Collapse of Civilization Makes Marketers' Jobs Harder

Political situations come and go but trust is the foundation of civilization itself. So I was genuinely shaken to see a report from the Edelman PR agency that trust in U.S. institutions fell last year by a huge margin – 17% for the general public and 34% for the “informed public,” placing us dead last among 27 countries. All four measured institutions (business, media, government, and non-governmental organizations) took similar hits, although government fell the most.

You won’t be surprised to learn that concerns about fake news and social media are especially prominent. What’s less expected is that trust in traditional journalism actually increased in the U.S. The over-all decline in media trust resulted from falling confidence in news from search engines and social media. Similarly, world-wide trust increased in traditional authorities such as technical, academic, and business experts.  So there are rays of hope.

Digging deeper, the sharp fall in U.S. trust levels follows two years when levels were exceptionally high. The current U.S. trust level is roughly the same as the four reports before that. Maybe you shouldn't head for that doomsday cabin quite yet.

Still, other reports also show tremendous doubts about basic questions of truth. A Brand Intelligence study comparing brand attitudes of Democrats vs. Republicans found that eight of top 10 most polarizing brands were news outlets. World-wide, 59% of people told Edelman they were simply not sure what is true and just 36% felt the media were doing a good job of guarding information quality.

The social implications of all this are sadly obvious.  But this blog is about marketing. How can marketers adapt and thrive in a trust-challenged, politically-polarized world?

• Protect privacy. Consumers can be remarkably cavalier in practice about protecting their data: this McAfee report found 41% don’t immediately change default passwords on new devices and 34% don’t limit access to their home network at all. But they are adamant that companies they do business with be more careful: Accenture studies have found that 92% of U.S. consumers feel it’s extremely important for companies to protect their personal information while 80% won’t do business with companies they don’t trust. Similarly, a Pega survey found that 45% of EU respondents said they would require companies to erase their data if they found it had been sold or shared with other companies. 

• Personalize wisely. Accenture also found  that 44% of consumers are frustrated when companies don’t deliver relevant, personalized shopping experiences and 41% had switched companies due to lack of personalization or trust. So there’s clearly a price to be paid for not using the data you do collect. Similarly, an Oracle report found 50% of consumers would be attracted to offers based on personal data while just 29% would find them creepy.  In fact, consumers have a remarkably pragmatic attitude toward their data: 24[7] survey found their number one reason for sharing personal information is to receive discounts. This has two implications: ask consumers whether they want personalized messages (or any messages), and be sure the value of your personalization outweighs its inherent creepiness. 

• Use trusted media. Consumers’ attitudes towards media in general, and social media in particular, are complicated. We’ve already noted that Edelman found growing distrust in online platforms. Other studies by Kantar and Sharethrough found the same. But consumers still spend most of their time on search engines and social media, which GlobalWebindex found remain by far the top research channels. Yet when it comes to building awareness, a different GlobalWebIndex report found that social ranked far behind search engines, TV, and display ads. Further muddying the waters, social and ecommerce companies (Facebook, Amazon, and eBay) topped NetBase’s list of most loved brands while Google ranked just 29th. But love isn’t the same as value: a LivePerson survey of 18-to-34 year olds – presumably the most enthusiastic social media users – found most would delete social apps from their phones before they'd give up practical apps for banking, ride-sharing and shopping. Similarly, The Verge found that Amazon and Google were significantly better liked and trusted than Facebook or Twitter. Taken together, this suggests that marketers need social channels for scale but can’t rely on them for credibility. Indeed, that’s precisely the conclusion of this Trusted Media Brands report about branded video.

• Consider brand safety. The problems with social and display channels extend beyond general mistrust to actively offensive environments. GumGum found that 68% of brands knew their ads have been placed in objectionable environments, with fake news, divisive politics, and disasters heading the list. A Dun & Bradstreet report on programmatic B2B ads similarly found that 66% of brands have found brand safety increasingly important.  Ad fraud is also a major concern – the two are related because they both reflect brands’ loss of control over their ad placements. This Forrester report on mobile advertising found 69% of marketers felt at least 20% of their budgets were exposed to found mobile ad fraud. Yet all three studies found marketers were plunging ahead with just limited efforts at brand safety and fraud prevention. In a world where consumer trust is tenuous to begin with, this is a very high-stakes gamble.

