are great, but with great tools comes complexity. 

They wanted to provide tools to help businesses understand the business logic and the product. Some tools the team built included a product taxonomy, segmentation model, and standard and business-specific values.

8) Staff a dedicated team

Informa has an IIRIS team that supports business from discovery through onboarding and go live through to business as usual. There are dedicated teams for different aspects, such as a team dedicated to onboarding businesses, a consulting services team, support teams, and more.

Handing you the keys to CDP adoption

At Informa, the team understands what it takes to drive the successful adoption of its CDP, and you can learn a lot from their work. As you plan for your CDP implementation, think about the challenges Informa faced and what the team put in place to overcome them. The eight strategies Informa implemented can also help you drive adoption across your organization. The key is to adapt them to your unique business needs.

Interested in learning more from CDP World 2024? You can binge-watch the featured sessions on our YouTube playlist. Also, get your free ticket for CDP World 2025; we’d love to see you there. 

8 steps for success

How Informa is Driving Global CDP Adoption | CDP World 2024

Replay full session

The post Accelerating CDP Adoption: 8 Lessons From Informa’s Success first appeared on Treasure Data.

Understanding your customers is essential for delivering personalized, contextual experiences, but without the right tools, getting that complete customer view is a challenge. 

By implementing Treasure Data Customer Data Platform (CDP), Condé Nast has unified all of its customer data, forming a 360-degree view of its customers and allowing it to see the broader connections between brands and within each country. Check out this blog post for Condé Nast’s tips on uniting teams around a CDP.

A content business with 37 brands operating in 32 countries, Condé Nast’s digital transformation over the past several years included consolidating, centralizing, and standardizing its global operations. The CDP has enabled the company to improve its understanding of how customers interact with it generally and across all brands and markets. With the help of Treasure Data’s Customer Journey Orchestration tool integrated with the CDP, Condé Nast can understand where customers are in their journey and deliver the personalized experiences needed to drive engagement and conversions.

The fruits of this transformation are showing. With help from Ian Phillips, CRM Data Manager at Condé Nast, we’re sharing three examples of campaigns the company has been able to launch powered by Treasure Data.

Selling event tickets to a highly targeted audience

The first example is a campaign that focused on quality over quantity. 

Condé Nast ran a campaign promoting a fashion event they were selling tickets for. It was a small event, but the tickets had a high price point. 

In Treasure Data, the team created a highly engaged audience segment that included individuals who attended specific events over the past year, made purchases in the store, and subscribed to magazines. They also included individuals who spent a certain amount (which allowed them to calculate revenue across all revenue streams). The segment totaled 600 individuals. 

Additionally, they sent out the same promotion to a list of 60,000 people. The 600-person list sold more tickets than the 60,000 list. 

Phillips said there is a case for sending something to a broad audience, such as to build brand awareness or cement a brand purpose. But it’s a law of diminishing returns. 

Determining what seeds to plant to engage your audiences is key. Condé Nast doesn’t want to oversaturate its audience; sending relevant communications to precise targets is more important.

Implementing a winback journey for Vogue Magazine subscribers

Condé Nast always ran customer win-back campaigns prior to implementing Treasure Data, but was looking to get more sophisticated and automated in its outreach.

The marketing team wanted to change that using the CDP and customer journeys. Using Treasure Data’s Customer Journey Orchestration tool integrated with the CDP, Condé Nast set up a journey that targets lapsed Vogue magazine subscribers whose subscriptions expired 91 days ago. In the first stage of the journey, customers receive a personalized winback email promoting the benefits of resubscribing. 

The journey divided customers into domestic and international groups and adapted the timelines according to these groups. Domestic customers receive the first email in one week, and international customers receive it in one month. If no subscription occurs, domestic customers are retargeted with paid social ads, while international customers move directly to the next step. 

In the final stage, domestic customers receive a promotional SMS and email, while international customers receive a last-chance print subscription offer.

The CDP also helped the marketing team determine the stage of customer relationship with each customer and the journey was adapted using this information. For example, people who bought a subscription with another brand would be put on hold for a month. Everyone else went straight into the journey for the next communication. 

Phillips said they couldn’t easily do this type of segmentation without Treasure Data CDP or build these journeys without its journey orchestration tool. Without the data from the other brands, they couldn’t identify who recently subscribed to another brand or what stage of the journey they were at. The marketing team now automates this program and continually optimizes it.

We didn’t have that data richness, and the CDP has given us that … We’ll be able to measure how things are progressing and see very easily what changes affected the bottom line.

Re-engaging lapsed Vogue Collection subscribers

The final example from Condé Nast involves a Vogue Collection subscription winback journey. This journey is for lapsed UK customers who haven’t purchased from Vogue’s e-commerce store selling Vogue-branded merchandise in the last six months but made a purchase 6–18 months ago. This journey provided an opportunity to craft a personalized journey related to their past purchases, and ensure communications are customer-centric.

