Ep. 66 | The Truth about CDPs with Joe Stanhope

This week Joe Stanhope, Vice President and Principal Analyst serving B2C Marketing Professionals at Forrester Research joins Allison Hartsoe in the Accelerator. Joe clarifies the common definition of a CDP and sorts the market into four flavors of CDP: Data pipes, Orchestration, Automation and Measurement. Then he covers a few areas where buyers should be careful to evaluate CDPs realistically such as identity resolution. What is the future of stand alone CDPs? How will the space evolve? Should you jump in or not? Find out now.

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Podcast Links:

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Read Full Transcript

Allison Hartsoe: 00:01 This is the customer equity accelerator. If you are a marketing executive who wants to deliver bottom line impact by identifying and connecting with revenue generating customers, then this is the show for you. I’m your host Allison Hartsoe, CEO of ambition data. Each week I bring you the leaders behind the customer centric revolution who share their expert advice. Are you ready to accelerate? Then let’s go. Welcome everybody. Today’s show is about unmasking the truth behind CDPs, and to help me discuss this topic is Joe Stanhope. Joe Is the vice president and principal analyst serving B to C marketing professionals at Forrester, and I personally know he is a leading expert in the intersection of marketing and technology. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Stanhope: 00:57 Thanks. It’s great to be here again.

Allison Hartsoe: 00:58 It’s great to have you back too. It’s been about a year since we last spoke.

Joe Stanhope: 01:03 Time flies.

Allison Hartsoe: 01:04 Can you tell us a little bit more about your background, and what you specifically do at Forrester?

Joe Stanhope: 01:09 Absolutely. I’ve spent really my entire career in the marketing business in some way. I, it’s been at Forrester. This is actually my second stint at Forrester. Cumulatively, I’ve done about six years here, but I’ve worked in marketing services, advertising, and marketing technology, and I’ve actually been a CMO myself, so kind of a pretty diverse career instead of experiences and of course we try to bring all those things together when I advise Forrester clients. As you mentioned, I’m on our business to consumer marketing research team uncovered enterprise marketing technology, and the bulk of my time is spent with large brands helping them decipher their technology needs and build a roadmap and the plan to assemble the right set of technologies that will get them to their course.

Allison Hartsoe: 01:51 Uh, that is a very much a needed thing. I hear that all the time. In fact, I’m hearing so much hype in the CDP space. I thought this would be a good topic for us because you must be hearing it too, but before we dig in, I thought maybe you could help us to find CDPs and the main flavors of CDPs.

Joe Stanhope: 02:10 Absolutely. Certainly, there is a lot of discussions and excitement, and some might say the hype around the customer data platform category and Group of suppliers. We certainly hear that too in the general marketplace, and even somewhat with Forrester clients, so we do watch the market. We have published research on it, and we have created a standard definition for a CDP at the end, literally verbatim. It would be a CDP centralizes customer data from multiple sources and makes it available to systems of insights and engagement. Sounds pretty simple. Of course, it’s never that simple in practice, but that is essentially the lowest common denominator definition. One of the interesting things that we see in here about the CDP space as it exists today in early 2019 is that it’s a very, very diverse group of suppliers and vendors, very, very different companies doing what I would consider to be very, very different things all calling them CDPs.

Joe Stanhope: 03:07 Essentially we’ve got a group of vendors who have struggled to define themselves in the marketplace, and we created that definition because we do the lack of definition has a problem, right? That is concerning a matter what one might think about CDPs. It’s important. I think that a category of vendor be able to describe themselves accurately and succinctly. I think one, it helps suppliers operate in the market better knowing who to target. Uh, it reduces their sales cycles and makes it easier to sell. But most importantly, my clients need to know what they’re buying. So when companies show up and are pitching their wares, I want my clients that I deal with at Forrest, should be able to interpret what they’re being told by a vendor accurately and correctly, to know that it matches up to their needs, right? And so that they can quickly and efficiently, uh, be assembling the right technologies, right? Um, and knowing that who they work with aligns with that. So having a strong definition, I think it’s just really, really important. And then nursing a adjunct to this whole CDP phenomenon has been how important it is to really be able to describe what you do.

Allison Hartsoe: 04:10 How many companies are we talking about here?

