Newly Formed Institute Helps Marketers Build a Unified Customer View
Wellesley Hills, Mass. – October 31, 2016 – Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can solve marketers’ biggest data problem: building a unified customer view. Yet few marketers know that CDPs exist. The Customer Data Platform Institute launched today with a suite of resources to help close this gap. Data management and customer engagement technology leader Redpoint Global is one of the founding supporters of the newly founded Institute.
The Institute defines Customer Data Platform as a “marketer-managed system that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems”. CDPs are a new alternative to systems that have largely failed to deliver a unified customer view, including enterprise data warehouses, data management platforms, and channel applications such as email engines. Unlike those approaches, CDPs are specifically built for marketing uses, incorporate first-party data including personal identifiers, and are open to access by all company systems. This lets them succeed where other approaches have not.
According to Institute founder David Raab, “The growing need for more complete, more accessible customer data has fueled the rise of CDP systems. We’ve identified nearly two dozen vendors who fit the definition. But awareness of CDPs is still low. The Institute will educate marketers about CDP capabilities and to help them take full advantage of these powerful new systems.”
One bright spot Raab noted is that in July, CDPs appeared for the first time on the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising.
The need for CDPs is clear. A recent LiveRamp survey found that 90% of marketers consider an omnichannel customer view important for marketing effectiveness, but less than 20% currently have such a view. (LiveRamp, The State of People Based Marketing, October 2016). An Experian study found that the technology issues were the biggest barriers to delivering a unified customer view, far outranking non-technical issues such as timeliness, lack of data, or poor data quality (Experian, The 2016 Digital Marketer, April 2016). CDPs remove many of those technical obstacles by using modern methods such as schemaless data stores, machine learning, and cloud-based deployment.
Leading CDP vendors have sponsored the Institute, recognizing the need for vendor-neutral education and community. Their sponsorship allows the Institute to provide resources at no charge to individual members. The Institute is managed by Raab Associates, independent technology analysts who first identified CDPs as a category in 2013.
Raab will be assisted by an Advisory Board of marketing practitioners and sponsor experts. Practitioner members include Shawn Goodin, Marketing CTO, JPMorgan Chase; Mayur Gupta, VP, Growth & Marketing, Spotify; Steve Herdegren, VP, Marketing Operations, Wiley; and, Tim Suther, Founder, Suther Strategic LLC and former Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase and CMO of Acxiom.
Vendors sponsoring the Institute include: AgilOne, Ascent360, BlueConic (Gold), BlueVenn, Ensighten, Lytics, mParticle, Redpoint Global (Gold), Segment (Gold), Signal, and Treasure Data (Gold).
“As organizations look to maximize the business value of their data assets, marketers have become very focused on finding ways to monetize their customer data. Big Data, which adds “variety, volume, and velocity” to the mix, has created new data access and management challenges – but also potentially great opportunities – for marketers who can capitalize on this data. A customer data platform, like the solution Redpoint provides, enables marketers to create a unified customer view from multiple internal or external databases and/or siloed data stores and is an accelerant for forward-looking, data-driven marketers. But we still have a long way to go to drive awareness of the capabilities and benefits of this technology. The CDP Institute, in our eyes, has an important charter: to both raise awareness of CDPs and to educate the market about why this technology is critical to the enterprise,” said Dale Renner, CEO of Redpoint Global.
Initial Institute offerings include a library of white papers, surveys, evaluation guides, case studies, and product information; a daily newsletter with industry news and opinion; a public forum for marketers and industry experts; and a directory of industry vendors. These are all available on the Institute website at: www.cdpinstitute.org.
About Redpoint Global Inc.
With Redpoint’s software platform, innovative companies are transforming their customer experiences across the enterprise and driving higher revenue. Redpoint’s solutions provide a remarkably unified, single point of control where all customer data is connected and every customer touchpoint intelligently orchestrated. Delivering more engaging customer experiences, highly personalized moments, relevant next-best actions, and tangible ROI – this is how leading marketers lead markets. To learn more, visit redpointglobal.com.
