State of Martech Report: Customer Data Platforms Are Evolving, Not Dying

Scott Brinker’s State of Martech report has grown from a one-page logo jigsaw to a small industry, co-authored with MartechTribe’s Frans Riemersma and apparently produced by a small army of elves reviewing thousands of products each year. The latest edition, released yesterday, provides the now-expected deep analysis of industry trends covering category growth, the impact(s) of AI, stack architectures, and more. It’s all interesting and too complicated (or maybe complex?) to recap here, so I can only suggest that you read it on your own. 

In addition to data based on the 15,384 vendors now listed (up 9% from 2024), the report analyzes results from a survey of martech and marketing operations leaders. Again, there’s lots of fascinating information, but I was of course drawn to the sections related to Customer Data Platforms.

On its face, the report offers some pretty bad news for the CDP industry: the fraction of companies citing a CDP as the “center” of their martech stack fell from 15.5% in their similar 2024 survey to 12.5% in 2025. However, the 2025 survey is based on just 96 responses, meaning that’s a swing of three answers, so it’s not cause for too much alarm.* Still, it’s an interesting result, and even more intriguing when you separate B2B respondents (52% of the sample) from others (14% B2C and 34% mixed B2B/B2C). CDPs have never been widely adopted in the B2B world, and indeed, their share is unchanged from 2024 (7.9%) to 2025 (8.0%). The flip side to that is in the B2C and mixed group, the shift is larger: from 26.9% in 2024 to 17.4% in 2025. But, again, bear in mind the sample size: that 17.4% represents seven responses. A shift of three answers is well within the range of statistical noise.

Let’s put sampling issues aside and assume there’s some drop-off in reliance on CDP. The question is, what has taken its place?

Did you just answer “cloud data warehouse, of course”? That’s not entirely wrong – the data warehouse share grew from 20.9% to 23.9%. But the big winner was MAP/CEP (marketing automation/customer experience platform), which grew from 19.4% to 26.1%. CRM grew from 17.9% to 19.5%, or nearly as much as data warehouses. Multi-product suites fell from 1.4% to zero, which hints quite strongly that the respondents heavily skewed away from large enterprises.**

If we combine the MAP/CEP, CRM, and DXP or ecommerce categories into “customer-facing systems”, the combined share of that group grew from 43.3% to 52.1%. So if I were to read any trend from this data, it would be that companies are centering their martech stacks on customer-facing systems, not on data warehouses.

This is actually consistent with the trends we’ve seen in the CDP industry itself, where the most recent major acquisitions (ActionIQ by Uniphore , Lytics by ContentStack, mParticle by Rokt) all involved merging a CDP into a customer-facing product, and where customer-facing vendors like MessageGears, Klayvio, Insider, Listrak, and Braze have added CDP (or CDP-ish) capabilities***. The CDP Institute classifies all of these systems as CDPs, in addition to whatever else they do. So, the way I see it, companies that list those products as the “center” of their martech stack are still building their stack on a CDP, even if they don’t call it one. That’s good news for the industry, not bad.

The survey also takes another look at the role of data warehouses in the martech stack, asking “Do you have a customer data warehouse/lakehouse integrated with your martech stack?” More than half the respondents (56.2%) said they did, a number that climbs to 92% for B2C vendors and 80% for enterprise companies. What’s interesting here is the relation of those answers to the previous question: many more firms have integrated a warehouse than are using their warehouse as the center of their martech stack. This is far from shocking but, again, suggests that the mere presence of a warehouse doesn’t mean that warehouse is the primary customer data store.

If you’re a “warehouse-centric” composable CDP vendor, you could read the relatively small share of warehouse-as-central system either as cause for alarm – the market isn’t as big as you thought – or reason to rejoice – the potential for growth is huge. Both could be true at the same time. But if the primary industry trend is for CDP functions to migrate to customer-facing systems (run by marketing or other business units), then a shift of CDP functions toward the (IT-controlled) data warehouse seems to be the wrong way to bet.  (In this context, the recent sale of leading composable CDP Census to data movement platform Fivetran may signal incipient consolidation in the young-but-already-overcrowded composable CDP sector. That Census was bought by a data movement tool rather than a customer-facing system reinforces the notion that composable CDP products serve IT teams while customer-facing CDPs serve marketers and other end-users.)

