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A: There does seem to still be a little bit of confusion, which of course makes me very sad because I’ve spent the last four years of my life trying to get rid of that confusion. Our definition of a CDP is: packaged software that builds a unified persistent customer database which is  accessible to other systems.

In somewhat plainer English, it means you pull together all of your customer data and create these unified customer profiles. Then you share them with whatever other system needs them. The core idea is that you have all this data, and you want to get it in one place so you can have a complete view of each customer. That’s really what a CDP does.

Q: Is the marketing group the key buyer of the CDP in an organisation?

A: Sometimes it is, but traditionally and in most cases I would say marketing is still the main buyer of the CDP, it was the case in the past. Now we’re seeing other departments in the company sometimes take the lead; it could be a customer service department that needs a complete view. But more likely, it’s central, like a data group or analytics group or even the IT group, which have been tasked with building this unified picture of their customers.

Of course, it’s useful throughout the company. Once the company realises a CDP has got uses outside of marketing, then the actual project management tends to migrate out of marketing as well, so the people who build it can share it with everyone else.

Q: Are all CDP offerings the same, what are some key differences? 

A: If I said they were the same, this would be a very short interview, they’re not all the same. There are about 130 CDPs in the world we know about, and certainly no two are alike; they tend to fall into clusters. There are some CDPs which meet the definition of building a unified database, then they stop there, and they make it available to whatever system wants to use them.

There are CDPs which do this, plus provide analytical capabilities, predictive modelling, typically or sometimes marketing, measurement, or attribution features. They build the database, plus they do the analytics.

For the bulk of the market, we estimate about 70% of the industry are CDPs that both build databases and do some flavour of campaign management, customer engagement or personalisation. But they give the marketers a tool to do something with the data, not simply create the profiles other systems can use.

There’s some you can go further with, some would follow an email engine or web content management to deliver messages, not select them as those campaign CDPs do. Some are CDPs baked into an ecommerce system, an entirely separate platform that happens to have the CDP inside. It’s quite a variety, which is a good thing because it means you can find one to fit your needs.

Q: Most major marketing cloud vendors now have a CDP (Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle). Has this impacted the market?

A: Oddly enough, it hasn’t had much impact yet. We certainly expect it will, but those products are all relatively new, Oracle’s is about two years old, Adobe is about a year old. Salesforce is still something of a work in progress, although Salesforce had bought a couple of other companies with CDPs, depending on how you look at it, you can say they’ve been around as well. So far, these are still relatively immature and they are of interest primarily to the companies already using the suites of those vendors.

The independent CDP vendors still have a pretty good chance of selling in environments where the company doesn’t use Oracle, Salesforce or Adobe, which is the vast majority of companies. There are very few companies that will only use one of those vendors. As long as they’re using a couple of the vendors, there’s at least a little bit of room for a non-suite CDP, or an independent CDP to sneak in there and be neutral across all the other vendors. We expect eventually the big vendors will take a larger role, but so far, it’s been somewhat limited.

Q: Do you think the infrastructure the CDP vendor chooses is important?

A: The technical infrastructure makes a great deal of difference. It drives what the CDP can do now because our definition of CDP says you have to be able to serve all different kinds of data and you have to keep all the details. That is a fairly stiff set of technical requirements. There are only a few kinds of technologies that can meet those requirements, almost every CDP will use some sort of a NoSQL database, for example.

You really can’t strictly do what a CDP needs to do if you’re going to use an Oracle, SQL server or one of the relational databases. That being said, some companies call themselves CDPs that don’t meet our definition and have these more limited capabilities because they’re built typically to service the tools developed by a particular vendor, not really to share with everyone else.

Those systems might use a more limited technique, or they might use a relational database, for example. But if you’re going to use a relational database, it’s really hard to keep web browser logs, for instance, or to keep social media post history, the actual text itself, it doesn’t work that well in those kinds of databases. You’re almost always forced to use something else.

There’s a lot of databases now which do that, Snowflake is a popular one, Elasticsearch or even Redshift, which is a SQL database but it’s highly scalable. MongoDB is a document database, there are some different data stores we’ll see being used by the CDP vendors, but it’s almost always something else, it’s not simply a relational database.

Q: With the changes web browsers are making to cookie access and Apple is making to the device advertising ID, what effect does this have on the CDP?

