There’s a place in Chicago called Kasama that makes the best breakfast sandwiches – people line up before sunrise just to get one. By the time the doors open, there’s a several-hour wait for breakfast. Sure, you could optimize the wait, or you could change the paradigm: order from the app, pull up right when your sandwich is ready, and walk past the line. Yet even with this option available, people still wait for hours.
That’s exactly what’s happening in marketing today. If you’re still relying on legacy approaches to identity resolution – making copies of your data, sending it to a partner, waiting hours (or days) for it to be sent back, hygiened, and resolved, you’re waiting in line when you don’t have to.
Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?
- You repeat ETL processes for each tool in your tech stack since almost all need data.
- Your team spends more time managing integrations than using data to drive performance.
- Your customers feel the disconnect every time they get a generic email, irrelevant ad, or broken experience.
Composable apps change this equation. Built directly within your cloud data platform, they don’t just help you manage and activate data, but they also help you act on it faster, without moving sensitive data out of your secure environment.
Because let’s be real, you don’t have time to wait for data, just like you don’t have time to wait for breakfast.
The New Paradigm: Moving to Seamless Data Activation
For years, marketers have been stuck in the old cycle of accessing data: waiting for batch jobs to run (and crossing your fingers they don’t fail), refreshing dashboards, and manually triggering actions. It’s slow, reactive, and can’t keep up with the pace of modern marketing.
The good news is you've already done the hard work. You’ve pulled data from dozens of operational systems, curated it, and centralized it in a cloud-native warehouse or lakehouse. That’s no small feat, so why keep adding fragile data pipelines when you can activate it right where it already lives?
The new paradigm is the principle of data gravity, where capabilities flow to your curated environment rather than forcing data to move.
Composable apps make this real by embedding capabilities directly in your cloud data platform. Your data doesn’t just sit waiting to be analyzed, it drives real-time action, turning marketing into a feedback loop of data collection, insight, action, and optimization.
Here are three ways composable apps help marketers activate data in the real world.
1. Built-In Privacy and Compliance
Privacy isn’t just a legal box to check, it’s a brand promise to your customers. Every time data leaves your environment to power a campaign or sync with a vendor, that promise is at risk.
Since composable apps run directly inside your cloud data platform, they inherit its security, governance, and compliance controls. That means no more risky data exports, no more shadow copies, and no more scrambling to prove compliance during audits. It gives users full visibility and control over who can access data and how it’s processed.
What this means for your team:
- Legal and compliance teams can breathe easier
- Less time spent on privacy reviews and risk assessments
- More confidence in every campaign you launch
2. Hygiene, Enrich, and Activate Data Where It Lives
In the old model, data had to be moved, cleaned, enriched, and put back in place before anything could happen. Every step added time and risk.
Composable apps eliminate that friction by applying the principle of data gravity. With a zero-copy, zero-share architecture, your team can cleanse, enrich, and activate data where it lives in your own secure cloud environment. No duplication. No exposure. No waiting on IT to move data from point A to point B.
What this means for your team:
- Clean and prep data without ever moving it
- Enrich customer profiles using third-party data in a privacy-safe way
- Activate audiences instantly, directly from your cloud platform
3. Future Proof Agentic Activation
Tomorrow’s campaigns will be assisted by agentic systems, made up of autonomous agents that can trigger actions and help your teams gain outcomes faster. But to get there, you need a data foundation that’s ready to support AI.
That foundation starts with structure: metadata, taxonomies, and semantic layers that give agents the context they need to act intelligently. Composable apps help you do the prep work by making it easier to organize, enrich, and activate data in ways that AI agents can understand and use.
What this means for your team:
- Build a future-ready data foundation that accelerates AI adoption
- Reduce time-to-market by preparing metadata, taxonomies, and semantic layers now
- Enable agentic systems to deliver personalization at scale without re-platforming
Make Your Move to Composable
The future of marketing isn’t about adding more tools, it’s about embedding and connecting intelligence into every decision, every campaign, every moment.
This is why dentsu is making composable architecture a priority. dentsu.Composable is our modular, cloud-native solution designed to help brands activate data where it lives, securely, flexibly, and at scale. With a zero-copy, zero-share architecture, dentsu.Composable empowers marketers to cleanse, enrich, and activate customer data directly within their own cloud environment.
If you're ready for purpose-built activation, it's time to go native with dentsu.Composable.