Presumably all those non-central warehouses are acting as data sources to CDPs or customer-facing systems with a CDP inside.  Indeed, the Brinker/Riemersma report positions CDPs (stand-alone or embedded) as intermediaries between data systems and activation systems (which they call "systems of knowledge" and "systems of context," respectively), responsible for "organizing or framing the data in a way that best serves more situational needs."  I quite agree, and couldn't have said it better.  I would expand on this by noting that CDPs within customer-facing systems will have direct access to the data those systems generate, so the role of the data warehouse is limited to supplying data that the warehouse collects elsewhere. A CDP with direct access to customer-facing systems overcomes one of the main drawbacks of the warehouse-centric approach, which is that warehouses often can't provide the real-time access to behavior data that's needed for many customer-facing applications of CDP data.

I should stress that CDPs are a bit player in the Brinker/ Riemersma epic. Definitely download the report (it’s free and ungated) and focus on whichever portions you find most relevant. It’s all good.

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*The 2024 survey had 168 responses, of which 60% were B2B, 9% were B2C and 31% were mixed. Doing that math, that’s 67 responses in the B2C and mixed group, of which 18 cited CDP as the center of their stack.

**The 2025 report says 30 of the 96 responded were from ‘enterprise’ organizations, but doesn’t indicate how these split between B2B, B2C and mixed.

***In addition, at least one unacquired CDP (BlueConic) has repositioned as a customer-facing system.

Open Letter to Scott Brinker: Suggestions for Next MarTech Conference

Dear Scott:

Congratulations to you and Third Door Media on another great MarTech conference. (And, as an aside, I’m astounded that you found time to write a blog post on the Stackies within a day of the conference ending. Do you NEVER sleep?)

I think I’m still technically on the advisory board for this conference, so I thought I’d share some thoughts. To encourage input from the larger community, I’m posting it publicly on this blog. You’re welcome.

Over-all, the conference went tremendously well. Attendees I spoke with were uniformly pleased with the quality of the presentations. The closest thing I heard to a criticism was that some sessions were more theoretical than action-oriented, but that is really a matter of taste. One person told me he liked the case studies best; no surprise there. Someone else said they were surprised at how many had a B2C focus, although that was more an observation than a complaint. The only frustration I heard consistently was having to choose between two interesting sessions when they were on at the same time.

From my own perspective, the worst thing was that no one laughed at the cave man joke.  Unga bunga bink! I did feel the exhibit hall was more crowded than optimal, although some vendors seemed to like being able to grab attendees as they walked by.  I’ll also complain that many vendors lacked signage that explained what they did – not your fault, of course, and maybe a conscious strategy to force people to engage?   Perhaps we could have one of the automated content generation vendors read all the vendor materials and write optimal signs for them!

On to suggestions for next year. I expect you’ll go to even more tracks, which will make it still harder to choose which to attend. Video recordings would let people catch up on sessions they missed; if that’s too expensive, voice recordings to accompany the slides would be a big help.

Maybe a better delineation among the tracks themselves would help too. I’d love to see a track of sessions analyzing product groups within the big landscape: i.e., one for marketing automation, one for content marketing, one for marketing analytics, etc. That would also be a good way to segregate analysts like me from people who want to avoid them. You might also have separate technology and organization tracks and maybe even have an ad tech track (a very underrepresented topic this year). If things get really big, you could also split B2B vs B2C or enterprise vs. SMB. The idea would be to find categories that are more or less mutually exclusive in terms of their audience, although of course some cross-over would be expected and a Good Thing.

Another way to help people with narrow interests would be to have special interest groups, such as ‘birds of feather’ tables at lunch or open-mike roundtables during sessions. I could see tables for CMOs, CMTOs, CTOs, marketing ops, newbies, and other peer groups with their own sets of challenges.  Or maybe separate bar set-ups during the receptions.

Speaking of social interaction, I still think the conference could do more to help people have fun. I’ve suggested this before but would still like to see 30 second videos submitted by attendees on topics like “tall tales I've heard from vendors”, “organizational horror stories”, “if people said what they really thought” (video of a typical meeting with thought bubbles showing people's real thoughts), or pitches for an imaginary, absurd martech product. People could do these in advance or have an opportunity to record them during the show. You’d show the best ones in between speeches or on a loop in the exhibit hall. I suspect there are some really hilarious MarTech folks out there. (Heck, I know there are – I’ve seen some of their project plans.)

I could also see some more conventional competitions in the exhibit hall. These would be team sports, so you could have marketing vs. IT, big companies vs. little companies, vendors vs buyers, etc. Or maybe mixed teams to practice their alignment skills. Picking a sport is tough: foosball is obvious but might give an unfair advantage to the IT folks. We could balance that with something that marketers are especially good at – maybe darts, which I believe are still the standard tool for setting media budgets. Just a thought.

There’s always Powerpoint karoke, although that’s best for after hours.

Or let’s get really high tech. We could have a speech recognition vendor listen to the presentations and score them for buzzword bingo. Or, at least, do a word cloud of what people are saying, either in speeches or in Twitter comments. We could have a competition among speakers for the most Tweets (although I guess that already happens).

Back to team sports. How about teams of attendees competing to create the most successful marketing campaign during the conference? We’d have vendors create preintegrated stacks with tools for research, content creation, campaign execution, optimization, and analytics. The vendors and team members would design, execute and optimize their campaigns, which shouldn’t take much time if the systems are really efficient. Two days is enough time to get some initial results. The campaigns could be for imaginary products or, better still, for worthy charities. Attendees could form their own teams or we could let something like CrystalKnows profile them and then assign attendees to teams with a good balance of skills and personalities.

If that’s too complicated, we could do a standard bake-off competition where vendors and novice users are given a simple task (e.g., create an survey or dynamic email) and do it while everybody else watches and then votes on the results.

Looking forward to next year!

Best,

David

MarTech Madness: Marketing Technology Managers Come Out to Play in San Francisco

MarTech Madness hit this week in San Francisco as 1,200 delighted marketing technologists escaped from their cubicles to cavort under the genial gaze of @chiefmartec Scott Brinker at the latest MarTech Conference. My own experience was a bit skewed because I was pulled into many side meetings, but the attendees seemed pleased and the sessions I did attend were excellent as always. MarTech is unique in its focus on the process of marketing technology management, with sessions covering organizational, staffing, and training issues even more than the technology itself. It’s also unusual in attracting people from both B2B with B2C companies, two groups that rarely mix.

As usual, I spent much of my conference time prowling the exhibition booths. I was struck by the number of content-related exhibitors – nearly half, based on my analysis of the conference program. Many of those were doing standard content management tasks such as workflow, approvals, and repository management.  But several offered some kind of interactive content, which I’d define as content that captures information about the user either through recording behaviors or explicitly asking for input (HapYak, ion interactive, LookBook HQ, SnapApp, and arguably Uberflipand Vidyard). This is a category that also caught my eye at the Content2Conversion conference last month.  Two mentions officially makes it a trend.

There were also several vendors doing what I’ll tentatively call “journey management” (Pointillist, Usermind, Thunderhead [represented at the conference by its partner Arke], and arguably IBM Journey Designer). These resemble conventional campaign managers but execute campaigns based on movement through a comprehensive journey map. These products differ from the earlier generation of journey managers in being tied to live customer data and execution systems, rather than simply drawing a map. There’s considerable variety among these vendors so I need to analyze them more closely before I can confidently call them a meaningful category. But seeing several products emerge simultaneously with similar features is usually a sign that something interesting is afoot.

As these observations suggest, many of my conversations during the conference – especially after the bars were open – related to the ever-popular game of What’s The Next Big Thing? The spotlight has clearly moved from predictive analytics.  ABM is still the current focus but it’s starting to feel dangerously familiar. Interactive content and journey management are definitely candidates, but the consensus at the deepest (and best lubricated) discussion seemed to be what you might call user-tuned content* – that is, content that adjusts to the viewer’s behavior, presumably using artificial intelligence to choose what to do next. That’s different from capturing behaviors with interactive content, as described above, although the same system could do both: in fact, I'd put LookBook HQ in both categories.

"User-tuned content" appeals to me in part because my own MarTech presentation was on machine intelligence, and one strand of development I foresee is combining systems that recognize an individual customer and select the best product or offer (e.g. Evergage or BlueConic); identify the customer's persona (e.g. CrystalKnows, Mariana, CaliberUX); and automatically write data-driven content tuned to that persona (Automated Insights, Narrative Science, Data2Content, and Arria). Concretely, imagine an ecommerce Web site that gives each customer different product descriptions based on her personality. That’s a step beyond current personalization or recommendation engines, which select the best message or product but don’t change how it's presented or use manually-created variations.  It’s also a step closer to what a good human salesperson does, tailoring their presentation to whatever they feel will best resonate with the person they’re talking to.

The pieces needed to deliver user-tuned content are all available, although I haven’t seen any one vendor combine them into a single product. Maybe that won’t happen soon enough to the very next Big Thing, but I’m pretty sure it will be a Big Thing in the not too distant future.

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*I really wanted to call this "smart content", but that's used by HubSpot for something else.  "Intelligent content", "responsive content", "contextual content", "dynamic content", "personalized content", "tailored content" and many others are also taken.  "User-tuned content" has been used in pretty much the sense I have in mind, although specifically relating to content tuned to the needs of autistic children.