The hype around new marketing technology creates warranted concern. Is this shiny new thing going to live up to its promise?

Surely, not every promise for every customer.

What are you to do? Should you expect a solid return on your marketing investment, or delay after delay after delay?

The best advice I can give is to talk with others who have implemented customer data platforms, or used customer data platforms within their organization. We are at the point where reaching out to professional networks about customer data platforms yields results.

When discussing the finer points of customer data unification, activation, and execution, keep organizational structure and personnel differences in mind! Find out how value is being delivered by the solution and try to translate that as best you can to your own business.

Most importantly, know that there are dozens of vendors in the crowded space already, and the capabilities of each varies quite a bit.

If it helps to talk with someone else who has their eye on a pile of it, please connect on LinkedIn or directly.

CDP Spotlight: BlueVenn

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Woohoo! Another CDP Spotlight - this time, we're taking a look at BlueVenn.

Blue.

I have a lot of fun using BlueVenn, along with BlueConic and BlueShift as an example of just how much work I have ahead of me in releasing a "customer data platform buyers' guide" that covers some 85 providers. It would seem that this is the decade of ColorSomething, if not SomethingAnimal/AnimalSomething. I digress! Well, one more thing -- you can sign up for access to the guide here.

Click here for free access

The CDP Spotlight Series

In case you missed the first spotlight post, here's how it will go: providers will explain WHAT they are/do. They will explain WHY an organization should choose them as a partner. We'll get to know the company a bit as we hear about WHO works there and WHERE. Finally, we'll close out getting a better understanding of WHEN key events in the providers' timeline occurred.

See for yourself!

In the early stages of marketing technology evaluation, there is nothing you love more to see than a recorded demo of actual product. Cheers and two big thumbs up to BlueVenn for their recent webinar which you can see for yourself on their website or right there below!

Big thanks to the team at BlueVenn for filling us up with the following information, as well.

(This mainly concludes my portion of this post.)

What is BlueVenn?

BlueVenn is the award-winning marketing platform that combines a Customer Data Platform with an omnichannel marketing hub, connecting marketers with customers for over 30 years.

Specifically designed for enterprise marketers to unify their customer data into a Single Customer View, BlueVenn coordinates consistent, integrated and personalized campaigns through every marketing channel. Drag & drop data analytics, predictive insights and segmentation tools help marketers to understand their customers better and optimize the customer experience - all in one browser-based solution!

Single Customer View

BlueVenn is the first and only Customer Data Platform with a customizable and configurable Single Customer View. This gives users unparalleled control of their data for better personalization and more accurate, consistent marketing.

The BlueVenn Marketing Platform gives marketing teams the power to integrate data sources from across an organization, using automated point-and-click methods, and will unify customer data to create a Single Customer View and a ‘Golden Record’ for every customer.

Marketers can use BlueVenn to view every

Continue reading→

CDP Spotlight: Celebrus

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Maybe you haven't heard that I'm gearing up to publish a "buyers' guide" at the end of the month? 

 Sign up today for free access

More to come on the guide, especially if you're signed up for it (sneak preview next week!) ...

In the meantime, I thought it would be fun to do something different. While the guide should be founded in objective, vendor-neutral viewpoints as best as possible, I wanted to invite some of the providers to tell us their story. Right here! Right now!

For the most part, this series will be written by the providers themselves. I've asked them to complete a version of "who/what/where/why/when" that should give a perspective that you might not get all in one place otherwise. Introducing...

The CDP Spotlight Series!

Here's how it will go: providers will explain WHAT they are/do. They will explain WHY an organization should choose them as a partner. We'll get to know the company a bit as we hear about WHO works there and WHERE. Finally, we'll close out getting a better understanding of WHEN key events in the providers' timeline occurred.

A natural CDP

I first came into Celebrus around five years ago. I was in search of good digital analytics partners for organizations migrating off of an old digital analytics system called NetInsight (RIP), which presented data ingestion and sharing challenges that Adobe and Google could not help with, especially not a way back then. I've considered blaming Celebrus for my initial interest in what weren't called customer data platforms yet. As a long-time analyst and frustrated consultant, the promise of action -- real action -- and not just actionability, was quite a draw.

What Celebrus had was mind-blowing at the time, and it still is. Celebrus' unique approach to web and mobile data collection and enterprise-friendly capabilities set them in a class of their own when compared to the rest of the field. Beyond the data collection, however, Celebrus features all of the core components of a customer data platform and so I am quite excited and thankful for Celebrus to be the first provider to be included in the CDP Spotlight series!

(This mainly concludes my portion of this post.)

