At 30:00 , Zach takes us through the blurring lines between CDP and DMP - or the martech and adtech applications of customer data. They agree it is a difficult choice, especially as now we are beginning to see some CDPs do more DMP-ish things and vice versa. Listen in to what David and Zach predict the trend is going to be: more or less unification between CDP and DMP? And are Agencies – the main users of DMPs - all caught up on what’s coming?

At 22.40: Build or buy CDP? How much will the ‘open source’ or the ‘tools to build your own CDP’ space impact the ‘build versus buy’ decision? When is a build decision more suitable than a buy decision? Zach and David weigh in on the upside and downside of building versus buying a CDP, who is responsible for the decision (between Marketing and Technology), and why this debate can be meaningfully resolved only when companies accept CDP as a strategic solution to the business - and not just something for Marketing to use.

Several smaller acquisitions happened, and then the two big ones - Datorama by Salesforce for reported $800 million and Treasure Data for $600 million by ARM Holdings for reported $600 million. At the same time, more new CDPs were announced last year than went out of business or got acquired. What is the impact of these dynamics on potential buyers?

Zachary Van Doren, CEO of CMO labs Talks CDP not just because we love the idea of customer data management, but because we have some of the best independent voices on CDP talking to us about some key factors impacting the space that may not necessarily be in the vendor’s control, but should nevertheless be considered during any CDP investment decision.

Chitra [00:00:12] Welcome back to this week our special Bonanza episode on CDPs. With some of the best independent voices on CDP in the industry today we have Zachary Van Doren who is the CEO of CMO labs. Much sought after speaker and consultant on All Things data and personalization David Raab, of course, the founder of the CDP institute an authority on CDP and Anand Thaker founder of intellify and very well regarded voice on marketing automation data and digital transformation. So delighted to have this panel gathered today because I am excited about this conversation not just because we are obsessed with demystifying CDP and customer data management at Martech adviser but today we actually want to move the conversation around CDP beyond the usual talking points beyond the nuts and bolts of what CDP is. Why do you need it? How do you evaluate CDP features etc.. We actually want to move further from their focus on other major factors that can or do impact this piece. And this we hope is going to be of use to anybody considering a CDP investment or even interest in the customer data management space. Because these are not the typical consideration considerations that vendors or even buyers guides in the market usually talk about but we think are useful considerations for an informed decision nonetheless. So David let's start with setting some context. The CDP Institute recently created a real CDP certification with you know I just wonder with all the diversity in use cases the different specializations of CDP the verticalization we are seeing. How did you arrive at this one size fits all definition of the CDP.

David [00:02:04] Well the real CDP definition focuses on the database building capabilities of the CDP. And we felt it was necessary to do that because of course, the term is very popular. So when you get a popular term many people decide to apply that label to themselves just because it seems like a good idea. So we wanted to kind of set a baseline really based on what we thought people's expectations were for CDP. So when somebody goes out to buy a CDP what do they think they're getting. We want to make sure that we had a definition that captured that so we could say yeah. You can actually, in fact, be confident that if this something is certified as a real CDP you're getting what you think you're getting and what we think people expect is that they're going to be able to log loading all of their data from all the different sources structured unstructured semi-structured. They'll be able to capture and retain all the detail on that data not throw away parts of it. They'll be able to store that data for as long as they want to store it not just for 30 or 60 days they'll be able to create a unified profiles by bringing together all the information about each customer to create the the famous 360 view and then they'll be able to share that day with all any other system that wants to share it. So those are the five things that they're for our part of the. Are the five checkpoints in the real CDP definition out to what Zach was saying earlier. This is just database building that real CDP definition and that's just assembling the data and making it available CDP is used primarily to support personalization by marketers other departments might use them for other things. So the real CDP is just addressing that one part of the CDP value prop which is the database assembly piece of it which we think is what people think about. But we fully recognize and CDP vendors themselves and CDP users recognize that just assembling the data without doing something with it isn't terribly useful so many of the CDP products actually include personalization capabilities as well.

