Rise of CDPs & Data-Driven Marketing — Carlos Doughty // MarTech Alliance

Quotes

• “We have seen signs of this for years now. We’ve seen sizable investment and the most recent example is Twilio’s acquisition for $3.2 billion. It’s a chunk of change and it says a lot. We have Adobe and Salesforce releasing their CDPs. As soon as the major clouds and the major providers starts swallowing up major providers like that, it tells you what you need to know.” - Carlos“A sponsor of the MarTech podcast, Treasure Data, another CDP was spun out of arm and is now moving to be an independent platform which I think is gonna be another enterprise player that someone needs to take note of.” - Ben“It hasn’t penetrated the market anywhere it needs to be. So, to me until CDPs are coming to CRM we haven’t reached that point or got close to it. You think of the number of providers in the CRM space and their level of reach and how bizarre and rare to work within an organization if it doesn’t have a CRM in place. I think we’re still early days but we are collecting more data than ever.” - Carlos“This goes back to our initial conversation about what happened in 2020 with the pandemic and to moving all of our marketing to activities online. We don’t necessarily agree about what’s happening in the events space but no matter how we look at it, there is more data that is being collected, and created and the smart marketers are the ones who can analyze that data effectively.” - Ben “I think that’s probably the biggest problem that the marketing industry and the martech industry are faced with. We used to have these channels that operated in silos, we would go to events and we would get business cards, we would call those people on the phone and try to sell them something.” - Ben “But the events space was not connected to what we’re doing in digital marketing which wasn’t necessarily related to what was happening in our webinars and now all of a sudden, all of those independent marketing activities either are gone or have to be related to each other to be effective.” - Ben “Some of it is the fundamental marketing which is, ‘do you know who your audience actually is, and do you slice and dice that audience in the right way.’ Start with that. The holy grail of the single customer view. Do I collect all of my data? Do I really understand who the hell my customers are? And that means every single possible data point around the individual so you got full context.” - Carlos“Afterwards, it’s being able to chop up that audience and segment in a way that is really smart and intelligent. That means moving beyond just demographics. It’s thinking about behavioral data, it’s thinking about having a level of intent and understanding about where they are in their customer journey and being able to apply all that rich insight in a way that you can personalize at scale on an individual basis.” - Carlos“I think what’s happening in the privacy space is actually gonna impact why CDPs are so important. Apple stands sharing less data with the providers. And I think that’s what’s happening with GDPR and what access to data we’re able to get and how willing companies are to buy third-party data knowing that there is risk because they need to validate that their vendors are collecting data appropriately. It just makes the data more valuable.” - Ben“If you’re gonna go and spend data and collect data, there is either gonna be more risk or more cost. You need to make sure that you can make the most out of that data. There may be less signals at some point here in the near future and if that’s gonna be the case, it’s not that we’re not creating more data, we’re able to use less because it’s either gonna be privacy concern or the platforms are gonna restrict us from getting access to it.” - Ben“You need to be able to make sure that if you’re gonna go through that cost of collecting data the appropriate way, you can actually use it and CDP is really the tool that can help you do that.” - Ben “I think privacy is another big wave that is definitely impacting this. In addition to that, obviously CCPA and beyond that is the death of the third-party cookie which is coming soon, so there’s greater need for first-party data.” - Carlos“I think there’s another caveat where the CDPs are going to, ‘my assumption is built in some sort of mechanism’ that tells you whether your data was collected and in the right place that allows you to understand whether this data can be used, analyze shared. I think that there’s another layer of value for this CDPs, not just the collection, the scrubbing, the aggregation of the data but also helping you manage, ‘hey this data needs to follow that rule in this country’ because there’s gonna be all sorts of crazy privacy regulation across multiple different spaces.” - Ben “Our biggest thing is obviously to help build the MarTech community. Specifically, what we wanna do is help connect people. Help them learn and better understand the space. In addition to that, the big thing that we are known most for is aptitude learning. So we got certification in a month in technology, and interestingly around, talking about CDPs, we’re also releasing a digital learning course in customer data platforms.” - Carlos