What is Celebrus?

Celebrus is a mature product (established 1999!) aimed towards large enterprises (banks, insurers and leading retail businesses) who require a CDP that can capture a complete audit trail of each individual customer’s behavior and experience in the simplest way possible, without JavaScript tagging. All this up-to-the-second 1st party data is automatically stitched, for every individual customer with their past history and other, third party data in real-time. The result? Highly detailed profiles, which contain the level of detail needed to power genuine 1-to-1 personalization and streaming analytics.

Celebrus is easy to deploy and connects to the sophisticated data applications which banks and insurers use to gain insight and engage with their customers. Financial services organizations also choose Celebrus due to the complete control of their customer data it delivers. These organizations are highly regulated and need a solution that can ensure their compliance, safeguarding their 1st-party data through rigorous penetration testing and flexible options for hosting data on-premise or securely in the cloud.

Why choose Celebrus?

Due to our extensive heritage, Celebrus has been deployed in many enterprise scale businesses around the world, including over 50 deployments in leading financial services organizations. These customers chose Celebrus because they require: Continue reading→

Announcing the 2018 Q4 Customer Data Platform Buyers’ Guide by CDP Resource

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At the end of the month, CDP Resource will publish its first "Customer Data Platform Buyers' Guide" intended to help clear up some of the confusion stemming in part from a long list of providers who offer what they or others have called "customer data platform" technology. 

Sign up today for free access

While the guide will definitely include some of the general market commentary you've come to know and love, the focus is on individual providers. Each provider will be placed into a primary and secondary category, and provider write-ups will include other details about platform highlights or specialties. A confidence score will be included based on how much of an opportunity I've had to be exposed to the system. 

Again, in case anyone is wondering, providers have been included in this list because they or someone else has indicated that they are a provider of customer data platform technology. Primary ways aside from using the words on your home page: 

What is not required to be on this list: 

  • Be a customer data platform

... though truly, what IS a customer data platform? 🙂

60+ providers

Over 60 providers are being categorized. 60! Anyone missing? It's not too late, though it's getting really close... please send a note! 

AgilOne

ActionIQ

Aginity

Amperity

Ascent360

BlueConic

Blueshift

BlueVenn

Boxever

CaliberMind

Camp de Bases

Celebrus

conDati

CrowdEngage

Datalicious

Datorama

Eulerian Technologies

Evergage

Fospha

Gamooga

Hull

Informatica

Jahia Solutions

LeadBoxer

Lemnisk

Lexer

Listrak

Lytics

mParticle

NectarOM

NextUser

NGDATA

Nominow

Omeda

ONEcount

Optimove

Pearl

Pitney Bowes

Piwik

Quaero

QuickPivot

RedEye

RedPoint Global

Reltio

Segment

Selligent

SessionM

Signal

Tapad

Tealium

Treasure Data

Umbel

Usermind

V12 Data

Yeti Data

Ysance

Zaius

ZenIQ

Zylotech

Coming soon: our first Customer Data Platform Buyers’ Guide

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Happy October! 

This month will bring two frequent requests to fruition on CDP Resource: 

  1. More information about providers of customer data platform technology
  2. More information on customer data platform use cases

More providers: On or around 10/31, our first "Customer Data Platform Buyers' Guide" will be published!

Sign up now

This guide will introduce over sixty (60!) providers of CDP technology, assigning feature-based categorization and detailing highlights to set buyers off on the right path from the start. In the meantime, several "CDP Spotlight" posts will land on the blog starting this week. These will be a more fun view of some of the top providers out there written in conjunction with provider content teams.


More use cases: In addition to "5 things" posts, a string of "problems customer data platforms solve" posts will start landing on the site mid-month.

Coming tomorrow: I'll rattle off the current list of providers in case anyone notes a discrepancy we might be able to fix before end of month!

5 things about what a customer data platform (CDP) is

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There has always been a page linked at the top of this site: "What is a CDP?"

There's other stuff there, but the provided definition is:

Customer data platforms are marketing technology that facilitate the use of entire-lifecycle customer data from multiple sources across multiple channels without vendor-based preference for the sources or channels.

flickr/puntodevista

Yuk. The points made in this definition are also strewn about within various blog posts on this site. Still, there is something missing, and so falling back on good old structure, here are 5 things about what a CDP is:

1. Good at unification (for you)

As varied as CDP definitions may be, all would agree that unification is part of the deal. Creating an individual profile. A 360 degree view. 1:1.

There are different levels of unification. Some customer data platforms do not feature any account-based unification of data, for example. Even when there may be ABM-related features, sharing account-level data across profiles may not be as easy as it seems.

