Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 2, 2021

The build vs buy debate has existed as long as packaged software itself. Any serious discussion quickly concludes that there’s no one right answer and real question is when to do one or the other. That discussion, in turn, usually leads to a recommendation that companies build software which will create unique competitive advantage and otherwise buy when a satisfactory option exists.

Work Management 292

Work Management Marketing Management Buy Ad Building 292

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

The next stop on our privacy software tour is Osano , which bills itself as “the only privacy platform you’ll ever need”. That's a bit of an overstatement: Osano is largely limited to data subject interactions, which is only one of the four primary privacy system functions I defined in my first post on this topic. (The other three are: discovering personal data in company systems, defining policies for data use, and enforcing those policies.

Enterprise Management 136

Enterprise Management Marketing Management Software Privacy 136

Customer Experience Matrix

APRIL 1, 2020

As marketers finish their initial emergency adjustments to coronavirus lockdowns, they are starting to think about longer-term plans. While the shape of things to come is impossible to guess, reporting on industry changes has become a marketing trend of its own. Here are a dozen-plus studies I’ve seen in the past week, most of which are on-going. Retail Behavior Data Adobe this week launched their Digital Economy Index , a long-term project that gained unexpected immediate relevance.

Paid Search Agency 240

Paid Search Agency Companies Advertising Agencies Business 240

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 9, 2020

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.

Work Management 177

Work Management Marketing Management Vendors Paid Search Agency 177

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

Adobe fully released its Real Time Customer Data Platform last November. Although they had briefed me on it before then, it was only this week that I finally caught up with them to discuss the final product. Since this is a topic of great interest – and confusion – it’s worth sharing what I learned. Part of the confusion has to do with Adobe’s habit of reusing product names.

Enterprise Management 286

Enterprise Management Marketing Management Ideal Customer Profiles Profiling 286

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 3, 2020

The CDP Institute published its semi-annual Industry Update report today, which you download here for free. Although every word and image in the report is a jewel, there’s no question that the main story in this edition is CDP industry consolidation. Events in the past six months (stretching a bit to include early January 2020) include seven new funding rounds, three acquisitions of CDP vendors, four acquisitions by CDP vendors, and four asset sales by CDP companies.

Buy 240

Buy Work Management Marketing Management Acquisitions 240

Customer Experience Matrix

OCTOBER 27, 2019

October 22 was a landmark day for the CDP industry. We reported three significant announcements: Mastercard bought CDP and loyalty vendor SessionM which will power Mastercard services for its merchant clients Teradata launched its own CDP offering, Vantage CX, which will anchor Teradata’s marketing software product line Tealium partnered with marketing agency Wunderman Thompson , which will use Tealium AudienceStream to manage customer data for agency clients Each announcement following a string

Enterprise Management 257

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management Paid Search Agency 257

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 1, 2019

Customer success platform Gainsight recently released a Customer Data Platform module for its system. This followed Freshworks’ acquisition of Natero , another customer success platform that builds a unified customer database. Totango, another customer success platform, also positions itself as CDP. There's nothing questionable about these claims. Customer success platforms were among the earliest classes of systems identified as CDPs.

Ideal Customer Profiles 179

Ideal Customer Profiles Marketing Management Class Vendors 179

Customer Experience Matrix

APRIL 30, 2019

Let’s take a break from Customer Data Platforms to do some trend-spotting. I spy with my little eye…privacy systems! Specifically, there's a crop of systems that are privacy-safe alternatives to dominant social, search, email and other common consumer technologies. One well known example is DuckDuckGo , which positions itself as “a search engine that doesn’t track you”.

Privacy Protection 219

Privacy Protection Privacy Eye-Tracking Mobile Advertising 219

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 16, 2019

It seems a bit soon to wax nostalgic about the good old days of the Customer Data Platform industry. But the industry has become so bewilderingly diverse in recent years that it is tempting to recall simpler times when all a new product needed to promise was making it easier to unify their customer data. That was way back in 2016. Stride is clearly a next-generation CDP, on the market for under two years and including the analytic and orchestration tools common to new CDP systems.

Ideal Customer Profiles 120

Ideal Customer Profiles Generation Ad Frequency Segmentation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 7, 2019

I returned earlier this week from a sequence of workshops, speeches, and meetings in Europe, all focused on Customer Data Platforms. Here are some observations: - The European CDP market is indeed behind the U.S. My own conversations are with people who already care about CDPs, so they're a very skewed sample. But vendors, consultants, agencies, and marketers I spoke with mostly agreed that the larger community is just beginning to hear about the concept.

Work Management 136

Work Management Marketing Management Paid Search Agency Vendors 136

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 12, 2019

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.