A: By large, it’s a good thing for the CDP vendors because it makes it harder to accumulate third-party data, both with the cookies and with the Apple ID situation. Therefore, it makes companies pay more attention to their first-party data. CDPs are mostly about first-party data, they’re mostly about data on your actual customers. It’s been a selling point for CDP vendors to say: “hey, you want to do more through first-party data? Well, you need a CDP to do that”. Interestingly, I did see one analysis the other day where somebody said, ‘a lot of CDPs collect their web data through a third party cookie’, which is a true statement.

Collecting data is one aspect of what a CDP does, it’s only 5% of the value if you had to pick a number. The CDP will have to find some other way to get their hands on the web data. But there’s still plenty of other things a CDP does, it’s still going to add value. All this is  not going to harm CDP use directly, and it will help them indirectly, quite a bit.

Q: How do CDP platforms enhance the customer experience? 

A: The CDP’s primary mission is to pull together unified customer profiles. When the customer comes to the website, the call centre, the retail store, the mobile app, wherever, they’re interacting with you. Whatever that system is, it can call back to the CDP and know everything about the customer across all channels they’ve interacted with. It’s not that they get into the call centre, and the call centre agent can only look up the history of that customer in the call centre. They don’t know what the customer did on the web, because the call centre system won’t know that.

The CDP can share information with the call centre system, they get a complete view of the customer, which means the agent now can react to the customer with full knowledge and give them a better experience. We have seen a lot of research demonstrating people want companies to recognise them, understand them, and treat them consistently across channels.

They don’t necessarily want to get personalised advertising, because no one in history has raised their hand and said, “hey, send me more advertising”. But they do want you to give them better treatment in terms of appropriate discounts, or offers relating to the products they’ve purchased. Other kinds of important treatment include making it simple to do returns, customers want you to know about them. That’s what the CDP makes it possible for the company to give them.

Q: What are some untapped opportunities marketers have when implementing CDPs that they might not otherwise have thought of?

A: Marketers are very creative people. They think of many things, some of which you can talk about in public, some of which you can’t. In terms of CDPs, what marketers might not necessarily think about are some of the cross channel things. CDPs traditionally work in cross channels. But to be more advanced in predictive modelling, for example, and doing more advanced segmentation based on the predictive modelling, this is something often marketers don’t even realise could be done with those kinds of models, because they’re focused on getting the job done and doing relatively simple things.

There is a very interesting advanced technology out there that the CDP makes possible, because it assembles all this data, lets you do things and see relationships that you couldn’t see before, and therefore maybe offer some new services, for example. To take advantage of this cross channel view with customers, there’s quite a bit which can be done, but most marketers have a long list of things they’d like to do. Again, they’re creative folks, their problem is rarely they can’t think of what they might like to do next.

Q: There has been a massive growth of CDPs in the past few years, why do you think this is? Will this growth last?

A: The growth has been driven by the proliferation of channels and independent disconnected channels. As customers demand a connected experience, the company is forced to buy a CDP to connect those channels, because that’s what CDPs do, it is very difficult to do without a CDP. It’s been very much demand-driven, very much customer-driven, which is not always the way in marketing technology. What happens is some technologist comes up with a clever idea, “hey, we can do virtual reality tours that are on some crazy new social media channels you never thought of before”. They can have colour pictures that read your mind and do whatever cool thing they think of. Then somebody builds it in some market and they buy it, but the customers scratch their heads and say: “I wanted you to process merchants more efficiently”.

The customer is generally less excited about the technology than the marketers are. CDP is the other way around, CDP is the customer saying: “get all my data in one place, give me better treatment, understand what I’m doing, do what I want you to do”. That’s what companies have been forced to do, that’s part of the reason the big vendors like Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle were relatively late to market on this,  because they didn’t see the need. Their customers saw the need and their customers’ customers saw the need, but it wasn’t so clear to them. They didn’t rush out and do it. It took them a long time to understand this was something serious their clients needed to serve their clients’ customers. Then they eventually came around and gave their clients what they wanted.

Q: What data trends have you seen over the past year that have shocked you, in either a good way or a bad way?

A: When it comes to data, in particular something that has very pleasantly surprised me, has been the increasing interest in privacy. For years, we’ve heard about privacy. There were this little coterie of privacy fanatics who were concerned about it and nobody else cared. The people who cared about it would make a lot of noise and they would get some people in the government excited. Nothing would ever happen because the industry would, I wouldn’t say paid anybody off, but they had influence.

