customer data platform - Martech Therapy

Negotiating the New Martech Economy

Most Martech vendors talk about “transparency,” yet the real negotiation is about who ends up carrying the complexity. Part 3 explores how ownership, definitions, velocity, and data reality shape what you can truly negotiate in today’s CDP/CEP market.

The reactions to last week's part 2, The inherited costs of the composable stack, revealed something important about Martech today. People disagreed with one another, yet they were all touching the same truth from different angles. Some pointed out that composable savings mostly show up in use-case velocity rather than infrastructure. Others argued that cloud costs are a black box, no matter what you buy. A few reminded us that the data warehouse remains the gravitational center regardless of whether your CDP is composable or packaged.

What everyone circled around, though, was the same underlying question: who holds the

Should your CDP take a year to implement? Zeotap CEO Elad has thoughts

A lively, no-nonsense chat with Zeotap’s ZEO Elad Simchon. We talk CDPs, audience boosting, European data culture, why US vendors misread Europe, and what’s coming next in AI-powered marketing.

If you ever wanted to hear two grown men bond over Bayern Munich, data sovereignty, and the existential mystery of why CDP projects take a year and a half to get going, you’re in the right place.

This week on Couch Confidentials, I sat down with Elad Simchon, CEO – sorry, ZEO... of Zeotap. Yes, ZEO. I accidentally coined the term mid-recording, and Elad immediately claimed it for the brand. Fair play.

Our chat was one of the most jovial conversations I’ve had all season. We wandered everywhere: his “midlife-crisis startup,” Germany’s secret basketball empire, DMEXCO survival

CDP & CEP pricing strategies for the uninitiated

CDPs charge for the data you hold. CEPs charge for the actions you take. “Usage” sounds simple, but every vendor defines it differently. The Hidden Logic of Martech Pricing reveals what those definitions really mean for your budget and your business.

Every vendor promises the same thing “you only pay for what you use”.

It’s a comforting line, one that suggests control and fairness. But in Martech, especially when you look at Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Customer Engagement Platforms (CEPs), the definition of use changes depending on who you ask.

Most CDPs still price around data management, how many profiles you store, how many events you collect, or how many systems you connect. It’s a model born from infrastructure.

Meanwhile, CEPs are leading the move toward usage-based pricing, a model built

The great rebalance & why 2026 belongs to the mid-market CDP

2026 will test Martech’s balance. As enterprise CDPs plateau, mid-market buyers are emerging as the industry’s new growth engine and its most overlooked opportunity.

For most of the last decade, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Customer Engagement Platforms (CEPs) have been sold as enterprise transformation tools. Big budgets, big integrations, big promises. But as we move toward 2026, the energy in that market seems to be changing course. Enterprise demand is flattening, and the next wave of growth is forming lower down the ladder, in the restless, pragmatic mid-market.

The state of play

Depending on whose model you trust, or whose newsletter you have subscribed to, the global CDP market will sit somewhere between $7.5 and $9.7 billion by 2025, growing at

Where CDPs quietly kept working

Every few months, someone posts another chart about the end of Customer Data Platforms. The logos change, the arrows move toward “composable,” and the takeaway is always the same *drum roll* the category is over. But when I look at what’s actually running inside mid-market marketing stacks, where I spend most of my days, the story doesn’t match the headline.

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Read part 1 here: If CDPs are dead, they’ve donated their organs...

The parts that never stopped working

What’s survived isn’t the marketing copy, that changes as often as the wind, but it’s the

If CDPs are dead, they’ve donated their organs...

Despite the headlines, Customer Data Platforms aren’t dead. Their best parts now power engagement platforms and data warehouses. This article explains why CDPs still matter, especially for mid-market businesses driving the next wave of customer data innovation.

Every week a new headline drops like a bomb. This company's app just killed another company's app, blew up something else, or declared the death of a technology category. As a military veteran, I find it strange how casually our industry borrows the language of conflict. There’s enough of that in real life.

Take Customer Data Platforms. Depending on who you follow, CDPs are either dead, obsolete, or absorbed beyond recognition. But as Brian Blessed once roared in Flash Gordon, “GORDON’S ALIVE!”

If he worked in martech, he’d be shouting, “CDP’S ARE ALIVE!”

Posts tagged with customer data platform

The state of play

The parts that never stopped working