Zachary Van Doren [00:04:09] The core is that the data is the data wrangler identity resolution creation of that 360 customer view and I would say the segmentation orchestration measurement elements are layers on top of that and some have more degrees of focus and others in those layers on top. I would say but fundamentally it's about the data wrangling data pipes identical resolution 360 customer creation and what we've seen as all other elements of column layer are ancillary to that core.

Chitra [00:04:45] We have arrived at an understanding of what the core of the CDP is right. But then we have all these other ways you can slice and dice that whole consideration set right. So one of them, for example, is nowadays we have a purpose built CDP systems for verticals so travel hospitality healthcare media all of that. And then you also have this access analysis campaign data governance focus so some CDPs are stronger in one than the other. You have CDP that specialize by size so mid and large size companies for example and enterprises. And then, of course, there's this business model sort of specialization also that we're seeing today which is B2B B2C ABM. Perhaps you know there'll be something for B2Cs as well because that's becoming such a huge industry by itself. So what's your comment on how a marketer should approach this piece of the puzzle when they're getting into their choices.

Zachary Van Doren [00:05:43] Yeah. Yeah. Just I mean just the comment on that first is I would say virtualization and size is much more import important in terms of how you would segment a CDP than business model and when also add another slice of that would say it would be to say that is it a more of a marketer's centric tool or is it more of a system engineer data engineering-type tool. Depending on the functionality the interface designs the capabilities in around segmentation orchestration type function. Usually, when someone approaches us on you know what is the right CDP for us we go back to my earlier comment about taking a step back and really understanding some core parameters that would guide us in that decision. So the existing Martech ad tech stack infrastructure the current resources and maturation of that company in terms of their abilities to manage and enable the use cases in around personalization of a CDP. Of course, the sizing the virtualization the budget all those would go into those factors. And you know there's there are a few keys that will go into this that are more conducive to specific functions and areas than others. So you have some CDP there really about that core. You know that that data wrangling piping DNA resolution customer 360 creation. Others are there more around. Automation around predictive automation runs segmentation and or a campaign orchestration. Others might be really core around let's say Internet of Things data and wrangling of that. So ARM Holdings acquired Treasure Data not getting into that space. So again it's breaking down his cause defining those parameters and then based on those parameters that really focus around real verticalization sizing budgets then we hone in on what would be the right CDP for that.

Chitra [00:08:00] There's another factor as well that you need to think about if you're thinking of a CDP and that is the growing consolidation and fragmentation in the space right?. So sort of just before we begin that what's kind of the member's trend that you have today. The CDP Institute.

David [00:08:17] Well we have. I think I counted correctly 40 first as of yesterday members being CDP vendors. And you know we have obviously many more individuals who are on our list than we did the fabulous daily newsletter. There are about a hundred or so CDP vendors in the world that we've noticed and you know we keep tripping over about once a week or so. The the the big thing looming over the industry of course is what happens when when the salesforce is in the Oracles and the Adobe's come in and you know we don't want to pretend that's not out there because if not only is it out there when these guys are very active and you know a number of announcements happening like you know imminently in that space. So there are more people providing CDP capabilities than we would list of specialists CDP vendors and then even looming behind behind you know the big enterprise software guys or the Googles and the Amazons and and the big cloud platforms who are also pulling in a lot of data and sooner or later could take over that role as well. So it's a very dynamic space right now. Of course, you mentioned the Arm acquisition and Datorama got acquired and then just yesterday as you all know a lot of Lattice Engines also got acquired by Dun and Bradstreet. So you know there is a little bit of consolidation happening we don't see. You mean you haven't just sort of going out of business.

[00:09:49] If the big vendors actually do step in. Does that end up changing how you would define what a real CDP certification would be?

[00:09:57] No no, in fact, it's exactly the opposite. The point of the real CDP certification is to make sure that users are getting what they think they are getting. You know we've seen people claiming to have a CDP product that didn't meet some of those requirements and you know there's no guarantee that when the salesforce Colorado becomes in that they're magically meet that requirement either but we feel the requirements the requirement. So if those guys meet it will gladly give them the badge and if those guys don't meet it we hope that people will notice that they haven't gotten it and make and understand what they're doing and not doing that. May or may not be a problem for a buyer.

Chitra [00:10:40] So how many do you reject. On a week in a week from the real CDP certification.