Vendors 136

Vendors Stats Paid Search Agency Advertising Agencies 136

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 1, 2019

The CDP industry had a great 2018, growing by 60% and reaching $740 million revenue, according to the CDP Institute’s just-released Industry Update (click here to download ). The industry added 29 vendors and 2,653 employees, slightly more than the 26 vendors and 2,233 employees added in 2017. Vendor funding increased $568 million in 2018 vs $492 million in 2017.

Marketing Management 215

Marketing Management Paid Search Agency Vendors Acquisitions 215

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 24, 2018

I finally caught up with Oracle for a briefing on the CX Unity product they announced in October. Although it was clear at the time that CX Unity offered some version of unified customer data, it was hard to understand exactly what was being delivered. The picture is now much clearer. Here are straight answers to important questions: It’s a persistent database.

Marketing Management 235

Marketing Management API Verticals Trigger Marketing 235

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 18, 2018

“If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made” runs the old joke. The irony-impaired managers of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) seem to have taken this as serious advice, last week announcing creation of a “Center for Brand Purpose” that will help companies publicize their social purpose. Confirming the worst stereotypes of marketers as cynical hucksters, the press release promotes its mission with the argument that “purpose-led brands grow two to three times faster than their co

Paid Search Agency 192

Paid Search Agency Advertising Agencies Privacy Protection Work Management 192

Customer Experience Matrix

OCTOBER 7, 2018

Recent discussions with Customer Data Platform buyers and vendors have repeatedly circled around a small set of questions: what are the use cases for CDP? (This really means, when should you use a CDP and when should you use something else?) what are the capabilities of a CDP? (This really means, what are the unique features I’ll find only in a CDP?

RFP 266

RFP Generation Vendors Ad Building 266

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

Salesforce has sipped the Kool-Aid: it led off the Dreamforce conference today with news of Customer 360 , which aims to “help companies move beyond an app- or department-specific view of each customer by making it easier to create a single, holistic customer profile to inform every interaction”. But they didn’t drink the whole glass. Customer 360 isn't assembling a persistent, unified customer database as described in the Customer Data Platform Institute's CDP definition.

Work Management 305

Work Management Marketing Management Ideal Customer Profiles Marketing AI 305

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 24, 2018

One of the more jarring aspects in Adobe ’s briefing last week about its Marketo acquisition* were several statements that suggested Marketo and Adobe’s other products were going to access shared customer data. This would be the Experience Cloud Profile announced in March and based on an open source data model developed jointly with Microsoft and stored on Microsoft Azure.** When I tried to reconcile Adobe’s statements with reality, the best I could come up with was they were saying that Adobe s

Enterprise Management 295

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 295

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 21, 2018

Forget about Martech, Adtech, or even Madtech. The next big thing is BadTech. I’m referring to is the backlash against big tech firms – Google, Amazon, Apple, and above all Facebook – that have relentlessly expanded their influence on everyday life. Until recently, these firms were mostly seen as positive, or at least benignly neutral, forces that made consumers’ lives easier.

Privacy Policies 149

Privacy Policies Privacy Salesforce.com Amazon 149

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 2, 2018

Customer Data Platform vendor Treasure Data today confirmed earlier reports that it is being purchased by Arm Limited , which licenses semi-conductor technologies and is itself a subsidiary of the giant tech holding company SoftBank. The price was not announced but was said to be around $600 million. The deal was the second big purchase of a Customer Data Platform vendor in a month, following the Salesforce ’s Datorama acquisition.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Buy Marketing Management Vendors 120

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 1, 2018

News that Salesforce had purchased Datorama crossed the wire just as I was starting on two weeks of travel, so I haven’t been able to comment until now. This was purchase was noteworthy as the first big CDP acquisition by a marketing cloud vendor. That the buyer was Salesforce was even more intriguing, given that they had purchased Mulesoft in March for $6.5 billion and that Marketing Cloud CEO Bob Stutz (who announced the Datorama deal) had called CDPs “a passing fad” and said Salesforce alread

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Buy Work Management Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 3, 2018

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.

Work Management 120

Work Management Marketing Management Paid Search Agency Advertising Agencies 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 20, 2018

The World Health Organization has just declared that video addiction is a real disease but they've missed something even more insidious: the dangers of newsletter publishing. The CDP Institute Web site has been down for two days now (hopefully it will be back up by the time you read this and test that link), which means I haven't been able to publish the Institute's daily newsletter.

Marketing Management 120

Marketing Management Cross-Selling Mobile Advertising Newsletter 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 22, 2018

Adobe yesterday announced its purchase of the Magento Commerce platform, a widely used ecommerce system, for a cool $1.68 billion. That Adobe would purchase an ecommerce system was the least surprising thing about the deal: it fills an obvious gap in the Adobe product line compared with Oracle , Salesforce , IBM , and SAP , which all have their own ecommerce systems.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management eCommerce 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 8, 2018

Some people have feared (or hoped) that the European Unions’ General Data Protection Regulation would force major change in the the marketing and advertising ecosystems by shutting off vital data flows. I’ve generally been more sanguine, suspecting that some practices would change and some marginal players would vanish but most businesses would continue pretty much as they are.