• Be careful about politics.  Edelman found that 64% of people want business CEOs to lead change rather than waiting for government to impose it. Sprout Social reported a similar finding:  65% of U.S. consumers felt brands should take a stand on social/political issues and 59% felt CEOs in particular should step in. But Euclid found the opposite: 78% said brands should avoid making political statements. Even more extreme, Bambu found just 2.3% of consumers said posting political content would make them more likely to buy from a salesperson while 34.9% said posting political content was a deal breaker, regardless of whether they agreed.  Still, the real danger is taking a position the customer dislikes: Bambu, Euclid and Sprout all found consumers are likely to boycott firms based on their positions. Sprout noted some compensating gain from people who agree but the net benefit is questionable at best: people are slightly more likely to praise a brand when they agree (28%) than criticize when they disagree (20%). But fewer will recommend it (35%) than warn friends and family (38%) and, most critically, fewer will purchase more (44%) than purchase less (53%).   In short, the data here are wildly conflicting: people want businesses to lead but they’ll punish behaviors they don’t like as often as they’ll reward choices they agree with. Of course, widely popular positions are still safe but many issues today have large numbers of people on both sides.  And remember it’s still possible to annoy everyone: Brand Intelligence found that Democrats, Independents, and Republicans all had Diet Pepsi (Kendall Jenner commercial, presumably) and Diet Mountain Dew (I don’t know why) on their most disliked lists. The ultimate result is probably that business leaders can justify being as active or inactive as they personally prefer.

So there you have it. Assuming we avoid complete social collapse, marketing in today’s polarized, anxiety-ridden world poses unprecedented challenges. Ironically, the loss of trust is happening at the precise moment when physical products are being replaced by trust-based services such as subscriptions and automated recommendations. The stakes couldn’t be higher.  Choose carefully and good luck.

Simple Questions to Screen Customer Data Platform Vendors

I’ve been working for months to find a way to help marketers understand the differences between Customer Data Platform vendors. After several trial balloons and with considerable help from industry friends, I recently published a set of criteria that I think will do the job. You can see the full explanation on the CDP Institute blog. But, since this blog has its own readership I figured I’d post the basics here as well.

The primary goal is give marketers a relatively easy way to decide which CDPs are likely to meet their needs. To do this I’ve come up with a a small list of features that relate directly to working with particular data sources and supporting particular applications. The theory is that marketers know what sources and applications they need to support, even if they're not experts in the fine points of CDP technology.

In other words, read these items as meaning: if you want your CDP to support [this data type or application] then it should have [this feature].

Obviously this list covers just a tiny fraction of all possible CDP features. It’s up to marketers to dig into the details of each system to determine how well it supports their specific needs.  We have detailed lists of CDP features in the Evaluation section of the CDP Institute Library.

The final list also includes a few features that are present in all CDPs (or, more precisely, in all systems that I consider a CDP – we can’t control what vendors say about themselves). These are presented since there’s still some confusion about how CDPs differ from other types of systems.

Now that the list is set, the next step is to research which features are actually present in which vendors and publish the results. That will take a while but when it’s done I’ll certainly announce it here.

Here’s the list:

Shared CDP Features: Every CDP does all of these. Non-CDPs may or may not.

• Retain original detail. The system stores data with all the detail provided when it was loaded. This means all details associated with purchase transactions, promotion history, Web browsing logs, changes to personal data, etc. Inputs might be physically reformatted when they’re loaded into the CDP but can be reconstructed if needed.
• Persistent data. The system retains the input data as long as the customer chooses. (This is implied by the previous item but is listed separately to simplify comparison with non-CDP systems.)
• Individual detail. The system can access all detailed data associated with each person. (This is also implied by the first item but is a critical difference from systems that only store and access segment tags on customer records.)
• Vendor-neutral access. All stored data can be exposed to any external system, not only components of the vendor’s own suite. Exposing particular items might require some set-up and access is not necessarily a real time query.
• Manage Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The system manages Personally Identifiable Information such as name, address, email, and phone number. PII is subject to privacy and security regulations that vary based on data type, location, permissions, and other factors.

Differentiating CDP Features: A CDP doesn’t have to do any of these although many do some and some do many. These are divided into three subclasses: data management, analytics, and customer engagement.

Data Management. These are features that gather, assemble, and expose the CDP data.

     Base Features. These apply to all types of data.

