TMW #164 | Wednesday Martech Briefing
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CDP disillusionment, Walmart buys 23M pairs of eyeballs, NYT embraces AI for contextual ads
Here’s the week in Martech:
- CDP discourse disillusionment: Gartner has made it harder to talk about CDPs.
- Walmart buys 23M pairs of eyeballs: The retailer's Vizio acquisition is not about TVs.
- The New York Times embraces AI for contextual ads: AI is boosting ad revenue.
- Everything else: Google’s Gemini facepalm, Bloomreach adds conversational commerce to CDP, Salesforce moves downmarket, RIP Pay TV, and more.
👇 Here’s everything you’ve missed in marketing and tech this week.
📰 Latest Developments
CDP discourse disillusionment. Safe to say, if you've been on LinkedIn in the last week, you will have seen that Gartner released its first-ever Magic Quadrant for the Customer Data Platform (CDP) category. As soon as it was released, Martechers everywhere went wild. There was naturally a lot of arguing the toss over which vendors scored highly, poorly, or didn't even make the cut. This contention may partly be why neither Gartner nor Forrester have previously released their fabled 2x2 matrices for this category. CDPs are a catch-all for so many different capabilities that it's nearly impossible to compare them all without considering the unique context of the potential buyer. Forrester tries to typecast CDPs into four categories – data management, orchestration, automation, and measurement – but even that lacks nuance, as many CDPs would fit into more than one of these categories. Going back to Gartner's report, they claim that CDPs as a category are in the "trough of disillusionment," with a falling number of implementations in the last year. Throw in that only 17% of marketers report high utilization for their CDP, and we converge on a simple truth: CDPs have become too bloated and too complex to neatly categorize. This has made discourse around the category difficult for marketers, leading to inflated expectations and a comparative lack of value realization from their investments in CDPs. Gartner's attempt to simplify the category into Magic Quadrants has not only highlighted how difficult it is to fully pin down CDPs, but it's also added to the difficulty of constructive discussion. Link
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Stay Curious,
Keanu Taylor
Make sense of marketing technology.
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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.