There are also different levels of unification needs. Some organizations are online-only and don't really attempt to identify their visitors. Some are club-like and won't allow a customer in the door without an identity.

It's important that the selected CDP unifies customer data by resolving/mapping customer identifiers through a scheme that works within your organizations data strategy.

2. Good at collection (for you)

Unification is not only about data that are already out there, being collected. It is also about adding value to these unified profiles by finding new data to collect. Not selling internet-connected coffee makers? IoT collection might not be necessary. Have no web data, or is data locked in a silo (free GA)? Solid web collection is absolutely necessary. Continue reading→

How do you implement a customer data platform?

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Eight implementation path origins, two main ingredients

In “Why are customer data platforms frustrating to buyers, strategists, and consultants?”, I posited that there may be some eight or so implementation path origins for customer data platforms.

These paths arise because there are various states of readiness and various priorities that create the perceived need for software in the first place.

The paths result in different speeds to market. Decentralized side projects are generally the quickest to implement, and are not always a bad idea. It depends on the situation. That said, these projects are certainly nowhere near the perfect CDP implementation. No ma’am. For that, you need two main ingredients to start:

1. The ever important data strategy (read: centralization)

At a simple level, this means that organizational time has been spent understanding, architecting, and activating data. Plans for progress exist. The customer data platform is part of these plans, or is becoming part of these plans.

2. Internal implementation support team

For a customer data platform implementation to be wildly successful, designate a cross-functional team to support the implementation. Not just strategists and star technologists. Include stakeholders who will ultimately be sharing in the benefits of the CDP, who understand their own data points and data needs. The level of involvement day-to-day will vary across the team, but all will be needed for phase-by-phase planning, reviews and sanity checks.

  Continue reading→

Why are customer data platforms frustrating to buyers, strategists, and consultants?

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Summer is over. It's time to go back to CDP school!

flickr/22905496@N07

It can be easy to get caught up in the happenings with "open season on CDPs" e.g. TreasureData being bought by Arm & Datorama by Salesforce. Our lovely area of martech is in an all out growth stage right now, and most acquisitions should only equate to more benefits... though certainly some extra red tape. Have fun with that!

To kick off September, we lay out some groundwork that will hopefully make everyone feel at home. Upcoming content will focus on the many possible paths to implementing and making great use of a CDP. We'll isolate some of the variables that lead to these many possible paths, and talk about getting near-term value while focusing on long-term benefits. 

For today, some background on what is going on with CDP buyers.

Who is buying customer data platforms?

It's almost 2019. The first "year of the CDP" was nearly two years ago. Every organization needs at least some combination of features that customer data platforms provide, though not all organizations will solve their problems with a CDP. Organizations that will are likely to be:

  1. Organizations improving upon or creating a data strategy where the CDP will act as a platform for data that are already warehoused/laked
  2. Organizations improving upon or creating a data strategy where the CDP will act as a platform for data that are in silos
  3. Organizations improving upon or creating a data strategy where a CDP is already in place but needs to be extended through advanced configuration, which may include <gasp> bringing in a second (or a different) CDP
  4. Innovation teams within organizations that understand the importance of taking advantage of the latest technology and bringing it into the data strategy over time as it is better understood by the wider organization
  5. Martech buying teams that have an immediate need for the technology to solve a specific problem, or that otherwise like to buy new marketing technology

The keyword of interest above is "data strategy." Without one (Hello, #5!), the customer data platform is not even a hammer, but the nail. The implementing team is the hammer. Look out!

 

How are decisions about CDP technology being made?

In the best situations for organizations with a data strategy, decisions about CDP technology are being made centrally. Plans for the technology are centralized to some degree for efficiency and mutual internal benefit... even if the plan is simply to check back later.

In other situations, customer data platforms are being purchased by an innovation team directly, with or without centralized understanding of what is happening. Continue reading→

What does the Salesforce acquisition of Datorama mean to CDP buyers?

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The Datorama acquisition, and impending string of CDP acquisitions, gives current customer data platform customers and buyers reason to consider what it all means. A couple key questions to me:

  1. Which vendors will make it standing alone after IBM, Oracle, and others make similar moves?
  2. What will happen with the platforms swallowed up by these clouds/suites?

flickr/peterblack2007

Standing alone means filling gaps

There will absolutely be standalone CDP vendors out there five years from now. The way they will survive is by filling gaps, as noted in the post linked above:

The suites will lag behind in some areas, or be in direct conflict with some first-party data programs, and customer data platforms will be there to fill in the gaps. These gaps will mostly be in data collection and data/decision delivery to execution systems the suites want nothing to do with.

