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 a