Salesforce kicked off its big Connections conference yesterday, and if you’re surprised the focus was on generative AI, you haven’t been paying attention. Still, the focus this time was on marketing applications that draw on Salesforce CDP data, so it’s right up our alley. They also announced direct access to Google BigQuery data, ticking the “zero-copy” box as well.
Even if you ignore the more apocalyptic warnings about AI, there are plenty of issues to consider and industry groups are stepping up. Publisher-backed trade group Digital Content Next just issued seven principles – more of a guideline, really – to help protect creators’ rights. Meanwhile, Publicis Group just became the first agency holding company to join the Coalition for Content Provenance Authenticity (C2PA), which is not to be confused with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Simon Data is a CDP that’s built on the Snowflake cloud database, which you might have thought they were in the “zero copy” camp already. You would have been wrong until yesterday, when they announced a “connected segmentation feature” that reads a Snowflake warehouse directly. It still requires mapping the Snowflake tables to a Simon schema and assumes the warehouse has tables coded with unique customer IDs, which most do not.
With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).