Joe Stanhope: 04:13 Oh, a lot. I’ve seen anywhere from 20 to 100. I actually maintain a pretty large spreadsheet to kind of track everything as I see it now from my perch, I think I’m up to about 95 vendors right now who in some way have intersected with the CDP space, now either they’ve been, describe as a CDP by somebody else or either they go to market explicitly as a CDP.

Allison Hartsoe: 04:40 ,So I’m picturing a matrix spreadsheet that somebody might be trying to use on the brand side where they’ve got 95 items listed, 95 different companies, and then all these different features that they want on the other side. I mean that’s just so much information. That’s gotta be hard for people to sort out.

Joe Stanhope: 05:00 Absolutely. And it’s not isolated just to CDPs to be fair, there are a lot of vendors, so like a lot of different capabilities in this market place, and following the hundreds if not thousands of vendors that inhabit, um, dozens of categories of capability at Forrester before we only cover 31 different categories of advertising and marketing technology, which at the enterprise level, you know, a buyer would encompass many hundreds of vendors gets my full-time job to know this stuff and it’s hard for me to keep up. Right? Imagine you’re a marketer with a day job, and you decide you need more help to ciphering the noise and the capabilities and separating the semantics of how all these companies, not just CDPs describe themselves is daunting, and even our definition of a CDP is very high level, and again it goes back to I needed that lowest common denominator to start to assess some kind of focus around really the data for CDPs, but we’ve gone further than that.

Joe Stanhope: 05:54 We actually broke it down formally into fourth subcategories of customer data platforms, and again that reflects I think the diversity of CDPs and a, the first category is what we call data pipes. These are companies that provide essentially a waypoint for marketing data. There’s like a data march. They ingest and centralize information in one place, and they make that available to other technologies for analysis and execution. There’s a basic need to that, right? Getting the data together in one place so that we can use it because data is sourced from so many internal and external sources. The second category is orchestration, orchestration orient CTPs, CDPs, build customer profiles in segments. So they bring that data in together and then they really help you target, right? They have kind of a light orchestration targeting tool, and you create these segments of your customers, and you move up segments off to engagement platforms to send messages or do whatever kind of engagement is appropriate at that point.

Joe Stanhope: 06:52 Then we’re into the third category which is the automation customer data platform, and these are very reminiscent in forced or parlance to cross channel campaign management. These are companies that can handle the data, they orchestrate targeting and personalization, but they also have the direct ability to execute campaigns. So they may have an email service provider facility or mobile messaging facilities. So you can really as a one-stop shop, you can directly figure out here orchestration and then send the campaigns directly from that one CDP much and much more of a campaign management concept in marketing automation concept. And then finally when you have the measurement customer data platforms, and these are companies that have taken a slightly different path, and it’s really interesting where they have a goal really of supporting customer analysis. And so they’ve emphasized creating some of the reporting and analysis, even modeling workbenches within their tool once that data is collected, and creating integration features that actually prior towards prioritize conductivity to third-party analysis, dashboarding and modeling systems. So it’s the data science way that would put customer data platform.

Allison Hartsoe: 08:04 I think for that last category we’ve previously called them CIPs or customer intelligence platforms. Does that sound like the same thing to you?

Joe Stanhope: 08:14 Yeah, and again, that’s not a new concept. At Forrester, we have a whole team of customer analytics and data science people that cover customer analytics technologies, and so this would actually fairly closely align the fat existing market. So we certainly see demand in that portion of the CDP market.

Allison Hartsoe: 08:33 Yes, that makes sense. Okay. So there’s a lot of companies here. You know, you’re, you tracked 95, and you know, there’s probably more than that. Uh, why is there so much hype in this space? Do you think?

Joe Stanhope: 08:46 Because the problem is real. The struggle is real Allison that much I know.

Allison Hartsoe: 08:49 The truth is out there.

Joe Stanhope: 08:53 The truth is out there. CDPs aren’t attempting to address of very real business problem. If you think about modern marketing, marketers do not want to collect data or look at data for academic or curation purposes. They want to apply data for insights and to drive customer experiences. That has always been difficult. Collecting and managing an activating marketing data has always been hard, and it’s something that’s always getting harder. We’re always getting new devices, new channels and touchpoints. Marketing has an increasingly broad remit to support not just marketing but overall customer experience. So it’s a moving target with more data, right? And a lot of the traditional marketing application players have not made a lot of effort to support the underlying machinations, right, of working with data because they want to be in the application business. So it’s been a very pure garbage in garbage out attitude with most marketing application providers.