• API/query access. External systems can access CDP data via an API or standard query language such as SQL. It’s just barely acceptable for a CDP to not offer this function and instead provide access through data extracts. But API or query access is much preferred and usually available. API or query access often requires some intermediate configuration, reformatting, or indexing to expose items within the CDP’s primarily data store. Those are important details that buyers must explore separately.
• Persistent ID. The system assigns each person an internal identifier and maintains it over time despite changes or multiple versions of other identifiers, such as email address or phone number. This allows the CDP to maintain individual history over time, even when source systems might discard old identifiers. CDPs that use a persistent ID applied outside of the system do not meet this requirement.
• Deterministic match (a.k.a. “identity stitching”). The system can store multiple identifiers known to belong to the same person and link them to a shared ID (usually the persistent ID). This enables the system to connect identifiers indirectly: for example, if an email linked to an account is opened on a particular device, subsequent activity on that device can also be linked to the account.
• Probabilistic match (a.k.a. “cross device match”). The system can apply statistical methods and rules to identify multiple devices used by the same person, such as computers, tablets, smart phones, and home appliances. While many CDPs rely on third party services for this sort of matching, this item refers only to matching done by the CDP itself.

     Unstructured and Semi-Structured Data. This refers to loading data from unstructured or semi-structured sources such as Web logs, social media comments, voice, video, or mages. These are typically managed with “big data” technologies such as Hadoop. Nearly all CDPs use some version of this technology but it’s only essential if clients have unstructured or semi-structured sources and/or very high data volumes. Some CDPs handle very high data volumes in structured databases such as Amazon Redshift.

• JSON load. The system can accept and store data through JSON feeds without the user specifying in advance the specific attributes that will be included. Additional configuration may later be required to access this data. There are some alternatives to JSON that offer similar capabilities.
• Schema-free data store. The system uses a data store that does not require advance specification of the elements to be stored. Examples include Hadoop, Cassanda, MongoDB, and Neo4J.

     Web Site. This refers to interactions with the company’s own Web site, whether on a desktop computer or mobile device.

• Javascript tag. The system provides a Javascript tag that can be loaded into the client’s Web site and used to capture data about customer behaviors. Some CDP vendors provide full tag management systems but this is not a requirement for this item. This item does require that data captured by the Javascript tag can be associated with a customer record in the CDP database. This is usually done with a Web tracking cookie but sometimes through other methods.
• Cookie management. The system can deploy and maintain Web browser cookies associated with the client’s own Web site. The cookies can be linked to customer records in the CDP database.

     Mobile Apps. This refers to interactions with mobile apps created by the company.

• SDK load. The system offers a Software Development Kit (SDK) that can load data from a mobile app into the CDP database. It must be able to associate the data with individual customers in the CDP database. This is usually done through an app ID. Other SDK features such as message delivery are not a requirement for this item.

     Display Ads. This refers to interactions through display advertising networks, including social media networks.

• Audience API. The system has an API that can send customer lists from the CDP to systems that will use them as advertising audiences. The receiving systems might be Data Management Platforms, Demand Side Platforms, advertising exchanges, social media publishers, or others. Ability to receive information back from the advertising systems is not a requirement for this item.
• Cookie synch. The CDP can match its own cookie IDs with third party cookie IDs to allow the marketer to enrich profiles with external data or reach users through advertising networks.

     Offline. This refers to interactions managed through offline sources such as direct mail and retail stores, where the customer’s primary identifier is name and postal address.

• Postal Address. The system can clean, standardize, verify, and otherwise work with postal addresses. This processing is reduces inconsistencies and makes matching more effective. Systems meet this requirement so long as the address processing is built into system process flows, even if they rely on third party software. Systems that send records to external systems in a batch process do not meet this requirement.
• Name/Address Match. The system can find matches between different postal name/address records despite variations in spelling, missing data elements, and similar differences. As with postal processing, systems can meet this requirement with third party matching software so long as the software is embedded in their processing flows.

     Business to Business. This refers to companies that sell to other businesses rather than to consumers.

• Account-level data. The system can maintain separate customer records for accounts (i.e., businesses) and for individuals within those accounts. This means account information is stored and updated separately from individual information. It also means that selections, campaigns, reports, analyses, and other system activities can combine data from both levels.
• Lead to Account Match. The system can determine which individuals should be associated with which account records, using information such as company name, address, email domain, and telephone number. This excludes processing done by sending batch files to external vendors.

