Three years ago, at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview event, Michael Katz, CEO and co-founder of customer data platform mParticle, pronounced from the stage that “DMPs are dead. Welcome to the CDP era.”
It was a somewhat controversial statement at the time, although not necessarily surprising coming from a CDP.
Even so, it’s a sentiment that’s “aged extremely well,” says Katz on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Since the days when marketers and even most analysts still weren’t totally sure about the difference between a CDP and a data management platform, there’s been a lot of progress in the customer data platform market.
Now, marketers are getting clearer about what they want from a CDP, although the space is still pretty crowded.
“There was a lot of noise,” Katz says.
But there are signs that the market is starting to mature, and today there are two main flavors of customer data platforms, according to Katz.
The first group, which includes mParticle, is focused on providing infrastructure and moving data downstream to different tools and partners. The other is what he calls a more “application-centric” type of CDP that focuses exclusively on marketer needs, such as audience insights and customer segmentation.
“Customer data infrastructure is useful to the whole business, including marketers, and goes beyond segmentation stuff to solve an industry challenge, a data quality challenge, a data governance challenge,” Katz says. “All of the things that impede the successful execution of digital strategies.”
Also in this episode: Common misconceptions that still remain about CDPs, predictions for the year ahead and how a chance encounter with the rapper Nas in an airport sparked an ongoing friendship.