Joe Stanhope: 09:51 Now, historically, I think you had a pretty clean supply chain where you had a marketing company that did your data hygiene and data integration and then you had a database provider maybe that hosted or managed a database for you or a CRM system and then you made that data available on sequence to some execution systems that would send messages or provides no actually deliver something to an endpoint for it to engage with a customer. But the ecosystem is so complex, and it’s happening so quickly that that traditional supply chain has kind of fallen apart and become harder to manage. So brands are struggling with not only getting access to the data but putting the data to work. It’s a very real problem. We see it almost universally at Forrester with all of our clients. Our biggest clients are small and midsize clients are extremely sophisticated customers, and our less mature customers all struggle with this. They all want to be better at it, and so CDPs are jumping into the breach, and they want to help solve that problem. It resonates with basically every buyer the opportunity to get better with data.

Allison Hartsoe: 10:54 So you’re talking about the traditional handoffs of lots of different specialization traditionally along the way, and perhaps those handoffs are specializations made it easy for your traditional marketing applications providers not to keep up because somebody else was handling that. It sounds to me like the speed with which we need to operate on marketing data is heavily what’s driving the need for centralized information from a CDP? Is that correct?

Joe Stanhope: 11:25 I think there’s definitely a philosophy factor to this. It’s not simply a warehousing data question or an ingestion question. I certainly have clients that have invested heavily in these things over the years, and in fact, they very recently have made a lot of investments in these capabilities. What they are finding increasingly is that the velocity of collecting data, being able to decision based on it and turn that around into some kind of customer experience on essentially a transactional basis. As one customer comes in and another customer comes in and tries to engage, uh, within milliseconds, that’s the bigger challenge. It’s not that they don’t have data, it’s not that they can’t get the data into one place like literally struggle to make the pipes run fast.

Allison Hartsoe: 12:11 Okay. That makes sense. And then the other aspect I think might be driving some of the hype in the space and, and this is just from my personal experience, when you have a lot of venture capitalists who are investing in a market, and it becomes a pile on, it starts to drive, maybe certain needs to sell more because there’s now not just one company that’s well funded. There’s a bunch of companies that are well funded. Do you think that’s also driving some of the hype?

Joe Stanhope: 12:39 I think it’s driving a lot of the hype, Oh, we’ve seen this in marketing technology before, and we will see it again. And it’s not just this happens in places out there, but you know, segments outside of marketing technology as well and their technology markets are like this too. Um, although CDPs have been a really kind of extreme example of this where you start to see a little bit of success or some funding, and that traditional market development arc starts to take off. Um, and it really accelerated the CDPs not just on the funding but in the way they talk about themselves. The way they group themselves together, the vast majority, the noise in the marketplace comes from CDPs. We actually did an analysis here at Forrester of the questions and inquiries about CDPs that we’ve gotten over the last couple of years and that 85% of them come from technology vendors and CDPs themselves, not from actual buyers. It craves that echo chamber about themselves in the marketplace. We’ve also seen a lot of non-native CDP vendors pivot from other segments into the CDP segments in substantial numbers. And a lot of them are doing it because of it’s expedient to call themselves a CDP to try to ride the coattails of what they perceive to be. It’s a hot market.

Allison Hartsoe: 13:47 Let’s circle back for a second to the echo chamber piece. I want to make sure I understood what you said, and that’s that when you looked at the questions and inquiries that were coming in with regard to CDP is a lot of it was coming from technology meaning complimentary technologies or from other CDP technologies?

Joe Stanhope: 14:06 A lot of this from CDP technologies and from other vendors actually trying to decide if they should be CDPs now which tells you almost everything you need to know.

Allison Hartsoe: 14:16 Okay.

Joe Stanhope: 14:17 It is very heavily vendor driven, and you know you might expect to see this in a young market that is still coalescing and gaining momentum. It might not be unusual to see a little bit of a skew towards the supplier side and how it’s being talked about in the marketplace when it is so off-kilter. For me as an analyst, I take that as being a potential sign of a mismatch set up market demands. If my enterprise clients, marketing clients are not asking about this at a relatively similar rate to the level of discussion we see on the vendor side, then something’s out downs, and we take that imbalance actually pretty seriously as an indicator of what’s going on in the market.