Analytics. These are applications that use the CDP data but don’t extend to selecting messages, which is the province of customer engagement.

• Segmentation. The system lets non-technical users define customer segments and automatically send segment member information to external systems on a user-defined schedule. Ideally, all data would be available to use in the segment definitions and to include in the extract files. In practice, some configuration may be needed to expose particular elements. Systems meet this requirement regardless of whether segments are defined manually or discovered by automated processes such as cluster analysis.
• Incremental attribution. The system has algorithms to estimate the incremental impact of different marketing activities on specified outcomes such as a purchase or conversion. Attribution is a specialized analytical process that relies on the unified customer data assembled by the CDP. Algorithms vary greatly. To qualify for this item, the algorithm must estimate the contribution of different marketing contacts on the final result. That is, fixed approaches such as “first touch” or “U-shaped distribution” are not included.
• Automated predictive. The system can generate, deploy, and refresh predictive models without involvement of a technical user such as a data scientist or statistician. This usually employs some form of machine learning. There are many different types of automated predictive; systems meet this requirement if they have any of them.

 Engagement. This refers to applications that select messages for individual customers. It does not include content delivery, which is typically handled outside of the CDP.

• Content selection. The system can select appropriate marketing or editorial content for individual customers in the current situation, based on the data it stores about them, other information, and user instructions. The instructions may employ fixed rules, predictive models, or a combination. Selections may be made as part of a batch process.
• Multi-step campaigns. The system can select a series of marketing messages for individual customers over time, based on data and user instructions. The message sequence is defined in advance but may change or be terminated depending on customer behaviors as the sequence is executed.
• Real-time interactions. The system can select appropriate marketing or editorial content for individual customers during a real-time interaction. This requires accepting input about the customer from a customer-facing system, finding that customer’s data within the CDP, selecting appropriate content, and sending the results back to the customer-facing system for delivery. The results might include the actual message or instructions that enable the customer-facing system to generate the message.

The Light Bulbs Have Ears: Why Listening Is Voice-Activated Devices' Most Important Skill

If one picture’s worth a thousand words, why is everyone rushing to replace graphical interfaces with voice-activated systems?

The question has an answer, which we’ll get to below. But even though the phrasing is a bit silly, it truly is worth asking. Anyone who’s ever tried to give written driving directions and quickly switched to drawing a map knows how hard it is to accurately describe any process in words. That’s why research like this study from Invoca shows consumers only want to engage with chatbots on simple tasks and quickly revert to speaking to a human for anything complicated. And it’s why human customer support agents are increasingly equipped with screen sharing tools that let them see what their customer is seeing instead of just talking about it.

Or to put it another way: imagine a voice-activated car that uses spoken commands to replace the steering wheel, gear shifter, gas and brake pedals. It’s a strong candidate for Worst Idea Ever. Speaking the required movements is much harder than making them movements directly.

By contrast, the idea of a self-driving car is hugely appealing. That car would also be voice-activated, in the sense that you get in and tell it where to go. The difference between the two scenarios isn’t vocal instructions or even the ability of the system to engage in a human-like conversation. Some people might like their car to engage in witty banter, but those with human friends would probably rather talk with them by phone or spend their ride quietly. A brisk “yes, ma'am” and confirmation that the car understood the instructions correctly should usually suffice.

What makes the self-driving car appealing isn’t that it can listen or speak, but that it can act autonomously. And what makes that autonomy possible is situational awareness – the car's ability to understand its surrounding environment, including its occupant’s intentions, and to respond appropriately.

The same is ultimately true of other voice-activated devices. If Alexa and her cousins could only do exactly what we told them, they’d be useful in limited situations – say, to turn on the kitchen lights when your hands are full of groceries. But their exciting potential is to do much more complicated things on their own, like ordering those groceries in the first place (and, eventually, coordinating with other devices to receive the grocery delivery, put the groceries in the right cabinets, prepare a delicious dinner, and clean the dishes).

This autonomy only happens if the devices really understand what we want and how to make it happen. Some of that understanding comes from artificial intelligence but the real limit is the what data the AI has available to process. So I’d argue that the most important skill of the voice-activated devices is really listening.  That’s how they collect the data they need to act appropriately. And the larger vision is for all these devices to pool the information they gather, allowing each device to do a better job by itself and in cooperation with the others.