David [00:10:47] Maybe maybe we'll look at one a week or so they'll say you know what that's not a real CDP. This is not necessarily people coming to us to be certified but we keep an eye out on who's in the space. I mean we see oh that's an interesting company up No they're not doing this. No, they're not doing that. Usually what they're not doing is they're not exposing the data sharing the data. That's the big thing that knocks out a lot of people will assemble data kind of for their own purpose. But if they haven't engineered the system to share that data and then that doesn't meet one of those keys CDP requirements. Yeah.

Chitra [00:11:23] And Zach you know you will you directly work with a lot of companies on their actual CDP selection and deployment trade. And that's one of the things that CMO labs do. So I'm really interested to hear your perspective on this. Do you have customers like I would think someone who already has an investment in Salesforce would probably want to wait for them to see what they're going to come up with now that they have Datorama they have that blue you know? And then Oracle users it'll be Microsoft SAP they're all announcing sort of CDP like solutions coming up sometime in the future or you know in the near future. What's the conversation like that you have you know potential users of CDP who are already users of these big techs.

Zachary Van Doren [00:12:05] Companies are waiting. They are waiting to see what what. What are these What coming announcements and plans from the big clouds? Whether or not they should or should not it really depends on how deep they are in that cloud. I know those worked quite well but less daily make up this AP solution. So you know our anticipation with Salesforce, for instance, is that it's their CDP solution it's going to be a conglomeration of tools that already exist with them within the cloud. So you have you know to an earlier point if you have the underlying data-wrangling placement and resolution layer you know I am sure that you'll stop will supply bits and pieces of that then you have the segmentation orchestration layer which is going. I'm sure it's going to be you know Salesforce working cloud add studio so sensitive you're going to be components of that and you have a measurement layer I'm sure Datorama is going to be a component that. And so if you are very deep for instance and add studio you know you're you have design orchestration customer journey designs established you're a matured in that system. You have Datorama as your measurement layer. If you're that deep then yes you should probably wait and see what kind of outcome and it's going to come forward from Salesforce. But I would just say that absolution of stop the company insofar as defining and designing what would be an underlying customer data strategy what would be their business outcomes in their interim personalization and how they would use that those toolkits to achieve those outcomes.

David [00:13:49] I definitely agree what people always need to do is an act. You and I both consultant so you know we say this like 20 million times a day right. You have to start with your requirements. You have to figure out what it is you need to do. And then you look at the systems that are out there and you compare them against your requirements so you don't buy a system because it's from Salesforce and you don't buy a system because it's from Salesforce. You buy a system because it meets your needs and then you know absolutely basic but unfortunately many buyers don't do it that way. So we just have to keep repeating it. You know if if if Salesforce were to pull together assist in offering it was just cobbling together their existing products it probably wouldn't meet the definition. I probably wouldn't have a single unified database which of course is the core of everything here. And I don't know whether they will or won't come. I have not been briefed on their latest offering yet. But you know buyers do need to be pretty careful and look pretty closely at what's being offered to them and again just match it against your needs if they can give a solution that doesn't have a central database but still does what you need. Hey, that's great you know. But just make sure it really does what you need and does what you're going to need in the future that you can kind of foresee because often if the architecture is not kind of what we expect the architecture to be even though they can get certain things done in the long run having an inappropriate architecture will limit you in ways that turn out to be pretty basic.

Chitra [00:15:21] One other question that we hear very often in the comments that we get is this whole debate about the sweet like and all in CDP solution vs. CDP that can plugin and be flexible and connect to all your different elements of your Martech stack what situation or circumstance should a potential buyer. Think about it all in Suite vs. these very flexible plug and play kind of CDP.

David [00:15:52] Well look THE ALL IN suite is basically a myth. There are very few companies of any size who only use software from one vendor and you certainly would be unwise to assume that even if you're doing that today that tomorrow there's not going to be some capability that you need from some third party company. Though no one should plan around having a having an all in one suite and the data shows that the market share of those things is if you're optimistic 20 percent may be closer to 10 percent so most people don't even have that situation. So you have to have a CDP that can connect to the two systems from different vendors which is not to say that in adobe or in Oracle or Salesforce can't have a CDP that connects to other people's systems in fact because they are already living in multi-vendor environments or their clients are living in multi-vendor environments they're already connecting across those suites. So again it's that's like a high level almost theological discussion but you know we're practical marketers here. So we just want to figure out what's going to work and let's not get into to any religious things about whether all in one is good or bad.

