Coming out of the Martech conference, we’re highlighting 3 industry insights that marketers should be aware of as they continue to innovate at the intersection of people, processes and tools. Below is part 3 of our 3-part series covering: (1) The mental state of the modern marketer regarding technology, (2) Platformization and the march from task-based silos toward enterprise orchestration and (3) The rapid and sudden rise of CDPs (below)
The Rapid and Sudden Rise of the Customer Data Platform (CDP)
At any marketing technology company there are challenges when deciding what category is the proper fit for your technology. It was especially interesting this year at MarTech San Francisco as the category that best fits our AudienceStream product, Customer Data Platforms, was a star of the whole conference because this new category precisely solves one of the biggest pain points emerging in the market – data fragmentation and activation.
One of my favorite quotes from the conference came from Praveen Palepu, director for the Microsoft USA Central Marketing Organization. He stated, “the next wave of innovation is interoperability,” when discussing Delivering Business Results with Marketing Technology. “Interoperability” is at the core of what CDPs were created to do.
For all the reasons above, about the mindset of modern marketers and the march towards enterprise orchestration, CDPs were in the spotlight at MarTech. But as exciting as the emerging CDP category is, there are quite a diverse array of capabilities and approaches being taken in this new space. While they all claim to solve the problems described above, they all do it in varying ways that may or may not lead towards a reprisal of the nightmare rat’s nest of technologies pointed out earlier that’s very difficult to untangle once created.
The CDP Institute defines CDPs as, “a marketer-controlled system that maintains a unified, persistent customer database which is accessible to external systems.” From that perspective, the 3 main criteria are, (1) marketer-controlled, (2) unified, persistent customer database, and (3) accessible to other systems. From that perspective, we can see how CDPs have attacked a crippling pain in the market.
Let’s explore each of those criteria a little closer as it relates to MarTech industry trends at large and in relation to the varying approaches being taken by CDPs…
All in all the MarTech conference is an awesome opportunity for marketers to get an overview of the whole technology landscape out there that’s emerging and really step back to take stock of where this is all headed. By this point it should be clear that change is here to stay, so we need to start planning for change in a way that allows us to be customer-centric. That way is treating known and unknown customer data as the foundation for business. Specifically, centering the organization around the data that comprises a unified customer profile in a way that is flexible and actionable will allow companies to be more customer-centric over time.
Your solution to the data fragmentation problem should be accessible to other systems so that insight becomes action in a consistent way across devices and channels. The solution should be vendor neutral and flexible so that the data can be applied no matter how consumer behavior changes and no matter what great technology comes out next. And this solution should be available across the whole organization so that customers don’t have uneven experiences. The fun part is making this work, and hopefully figuring out that the way forward isn’t quite as daunting once you take a step back and see where the market is headed.
In case you didn’t see part 1 & 2 of our 3-part MarTech Conference series, check out the links below:
Part 1: The mental state of the modern marketer regarding technology
Part 2: Platformization & the Evolution from Task-based Silos to Enterprise Orchestration