cep - Martech Therapy (Page 2)

The reference call that changed everything

A reminder, based on a true story, that even when teams do their homework, the CDP market still stacks the deck, and what to do about it.

Last week, after publishing The CDP Dating Game, my LinkedIn inbox lit up, and the number of subscribers to this Substack jumped. Marketers on the brand side reached out privately with a mix of relief and frustration. Heck, I even spoke to a few at the Martech World Forum who reacted in the same manner. Relief that someone had finally put words to what they’d been experiencing. Frustration that they’re stuck in a market where even defining what a CDP is has become an impossible task.

One marketer admitted in confidence that they no longer bother correcting their

MAP, CEP, or CDP? Klaviyo’s James Fang on where marketing automation is headed

A conversation about consolidation, AI, and why labels like CEP or MAP might miss the bigger picture.

Season 2 of Couch Confidentials opens with James Fang, Director of Product Marketing at Klaviyo and former VP at mParticle. We get into the weeds of Martech terminology, such as CEP, MAP, CDP, and whether those labels still mean anything when platforms are converging. James shares why Klaviyo positions itself as a B2C CRM built on a shared data platform, and how that ties into the wider trend of commoditized CDP features.

We also discuss the consolidation wave I’ve written about in the CDP Reboot and Multi-CDPs series, with James pointing to real-world cases where companies are questioning the

Is it all a magical illusion?

Rethinking the Quadrant / Part 1: Why the Magic Quadrant no longer reflects CDP reality

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is treated like gospel in boardrooms from Dubai to Düsseldorf. A single position in that familiar matrix can nudge millions in Martech budgets from one vendor to another. The thing to keep in mind is that the Quadrant doesn’t measure what many buyers think it does. It rewards size, vision, and analyst choreography, and not necessarily real-world usability, implementation speed, or practitioner satisfaction. It reflects power structures, and rarely performance.

This first part in the Rethinking the Quadrant series takes aim at the mechanics behind those polished charts and asks a blunt question:

What kind

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

Why, in my opinion, “actionable data ownership” should be the most radical thing in Martech right now!

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

Shopify isn’t enough

…and deep down, you already know that.

There’s a moment that creeps in somewhere between “should I try another email pop-up plugin?” and “why don’t my reports ever answer real questions?” It’s a quiet realization. The platform that made it beautifully easy to launch your store might not be built to help you scale your marketing or understand your customers beyond last Tuesday’s sale.

Shopify does many things well. It’s clean, manageable, and doesn’t ask you to learn code or bribe a developer friend. It’s perfect for what it is: a commerce platform. Not a data platform. Not a campaign

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