We were all waiting for a platform that stitches data across the enterprise to deliver impactful digital experiences in real time. We finally got it in form of CDP. Now What’s Next? Before I have tried to answer this question below, let us see the journey of Digital Analytics. Feel free to add.

Going back a decade back, when world was coming out of financial crisis of 2008, Digital was hype of the moment. SEO/SEM/PPC were words we used to hear. However, Analytics was not in the agenda of Digital Marketers. As I remember, Urchin was originally a software to evaluate web server log files, but then developed into a good web analysis tool in late 90s. Google acquired urchin in 2005 and named Google Analytics that we all know today. Later, Adobe acquired Omniture in 2009 and named Adobe Analytics. Webtrends, IBM Coremetrics among others- were also used by marketers.

Well, coming back to the topic. After marketers starting recognizing the capabilities of Digital Analytics, there came need of Testing Tools like Target, Optimizely, Google Optimize etc. As the digital world evolved, data was the king where we saw customer buying patterns on social media platforms and influencers. In Parallel, we saw buyers shift from physical stores to computers to Mobiles. Data centers also evolved that can now handle Terabytes of Data that gave way to AI and ML.

With multiple touch points, marketers felt a need of creating Unified Customer Profile and Identity Map. This is when Adobe came with Adobe Experience Cloud and a segmentation tool called Adobe Audience Manager DMP. DMP has long history as well that was first developed in the 2000s, enabling organizations to ingest, organize, and activate customer data to be used in building anonymous customer profiles for advertising programs. Lotame, Oracle BluKai, AAM (Demdex), Sales Force (KRUX), Tealium Audience Stream are leading DMPs in the market. Adobe Acquired Demdex in 2011, Krux was acquired by Sales Force in 2016 and Blukai got acquired by Oracle in 2014. Google Audience (not exactly DMP segmentation tool) has much bigger data sets and anonymous data pool for ad exchanges.

With Omni channel, there came need of bringing offline and PII data into system. CDP came into picture that was not a replacement existing marketing tools but a front end that integrates the marketing suite together discussed above - Sensei, Marketo, Target, Audience Manager, Campaign, CJA, RTCDP.

So, What’s Next.

  • I believe it will more of user orchestration that we will see. More like Adobe Campaign where we can create wire frames and diagrams
  • AI will be part of segmentation. Sensei will evolve driven by sequential to real time to events to static
  • XDM will be new normal for all marketing suite products that will be more standardized and driven by content and events
  • We will see efficiency of scale
  • GRC (Governance/Risk/Compliance) will be marketers focusing on
  • CDP will be more like an application and plug/play