In the last few years, privacy advocates have been much more effective. I’m not sure it’s because the privacy advocate got any smarter, however, consumers got a lot more worried about privacy.

Frankly, they saw a lot of data presented to them, about them, which they hadn’t intended to share, and it scared them. They worried about what data was being collected about themselves, and about their children. They realised this data was being used in many ways; some good, some not so good. There’s a substantial growth in actual mass consumer interest in privacy, no longer the relatively small number of advocates.

This led to considerable regulation, obviously GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California, there’re some in Australia as well. All of a sudden, there is some fairly serious concern about privacy and, of course, more recently, with Facebook and Google. Australia passed a very good law regarding this for the news channels. It’s all part of people pushing back against the companies that do suck up a lot of their data. I tend to think this is a good thing, but it may not be the easiest thing for marketers to deal with. But it’s a good thing overall, it’s been a pleasant surprise,

Q: As we step into a post-cookieless era, what are some of the myths about data you want to see disappear? 

A: I want to see the mystique disappear around the thought you can’t do anything without third party cookies. Even though I’ve been saying it for quite some time now, the rest of the world has no choice but to deal with this reality. It’s weird, everybody’s been saying “oh, cookies are going away, the world is gonna end”. I thought, well human beings have been on this planet for a long time and they were doing marketing for most of that long time, they didn’t have cookies until maybe 20 years ago. Somehow, the world of marketing survived before there were cookies, and no doubt the world of marketing will survive after cookies.

If there’s a myth, it’s related to the notion that with cookies, and with other kinds of data collection techniques, we can predict with great accuracy what customers will do. It’s absolute nonsense. At one point in my checkered career, I ran a predictive modelling team, and the models are 80-90% more accurate than throwing a dart at a dartboard, but they’re not 100% accurate. The more complicated the behaviour, the less accurate they get. It’s not like we had all this absolute precision we are suddenly losing, we were never that good at actual predictions.

People need to understand there’s plenty of data out there, still. There’s plenty of tools to be used for modelling. Some of it is more effective data for modelling than cookies ever were, as cookies had a lot of issues anyhow. But we have to realise you only go so far, you have to listen to your customers and not try to figure out what they’re going to do as much as seeing what they’re doing and react to it. You really can’t force them to do things too much.

There are some exceptions around this, and some of them are pretty scary, like some of the kinds of things social media can do shape people’s behaviour. But even then, they’re taking people’s tendencies and exaggerating them, you’re not going to make me do something I have absolutely no interest in doing because I’m on social media. Social media exaggerates and moves people in more extreme directions than they move in otherwise, but even social media is not the root of all ill.

Who can create media has changed dramatically as well. We are a partner of Bluestripe, we are a group that owns a PR agency and a content agency. We’ve got a media arm which owns titles such as New Digital Age (NDA) and Ecommerce Age (soon to launch). An agency couldn’t launch a respected media title 20 years ago, it was unheard of. Whereas nowadays, we can publish a title as long as you produce content with the same value to the audience, as you do within a publisher. It matters far less who’s actually producing media. The rules have shifted hugely and trade media itself has shifted.

In the UK, for example, we’ve got titles such as The Drum, which has become a global powerhouse. Trade media is evolving, and it will never stop evolving. The rules have changed, the one thing that’s paramount is as long as you still have respect for your audience and produce valuable content.

Q: Your most recent venture sees you as Editor at New Digital Age, and partner at Bluestripe which acts as both a PR and content agency. Bringing these three worlds together feels like an innovative approach in supporting your clients by cutting through the noise. How did this business model come about and why?

A: In Bluestripe Group, there are three founders, which is myself, Andy Oakes and Lydia Oakes. Lydia spent 20 years working in PR. I spent almost 20 years working in standard journalism. Andy spent the same amount of time in publishing; he was MD and publisher for titles like Drum and New Media Age. When we all came together, we realised two things: firstly, the world does not have enough media. Secondly, people need media, they want an edited view of the world.

We wanted to create a company that could do great PR for clients, to make sure they were represented as the best across the media landscape from video to articles to events, through to our content lab and also within our own media.