Whether you want to live in a world where the walls, cars, refrigerators, thermostats, doorknobs, and light bulbs all have ears is debatable. But that’s where we’re headed, barring some improbable-but-not-impossible Black Swan event that changes everything. (Like, say, a devastating security flaw in nearly every microprocessor on the planet that goes undetected for years…wait, that just happened.)

Still, in the context of this blog, what really matters is how it all affects marketers. From that perspective, voice interfaces are highly problematic because they make advertising much harder: instead of passively lurking in the corners of a computer screen, appearing alongside search results,  larded into social media feeds, or popping up unbidden during TV shows, voice ads are either front-and-center or nowhere. Chances are consumers will be highly selective about which ads they agree to hear, so marketers will need to gain their permission through incentives such as discounts and coupons. Gaining the consent required by privacy regulations such as GDPR* will be good practice for this but it will soon seem like child’s play compared with what marketers need to do on voice devices. So one change is marketers will need a new set of skills around creating aural ads and convincing consumers to agree to listen to them.

A related skill will be making those ads effective. Remember that people are vastly better at processing visual images than words.  That’s why we have the 1000:1 word:picture cliché. That efficiency is why visual ads can be effective even if people don’t focus on them – they are still being registered on some level and people will pay closer attention to those that look interesting at a glance. Aural ads will transfer much less information per moment of attention and chances are most of that information will be forgotten more quickly. We’re in early days here and there’s much to learn. But if you can buy stock in a jingle-writing company, do it.

Another obvious change will be that the device vendors themselves have more control than ever over the messages their customers receive. This gatekeeper function is already at the center of the business models for Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and others (increasingly including non-net-neutral broadband operators). But as fewer channels become available to reach consumers and as the channels themselves deliver fewer messages per minute, the value of those messages will increase dramatically. Insofar as separately-controlled devices compete for consumer attention, the device vendors will have even more reason to deliver experiences that consumers find pleasant rather than annoying. Of course, as I’ve argued extensively elsewhere, “personal network effects” make it likely that most consumers will find themselves dealing primarily with a single vendor, so actual competition may be limited.**

The gatekeepers’ control over their customers’ experience means that marketers will increasingly need to sell to the gatekeepers to earn the opportunity to reach consumers. What’s different in a voice-driven world is the scarcity of contact opportunities, which means that gatekeepers don’t have enough inventory (e.g., ad impressions) to sell to all would-be buyers. This isn’t entirely new: even today, impressions for Web display, paid search, and paid social are auctioned to a considerable degree. But a huge reduction in inventory (and the impact of serving ads that lead consumers to opt out, assuming they really have that option) will make the gatekeepers much more selective and, no doubt, raise prices. The gatekeepers will also have more conflicts with potential advertisers as they sell more services of their own, adding yet another level of complexity and more opportunities for deal making.

Finally, let’s come back to the sensors themselves. Assuming that the gatekeepers are willing to share what they gather, marketers will finally be able to understand exactly how consumers are responding to their messages. It’s not just that they’ll be able to know exactly who saw which messages and what the subsequently purchased. The new systems will be collecting things like heart and respiration rates, creating the potential to measure immediate physical reaction to each advertisement.  It almost seems unnecessary to point out that listening devices will also capture conversations where consumers discuss specific products, not to mention their needs and intentions. The grand mysteries of marketing impact will suddenly be exposed with thoroughness, precision. and clarity. The change will be as revolutionary as X-rays, ultra sounds, and CAT scans becoming available to doctors. As with radiology in medicine, these new information streams will require new skills that form the basis of entirely new specialties.

In short, voice-activated devices will change the world in ways that have nothing to do with the interaction skills of chatbots or ease of placing orders on Alexa. Marketers' jobs will change radically, demanding new skills and creating new power relationships. Visual devices won’t really go away – people are too good at image processing to waste the opportunity. But presenting information to consumers will ultimately be less important than gathering information about them, something that will use all the sensors that devices can deploy.

Who knew the sentient housewares in Disney's Brave Little Toaster were really a product roadmap?

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*General Data Protection Regulation.  Have we reached the stage yet where I no longer need to spell it out?

** The essence of personal network effects is the value of pooling data to create the most complete information about each customer. In many ways, situational awareness is another way of describing the same thing.

What's Next for Customer Data Platforms? New Report Offers Some Clues.

