Reflections on the CDP Revolution in France (and the Rest of Europe)

The CDP Institute just published a report on the CDP Industry in Europe (download here). This was based primarily on the global Industry Update released last month. This showed especially fast growth in Europe, with a year-on-year increase of 74% in the number of European vendors and 80% in European CDP employment, compared with growth outside of Europe of 38% in vendors and 59% in employment.

We spent quite a bit of time in Europe last year, so I certainly have my own ideas of the reasons behind these sharp increases. But it always seems best to get information from people who live in the region. So as part of the report we collected comments from several European CDP vendors and consultants on what they saw happening in their markets. Their complete comments are included in the report. They are largely consistent with each other, so I think it’s fair to give a summary. Here’s my interpretation:

• The European market is divided into several zones, each at a different stage of the development. The UK market is closest to the U.S. and most mature. Growth there began in 2017, paused as companies worked to meet the GDPR deadline of May 2018, and then resumed. The Netherlands and Germany are next in line, with growth taking off after mid-2018. Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and the Nordics the least mature, with limited deployment to date. Maturity can be measured by understanding of CDP, adoption levels, and the speed of sales cycles.

• Each market is served by native national vendors. These are often affiliated with marketing agencies or consultancies and usually provide a combination of data assembly and campaign management. Large U.S-based vendors have a substantial presence in the UK and Netherlands/Germany regions but little activity elsewhere. These vendors are primarily focused on data assembly. Some of the European vendors also sell throughout the UK/Netherlands/Germany markets. Few non-local vendors have much presence in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, or the Nordic.

• France is a market of its own.  Most CDP sales in France are made by French vendors, who sell little outside of France.  U.S. and non-French European vendors do continue to try to penetrate the French market, so far with limited success.  Unlike other markets, the French vendors generally started as Data Management Platforms (DMPs) although they took a broad approach that included some CDP features from the start. They have now further evolved to towards CDP although their DMP roots still show.

• GDPR was an early impetus to CDP adoption but that momentum is now largely spent. Current interest in CDP is based on the core use cases of data unification and campaign management. In the more mature markets, where CDPs are better understood, this interest is most likely to result in buying a packaged CDP system. In the less mature markets, this interest is more likely to result in buying a solution from an agency or in building a solution in-house.

These observations largely parallel my own impressions of the region. One difference is that none of the commenters mentioned the several European CDPs that compete globally as specialists in travel, telecommunications, financial services, or retail. The reason may simply be that only one the vendors who contributed to the report is in this category.  Also, none mentioned the limited funding available to European CDP vendors, an extremely sharp contrast to heavily-funded U.S.-based firms.

There’s much more in the report, both in the vendors’ comments and in the industry data.  Again you can download it here.  Enjoy.

What's Different About European CDPs?

For reasons that made sense at the time, I recently interviewed myself about the CDP Institute's latest review of Europe-based CDP vendors.  Here's how that went.

What do you think potential CDP buyers would find the most interesting stats from this?

From a buyer’s perspective, the most interesting stat may be the absolute number of local vendors available. We found 25 Europe-based CDP vendors, nearly one-third of the worldwide total. Marketers in UK, France, or The Netherlands can each pick from a half dozen vendors based in their country. This matters because markets still have considerable national differences. And I suspect that many buyers prefer to work with a local firm, especially for customer-facing functions such as personalization where knowledge of local buyers is important.

Buyers may also be interested in the market growth rate: the number of European vendors doubled, from 13 to 25, during 2018, while employment grew by 58% from 929 to 1,469. Cumulative funding grew by just 16%, suggesting that most growth is self-funded. We estimate total revenue among these vendors at €150 million in 2018. Revenue in Europe for non-European vendors is probably about equal to this amount.

Are there significant differences from country to country?

It’s a bit hard to say about country differences because there are probably quite a few firms we don’t know about. For example, I’m aware of only one German CDP, which just seems very unlikely. And although our figures show that Netherlands-based companies are especially small, the reason could simply be that we have been more exposed in The Netherlands than elsewhere and thus are more likely to learn about small companies in that market.

What about the rest of the world vs Europe?

The differences here are clearer. Seventy percent of European CDP employees work at companies with campaign-type systems, meaning they can select messages for individuals in batch campaigns or one-on-one interactions. Just 43% of employees outside of Europe work at similar firms. The domination of the European industry by campaign CDPs is its most distinctive feature. I suspect that European marketers prefer campaign systems because European marketers have fewer technical resources than their counterparts in the U.S. Campaign systems help European marketers stretch their budgets because they include a broader range of features than other types of CDPs, reducing the need for additional products.

Are there other differences beyond campaign type?

Yes. European CDP companies are much smaller and less well-funded than those outside of Europe: the average European company has 59 employees and €6 million funding, while the average company elsewhere has 99 employees and €25 million funding. Averages can be deceiving but other measures tell a similar story. For example, only one of the ten largest CDPs is based in Europe compared with five of the ten smallest. The difference is actually greater than this suggests because most of the large European CDPs are old companies – four of the six with over 100 employees were founded before 2006. By contrast, just one of the fourteen non-European vendors with over 100 employees is that old. This means that the largest European CDPs built their business doing something else – mostly as marketing services agencies -- while the largest non-European CDPs were CDPs from the start. (You’d need to look at the data in our global industry update, available here, for the non-European information.)

