David Raab
CustomerThink
New York, NY, United States
Contact David
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
| Recent: |
|
| Past: |
|
Past articles by David:
When CDPs Fail: Insights from the CDP Institute Survey
We released a new member survey last week at the CDP Institute. You can (and should) download the full report, so I won’t go through all the details. You can also view a discussion of this on Scott Brinker’s Chief Martech Show. But here are three major findings. Martech Best Practices Matter We identified the top 20% of respondents as leaders, based on outcomes including over-all martech… → Read More
Software Review: BigID for Privacy Data Discovery
Until recently, most marketers were content to leave privacy compliance in the hands of data and legal teams. But laws like GDPR and CCPA now require increasingly prominent consent notifications and impose increasingly stringent limits on data use. This means marketers must become increasingly involved with the privacy systems to ensure a positive customer experience, gain access to the data… → Read More
Data Security is a Problem Marketers Must Help Fix
Everything you need to know about 2020 is covered by the fact that “apocalypse bingo” is already an over-used cliché. So I doubt many marketers have found spare time to worry about data security – which most would consider someone else’s problem. But bear in mind that 92% of consumers say they would avoid a company after a data breach. So, like it or not, security is a marketer’s problem too.… → Read More
Don’t Misuse Proof of Concept in System Selection
Call me a cock-eyed optimist, but marketers may actually be getting better at buying software. Our research has long shown that the most satisfied buyers base their selection on features, not cost or ease of use. But feature lists alone are never enough: even if buyers had the knowledge and patience to precisely define their actual requirements, no set of checkboxes could capture the nuance of… → Read More
Here’s a Game about Building Your Martech Stack
I’ve recently been running workshops to help companies plan deployment of their Customer Data Platforms. Much of the discussion revolves around defining use cases and, in particular, deciding which to deliver first. This requires balancing the desire to include many data sources in the first release of the system against the desire to deliver value quickly. The challenge is to find an optimal… → Read More
Balandra Orchestrates Customer Journey Without a CDP
The need for a system that assembles unified, sharable customer profiles is now widely accepted. So is the label of “Customer Data Platform” to describe such systems. What people do still debate is whether a Customer Data Platform should only assemble those profiles or should also include features to “activate” them in the sense of selecting customer treatments. I personally find the discussion… → Read More
Reflections on the CDP Revolution in France (and the Rest of Europe)
The CDP Institute just published a report on the CDP Industry in Europe (download here). This was based primarily on the global Industry Update released last month. This showed especially fast growth in Europe, with a year-on-year increase of 74% in the number of European vendors and 80% in European CDP employment, compared with growth outside of Europe of 38% in vendors and 59% in employment.… → Read More
What Happens When Everyone Has a CDP?
October 22 was a landmark day for the CDP industry. We reported three significant announcements: * Mastercard bought CDP and loyalty vendor SessionM which will power Mastercard services for its merchant clients * Teradata launched its own CDP offering, Vantage CX, which will anchor Teradata’s marketing software product line * Tealium partnered with marketing agency Wunderman Thompson, which will… → Read More
Marketing cloud vendors join the customer data platform industry
The CDP industry is already thriving without participation by the marketing cloud vendors. It will have to survive a bit longer without their help. → Read More
Do Customer Data Platforms Need Real-Time Processing?
Is real-time processing a requirement for a Customer Data Platform? It’s a deceptively simple question that can’t be answered without resolving two additional questions: What do we mean by real-time processing? How do we decide what is and isn’t a requirement? Let’s tackle the definition of real time first. There are at least four different flavors of real time processing that relate to CDPs. *… → Read More
The Privacy Multiverse: A Fantasy in Three Acts
Jamie knew something was wrong when his alarm clock didn’t greet him by name. Weird, he thought. Things quickly got weirder. The water in the shower wasn’t set to the right temperature. The traffic report mentioned an accident nowhere near his route to work. When the radio played a song he had specifically banned from his play list, he knew something serious was wrong. “Clock, please run a… → Read More
Jamie’s Excellent Privacy Adventure
Jamie knew something was wrong when his alarm clock didn’t greet him by name. Weird, he thought. Things quickly got weirder. The water in the shower was too hot. The traffic report mentioned an accident nowhere near his route to work. When the radio played a song he had specifically banned from his play list, he knew something serious was wrong. “Clock, please run a system check,” Jamie… → Read More
Privacy-Protecting Systems Are The New Green
Let’s take a break from Customer Data Platforms to do some trend-spotting. I spy with my little eye…privacy systems! Specifically, there’s a crop of systems that are privacy-safe alternatives to dominant social, search, email and other common consumer technologies. One well known example is DuckDuckGo, which positions itself as “a search engine that doesn’t track you”. But there are plenty of… → Read More
Informatica Buys AllSight and What It Means for the CDP Industry
Informatica announced last week that has purchased AllSight, a Toronto-based Customer Data Platorm vendor. This is interesting on several levels: * A CDP vendor is being bought by an established enterprise data management firm. This is a normal event in the development of a software category: products are developed as single-purpose “point solutions” and then, after the category is validated and… → Read More
Stride Offers a Next-Generation Customer Data Platform
It seems a bit soon to wax nostalgic about the good old days of the Customer Data Platform industry. But the industry has become so bewilderingly diverse in recent years that it is tempting to recall simpler times when all a new product needed to promise was making it easier to unify their customer data. That was way back in 2016. Stride is clearly a next-generation CDP, on the market for under… → Read More
European CDP Market Is Still Behind the U.S.
I returned earlier this week from a sequence of workshops, speeches, and meetings in Europe, all focused on Customer Data Platforms. Here are some observations: – The European CDP market is indeed behind the U.S. My own conversations are with people who already care about CDPs, so they’re a very skewed sample. But vendors, consultants, agencies, and marketers I spoke with mostly agreed that the… → Read More
What’s Different About European CDPs?
For reasons that made sense at the time, I recently interviewed myself about the CDP Institute’s latest review of Europe-based CDP vendors. Here’s how that went. What do you think potential CDP buyers would find the most interesting stats from this? From a buyer’s perspective, the most interesting stat may be the absolute number of local vendors available. We found 25 Europe-based CDP vendors,… → Read More
Consumers Aren’t As Into Personalization As You Think, and Other Survey Results
I review a lot of surveys — easily a dozen each week. Mostly they go into a big file which I mine occasionally for helpful factoids to spice up a paper or presentation. Sometimes I take a more thorough tour to look at some bigger issues. Today is one of those days. Specifically, I was prepping for a presentation in Amsterdam, which meant I needed to present general industry trends and then see… → Read More
2018 Was a Great Year for Customer Data Platforms
The CDP industry had a great 2018, growing by 60% and reaching $740 million revenue, according to the CDP Institute’s just-released Industry Update (click here to download). The industry added 29 vendors and 2,653 employees, slightly more than the 26 vendors and 2,233 employees added in 2017. Vendor funding increased $568 million in 2018 vs $492 million in 2017. But the smooth growth hides some… → Read More
Oracle CX Unity Looks Like a Real Customer Data Platform
I finally caught up with Oracle for a briefing on the CX Unity product they announced in October. Although it was clear at the time that CX Unity offered some version of unified customer data, it was hard to understand exactly what was being delivered. The picture is now much clearer. Here are straight answers to important questions: It’s a persistent database. CX Unity will ingest all types of… → Read More