We decided to build a three-part company, all interlinked and all standing on their own two feet. The media arm in which NDA sits is an independent media operation. Our PR clients essentially have to pitch to be in NDA as much they would have to pitch to be in Campaign or Drum. We’re totally transparent, we write about our clients, as much we’ll write about their competitors. We write about a whole spade of companies, but our clients get priority access to our top jobs.

I used to sit a few years ago on the board of the IAB when it was coming up with the rules for branded content, essentially what publishers should be doing to educate readers about what was paid for, and what wasn’t. It’s very important to me to offer clarity in terms of never pulling the wool over your readers’ eyes.

We’ve been totally transparent, the fact is every publisher has to make money. Every publisher has a commercial content operation now. At Bluestripe, we say we will write about our clients. We’re lucky we have the best clients in the industry; if I was the editor of magazines, I’d write about Liveramp, Xandr and all our clients. But because the NDA media arm is independent, we can write about their competitors, and we can write about their partners. It is about providing a totally interlinked model, with the three parts working seamlessly together.

Q: The global pandemic forced us to adapt at the speed of light in terms of B2B marketing; events were cancelled across the globe, with many creating new and exciting virtual experiences whilst others postponed. 

What were some of the biggest challenges you saw – not just from your clients and how they adapted to change, but the trade media itself?

A: The biggest change has probably been events. In normal time, I spend what seems like most of my life at an event somewhere, whether that be in Cannes, Mexico, or the multiple events in London itself. Events are a core part of our industry, not only for the education it provides and inspiration from the main speakers. Our industry thrives on networking, one of the fascinating things from last year is how we’ve still managed to do that without being together.

With the lack of events, everyone moved pretty quickly to virtual events. We produce a huge number of events, both for our media arm NDA and for our clients. In the first lockdown in June last year, we put on a week-long virtual Festival, which was one of the first virtual events for us. We hosted that in our SoHo office, it was weird because London was shut down and dark. Over the last year, we’ve seen some incredible virtual events, people like Mediatel, pivoted quickly with their virtual events.

We’re a partner of a company called Madfest, and they’re coming back into the real world in July. Even though we’ve all missed real-world events, we have proved how to make virtual events work. Virtual will always be a part of events going forward. Two years ago, a virtual event meant some dodgy webinar which often broke down a bit or a screen in the corner of a conference. No one knew how to make it really work, and now, the platforms are stable. There’s real innovation going on with platforms such as Socio, which lets you do proper networking virtually. This has been a really refreshing outcome from this pandemic.

Q: Diversity and inclusion have long been high on the agenda for our industry and have a long way to go. How are you in your team helping clients support diversity efforts and do it well?

A: Diversity has always been important to Andy, Lydia and I who run the company. For the last 20 years, we’ve always tried to make sure anything we’ve done has been diverse, from panels and content we produce to the clients who work for us. Over the last year, we launched Practice Makes Unperfect in association with Amy Kean. Its aim is to help women and men find their voice. It’s a mix of a training course, which Amy runs. Everyone on the course gets a podcast interview conducted by myself and an article about them published on NDA. We’ve run five cohorts now.

What’s been refreshing to me is when you interview someone it is generally the boss that’s been put forward by the press office. However, through PMU, I’ve spoken to different people from web designers up, and these women so far have been incredible. But they felt the need to go on a course like PMU.

There’s one woman who blew me away; for 20 years, she held senior global roles in America, the UK and Europe. Yet, she still felt that she needed to go on our course to help her find her voice. At the same time, if I look at all the inbound pitches I get for NDA, from PR agencies for opinion pieces, I would say 90% are from men. I know all these people sending in these pitches to me believe in the need for diversity and understand the need for a range of voices.

The problem is endemic. At our PR agency, we always work really hard to make sure when we’re putting up our clients for speaking ops or for interview ops, we offer up a diverse range of voices. Hand on heart, it is not easy, you have to work hard at it. Diversity is an endemic problem and it starts from the bottom. We hope things like PMU are helping, there’s been such a huge success over the last six months, and we were doing far more of these, but it’s everyone’s responsibility.

Q: Celebrating talent in our businesses is something we should all be doing. But it can often get sidetracked due to overwhelming workloads and limited resources and time. Do you have any tips and tricks for businesses when it comes to giving their organisation a voice? 

