Customer Data Platform articles and analysis

A little lift never hurt anyone

Hightouch, Zeotap and mParticle now sell a toggle that lifts your match rate with identifiers you never collected. The gain is real. The work is the consent check nobody does before flipping it. What it does, and what to look at first.

You spend a week defining an audience in your CDP. Lapsed high-value customers, the ones actually worth winning back. You push the segment to Meta feeling good about it. Then the matched figure comes back at around sixty percent of what you sent, and the rest just isn't there. The platform couldn't recognise four in ten of your own customers.

Anyone who has run paid media knows that feeling. It's the match rate gap, and it has a few causes. People sign up with one email and log into Meta with another. Phones get replaced every

Diverted by design? What the CDP split means for the mid-market

The CDP market didn’t just split into platforms and agents. It quietly diverted the mid-market along the way. This piece looks at what changed, why many teams now hesitate, and how CEPs became the safer path for getting things done.

In last week's part 1, I described how Gartner finally named the split inside the CDP category in their Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms 2026. Platformization on one side. Agentification on the other.

Two futures, both serious, both demanding.

That still leaves a simple question hanging:

Who is this actually built for?

Because when you read this year’s Magic Quadrant carefully, the most telling signal isn’t who moved up or down, which opens another can of worms. It’s the kind of organization the category quietly assumes as the norm.

Large teams. Strong data foundations. Time

The CDP split is official (and it’s not the one vendors were selling)

For years, CDPs have been stretched like the industry’s Spandex. Data foundation one moment, orchestration layer the next, now even the “context brain” for AI. In this year’s Magic Quadrant, Gartner finally names the split. And it changes how everything should be read.

Reading this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms gave me a familiar feeling.

Not, not that of reading a short novel, with its 46 pages. Not excitement. Not disbelief. More the quiet recognition you get when something you’ve been circling for a while finally lands on paper. The conclusions didn’t come out of nowhere. They arrived right on time for the category.

For years now, CDPs have been asked to stretch in every possible direction. Think of them as the industry’s Spandex. One moment they’re a data foundation. Then an orchestration layer. Then

Meet the CDP Simulator, the easiest way to finally understand your data stack

The CDP Simulator is a free, interactive way to see how customer data actually moves through traditional, composable, and hybrid stacks. Click, explore, and watch the architecture come alive without needing a single slide.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to explain a CDP diagram that looked like someone spilled spaghetti on a slide. If you’ve ever been in a meeting where five people are discussing “real time” and each one means something completely different, you probably know the feeling.

So instead of drawing yet another arrow-filled diagram, I built something people can actually play with.

CDP Simulator displaying David Chan's inspired Hybrid architecture.

The CDP Simulator is now live. It’s free, and you can get started in about three seconds. No signup, no

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

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,

Posts tagged with Customer Data Platform