Everyone wants clean data, no one wants to take out the trash

There’s a certain absurdity to how we talk about data. We obsess over real-time pipelines, predictive models, AI *cough* that promise to know our customers better than we know ourselves… and then completely sidestep the question of who’s actually responsible for the data in the first place.

And this is why Avo’s latest announcement matters more than it probably should. “Actionable Data Ownership” isn’t a sexy product drop, I mean it does contain the letters ‘A’ and ‘I’, but it’s a blunt instrument aimed at one of the most deeply neglected problems in Martech.

⚠️ This post is in no way sponsored or influenced by Avo. I have been a HUGE fan of their product for years and always recommend it where I can.

While most of the industry is playing with yet another set of audience templates or chasing AI-based personalization for audiences they barely understand, Avo is out there doing something radical: focusing upstream. First with data quality. Now with data ownership. And not in that vague governance-deck kind of way we have become used to. In a real, this-will-make-your-product-managers-sweat kind of way. And I for one, LOVE IT!

Whose data is it, anyway?

Be honest, this isn’t a new question, you have most likely even asked it yourself. People like Tiankai Feng have been wrestling with the human side of data strategy for years. In his book, he describes how teams tend to treat data as a communal resource → used by many, owned by none. The result? No one feels responsible when things go sideways.

Sound familiar?

It should. Because this is exactly what’s happening inside your average CDP implementation. Or CDI. Or CEP. Heck, even CDWs aren’t immune. (At this point, anything that deals with is guilty until proven otherwise. Data is a people problem.)

CDPs aren’t broken, we are

In my last post, I made the case that CDPs have become the fall guy of the stack. Not because they’re flawed technology, but because we expect them to fix years of neglect... by us. If your source data is a mess, your segment logic is a pile of IF statements glued together, and your consent records live in four different systems, don’t go crying that it is the CDP’s fault.

Blame the vacuum of ownership that let it get that way.

Avo’s move matters because it inserts responsibility exactly where it’s been missing: at the point where data is created. They have been fighting for this for years. And if I may be so blunt, I think it’s an absolute power move. Instead of making engineers and product teams guess what marketing might need later, Avo connects the dots between what’s tracked and what’s actually used. And now, who owns it.

Ownership isn’t tagging someone in a Slack thread. It’s making sure someone is on the hook when a field is deprecated, a naming convention drifts, or a signup event stops firing on mobile for three weeks. It’s not glamorous, it never will be. But it’s how real systems get better.

The battle nobody asked for

To be clear: this isn’t the fun part of Martech. It’s not where the awards are. So put your fancy shoes back in the closet. One thing it is, it is where the pain starts, and where the healing has to begin if we ever want to do anything genuinely useful with customer data.

Avo is doing the hard, tedious, necessary work that the rest of the ecosystem quietly avoids. And they’re not just talking about it in principle. They’re shipping features that push accountability upstream, to the source, before the data enters the glow of a CDP dashboard or an AI orchestration engine.

Honestly, I mean, from the core of my being, I know it’s the kind of product thinking we need more of. The in-your-face, hands-on, slightly annoying (in a good way), and unafraid to call BS on how our industry actually operates.

Let me tell you this before I end the post → I’m a little jealous. Maybe it’s the clean Icelandic air. Maybe it’s the skyr. Or maybe you need to live near volcanoes to develop a proper respect for what happens when you ignore small warning signs.

Either way, Avo is building a responsibility infrastructure. If you work with CDPs, CDIs, CEPs, or frankly anything with a database and a dream, you should be paying attention.

Watch my previous podcast with Avo CEO Stefania Olafsdottir 👇🏻

How to avoid data chaos, one sunny walk at a time

Data chaos doesn’t wait for a boardroom. So we took this Couch Confidentials special episode outside, wandering the streets of Amsterdam with Stefania Olofsdottir during Measurecamp. We talk about the origins of Avo, trusting teams with their own datasets, and how her journey from Iceland to analytics has always centered around making data meaningful

Martech TherapyMatthew Niederberger

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