TMW #194 | Wednesday Martech Briefing

Sep 25, 2024

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Plenty more fish in the CDP, AI is a vendor lock-in play, infinite content optimization

Here’s the week in Martech:

Plenty more fish in the CDP: Don’t overlook vendors not on the Forrester Wave.
AI is a vendor lock-in play: Ecosystems have the data advantage.
Infinite content optimization: How far can we personalize product images?
Everything else: democratizing analytics, from keywords to key questions, the FTC takes aim at social media, the fourth marketing rebellion, and more

👇 Here’s everything you’ve missed in marketing and tech this week.

📰 Latest Developments

Plenty more fish in the CDP. The CDP Institute tracks 194 different CDP vendors. According to G2, there are 253 players in the space. MartechMap.com lists 104 CDP vendors. Whichever number you go by, there are hundreds of companies that develop CDPs out there. When Forrester released its Forrester Wave for CDPs for B2C last week, there were just 12 companies represented, and only one of those wasn't featured on Gartner's inaugural CDP Magic Quadrant earlier this year. I’m not here to bash Forrester and Gartner, but rather to point out that their reports cover a tiny segment of a very diverse Martech category. The key dividing line in CDPs at the moment is composability. A lot of the vendors featured by Gartner and Forrester are either not composable, or have had to build composability on top of traditional CDP architectures. This can lead to architectural challenges that composable-first CDPs avoid, as recently articulated by the Real Story Group – and Martech buyers via Alium – in relation to Salesforce Data Cloud¹ 💬. There are a lot of strong composable-first CDPs and reverse ETL tools out there that don't feature with the big two analyst firms: Consider this a reminder to not overlook them. Forrester Wave for CDP | Real Story Group

💬 Insights from Alium, The Buyer Intelligence Platform:

Plenty more fish in the CDP: “I built a bunch of things on Salesforce, and it is not easy... [It’s] something that should be ubiquitous and backwards compatible, [but] it still isn't. It drives me nuts, but that's how the company is.”
Travel | $1B – $10B revenue | 10K – 100K employees

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Stay Curious,

Keanu Taylor

Make sense of marketing technology.

Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.