Zachary Van Doren [00:17:05] I would not define it as all end but I would define it maybe as CDP that have more advanced state marketing functionality such as Mark animation or email delivery and we have seen especially if you go into it the more segmented virtualization space and or if you go downmarket to kind of small business-oriented CDP is that there is some interesting stuff happening in those categories. For instance we have a you know a smaller Publishing Media Publishing client who wherein you know they were having a ton of headaches with regard to adopting a CDP and navigating the redundancies and overlaps between the CDP and some of the existing marketing automation systems they had in their stack and they migrated to a a CDP specializing in that vertical perfect to their size that had those capabilities and our marquee animation and email and that really were they were really able to make that work very efficiently. And so in certain cases for certain environments having some of those capabilities built-in would make sense in my experience.

David [00:18:25] I absolutely agree. Particularly down in the mid-market in the lower end of the market that's where those those those multi-functional CDP are very attractive because those are the companies that have fewer resources to the integrations and even though the integration theoretically is plug and play there's always work involved in the littler companies would really prefer not to do that.

Chitra [00:18:46] Yeah. And yeah I just want a. While we're on the topic of marketing automation. Anand, you've been a part of the marketing automation conversation for years now you're really close to that side of things. Did you see the conversation start shifting from okay? We had this marketing automation component of this Martech Martech but if we want to do real CX then we've got to start thinking about unifying our data and potentially investing in a CDP.

Anand [00:19:15] A lot of the conversation happened with regards to personalization customer experience because there was a lot of that you did at the new asset for companies is not necessarily the IP or the brand it's actually specifically re reevaluating it's actually going to be the community or the ecosystem that you have behind you. And the only way to be able to develop a relationship that strong enough to support that has these types of better experiences so that people can talk about them right so social media had a component to this. The other part of that is you know the personalization piece of it was again customers would talk about their experiences share that with other people and still word of mouth is one of those powerful components in marketing. So that's really when it started transitioning. I think the privacy and the opportunity to gain customer insights were too kind of trajectories that started to say OK well now we need to unify that also. And of course, being a consultant as well transitioning from one data set to another or trying to architect it like trying to orchestrate internally how to manage that data was very challenging. So there was a lot of different pieces that came at it at an intersection where the need for CDP was very very paramount. This is where I had this ridiculously long you know just banter or just a soapbox moment with David Raab before you know during his early days of the CDP about why we actually needed something like this.

Chitra [00:20:47] This is we've talked about it before. People thing. This requires a smooth and easy flow of data across functions across the organization across data sets. It needs an open mind to be able to do that to be able to centralize and at the same time decentralize in a way the way or those being used for marketing right. So if you had you know if you had to like just say this bluntly to do a CMO or marketing leader you know what what should they be doing to get you know because we've heard a lot of large companies especially traditional businesses even in David's report that we talked about last time they struggle with the legacy technologies they have they struggle with getting those who talk to each other and the integration even between more marketing more modern CX has been a challenge for them. What would you say to us anymore when it comes to you know making this happen within the organization going beyond the technology.

Anand [00:21:46] The simple statement. I've actually said this to a number of CEOs and actually they sign on the dotted line when that happened but I would say that having a lot of data doesn't mean it's OK. And we can believe that out. But basically, you know you have data doesn't mean jack right. What actually matters is having good clean data. It means understanding the intersections of that data means understanding or developing relationships using that data. And it also means to you what you get alerted alluded to earlier to there and we always talk about is the training and the democratization of the use of that data both internally and externally. So if you start with the data conversation or you if you feel that data is going to be your strength which should be for everybody then you need to understand just hoarding data is not enough. Right. Just gathering data into different data sets isn't enough. And this is what these acquisitions that we've all mentioned and heard about are speaking to just having a big database doesn't do anything yet to have something added onto it Zach alluded to. You know you need some level of orchestration and you need to have a strategy between connecting your data and your you know your automation or orchestration and we alluded to the privacy matters you know how you enable trust with your with the data that you use to communicate with your prospects and customers is incredibly important.