Allison Hartsoe: 14:58 That’s very interesting. So you mentioned that CDPs are for everyone, but are there places where there’s a bit of a mismatch between what a company is looking for and what a CDP is saying but not actually offering?

Joe Stanhope: 15:14 Absolutely. I think what you see is the basic concept of access to more data more quickly in a smarter way and a more consistent way as appealing to almost all marketing organizations today, that underlying proposition of a CDP. So that’s appealing. The differences we start to see are not everyone always agrees that it’s a CDP that’s going to solve that problem. So they see the problem. But there are different ways to address that challenge, and it certainly varies on size bulk a company, the sophistication of a company to be kind of investments. They’ve already made those existing marketing technology stack. So we see a pretty strong bifurcation at Forrester between our large and experienced clients versus mid-size, less sophisticated marketing organizations cause the CVP value proposition plays very, very differently to those two buyer segments.

Allison Hartsoe: 16:08 You talking about the bifurcation between large and mid-size, but where do the small folks fit in? Are they also a candidate for CDPs?

Joe Stanhope: 16:16 I think they absolutely are. I think the value proposition of CDPs works very well for small and midsize businesses. We’re also bullish on it at Forrester for B to B applications. There are a whole segment of dedicated B to B customer data platforms, and we think that group is really onto something as well. The value proposition of a CDP around creating simplicity, consolidate in the marketing technology stack. Getting data together in one place really appeals to I think small and midsize businesses as well as B to B buyers. These are companies that are trying who literally to a mass data together in certain combinations for the first time or to become more cross channel and customer experience-centric. They may be far more resource constraints. Some of these companies don’t have the money or the expertise to go by all of the big marketing cloud, for example, or to pay a marketing services company to build a highly customized marketing database for them or a new advanced CRM system.

Joe Stanhope: 17:15 So a CDP fits very nicely into a package the way I started harassing some of those challenges and help them on their own marketing to continue to mature in a very practical way. Those same value propositions are a little bit harder to rationalize when you get into very large, very mature, very experienced corporations because they’re trying to fit a CDP into a much more developed marketing technology stuff. So it’s not a consolidation play. They’re trying to work with much, much bigger and oftentimes regulated data sets. So the data and security requirements might be very different. They also have much more dramatically higher expectations for the basic features and functionality of the tools because they already have access to the best and most advanced tools. So they expect everything they work with to be pretty mature. But keep in mind that CDPs are newer on the scene. So their functionality is not often as mature in some of these orchestration and personalization and data management capabilities. So some of the very large companies would look at it and say, well, this doesn’t really replace what I’ve already got. Then it’s not as mature as what I’ve already got. So that value proposition, it’s a little bit constrained.

Allison Hartsoe: 18:21 I would imagine that it’s not just personalization and data management, but it probably has a lot to do with security and GDPR, and other really deep regulations that fit alongside the enterprise need.

Joe Stanhope: 18:35 Oh, absolutely. And our largest companies, largest clients I should say, and a lot of time thinking about those, they are beholden to those kinds of regulatory compliance mandates. They also take their customer data assets extremely seriously, and wants to remain in control of them, and make sure that they’re safe and secure, an extension of customer experience as well as compliance and privacy for them. And so certainly CDPs uh, some of them talk about compliance, they have worked a lot of them on being secure and safe. But fundamentally you have a new class of provider, some young vendors that are newer to the scene and I haven’t been around as long. They are not as known a quantity as other providers, and they are hosting data in cloud infrastructure. So again, our largest customers, while they might be open to it, take a very calculated view of who they allow to host our data, and where, and so they not surprisingly want to be very careful with the same thing on a CDP level four data tech test stuff.

Allison Hartsoe: 19:33 Does that mean that in a sense a company might be overcharging in a way? If I’m simply putting a spin on what’s already in the cloud infrastructure, and then I’ve got companies like Amazon and Google rolling out all kinds of services attached to that cloud infrastructure, is there a potential for especially the larger companies to pick up a tool that they don’t really need because they’re being oversold?