The Customer Data Platform Institute released its semi-annual Industry Update today. (Download it here).  It’s the third edition of this report, which means we now can look at trends over time. The two dozen vendors in the original report have grown about 25% when measured by employee counts in LinkedIn, which is certainly healthy although not the sort of hyper growth expected from an early stage industry. On the other hand, the report has added two dozen more vendors, which means the measured industry size has doubled. Total employee counts have doubled too. Since many of the new vendors were outside the U.S., LinkedIn probably misses a good portion of their employees, meaning actual growth was higher still.

The tricky thing about this report is that the added vendors aren’t necessarily new companies. Only half were founded in 2014 or later, which might mean they’ve just launched their products after several years of development. The rest are older. Some of these have always been CDPs but just recently came to our attention. This is especially true of companies from outside the U.S. But most of the older firms started as something else and reinvented themselves as CDPs, either through product enhancements or simply by adopting the CDP label.

Ultimately it’s up to the report author (that would be me) to decide which firms qualify for inclusion.   I’ve done my best to list only products that actually meet the CDP definition.*   But I do  give the benefit of the doubt to companies that adopted the label. After all, there’s some value in letting the market itself decide what’s included in the category.

What’s most striking about the newly-listed firms is they are much more weighted towards customer engagement systems than the original set of vendors. Of the original two dozen vendors, eleven focused primarily on building the CDP database, while another six combined database building with analytics such as attribution or segmentation. Only the remaining seven offered customer engagement functions such as personalization, message selection, or campaign management. That’s 29%.**

By contrast, 18 of the 28 added vendors offer customer engagement – that’s 64%. It’s a huge switch. The added firms aren’t noticeably younger than the original vendors, so this doesn’t mean there’s a new generation of engagement-oriented CDPs crowding out older, data-oriented systems. But it does mean that more engagement-oriented firms are identifying themselves as CDPs and adding CDP features as needed to support their positioning. So I think we can legitimately view this as validation that CDPs offer something that marketers recognize they need.

What we don’t know is whether engagement-oriented CDPs will ultimately come to dominate the industry. Certainly they occupy a growing share. But the data- and analysis-oriented firms still account for more than half of the listed vendors (52%) and even higher proportions of employees (57%), new funding (61%) and total funding (74%).  So it’s far from clear that the majority of marketers will pick a CDP that includes engagement functions.

So far, my general observation has been that engagement-oriented CDPs appeal more to mid-size firms while data and analysis oriented CDPs appeal most to large enterprises. I think the reason is that large enterprises already have good engagement systems or prefer to buy such systems separately. Smaller firms are more likely to want to replace their engagement systems at the same time they add a CDP and want to tie the CDP directly to profit-generating engagement functions. Smaller firms are also more sensitive to integration costs, although those should be fairly small when CDPs are concerned.

There’s nothing in the report to support or refute this view, since it doesn’t tell us anything about the numbers or sizes of CDP clients. But assuming it’s correct, we can expect engagement-oriented vendors to increase their share as more mid-size companies buy CDPs. We can also expect engagement-oriented systems to be more common outside the U.S., where companies are generally smaller. For what it’s worth, the report does confirm that’s already the case.

If the market does move towards engagement-oriented systems, will the current data and analytics CDPs add those features? That’s another unknown. There’s already been some movement: four of the original eleven data-only CDPs have added analytics features over the past year.  But it’s a much bigger jump to add customer engagement features, and sophisticated clients won’t accept a stripped-down engagement system. We might see some acquisitions if the large data and analytics vendors want to add those features quickly. But those firms must also be careful about competing with the engagement vendors they currently connect with. Nor are they necessarily eager to lose their differentiation from the big marketing clouds.  Nor is there much attraction to entering the most crowded segment of the market with a me-too product.

So most data and analytics vendors may well limit their themselves to their current scope and invest instead in improving their data and analytics functions. That will limit them to the upper end of the market but it's where they sell now and offers plenty of room for growth.  Certainly there’s a great deal of room for improved machine learning, attribution, scalability, speed, and automated data management. If I had to bet, I’d expect most data and analytics vendors to focus on those areas.

But I don’t have to bet and neither do you. So we’ll just wait to see what comes next. It will surely be interesting.


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*CDP is defined as a marketer-controlled system that builds a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible by other systems.

**To further clarify, customer engagement systems select messages for individuals or segments.  Analytics systems may create segments but don't decide which messages go to which segment.  And execution systems, such as email engines, Web content management, or mobile app platforms, deliver the selected messages.