Chitra [00:23:06] You know I want to go back to what you said about Bill VS BUY. And David We discussed this before the show as well. When it comes to Bill vs. buy there are some options that also seem to be opening up on the open-source front as well as vendors who are providing the tools that you need to actually build out your own CDP right. So just take one of the factors we discussed was all these acquisitions and whether people will be waiting and watching what happened on that front. Do you see people waiting and watching what's happening on the bill yourself front with these tools and with these open source?

David [00:23:44] I don't know. They're waiting and watching. It's certainly something that they think about when they decide that this is something they want to explore. Now. Marketers by and large are not terribly interested in building anything. They want to buy. It's the I.T. people who would rather build something for themselves and for perfectly valid reasons and you know you can argue it's a corporate asset not a marketing department asset and you can customize it to your talents your needs when you build it. So you know it's not just a slam dunk. Nobody should ever build software. Everybody should buy package systems. But there are a lot of disadvantages to building cost time risk. You know in particular a lot of companies don't honestly have the skills in-house in their I.T. department to really do a good job managing customer data. It's traditionally not been the corporate priority that I.T department cares about more about things like security and reliability than in your customer management and customer experience is pretty far down the list. So what is happening is that there are better and better tools for the I.T. departments to build these things so they don't have to build it quite from scratch just as back in the day you used to have to build your own data extract tools. Now you go out and you buy informatics or a package to do that. And similarly there's actually quite a bit of technology to do things like a Daniel resolution and some of the other ingestion in some of the other things that are built into a CDP platform that you can go out and buy tools or toolkits for the I.T. department to do some of that they still have to get it together. It's definitely not just plug and play for I.T. but it does become more practical for them to do that. So the balance shifts a little and if they get more knowledgeable about it and as they see it as more strategic and more core, not just this little thing that the marketers are doing you know go off little marketers and play in your little corner and don't bother us but they actually say hey you know we could get slammed with a GDPR penalty if we do it wrong. Now they kind of the corporate group's compliance as well as I.T. and in customer experience which is sometimes separate from marketing kind of jump in and say hey you know what we really have to pay attention to this and maybe we should build something. So it's changing.

Chitra [00:25:57] Zach do you get asked a lot as well by potential clients or existing clients on you know should Zach. Should we be buying this or should we be making it in-house?

Zachary Van Doren [00:26:09] Not so much. No. We most you know our customers on the market side Many most do not. Attempted to buy or observe them do not attempt to build themselves. I mean the market has become so poor proliferate in terms of toolkits and they're already in such a mode where they have such a degree of of of toolkits within their existing stack looking to complement that and enable this custom data platform strategy customer data management strategy in the context of this larger stack look looking ourselves to the fact that you know many of the more powerful CDP has a very comprehensive set of integrators an API can enter libraries to connect to that is just conducive to looking at it from a base standpoint. So I do not come across a lot of copies in my experience looking to build

Chitra [00:27:12] I have yet to meet an I.T. professionals within the organization who doesn't think that they can do it better. If you ask them. I suppose for marketing it's like I just won the coffee. So it's a part of the reason for the runaway success. All of these says the Martech platforms because it's kind of plug and play is just you know bring it on. Start working on it. David who should play the referee when this decision is out. You know who will take the call.

David [00:27:38] I think it should be a consensus a joint decision. You know you don't get around the campfire and say hey hot for Wells preferably you know at an offsite in Hawaii or someplace nice. But seriously you have to cooperate. It's not that someone should just say you know you have to do it my way because there are arguments on both sides and situations do differ. And you really do need to look at it. And plus you need to buy it. You know if you jam it down the throat of either department they're not going to cooperate very well and you really do need the cooperation. So people just have to work together. All right.