Using logic and automation within the journey orchestration tool, the journey begins with a personalized winback email with dynamic content. Customers who click certain links get a different experience, such as a follow-up email. Customers who don’t purchase within one week receive social or display ads (Meta or Google) based on their preferences for about one month. 

If they still don’t purchase within one month, the final stage offers a discount via email, and the journey ends if no purchase is made. Phillips said that if customers don’t engage at all, they are put into a holding pattern for about a year before they are eligible to be put back on the journey. The campaign underscored how Condé Nast can use marketing channels like email and paid media together to drive more engagement as opposed to independently.

Deep dive into Condé Nast’s use of Treasure Data and how it has helped the company transform marketing strategies and enhance the customer experience. Watch the full session to hear more:

How Condé Nast Enhanced Its Customer Experience with Treasure Data CDP

Watch the session

The post 3 Ways Condé Nast Personalized Customer Journeys with Treasure Data first appeared on Treasure Data.

As Head of Data Products at ITV, one of the UK’s largest broadcasters and streaming services, Hardeep Dhaliwal understands the challenges of leveraging data to transform audience engagement, drive sales, and deliver personalized experiences. 

He joined us at CDP World 2024 to share his insights on how a customer data platform (CDP) helps connect data and empowers teams to collaborate on the use cases that drive impact and revenue. Here are the highlights of what he shared: 

Q: How does ITV identify CDP use cases?

Hardeep Dhaliwal: We have multiple internal customers, and balancing all their needs is difficult. It’s the CDP product owner working alongside other teams in the business to make sense of everything with a clear roadmap, and it comes down to identifying the right use cases. What’s the most valuable? What’s the right timing? What needs to be done now, and what can be done later? 

Q: Tell us about the data you are working with in the CDP.

HD: We’ve been a Treasure Data customer since 2020, and around that time, the CDP was part of a wider data strategy. So, we recognized the value of data and personalization early. 

We started creating a data products approach, where we meshed the data, implemented the CDP layer, and then integrated other systems. In terms of our data, one of our richest datasets comes from ITV’s streaming platform, where we collect data on how people engage with the platform. We also have other third-party datasets as well.

Q: What systems have you connected with the CDP, and what do you want to connect? 

HD:   We have Databricks, a CRM tool, product experimentation and analytics, Google Analytics 4, and many other data sources. We see the CDP at the center, but there is a whole martech stack out there, and it takes a while to figure out what the stack looks like and how it will evolve in the next three to five years. 

Q: Who is responsible for the CDP, and how are decisions made? 

HD:  Being in the streaming and broadcast market is very interesting. There are a lot of behavioral changes. A lot of things are happening, and we’ve restructured the business slightly differently to break down silos. 

Instead of a Chief Marketing Officer, we have a Chief Viewer Officer, who is the ultimate decision maker. Marketing, product, my team, and distribution all sit under them. This allows us to see the end-to-end customer journey because all the teams sit within one area.

Q: What challenges do you face with data management? 

HD: I have worked on various data projects for almost 18 years, and the pain points always revolve around data engineering and quality. That’s where the heavy lifting and complexities are. Pipelines are always failing. How do you get robust pipelines and good data quality? 

It’s a continuous effort, and you must proactively stay on top of changes. 

Q: How do you interact with the teams that execute/activate the data? 

HD: This is one of the complexities with the CDP sitting centrally. You have data systems on one side and the martech stack and other applications on the other. Engaging everyone to develop a shared roadmap and vision and collaborating to achieve those successful outcomes is important. Ultimately, as a streaming and broadcasting business, it’s about monthly active users and streaming hours – those KPIs and revenue. That’s the shared goal that everyone needs to work towards.

Q: What excites you most about generative AI today? 

HD: There are three things:

• One is the automation of routine tasks you don’t want people to do so they can focus on higher-value activities. 
• The second is the hundreds of use cases on the creative side. 
• The third on the CDP side is that I would like the AI to do what a human can’t see, like create or suggest segments or insights. I think that is powerful and can allow much more value, lead to more personalization, etc.

Improving data pipelines with a CDP

Hardeep’s experience at ITV demonstrates the transformative potential of CDPs. His insights underscore the importance of robust data pipelines, a clear roadmap, and a focus on continuous improvement to drive impactful business outcomes. 

CDP World 2024 offered many more insights and knowledge from global brand executives and industry leaders like Hardeep. You can dive into more of these topics by checking out the featured sessions on our YouTube playlist

And mark your calendars for CDP World 2025! We’ll be back in Las Vegas on October 28–29, 2025, with more cutting-edge discussions on CDPs and the latest in marketing technology. You won’t want to miss out.

Tune into insights

CDP World 2024 On-demand

Replay featured sessions

The post The Power of CDPs in the Data Layer: Insights From ITV’s Head of Data Products first appeared on Treasure Data.

A leading global online game developer wanted to maximize advertising efficiency around their new title launches while establishing more direct relationships with customers. The company had amassed extensive first-party data but wasn’t getting much value from it.

