Customer Data Platforms Spread Their Wings

I escaped from my cave this week to present at two conferences: the first-ever “Customer Data Platform Summit” hosted by AgilOne in Los Angeles, preceding Shop.org, and the Technology for Marketing conference in London, where BlueVenn sponsored me. I listened as much as could along the way to find what’s new with the vendors and their clients. There were some interesting developments.

• Broader awareness of CDP. The AgilOne event was invitation-only while the London presentation was open to any conference attendee, although BlueVenn did personally invite companies it wanted to attend. Both sets of listeners were already aware of CDPs, which isn’t something I’d expect to have seen a year or two ago. Both also had a reasonable notion of what a CDP does. But they still seemed to need help distinguishing CDPs from other types of systems, so we still have plenty more work to do in educating the market.

• Use of CDPs beyond marketing. People in both cities described CDPs being bought and used throughout client organizations, sometimes after marketing was the original purchaser and sometimes as a corporate project from the start. That was always a potential but it’s delightful to hear about it actually happening. The widely a CDP is used in a company, the more value the buyer gets – and the more benefit to the company’s customers. So hooray for that.

• CDPs in vertical markets. The AgilOne audience were all retailers, not surprisingly given AgilOne’s focus and the relation of the event to Shop.org. But I heard in London about CDPs in financial services, publishing, telecommunications, and several other industries where CDP hasn’t previously been used much. More evidence of the broader awareness and the widespread need for the solution that CDP provides.

• CDP for attribution. While in London I also stopped by the office of Fospha, another CDP vendor which has just become a Sponsor of the CDP Institute. They are unusual in having a focus on multi-touch attribution, something we’ve seen in a couple other CDPs but definitely less common than campaign management or personalization. That caught my attention because I just finished an analysis of artificial intelligence in journey orchestration, in which one major conclusion was that multi-touch attribution will be a key enabling technology. That needs a blog post of its own to explain, but the basic reason is AI needs attribution (specifically, estimating the incremental value of each marketing action) as a goal to optimize against when it's comparing investments in different marketing tasks  (content, media, segmentation, product, etc.)

If there's a common thread here, it's that CDPs are spreading beyond their initial buyers and applications.  I’ll be presenting next week at yet another CDP-focused event, this one sponsored by BlueConic in advance of the Boston Martech Conference. Who knows what new things we'll see there?