This study on data management is by Forrester for Zeta Global. It also highlights data quality challenges: only half the respondents are confident in their data quality, security, reliability, and activation. The thrust of the report is that companies have lots of systems impacting customer experience (84% have more than eleven), so poor integration among “best of breed” systems causes all kinds of problems.
Are CDPs replacing DMPs? Perhaps, but slowly: 36% of respondents to this Piano survey reported they use their CDP as a DMP, a figure that’s still far behind standalone DMPs (53%), audience management systems (50%) and DMP integrated with a supply side or demand side platform (43%). Lots of juicy details here on data collection goals, growth in spending on data unification and on the revenue it creates, and data quality as the biggest collection challenge.
Customer success platform Gainsight was among the firms we originally tagged as CDPs a decade ago. They don’t call themselves that anymore, although they probably still qualify. Still, it’s rare to see even a borderline CDP make an acquisition, so let’s note that they just purchased learning management vendor Northpass.
Salesforce announced three enhancements to Salesforce Data Cloud at Dreamforce this week. There is an expansion of unstructured data types it can address including audio and video; there will be a sub-second “real time” layer for data from ingestion to activation; and the connector eco-system has been expanded. Salesforce also emphasized close collaboration between Data Cloud and its new Agentforce AI bots.