Joe Stanhope: 19:59 It’s possible. I think for buyers stays focused on what the use cases are and what the value is of their data. They can avoid some of that. I think it is fair to note though that CDPs do cost money and in fact, a lot of them are not inexpensive, and so there is a real discussion to be had functionality and maturity aside about what the opportunity cost is. I’m investing in a CDP versus other capabilities. I spent a lot of time with Forrester clients talking to them about buying it for the right reasons. There’s a lot of use cases where CDP might make a lot of sense, but then you have to make a financial argument. CDPs can cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars a month, and if you’re only using it as maybe a band-aid or duct tape to stitch some things together, it may not be the best use of a marketing department’s budget.

Joe Stanhope: 20:46 You know, I had a client that was struggling with one of their marketing cloud implementations, and they wanted to buy a CDP. They thought with the CDP would help them bring all that data together. Then we suggested before doing that make sure you actually work on your marketing cloud implementation and maybe fix the source of that issue before you go and paper over it with a CDP. Now ultimately a CDP might be the right choice for them for various reasons. Before you go spend 10 grand, 20 grand, even a month on something, maybe try fixing the source issue first. So this is the kind of maturity elements that we’re dealing with when we try to make sure that there’s the right fit between somebody who’s technology vendors and their buyers.

Allison Hartsoe: 21:23 And when you talk about fixing source issue to me that sounds like, um, are you collecting clean data? Are you setting your campaign codes? Are there other types of examples of, you know, source issues that might predicate whether you get a CDP or whether a CDP makes sense?

Joe Stanhope: 21:41 Oh, many marketing automation and even marketing cloud systems are able to ingest quite a bit of data, and they have package integrations with a lot of different providers in the space. So there may be ways to continue building on that existing investment rather than going out and using yet another tool. Now it’s possible that it makes sense to use that CDP for some kind of leash data collection, where to handle a specific data type, or just to do something you can’t quite get done either from a functional perspective or in a reasonable amount of integration time and efforts to an existing solution. It’s still might be the right choice, but I think it’s really important to consider all the options.

Allison Hartsoe: 22:19 So what are some examples of where something comes out of a CDPs mouth, and you should just run if you hear this come from a CDP?

Joe Stanhope: 22:30 Um, look it, it’s like with any vendors, buyers must take control of the process rather than let any vendor take control of the evaluation or the selling. The buyer has to have a very strong view towards their goal and engaging with any of these companies, any marketing technology and not just CDPs. What use cases do they want to apply the CDP towards? What kind of customer engagement? Is this for email? Is it for websites? Are we talking about mobile? Um, being very clear here’s the kind of customer experience we want to support with enhanced capability through a CDP being very specific about here are the systems that it needs to integrate with. Here is our email vendor, here’s our mobile engagement vendor a, here’s our DMP. Being very, very clear about the data sources. Here are the data sources that we want to feed into the CDP.

Joe Stanhope: 23:29 Here’s how much data it is, here’s exactly where it comes from. The vendors, here’s how we expect the data to be integrated. I think it’s also really important to pay special attention to what happens to the data once it lands inside the CDP. We see a lot of claims around identity management. Identity resolution are stitching together customer profiles. Once the data is all in one place, resident within the CDP. Unfortunately what our clients find is most CDPs are not very specific about how that actually happens. It’s really important that you understand how a CDP compiles customer profiles on what basis they match data, what kind of referential truth set they built against, or what kind of customization options to meet their specific requirements might exist within that system because of the profiles and the data. Is it being handled correctly within the CDP? Nothing else matters.

Allison Hartsoe: 24:21 It makes perfect sense. I also sometimes feel like it’s a bit dangerous when you have somebody else putting your customer profiles together outside of your business that that seems like an awfully valuable asset to let out of the walls.

Joe Stanhope: 24:36 Yeah. Although it is not unusual for brands to rely on identity resolution vendors, for example, to help them in that effort, again, it depends on the use cases, the kind of customer engagement, the channels that are involved, but a lot of our clients engage with a specific class of vendor to handle their identity resolution, which is bus used to assemble and disperse customer profiles, and to do analytics such as attribution based on identical linkages created by identity resolution. So it’s not unusual to work with vendors for identity resolution, but what we’re seeing is most of those vendors are specialists and that they’ve been doing it for a very long time. They’ve invested very heavily. And the EFL property and the technology to do that that scale with accuracy, with precision, and that, uh, a buyer just has to be careful not to conflate CDPs identity capabilities with that, oh, a specialist identity resolution provider.

