brands consider the promise and the reality of using a CDP

Data and technology move fast, and it can be hard for companies to keep their tech stacks up to date. One thorny example of this conundrum is the CDP. Just a few years ago, marketers were happy enough using third-party cookies to identify and target audiences. But, as they became more interested in collecting and owning customer insights, they needed a place to house all this data. 

Enter the CDP, a catch-all bucket that includes any vendor that collects, organizes, and pushes data to various places. It’s been an expensive, heavy lift for many companies with mixed results. Marketers contend with incomplete profiles, hard-to-access data, and a lack of integration with critical channels, making it impossible to get the 360-degree view they hoped for.

Adding real-time targeting and personalization also makes traditional CDPs more difficult to leverage. Some retailers have decided to use old CDP data and real-time on-site data from their marketing automation partners to be as relevant as possible to shoppers.

Many companies are moving on despite making major investments in building data in their CDP. One place they’re going is the cloud. 'Composable CDPs' in marketplaces like AWS and Snowflake take a nimbler approach. They connect to data that a company can use more easily without replicating, deduplicating, and managing it in a separate CDP environment.

Soon, as more marketing moves to the cloud, marketers may leapfrog CDPs altogether and take advantage of marketplaces that allow them to transfer information seamlessly within their cloud environment. It doesn’t necessarily require major technical chops, but it does mean working with a cloud provider significantly. 

Here’s where brands are today with their CDP strategies:

"Theoretically, we’re looking for a composable CDP. Even some of the full-stack guys have started to unbundle themselves, so you don't need to buy all their modules right away. So, I guess the line between what a traditional CDP is and what a composable CDP is gets a little bit blurry every day. I think for us, the goal would be to really have the data in a data warehouse environment and then not have to do a 100% copy up into the CDP realm. Some people say that they're 100% no copy, so they're just letting all the data reside in the data warehouse. Others say, well, we need to replicate things up. I think ultimately, whenever we have our final set of CDP use cases, that'll determine how real-time the data needs to be and then where it would need to sit."

DIRECTOR, MARKETING
$1B-10B LUXURY FURNITURE COMPANY

"We’re using Hightouch as our ‘CDP-lite’ at this point. But we're creating some audiences in Hightouch that we're sending to Cordial and Braze. So, it has taken some of the reliance off of our data engineering team and let my martech folks and my analysts do some stuff versus us having to get on an engineering roadmap. So, it's mostly audience-building. I'm sure we could test some more sophisticated and more CDP-like use cases in the future. We just haven't gotten there yet. But we've been happy with them. I'd give them an eight. They've been very engaged partners. If we ever want to brainstorm or suggest some stuff we want to work on, they're always game to talk. The price is right."

VP, MARKETING
$500M-1B REAL ESTATE SITE

"One of the requirements (of choosing a CDP), which makes our job harder and easier, is because we do not want to duplicate the data and maintain two data sets as a source. Only four or five CDPs can actually do it. But one of the ones that I'm really excited about is a company called RudderStack. They're not a big player like Adobe or Salesforce, but RudderStack has an actual CDP capability, whereas Salesforce does not. I don't care what the magic quadrant shows; it just shows that they paid a lot of money to be on the top right side of that quadrant."

DIRECTOR, OPERATIONS
$1B-10B COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM