Accelerating CDP Adoption: 8 Lessons From Informa’s Success
Last updated August 21, 2025Informa’s journey in implementing its customer data platform (CDP) highlights effective strategies for widespread organizational adoption, showcasing a transformative shift from legacy systems to a sophisticated, consent-driven B2B data ecosystem used across its global network.
Key to their success is a structured onboarding process for new businesses, tailored training, and an engagement strategy that ensures all business units are fully integrated and active participants in leveraging the platform to enhance marketing effectiveness and product development.
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).
- Marketing Forum: For senior leadership, this forum covers strategic aspects such as industry trends and long-term vision.
- Power Hours: This is a more tactical forum where they showcase work and use cases that are easy to implement.
- 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.