Are there any trends that might help to predict the future?

We assemble this data every six months so we get a good perspective on changes over time. The European CDP industry had been growing slightly faster than the rest of the world but in the recent period that was not the case: the European share of employment actually fell slightly. Another trend that had been clear was the steady shift of industry away from access vendors towards campaign vendors. But that also slowed during the most recent period and actually reversed outside of Europe, where analytics vendors gained share. This reversal suggests that different types of CDPs are finding success among different customer groups, meaning that the industry is not going to coalesce around a small number of vendors with similar features any time soon. That is different from the path that most industries take, where a dominant model and few leaders do tend to emerge fairly quickly.

Data on industry concentration points in a similar direction: the share of employment among the top five vendors has fallen steadily over the past two years, and even the share of the top 20% of vendors (a number that increases as the industry grows) fell in the most recent period. 

Over all, the report shows a vibrant, innovative European CDP industry that continues to grow by taking approaches that fit the special conditions of the European marketplace. U.S.-based firms, with much higher funding and a substantial technical head start, will not leave the market any time soon. But because the non-European firms are strongest in the data access and analytics categories, we see both sets of vendors coexisting and often even being used for different purposes within the same company.

Readers can download the European report here.

State of Customer Data Platforms in Europe

The Customer Data Platform Institute will be launching its European branch later this month with a series of presentations in London, Amsterdam and Hamburg. We’ve seen considerable CDP activity in Europe – nearly one quarter of the CDPs in the Institute's latest industry update are Europe-based, several others with European roots have added a U.S. headquarters, and some of U.S.-based CDPs  have significant European business. A recent analysis of CDP Institute membership also found that one quarter of our individual members are in Europe. So what, exactly, is the state of CDP in Europe?

 It’s long been an article of faith on both sides of the Atlantic that the U.S. market is ahead of Europeans on marketing technology in general and customer data management in particular. That (plus the larger size of the U.S. market) is why so many European vendors have relocated to the U.S. This study from Econsultancy suggests the difference is overstated if it exists at all: 9% of European countries reported a highly integrated tech stack, barely under the 10% figure for North American companies. North American firms were actually more likely to report a fragmented approach (48% vs 42%), although that was only because European countries were more concentrated in the least advanced category (“little or no cloud based technology”) by 20% vs 13%.

 The assumption that cloud-based technology is synonymous with advanced martech is debatable but, then again, the survey was sponsored by Adobe.  What is clear is that European firms have generally lagged the U.S. in cloud adoption -- see, for example, this report from BARC Research.

Lower cloud use probably hasn’t directly impeded CDP deployment: although nearly all CDPs are cloud-based, a substantial number offer an on-premises option. (The ratio was seven out of 24 in the CDP Institute’s recent vendor comparison report, including nearly all of the Europe-based CDPs.) But the slower cloud adoption may be a hint of the generally slower pace of change among European IT departments, which could itself reduce deployment of CDPs.

A Salesforce survey of IT professionals supports this view. Answers to questions about leading digital transformation, being driven by customer expectations, and working closely with business units all found that U.S. IT workers are slightly but distinctly more business-oriented than their European counterparts. Interestingly, there’s a split within the European respondents: UK and Netherlands are more similar to the U.S. answers than France and Germany. I should also point out that I’ve highlighted questions where the U.S. and European answers were significantly different – there were quite a few other questions where the answers were pretty much the same.

Organizational silos outside of IT are another barrier to CDP adoption. A different Salesforce survey, this one of advertising managers, also found that North American firms are generally more integrated than their European counterparts. The critical result from a martech perspective is North American marketing and advertising departments were much more likely to collaborate on buying technology.

Then again, a Marketo survey found that European respondents (from a mix of IT, marketing, sales, and service departments) were generally more satisfied with their tools and performance, even though they lagged North Americas in slightly innovation and more clearly in strategic alignment with corporate objectives. This isn’t necessarily inconsistent with the previous results: being less integrated with other departments may free the Europeans to pursue their departmental goals more effectively, even if they’re less fully aligned with corporate objectives. Other surveys have given similar results: people are generally happier with technology when they buy it for themselves.

Not surprisingly, one area where the Europeans are clearly ahead in preparation for GDPR: a Spiceworks survey at the start of this year found that 56% of European companies had allocated funds for compliance compared with just 31% of U.S. companies. (Almost half the U.S. respondents believe GDPR wouldn’t affect them, even though GDPR applies globally.) While the result clearly relates to the fact that GDPR is a European Union regulation, it may also reflect a generally higher interest in privacy among European consumers: to take one example, ad blocking is much more common in Europe than the U.S. That’s good news for CDP vendors, since GDPR has emerged as one of the primary use cases.

On the other hand, a survey from Aspect found that U.S. consumers are generally more demanding than Europeans about customer service: they care more about having a choice of service channels, are more willing to pay extra for good service and are quicker to stop buying after a poor experience. This is probably bad news for European CDP vendors, since unified customer data is a foundation for modern customer service.

In sum, things really are a bit different in Europe. Integration, the primary CDP use case, is lagging compared to the U.S. So it makes sense that CDP adoption is also lagging.  But GDPR may be changing the equation and consumer attitudes are certainly adding external pressure.  The need for CDP is growing and we hope the CDP Institute’s European operations will make it a little easier for European companies find right solutions.