Using Treasure Data Customer Data Platform to unify its first-party data, the gaming company has been able to identify more opportunities for DLC and offer perks at the right time to the right customer, growing its subscription base. Additionally, through sophisticated segmentation of its audiences, the game developer has been able to measure marketing performance/attribution, improving ROAS by 65%.

Challenges

The online gaming company has collected a lot of valuable first-party data from its users, including information from website visitors, in-game purchases, emails, and more. Unfortunately, this data was spread across more than a dozen different systems, making it hard to access and use.

The company needed a customer data platform that could provide a foundation for a trackable customer journey, including the ability to take anonymous visitors to known visitors, first-time buyers to routine buyers, and grow subscription-based accounts.

Solution

To tap the valuable insights on user behavior, preferences, and interests within their data, the gaming company turned to Treasure Data and Leverage Lab, a strategic first-party data activation partner.

Since deploying Treasure Data CDP, the online gaming leader has improved its marketing efficiency by building high-value audience segments, forming lookalike audiences, suppressing and geo-targeting audiences for cross-selling, and upselling high-propensity audiences.

Results

With the Treasure Data CDP, the online gaming leader has improved its marketing efficiency by building high-value audience segments, forming lookalike audiences, suppressing and geo-targeting audiences for cross-selling, and upselling high-propensity audiences. Results include:

• Created unified customer profiles by matching IP addresses from website visitors and various sources of gaming data
• Sophisticated segmentation of audiences
• Capture high-purchase intent signals on users and web events
• Effectively measure marketing performance/attribution
• Improved marketing ROI through better targeting

The post Game Developer Case Study first appeared on Treasure Data.

A global gaming company had limited visibility into its customer data, which hindered its marketing efforts. By deploying Treasure Data Customer Data Platform, the company has achieved greater efficiencies and effectiveness in running marketing campaigns with ready-to-segment, cross-studio data and better customer matching. Consequently, they’ve realized $15 million in ad savings and been able to personalize experiences to drive more engagement and cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Challenges

With over half a billion users interacting with its properties every month, the gaming company was struggling to make sense of a vast amount of fragmented data. Not only was this fragmentation slowing down new customer acquisition, but it was also increasing advertising costs and making it nearly impossible to cross-sell across brands.

Solution

The company realized that it would not be able to overcome its marketing and operational challenges without a unified view of the data from all the disparate systems and data silos across its multiple studios. By deploying Treasure Data CDP to integrate marketing data from multiple studios, the gaming company now has enriched, unified customer profiles. With this data, the company’s marketing team can now create customer segments more effectively to enhance their targeting strategies.

Results

By deploying Treasure Data CDP to integrate marketing data from multiple studios, the gaming company now has enriched, single-customer view (SCV) unified customer profiles. With this data, the company’s marketing team can now create customer segments more effectively to enhance their targeting strategies. This has led to benefits including:

• Greater efficiencies in running marketing campaigns with ready-to-segment, cross-studio data
• Increased effectiveness of campaigns with cross-channel advertising and better customer matching
• Decreased ad spend and increased uplift on promos
• Personalized customer experiences and communication
• More engagement and cross-sell/upsell opportunities
• Enriched customer profiles across brands

The post Global Gaming Company first appeared on Treasure Data.

Dentsu, one of the top five global advertising agencies, leverages its deep analytics expertise to deliver data-informed services to its more than 11,000 clients worldwide. The amount of data Dentsu accumulates on a specific campaign is huge: 10 terabytes, 100 terabytes, or even a petabyte for a single campaign.

Challenges

Dentsu first built their data management platform in-house taking more than a year, hard work, and substantial expense to complete. Each client needed a highly customized version of Dentsu’s platform, blending contextual and psychographic data with the client’s own success metrics to create the best algorithms. This meant that each new account required months of custom integration work to collect data from the customer’s POS, CRM, production databases, and more. And each new instance required engineering resources to maintain it.

Solution

Using Treasure Data Customer Data Platform (CDP), Dentsu’s data scientists could blend data from multiple sources and create advanced analytical workflows on the fly without any resources from IT. Instead of building custom connectors for an ever-increasing variety of data sources, Dentsu used Treasure Data’s plug-and-play integrations to set up new data feeds in minutes.

• In under a month, they centralized hundreds of customer datasets in Treasure Data’s flexible, scalable cloud
• The implementation time for each new customization dropped from months to weeks
• In addition, the Treasure Data CDP scales well and provides better performance than the original in-house system

With the addition of  Treasure Data, Dentsu is now a one-stop customer insight portal where all of its clients can discover consumer trends, launch highly targeted campaigns and intelligently nurture leads. By removing the obstacles between data and results, Treasure Data has exponentially increased Dentsu’s ability to deliver cutting-edge technology to its global brands.

Results

With Treasure Data, Dentsu was able to:

• In less than 1 month, centralize hundreds of customer data sets
• Customize client instances from months to weeks

The post Dentsu Case Study first appeared on Treasure Data.