A: Going back to having a diverse range of public faces, in most companies the CEO has been media trained within an inch of their life. Money is put into making sure that they can get up on stage and not appear in the press.

But any company has a huge range of credible talent, it’s the responsibility of the companies’ press departments to ensure there’s a huge variety of voices that are prepped to appear in public. We all know if you appear in the press or if you speak on conference stages, it’s going to help your career.

Any company wants to help their people, their staff, their talent, it also makes their own company better and act better. It’s incumbent on everyone to make sure everyone throughout the company is given the opportunity to have a public voice.

Yes, it’s not easy and yes, there’s no way you’ve got to put up someone to be interviewed with no preparation. We know what can happen, mistakes can be made in the press, but it’s just incumbent on organisations having agencies that support them to make sure they’re not just focusing on the top talent, often male, often white, often older board members.

Q: AdTech is going through a seismic shift, and many businesses are having to discard old ways of working and build a new business model for the future. Much of this change is about surrounding yourself with expert partners in order to get to grips with global regulations and the demise of the third-party cookie. How important do you think this change in mindset is for businesses in our sector? 

A: Partnership and collaboration have always been a critical part of our industry. Back before the dot com boom, when I first started off in journalism, partnership and collaboration are what drove this industry. Some of the best results we see are from the collaboration with different partners.

Our clients on the PR side, people like Xandr, one of the world’s biggest ad tech companies. Its strength is not only within its own walls, it strengthens within the partnerships it builds an ecosystem it creates. It is the same for our clients like Liveramp, it’s creating this healthy, effective, efficient ecosystem you can do if you’re a strong player in this industry, that’s always going to be critically important.

Q: Looking ahead to the next one to two years, how do you see the trade media worlds adapt to the new normal?  Do you think there will still be a place for virtual initiatives which can often be a fantastic cost-efficient way for businesses to engage with their clients? Or, do you think we’ll sink back into old habits?

A: At NDA, we’re not a traditional trade publisher, all the other traders are our friends or we work with them. We’re fascinated with what’s happening to trade media. We’re launching a new series where we’re interviewing people, like Greg Grimmer at Mediatel, and all the people running trade media because it’s such an important part of our industry.

Trade media has not covered itself enough, trade media spends its life reporting on the industry, but what it’s doing is equally interesting to the industry and the people are equally interested in the industry. We will be spending more time looking at how trade media is changing.

There’ll be huge changes over the last year or so. Personally, a lot of these changes will be maintained, because if you look to the success of people like Drum, Campaign and Mediatel, their virtual events have now become so good, so slick, so effective, why wouldn’t they keep going with these? We definitely will keep doing those events. I can’t wait to come back to the real world and start running events at The Ivy in London.

However, there’s a danger many of these great changes will be lost to the industry, as a lot of trade media agencies and brands will snap back to normal. We will see as London and New York reopen, and the offices reopen, although hopefully all the good work the pandemic has done in proving the validity of flexible working will remain.

I do believe people will want to get back to the office. Bosses will want their staff back in the office, people will want to be in the office, people want to see their colleagues again. If you look at how you learn in this industry, it’s through people, it always has been. The reason I’ve learned for the last 20 years is through people, we need to be together again. Yes, we’ve worked hard to make it work virtually. We can take the best of it forward, but we definitely need to be together.

Q: Having many hats as you do within your current remit, must be quite a challenge at times; not only are you supporting global brands to tell their story across a variety of channels, but you have to keep afloat of trends in the industry. What do you think is key for success in your role?

A: I’ve always enjoyed meeting people and bringing people together. Back when I was a young reporter, what I loved was going out and meeting people and 20 years ago, that’s all you did. The reason how you excel your career was going to the pub and meeting people. It’s always such an important thing for me.

As I’ve progressed my career, you meet more and more people and find out, especially in our industry, most people are interesting, creative people. Keeping your network going, was not really a hardship when you know lots of amazing people. Always keeping on top of what’s going on, again, nowadays not a hardship, with networks like Twitter and LinkedIn, always being aware of what’s happening.

This industry moves so fast, occasionally I’ll convince myself to take a few days off social media and talk to people in the industry, which is tough. You come back three days later and things have totally changed, a company has bought a different company, Google’s done something, Facebook’s done something, or something’s launched. This industry moves so fast, you can’t afford to ever be sort of not watching or not being part of it.