![]() ![]() Since then, I think the pandemic may turn out to be an inflection point where we’re seeing this sort of acceptance of digital, and it’s not something that just some companies do. That really was a fundamental change in the industry and we’ve just been on that huge expansion. So that started at the turn of the century, the end of the first dot com boom and then the growth of SaaS after that – software as a service, SaaS. And on the other side, of course, opened up just this plethora of MarTech tools that grew from next to nothing, to this sort of infinite set that we have today. David has chronicled the rise of martech ever since it first gained traction in the 1980s and so I began the interview by asking him to describe its evolutionary arc.ĭavid Raab: Well, the big turning point, of course, was the internet or the web, in particular, which made us go from one or two channels to multiple channels or one or two data sources to multiple data sources. This fledgling industry is now valued at $1.5 billion, according to the CDI, and grew by 20% last year. In 2016 he founded the Customer Data Institute whose mission is to serve as a clearing house of information about this fast-growing but fragmented (and confusing) category. The term “customer data platform” was coined by David Raab who’s a highly regarded expert and consultant on marketing technology. A reliable, up-to-date, and comprehensive view of the customer, including all past interactions, is critical to success. Unlike most other end users, marketers are not simply passive consumers of data: their job is to put the customer profile information to commercial use, creating personalized messaging, serving up “next best offers”, managing the customer journey, and so on. A CDP is simply a purpose-built platform for storing customer-level data. That’s why an alternative solution, which first appeared around the time Redshift was released, has become popular amongst marketers: The Customer Data Platform. ![]() In fact, the technical challenges are so formidable, according to Gartner Research, that 80% of organizations are expected to abandon their efforts to create a single customer view in the next few years. It takes a gargantuan effort, no matter how automated the data stack may be. Because processing large datasets and then moving sub-sets of data around to meet the needs of different users remains an immense challenge. Yet despite all of this innovation the dream of a “Golden Record” remains on the bucket list of every marketer. ![]() Its arrival unleashed a wave of other data technologies which modernized the practice of data management. The breakthrough came in 2012 with the launch of the cloud-based Amazon Redshift which was both fast and cheap. So, the much maligned data warehouse was brought back into the picture, this time as a cheaper and more agile technology. Data lakes quickly became “data swamps”, filled with extraneous data and difficult to wade through. However, this solution proved just as unwieldy. Specialized tools were needed to query the data lake and pull raw data into BI platforms where it could be structured for analysis. Thus was born the “data lake”: a centralized repository that could store data of any kind, both structured and unstructured. New storage solutions were needed to ingest many forms of raw data from many different digital channels. In the early 2000s this monolithic architecture was overwhelmed by the deluge of “Big Data”. The initial response to this rising demand for data was to build galactic data warehouses, usually on a costly Oracle or IBM relational database management system, and provide end users limited access for analytical reporting through custom built data marts. They clamoured for easier access to customer-level data, at the time locked away under protective custody by the IT gatekeepers. Ever since the 1980s, when data-driven marketing first became practical for most companies thanks to PC-based computing, marketers have pined for a “single view of the customer”. Marketers realize this better than anyone. Call it what you will, it remains a utopian vision for most organizations, despite a massive investment over the past decade in building intricate, cloud-based enterprise data stacks. That trend is likely to continue in coming years, according to the world’s leading CDP expert David Raab, as more companies recognize the value of first party data.ĭavid Raab is the Founder of the CDP Institute, and a widely known expert and consultant on marketing technology and analytics.Ī single source of the truth – a 360-degree view of the customer – a “unified profile” – the “golden record”. Tired of waiting for IT to build them a “golden record”, marketers are turning to commercial solutions called Customer Data Management Platforms. Despite a massive investment in data management technology over the past decade, the dream of a “single view of customer” remains as elusive as ever for marketers. ![]()
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