Customer data: quality, ownership and identity

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.

Don’t let your CDP become the Fall Guy

Five things you can do right now to make your data work harder.

The CDP market is taking a breather.

I was recently speaking to an industry leader who told me:

“I think the whole CDP space has quietly ground to a halt… We’re seeing no more than 3–5 new opportunities per quarter. Lowest number ever.”

Funding has dried up, unless you are adding the “AI” label to a new feature. Sales cycles have slowed. Implementations are dragging. And the next big thing? It’s not here yet. AI might be “le mot du jour” (French for “word of the day”) of the moment, but it’s not the thing replacing

Can identity resolution work without AI? Steven Renwick from Tilores explains

Tilores’ CEO explains why rules still rule, and how GenAI plays a supporting role in identity resolution, not the starring one.

There’s a lot of noise around AI and identity right now.

Hightouch just launched Adaptive Identity Resolution, Meiro is leaning hard into real-time CDP-native matching, and Amperity continues to push its probabilistic + deterministic blend for enterprise brands. But when someone asked me whether GenAI could solve identity resolution, I went straight to someone who’s seen the inside of the problem: Steven Renwick, co-founder and CEO of Tilores.

Steven and his team aren’t building another black box, they’re focused on traceability, reversibility, and real-time performance for messy, high-volume data. In this episode,

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

Stefania Olofsdottir, CEO of Avo, shares her mission to stop bad data at the source in a walk and talk that proves you don’t need a desk to get deep about analytics.

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 before it breaks things downstream.

☀️ Recorded on a sunny stroll.

📍 Measurecamp Amsterdam.

🧠 Powered by Avo’s mission to fix bad data before it breaks your stack.

📄 Download Avo’s whitepaper: https://www.avo.app/resources/data-mesh-for-event-based-data

👥 Connect with us:

Stefania:

The CDP Reboot: The Promise

Part 1 of 4: Exploring the original promise of CDPs.

This is Part 1 of my four-part #CDPReboot series, where I take a critical look at the evolution, saturation, and potential rebirth of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) category.

In this article, I explore the promise that launched the CDP category: what it was supposed to solve, why it caught fire so quickly, and how that same momentum led us into murkier territory. It all started with good intentions, a mess of Martech tools, and a lot of scattered data pipelines.

The Context: Data fragmentation was killing marketing

So, in the early 2010s, I watched marketing departments struggle with

Why I’m rebooting the CDP conversation...

The Customer Data Platform (CDP) category was built on a promise, clean, unified data and a single view of the customer. For a while, it looked like it might actually deliver. Then came the vendor land grab, the copycat features, and the acronyms no one could keep straight.

As a longtime CDP consultant, I’ve seen the best and worst of it, on the ground, inside orgs, in meetings where the tech made sense and where it absolutely didn’t.

So I’ve decided to do something about it.

This four-part blog series, The CDP Reboot, dives into how

Posts tagged with Customer data