Allison Hartsoe: 25:30 Is there a canary in the coal mine where you could say, okay, I want to check your identity management. Maybe I pull my own profile and see how accurate it is between maybe at an identity specialist and a CDP. Is there a way to kind of gauge the accuracy of a CDP?

Joe Stanhope: 25:49 Start by understanding exactly how the product works, how it aggregates information and create matches, but Bosch and the Algorithms look rules that go into that. The degree to which they are hard-coded versus customizable. You can also audit that, right? There’s nothing to say. There shouldn’t be anything to say that you couldn’t go in and audit the results of those processes at the vendor. You could also look at things like accuracy and precision at the time of activation. Do you know how is it being activated, how well does it scale? What kind of accuracy are you saying? Those things are all possible. You know what’s also possible is an identity resolution provider and a CDP are not mutually exclusive. A lot of CDPs don’t want to do identity resolution capabilities. They assume that the brand will have done that already or has another provider for it so they can ingest the outputs of identity providers and just use that within their own system. So if you have very strong opinions and very intense requirements around identity, and that probably makes sense to split that apart. Whether you’re using identity resolution providers to create the best sense of identity and then allow the CDP or whatever, you know, data ingestion and storage environment you have, you like take the benefit of that and how it matches the data based on what the identity resolution providers sends back.

Allison Hartsoe: 27:01 Would you see the same thing around the math for calculating customer lifetime value per se?

Joe Stanhope: 27:06 Absolutely. Again, that’s what I think most CDPs are designed for, it is to allow you to take that data that they store, bring it into analytics or data science environment, generates the algorithms, say for response insurance CLV models, and then either send the results of that modeling back to the CDP to be stored or to send it off to other activation systems to be directly leveraged. And again some of those measurement oriented CDPs actually have her own modeling workbenches. So there may be scenarios where a data science team to do some of the work directly in the CDP.

Allison Hartsoe: 27:45 It also I think provides a good way to tell if a CDP is overreaching. So at the point that they say, yes, we can do identity resolution, yes we can be your modeling environment, you know we’re going to do it all for you from soup to nuts. It sounds like that’s an overreach. Would that be fair?

Joe Stanhope: 28:06 That’s where it becomes risky. That’s the way I would define it because either you’re talking about functionality where you know that this category of the vendor is less mature and you just need to know more. It may align with the way you think about it. It might not, but you need to know cause there’s not a single answer those questions or you have to think about kind of the workflows and your existing tech stack, so even for a CDP that has let’s say a modeling work batch or some artificial intelligence machine learning facility, that assumes that your brand’s data science people want to use that environment. Now most companies that are sophisticated enough to already have a data science team have already chosen what their stack of tools is going to be for that. They’re not going to use the CDPs tools.

Allison Hartsoe: 28:46 True. Especially if it’s not transparent.

Joe Stanhope: 28:49 Exactly. They’ve sorted that out so they might take the benefit of the data out of the CDP and then send the models back, but they’re not going to use a CDP as a modeling environment at that stage because they have their own systems in place. That’s again where you get into these more mature buyers where they say, this doesn’t replace anything I already have. We’ve already built all of these systems. What I really would want a CDP for is data piping. I don’t need them to replace anything on an application standpoint.

Allison Hartsoe: 29:14 So do you see the CDP space evolving in such a way that it eventually becomes something we look back on and say, Oh yeah, I remember when we needed CDPs, but now it’s part of everything? Or is it just a temporary blip or is it something that we’re going to always need?

Joe Stanhope: 29:32 Well I don’t think the data issues going away. We’re going to keep needing data. There’s going to be more data, and we’re always going to want it faster.

Joe Stanhope: 29:39 So I don’t see the challenge going away, and I don’t see everybody magically solving it and say, okay, let’s call it a day, we’re done. Because again, it’s always a moving target. Even if you have to figure it out today, you’re going to have to update it tomorrow or kind of a new world of customer engagement. So that will be the gift that keeps on giving.