Anand [00:28:17] And the other thing that adds to that too is that you want to find out how they can benefit from this as well like out of that conversation. You know if some companies hit with a GDPR fine just show how it will impact everybody's budget and time and energy and you know I mean in the chaos that would ensue as an example. So I think the future of customer data. That's what's so Jay Z. You know the future customer use of customer data isn't limited to marketing. And if you're thinking that's the case then you're too limited in your thinking. Right. We're seeing I mean these mandates are not a marketing mandate. They may seem like that right now but they really truly are an operational mandate about how are these you know how this data is being used. A lot of the breaches are coming from you know the operational side the I.T. side that it's their fault is just simply these are the cracks in where sometimes these things happen. You know you finance invoicing legal logistics I mean there's a lot of different areas where customer data is essential to their operations so it could be marketing-led. If you have a marketing leader who understands more of the organization. And I'm going to squeeze in my little statement about why CMOs could be CEO one day. This is the way business has evolved. If we do believe that communities and ecosystems are incredibly important to a brand and the success and growth of a company. Yes, the marketer has a very good stake in being able to move forward or foundation to move forward with that.

Chitra [00:29:53] Absolutely. And I think I want to wrap up this part of this segment of the show talking about extraneous factors. And of course regulation governments are also some very important factors that need to be thought about and that comes from outside And honestly the market has total control over that. But we also do going to wrap this up by talking about one other question we get a lot about this space while making this call. And Zach perhaps we could start with you answering is that the DMP and CDP question right. So a lot of there is this conversation about the blurring lines between ad tech and Martech applications of customer data. Right. And you spoke about personalization just now. So obviously we know CDP helps personalize the whole Martech piece and adtech side There has been the piece to now but there's more and more sort of fusing going on between those so what other things that a marketer needs to think about from that perspective in this whole decision.

Zachary Van Doren [00:30:54] Yeah I mean it's going to get all the more blurred all the more confusing as we as we go forward. Thing. Yeah. I mean the DMPs is are you know very well aware what's going on and they have certainly been adopting you know called quote unquote downstream or down funnel capabilities functions with regard to you know managing first-person party data GDPR are going upstream up funnel if you will start to manage and optimize their person party data cookie-based data. So it's the lines are going to be just all the more blurred and at some point, I think I would predict that it's the difference between a DMP and see people be meaningless. It'll be one thing in around CMOS. You know customer and prospect data management personalization engine is what it will become down to. Many companies struggle with this and many companies struggle with what should we adopt. First, the DMP and we and we tighten up that approach strategy or should we adopt versus CDP. And that really depends on their objectives business outcomes and use cases and whatnot but it's a very difficult and confusing decision to make and many clients we still work with struggle with that.

David [00:32:15] I agree with what Martech just said. But then I think well you know as privacy becomes more important maybe we'll actually have to re-segregate the data because we really have to keep the identified data separate from the non identified data so maybe actually makes sense to have them separate. I'm thinking that because you're going to have to manage privacy anyhow properly so they probably should be unified because that's the trend right now is to bring them together they've always been very separate DMP over here in the CDP over there and we spent a lot of time explaining to people that they were different things for technical reasons as well as just business reasons. But now we're beginning to see some CDP that do more and more DMP ish things and of course, the DMP is also trying to go the other direction. But there's this there's the possibility that really specifically for privacy reasons you'd want to be separate but if you do your CDP right to manage privacy right then it should be one system that can handle that both. So I think overall I would agree that the trend is going to be more unification. You know the distinction between anonymous and identified is getting blurrier by the minute. You know we think of them as two separate categories and then you flip the switch and you get somebody's right name. But of course it doesn't really work that way and it's less and less working that way you can have a non anonymous cookie where you know so much about who that cookie is even if you don't know their name you might as well know their name and you could easily figure out who their name was actually if you bothered to try so that that that distinction becomes less and less meaningful which again argues for a unified approach. I think.

Chitra [00:33:52] Yeah and then we should be watching I think it seems like an unrelated trend but then we've been hearing of large enterprises in housing their whole programmatic attic piece. You know traditionally that the employees have been managed by the agencies the large agencies of record and with them, in housing, we'll have to wait and see how much they are doing with CDP and how much of that DMP ish kind of work they can make happen with their CDP as well right.