Over time, gaps will be more clear. There's always something. For example, it might sound on the outside like all platforms have extremely capable and flexible data collection mechanisms, but they don't... and how much work goes into all if it? CDPs drive value by creating efficiencies, and are already helping in this area.

As another example of a gap, many organizations house data that must stay off-cloud, but still needs to be involved in analyses and execution systems. CDPs that help deal with this have an avenue to longetivity.

Cutomer data neutrality, service gaps 

Salesforce claims to be heading towards being platform agnostic, but how far will that go? And what are the pricing implications on individual components?

Marketing clouds/suites love to keep things in-house. In sort of a net neutrality-like situation, vendors will steer customers towards their own services via pricing incentives.

Pricing incentives won't be enough to get everyone on board. There will always be customer data platforms that make more sense for specific industries. For example, if your "customers" are higher education candidates, rather than use the Salesforce CDP, use the one that specializes in tracking candidates from high school through graduation and beyond. The best CDP for higher education might be one that connects to nichey higher education systems and provides a level of service through experience that a Salesforce couldn't match.

With this in mind

Keep an eye on what your CDP has done for you lately. Make sure it's developing. Progressing. Filling gaps. It will be a hard climb, and the ones that continue to work at it and win the hearts and minds of specific industries, creating value in unique ways, will have the best chance at sticking around.

What does the Salesforce acquisition of Datorama mean for other CDPs?

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image credit: www.amtec.us.com

Just months after the acquisition of MuleSoft at $6.5B, Salesforce took another step towards CDP land by announcing plans to acquire customer data platform vendor Datorama.

Salesforce appears to be taking serious steps towards offering a vendor agnostic approach to dealing with customer data. Don't forget the partnership with Google Analytics. Add MuleSoft's integration-enabling capabilities combined with Datorama's three-pronged approach to helping organizations work with customer data (data integrations, insights, activations), and Salesforce is going to give all others a run for their money.

Adobe has to be a little bit annoyed at the precision in these moves made over the last nine months.

Open season on CDPs

When acquisitions in a rising category of marketing technology start getting serious, expect more of the same. A great parallel to take a look at is the great tag management acquisition/convergence period earlier in this decade. 2012 and 2013 martech news was littered with such stories.

Oracle, IBM, and Adobe are all likely acquirers of CDP technology. Salesforce might do it again as niche CDP players grow, whether for the customer base, the employees, or the industry-based focus some of the platforms bring.

An execution-centric customer data platform will be bought by a data-centric customer data platform. That will happen a few times.

The story, abbreviated

Founded in 2012, Datorama exits with over 3,000 customers and ~400 employees. While the sum total is just a fraction of the Mulesoft price, this acquisition is indeed an $800MM investors dream story. Series A in 2013, Series B in 2014, and Series C in 2016 (total for all three: $50MM) plus some initial investments (guesstimate: less than $3MM).

The other side of the story

There are still dozens of other customer data platforms out there.

In a CDP Institute email, David Raab noted that a Walker Sands survey reported "63% of responders said they have a CDP in place." Aside from the inevitable discomfort of having to change out all of the paperwork for software agreements, what does the Salesforce acquisition of Datorama mean to CDP customers/buyers?

Centralizing decentralization ftw

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In customer data land, centralization is generally a good thing. Efficiencies are created. Boom!

Moderation is key, though, and sometimes exceptions to the rules are warranted. Especially in the case of internal centers of innovation.

Want the latest and greatest? Sell up!

It's wonderful when the latest and greatest technologies are handed down from the top without nary a peep.

It does not always happen, though, does it.

flickr/gshowman

Getting an organization to consider evaluating new marketing technology can be tricky. Good news! Customer data platforms can be fast friends for teams who innovate with customer data, teams who may be actively clashing with the top-down vision of centralization. Here are two decent selling points for these teams who want to be doing more with data:

1. CDPs are the anti-silo.
Customer data platforms sit up against centralized systems, extending their capabilities and providing a feedback loop.

2. Customer data platforms solve for so many use cases with customer data it would take years to work through all of them.
Take the time to consider the next two or three things your team would do, and what the potential results of those projects would be.

Being armed with this information is a great starting point. In the end, we all want the efficiencies delivered by centralization. These efficiencies do not need to be disregarded as part of projects that seem to be introducing new or parallel customer profiles. It is less important for customer profiles to be centralized for the sake of centralization than it is to ensure that centralization is not leading to trainwrecks or slowdowns of ridiculous proportions.

Good luck!

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