Friday, July 27, 2018

Get Ready for CDP Horror Stories as Customer Data Platforms Enter the Trough of Dillusionment

It’s nearly a year since Gartner placed Customer Data Platforms at the top of its “hype cycle” for digital marketing technologies. The hype cycle shouldn’t be taken too literally but it does capture the growing interest in CDPs and reminds us to expect this attention to attract critics.

Sure enough, we’ve recently started to see headlines like “Customer Data Platforms: A Contrarian’s View”, “Why Your Customer Data Platform Is a Failure”  and “CDPs: Yet Another Acronym That Lets Marketers Down”.  It's tempting to dismiss such headlines as competitive attacks or mere attempts to piggyback on wide interest in CDPs.   But we should still take a look at the underlying arguments.   After all, we might learn something.

Let’s start with the “Contrarian’s View”, written by Lisa Loftis, a customer data industry veteran who current works for SAS. She offers to debunk two common CDP “myths”: that “CDPs solve a problem unique to marketing” and that “'marketing-managed' means you don’t need IT’s help”.

Regarding the first myth, Loftis says that systems to match customer identities have been available for decades and that departments outside of marketing also need unified data. Regarding the second, she states its best for marketing and IT departments to work together given the complex technical challenges of marketing systems in general and customer data matching in particular.

She’s right.

That is, she’s right that these technologies are not new, that unified data is useful outside of marketing, and that deploying CDPs requires some technical skills. So far a I know, though, she's wrong to suggest that CDP vendors and advocates (obviously including me) claim otherwise. False belief in these myths are not the reasons marketers buy CDPs.

To put it bluntly, the problem that CDP solves isn’t the lack of technology to build unified customer databases: it’s that corporate IT departments haven’t used that technology to meet marketers’ needs. That failure has created a business opportunity that CDPs have filled. It’s the same reason that people hire private security guards when the government's police fail to maintain order.

And, just as good security guards cooperate with the police, CDP systems must integrate with corporate systems and CDP vendors must work with corporate IT.  CDP vendors have designed their systems to be easier to use than traditional customer matching and management technologies, but that only reduces the technical effort without eliminating it. The remaining technical work may be done by the CDP vendor itself, by a service provider, or even by the corporate IT group. The term “marketer-driven” in the CDP Institute’s formal CDP definition is intended to express this: marketers in control of the CDP, which isn’t the same as doing the technical work.

“Why Your CDP is a Failure” offers an even more provocative headline. But hopes for juicy disaster tales are quickly dashed: author Alan J. Porter of Simple [A] only means that CDPs “fail” because customer data should be shared by all departments. Again, no CDP vendor, buyer, or analyst would ever argue otherwise. There’s no technical reason a CDP can’t be used outside of marketing and some CDP vendors explicitly position their product as an enterprise system. The reason that CDPs are not used outside of marketing is that companies fail to fund enterprise-wide customer databases, not that CDPs can’t deliver such databases. Your CDP is a failure for this reason only if building such a database was its goal. That’s rarely the case.

“CDPs: Yet Another Acronym That Lets Marketers Down” starts with the airy assertion that “When you strip all the nonsensical nuances away from these companies -- the CRMs, the TMSs [tag management systems], the DMPs, the CDPs -- they’re all one simple thing at their cores: identity companies.”  This will be news to people who use such systems every day to run call centers, manage sales forces, capture Web site, run advertising campaigns, and assemble detailed customer histories.

The article continues qirh assertions that “identity isn’t everything”, “brands don’t have a complete understanding of their customers”, and “behaviors without motivations teach us nothing."  Few would argue with the first two while the third is surely overstated.  But the relevance of CDP to all three is questionable.  It seems that author Andy Hunn’s main message is that marketers need the combination of anonymized third party data and survey panel results offered by his own company, Resonate. This may be, but Resonate clearly serves a different purpose from CDPs.  So there's little reason to measure one in terms of the other.

Let me be clear: CDPs are not perfect. Like many new technologies, they are often expected to deliver more than is possible.   We are surely entering the “disillusion” stage of the hype cycle when tales of failed implementations and studies showing mixed satisfaction levels are common (and prove nothing about the technology's ultimate value).  Critical articles can be helpful in clarifying what CDPs do and don’t offer.  It's easy to lose sight of those boundaries in the early stages of a product category, when the main task is building a clear picture of the problems it solves, not on establishing its limits.

This is why the most productive discussion around CDPs right now revolves around use cases. Marketers (and other departments) need concrete examples of how CDPs are being used.  In particular, they need to be told what applications typically become possible when a CDP is added to a company’s marketing technology stack. These generally do one or more thing: combine data from multiple sources, share that data across channels, and rely on real-time access to the assembled data. It's these applications that justify investment in a CDP.

Complaining that CDPs don’t do other things isn’t very helpful – especially if CDP vendors don’t claim they do.  Nor is it a flaw in CDPs if other solutions can achieve the same thing.  Buyers can and should consider all alternatives to solving a problem: sometimes the CDP will be best and sometimes it won’t. It takes a clear understanding of each possibility to make the right choice.   Blanket claims about the value or failures of CDP may be inevitable but they don't really advance that discussion.





Tuesday, July 03, 2018

Interpublic Group is Buying Acxiom Marketing Services for $2.3 Billion. Here's Why.

Yesterday brought news that Acxiom had agreed to sell its marketing services business to Interpublic Group, a major ad holding company, for $2.3 billion. Acxiom will retain LiveRamp and do business under that name. Acxiom had restructured itself in March into the Market Services and LiveRamp groups and announced it was looking at strategic options, so the deal wasn’t especially surprising. But it’s still a milestone in the on-going evolution of the marketing industry.

For historical perspective (and assuming Wikipedia is correct), Acxiom got its start in 1969 compiling mailing lists from public sources such as telephone directories. The company grew to do all sorts of list processing, to manage custom marketing databases, to do identity resolution and to provide data enhancements for marketing lists. Although technology was always central to Acxiom's business, it was ultimately a services organization whose chief resource was a large team of experts in databases and direct marketing. It was also a favorite target of privacy advocates in those quaint days before online data gave them something much scarier to worry about.

Acxiom bought LiveRamp in 2014 for $310 million, as a logical extension of its identity data business. Since then, LiveRamp has grown much more quickly than the rest of Acxiom, currently accounting for about one-quarter of total revenue. Interesting financial note: Acxiom stock closed today at 39.45, giving it a market cap of $2.66 billion. Extracting the $2.3 billion that Interpublic is paying for everything else, this leaves LiveRamp with an implicit value of $360 million – not much more than Acxiom paid, and even less if you add the $140 million LiveRamp paid in 2016 for identity matching firms Arbor and Circulate. That’s shockingly low and suggests either an error in my calculations (let me know if you spot one) or that the market has serious doubts about something.

But we’ll worry about LiveRamp another day. What’s interesting at the moment is Interpublic as Acxiom’s buyer. At first it seems to buck the trend of private equity firms buying martech companies: see Marketo, Integral Ad Science, Aprimo, and Pitney Bowes. But this report from Hampleton Partners gives a more comprehensive perspective: yes, private equity’s share of marketing deals doubled in 2017, but the main buyers are still big agencies and consultancies. Indeed, Interpublic competitors Denstu and JWT are among the top three acquirers in the past 30 months, along with Accenture. And bear in mind that Acxiom is really more of a services company than technology developer.  It will be right at home with an agency parent.

So, what will Interpublic do with Acxiom? Some comments I saw said their main interest is Acxiom’s data business, which compiles and sells information about individuals (remember those phone books that started it all?)  However, I disagree.  It's not that I fear privacy regulations will kill that business: I expect third party data sharing will continue.  In fact, new rules should work in Acxiom’s favor.  As a company that privacy watchdogs have barked at for decades, Acxiom is likely to thrive after less responsible providers are driven from the business and as data buyers seek sources they can trust.  Indeed, Interpublic’s own discussion of the deal (click here to download) makes several references to data sales as an incremental revenue stream.

But it seems pretty clear that Interpublic’s main interest lies elsewhere. One of the nice things about ad agencies as buyers is they’re really clear in their explanations of their purchases. Interpublic’s deck lists their strategic rationale for buying Acxiom Marketing Services as acquiring “data solutions that enable omnichannel, closed-loop marketing capabilities and power exceptional marketing experiences.” A bit further on, they define the strategic fit as gaining “world class data governance and management capabilities [which] allow us to fully support clients’ first-party data”.  They also say “data assets have intrinsic value that will grow over time”, but I read this to mean they're most interested in managing each client’s own (first party) data.

This makes total sense. When Acxiom was founded in 1969, customer data was only used by a handful of direct mail marketers who were considered something between irrelevant and sleazy by the “real” marketers at big agencies and advertisers. Today, customer data management is considered the key to success in a future where every buyer expects a personalized experience. Ad buying itself, once an art form based on obscure (and often imaginary) distinctions among audience demographics, has become a mechanical process run by programmatic bidding algorithms. Indeed, the fraud-infested, brand-unsafe online ad market is now the shadiest corner of the industry.

The change is perfectly symbolized by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) purchasing the DMA (originally Direct Mail Marketing Association): data-driven marketing is now main stream, even though the data-driven marketers are still not in charge. (If the data marketers had really taken over, DMA would have bought ANA, not the other way around.)

This is the world where Acxiom's expertise at managing customer data is needed for Interpublic to remain at the center of its clients’ marketing programs. If Interpublic doesn’t have that expertise, other agencies and digital consultancies like Accenture and IBM will provide it and displace Interpublic as a result. It’s not a new trend but it’s one that will continue. Don’t be surprised to see other data-driven marketing services firms find similar new homes.