How the CDP market has evolved
How the CDP market has evolvedAs the functionality of CDPs has matured, the overall marketplace has seen five major changes in the last 12-24 months. Let’s review them quickly to illustrate the advancements and how vendors have reacted to buyers’ demands.
All marketing clouds announce CDP offerings. In response to their users seeking improved integration among their portfolio of products, virtually every marketing cloud vendor has started offering CDPs. Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and Zeta built their own CDPs, while Acquia, Twilio, and Sitecore acquired independent vendors.
Friendlier user interfaces. In response to buyers’ demands for improving business teams’ productivity, vendors have produced friendlier UIs. While original CDPs catered more to data analysts and marketing analysts, most current CDPs have created drag-and-drop workflows that easily support audience segmentation and activation across channels for non-technical users.
Privacy and security measures. In response to global privacy regulations (e.g. GDPR, CCPA, et al.) and with 54% of brands saying they experience security challenges with their CDP, vendors have been hardening their protocols. Now, most leading vendors have become certified to the aforementioned privacy standards as well as security standards in SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and more.
More prebuilt integrations. In response to buyers’ demands for quicker deployments and 91% of brands saying their success has been limited by a growing number of data sources, vendors have widened their portfolio of prebuilt integrations. However, despite many vendors offering somewhere between 75-200 prebuilt integrations, these prebuilt integrations also come with a shrewd warning from Real Story Group, cautioning that “most customer data platform vendors have disappointing packaged connectors.” Slalom equally urges brands to be wary of extra development required before use.
The emergence of CDP experts. In response to buyers’ demands for faster vendor evaluations and higher probabilities of success, CDP experts have become critical resources for learning which vendors are best suited for their needs. More specifically, experts with years of hands-on-the-keyboard CDP experience—often having five or more years as CDP integrators and advisors—have uncovered the distinct nuances that prevent each vendor’s success. For example, Slalom’s experts have learned which vendors can support low, medium, and high complexity use cases, enable flexible data models, complement existing tech investments, or scale to large data volumes.