Advertising Agencies 166

Advertising Agencies Marketing Proposals Barriers Vendors 166

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 7, 2018

I’m no fan of the TV show Black Mirror – the plots are obvious and excruciatingly slow. But nevertheless, here’s a story for consideration. Our tale begins in a world where all data is stored in the cloud. This means people don’t have their own computers but can instead log into whatever machine is handy wherever they go. All is lovely until our hero one day notices a slight error in some data.

Course 120

Course Best Practices Privacy 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 1, 2018

Readers of this blog and the CDP Institute newsletter know that I’ve been fussing for years about privacy-related issues with Facebook , Google , and others. With the issue now attracting much broader public attention, I’ve backed off my own coverage. It’s partly because people can now get the information without my help and partly because there’s so much news that covering it would consume too much precious reader attention.

Privacy 159

Privacy Facebook Personalization Paid Search Agency 159

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 18, 2018

For the past year, the most common question about Customer Data Platforms has been how they differ from Data Management Platforms. Recently that seems to have changed. Today, the question everyone seems to be asking is what project they should pick as their first CDP use case. That’s certainly progress but it’s a much harder question to answer than the one about DMPs.

Ideal Customer Profiles 136

Ideal Customer Profiles Barriers Analysis Trigger Marketing 136

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 4, 2018

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.

Work Management 212

Work Management Marketing Management Allocation Paid Search Agency 212

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 23, 2018

Most Customer Data Platforms are Software as a Service products, meaning they run on servers managed by the vendor. But some clients prefer to keep their data in-house. So before releasing the CDP Vendor Comparison report – now available here – I added a line for on-premises deployment. This seemed like a perfect fit: a clear yes/no item that some buyers consider essential.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Vendors Comparison Amazon 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 12, 2018

If one picture’s worth a thousand words, why is everyone rushing to replace graphical interfaces with voice-activated systems? The question has an answer, which we’ll get to below. But even though the phrasing is a bit silly, it truly is worth asking. Anyone who’s ever tried to give written driving directions and quickly switched to drawing a map knows how hard it is to accurately describe any process in words.

Activities 174

Activities Marketing AI Paid Search Agency Paid Social Agency 174

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 19, 2017

The Customer Data Platform Institute (CDPI) recently surveyed its members about their customer-facing systems and CDP deployment plans. ( Click here to download the full report.) While CDP Institute members are obviously not typical marketers (being smarter, richer, and better looking), the answers still provide some intriguing insights into the marketplace.

Marketing Automation Services 136

Marketing Automation Services Customer Surveys Planning Comparison 136

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 6, 2017

My wife is working on a Ph.D. in education and recently took a course on strategic planning for academic institutions. Her final project included creating a game to help illustrate the course lessons. What she came up with struck me as applicable to planning in all industries, so I thought I’d share it here. The fundamental challenge she faced in designing the game was to communicate key concepts about strategic planning.

Resources 136

Resources Class Course Conference 136

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 6, 2017

I wrote a couple weeks ag o about the importance of attribution as a guide for artificial intelligence-driven marketing. One implication was I should pay more attention to attribution systems. Here’s a quick look at two products that tackle different parts of the attribution problem: content measurement and advertising measurement. TrenDemon Let’s start with TrenDemon.

Marketing AI 120

Marketing AI Click Fraud Paid Search Agency Allocation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

OCTOBER 29, 2017

Some of the most impressive marketing systems I’ve seen have been developed for mobile phone marketing, especially for companies that sell prepaid phones. I don’t know why: probably some combination of intense competition, easy switching when customers have no subscription, location as a clear indicator of varying needs, immediately measurable financial impact, and lack of legacy constraints in a new industry.

Enterprise Management 212

Enterprise Management Marketing Management Paid Search Agency Ad Frequency 212

Customer Experience Matrix

OCTOBER 22, 2017

“I used to hate POCs (Proof of Concepts) but now I love them,” a Customer Data Platform vendor told me recently. “We do POCs all the time,” another said when I raised the possibility on behalf of a client. Two comments could be a coincidence. (Three make a Trend.) But, as the first vendor indicated, POCs have traditionally been something vendors really disliked.

Work Management 136

Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services Software 136

Customer Experience Matrix

OCTOBER 16, 2017

Wizaly is a relatively new entrant in the field of algorithmic revenue attribution – a function that will be essential for guiding artificial-intelligence-driven marketing of the future. Let’s take a look at what they do. First a bit of background: Wizaly is a spin-off of Paris-based performance marketing agency ESV Digital (formerly eSearchVision).

Paid Search Agency 149

Paid Search Agency Allocation Classified Ads Ideal Customer Profiles 149