Joe Stanhope: 29:56 In this industry, certainly CDPs will keep evolving. It’s early days for seeking the peace. They’re going after a specific kind of solution. They want to solve for a specific kind of buyer using a specific set of data, and that will evolve. I think the question is what’s the future of a standalone CDP essentially a CDP for CDP sake. I think that will shift dramatically where I think there will be standalones CDPs in the B to B market. I think there will be several um, uh, market of CDPs that serves the small and medium-size business market. I think a lot of existing CDPs we’ll develop enough functionality that they will migrate off naturally into other categories that they develop very strong personalization functionality as a part of their orchestration. Well, that really makes them a personalization vendor with a CDP data foundation, or if you develop very strong messaging functionality with a CDP data foundation, well that really makes you campaign management vendor with a CDP data foundation.

Joe Stanhope: 30:52 And the same thing with customer analytics. These companies develop strong data management data handling, data workbench, dashboard reporting functionality. Don’t migrate off eventually into the customer analytics category, but on the basis with a strong data foundation. So you’ll see them disperse off functionally into categories which are healthy because those are categories where marketers are buying actively that there was a budget for them to buy actively. That’s good for everybody. And then you’ll have some specialty standalones that support more of a mid-market and B to B, and I believe increasingly, and we’ve already started seeing this just in the last month, although it was declared last year by the end of 2019 really every marketing cloud vendor will have pretty strong data management capability upgrades in place cause they see this shift happening too and they’re working quite hard investing very heavily in attempting to up their game in terms of data ingestion, profile building and extensibility for data.

Allison Hartsoe: 31:49 I saw some recent announcements from Adobe on just those lines. You know now we have a CDP too.

Joe Stanhope: 31:56 Yeah, so they don’t always call it a CDP. They look at that as really a building kind of the core services infrastructure for their application sets. But a lot of it is highly reminiscent of CDP, just writ large, high scale, more data, more applications. And of course they’re selling it into a very, very large installed base, so their ability to get traction in the market because the market power of these marketing clouds have, Um, you know was pretty impressive. And then we’ll see what they actually shipped because a lot of these things have been pre-announced companies like Oracle and Adobe have announced that they have significant functional upgrades coming that again, are CDP like, always doing some noise around that, and we’ll see what some of the others do like a salesforce and an SAP. I’ve yet to really make strong declarations in that area, but it stands to reason that they will also try to make large.

Allison Hartsoe: 32:45 Now Joe, this has been really helpful. If people want to reach you, is there a particular way they can get in touch?

Joe Stanhope: 32:50 Yes, absolutely. We’d love to hear from everybody. You can email me joestanhope@forrester.com it’s probably the best way, or I’m on Twitter. You can find me @joestanhope. I’d love to connect.

Allison Hartsoe: 33:03 Fantastic. As always, everything we discuss is at ambitiondata.com/podcast, and Joe was there anything I can link to that would be helpful for people to see from that page?

Joe Stanhope: 33:15 Sure. We’ve written blog posts about CDPs, and we can give you that link and can you can use that services for a starting place for not only finding me later but seeing someone Forresters point of view on the top.

Allison Hartsoe: 33:26 Fantastic. I know everybody will appreciate that. Well Joe, thank you for joining us today. You know, every time we talk there’s always interesting angles, interesting insights that I pick up personally, so I genuinely appreciate you sharing the knowledge that you have at Forrester, not just with me but with the audience. Thank you for doing that.

Joe Stanhope: 33:46 Thank you. It’s always fun and the feeling’s mutual. I always get stuff out of it too. So great to work together again,

Allison Hartsoe: 33:52 Remember everyone, when you use your data effectively, you can build customer equity. It’s not magic. It’s just a very specific journey that you can follow to get results. Thank you for joining today’s show. This is your host Allison Hartsoe, and I have two gifts for you. First, I’ve written a guide for the customer-centric Cmo, which contains some of the best ideas from this podcast, and you can receive it right now. Simply text, ambition data, one word, two three one nine nine six and after you get that white paper, you’ll have the option for the second gift, which is to receive the signal. Once a month. I put together a list of three to five things I’ve seen that represent customer equity signal, not noise, and believe me, there’s a lot of noise out there. Things I include could be smart tools. I’ve run across articles, I’ve shared cool statistics or people and companies I think are making amazing progress as they build customer equity. I hope you enjoy the CMO guide and the signal. See you next week on the customer equity accelerator.