Zachary Van Doren [00:34:19] We could dedicate a whole show to just that. You can plan campaign orchestration planning and how agencies are looking at CDP and adopting CDP or not adopting them. I would say yes. That's one big distinction I would say and that agency and programmatic barriers have been fully adopted DMP is aware that there's the market is quite mature there. With regard to CDP, it's absolutely wide open and I'm finding very few agencies have fully adopted that technology nor have they really designed and implemented any sort of. You know strategic planning service layer and managed professional services manager layer on top of what would be enabled by CDP. So that's a wide-open space. And in that regard, there's a lot of catching up to do.

Anand [00:35:15] And it's funny to like that the opposite is true for the stretched strategic management consulting firms or the strategic management side where they're actually targeting more of the CDP side and the kind of not yet picked up on the DMP and without getting too many details. There's a lot of agencies and strategic management consulting firms starting to go after each other's business.

Chitra [00:35:39] I have three questions I want to ask you and really quick responses whatever comes top of mind. I'll start with you David. What is your view is the best or most useful innovation you've seen in the CDP piece of late.

David [00:35:55] I think probably the biggest change is the integration of more and more functionality things like actually doing the message delivery. That's something that has come up recently and really is sort of changing the year tenure of the industry quite a bit.

Zachary Van Doren [00:36:11] I am very excited to see what's going on within the verticalization specialization and then small business specialization.

Anand [00:36:19] So like intelligent insights side of things. So now that you've got a full view of the customer you know how you can truly leverage these technologies to understand your customer and understand how you can meet their needs or find new opportunities.

Chitra [00:36:33] So David you will probably get a lot of questions about CDP. I want to know what side the number one most frequent question you'll get. And has that changed over the years or has it just been the same.

David [00:36:44] Now it has changed. It used to be the DMP question what's the difference in the CDP CDP. More recently the question has been more about use cases what what what what are the use cases for CDP. I think probably the next question is gonna be about well do I need an independent CDP. Or should I wait for my Salesforce Oracle Adobe Google Amazon whoever to sort of do it for me. That's the one I expect to come up.

Chitra [00:37:08] you heard it here first. What about Zach. What is it? What's your take on it.

Zachary Van Doren [00:37:14] Yeah I would say it's the that the question is what is the all end research requirement land or cost associated with successful implementation management of a CDP. And so you know way above and beyond just the technology licensing cost. What is the team structure? How should or should my agencies be using it. What kind of consulting outside consulting do I need? And what is the all in resource allocation requirement for that large effort.

Anand [00:37:46] There's there are two audiences from the investor world keeps asking me which CDP I should they should invest in. The other question is I still get the question of what's the difference I mean the CDP and CRM why can't the CRM do it. CDP does or vice versa.

Chitra [00:38:01] The final question I want to run through all of you before we wrap our show for the day is and Zach let me start with you in your view what would be said agreed. CDP apart from a good one.

Zachary Van Doren [00:38:15] I would say. Agility and adaptability. And at its core function in its ability to adapt fully adapt to. Enterprise clients civic Martech objects infrastructure and architecture.

David [00:38:35] I totally agree I was going to say ease of use but that really comes down to the same thing. The whole point of the CDP is to be able to adapt to whatever you throw at it. So that is by far the number one requirement.

Anand [00:38:48] I would act a little futuristic but I'd love to see some more forecasting where the CDP being able to provide some near-term forecasting of what's going on with customers or where what's going on with the brand engagement with customers.

Chitra [00:39:06] Absolutely. And I'm going to throw my two cents in the ring as well as a practicing market I would say the people who run the business you know I think I might actually choose one CDP the other just because the vendors have a better plan to get us to succeed with it as well.

Chitra [00:39:25] I think we're going to have a lot of people finding this to be a really useful resource to help get a bigger picture and put some of the bigger questions around this space into perspective for them. So I want to thank you for Zack for joining us today.

Zachary Van Doren [00:39:42] My pleasure. Thank you.

Chitra [00:39:44] And then. David thank you for sharing your thoughts on our CDP special. We are so happy that we have you right here on our panel.

David [00:39:52] My pleasure always.

Chitra [00:39:54] And Anand thanks for bringing those very important perspectives about you know what the leaders need to be thinking about together team to go with the flow.

Anand [00:40:05] To be a part of the group.

Chitra [00:40:08] Thanks everyone and thank you, listeners, for joining us today. Leave us a comment on iTunes or a lake on Soundcloud and comments on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter.