No Longer a Luxury: CDPs Become a Staple of Martech, Providing Flexibility and Value Beyond Foundational Use Case

New Survey Demonstrates CDPs’ Maturation From Powerful Tool to Critical Solution, With Spotlight on Data Security and Privacy Compliance

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., January 11, 2023 – Treasure Data™, an award-winning enterprise customer data platform (CDP) provider, today announced the results of a survey of martech decision-makers that highlights the current state of CDPs, including common trends, best practices, and future use cases. The survey’s findings signal a new era for CDPs, as the once-emerging technology establishes itself as the absolute centerpiece of the martech stack. The vital importance of CDPs is best represented by the amount of time it takes for brands to see a full return on investment, a mere eight months on average. Also, enterprises are overall bullish on CDPs’ prospects going forward, with 99% of survey respondents expecting a greater role of importance for their CDP solutions over the next one-to-two years.

The survey, conducted by Advertiser Perceptions, shows that with a potential market downturn looming, consumer-facing brands in every industry are considering cost reduction and risk management strategies that align with their technology. To that end, data security and data privacy compliance were recognized as “very important” factors when evaluating CDPs (68% and 60%, respectively), ahead of more conventional CDP functions such as identity management and resolution (46%), integration with other technologies in the tech stack (61%), and the ability to scale with data needs (55%). Knowing that reliance on third-party data exposes brands to potential compliance issues, 40% of martech decision-makers indicated that their CDPs will help improve their first-party data ownership.

“The rise of CDPs parallels the added importance of consumer data in marketing strategies and customer-centric initiatives,” said Zack Wenthe, CDP evangelist at Treasure Data. “CDPs have lived up to their initial promise of unifying data and orchestrating the customer journey all while demonstrating remarkable data privacy and governance. Treasure Data’s technology is now taking the next step by powering business transformation across the enterprise through innovative use cases.”

The survey also shows that CDPs already excel at traditional digital marketing functions. Half or more of martech decision-makers credit the following as current use cases: campaign personalization (59%), audience segmentation and targeting (56%), measuring marketing performance (51%), and identity resolution (50%). In addition, once a pure-play martech tool, CDPs are beginning to take on use cases that go beyond the scope of marketing. Almost half of respondents (43%) say they will leverage their CDPs to achieve operational efficiency in the future and over a third (34%) to attain input for supply chain management. Adding to enterprise-wide utility, the end-game for decision-makers is to derive even more ambitious outcomes from their CDP, with advanced insights via machine learning (46%) and less reliance on IT teams (43%) leading the roadmap of future benefits.

Other key findings from the survey include:

• Just over a third of survey respondents (35%) said marketing teams primarily owned the CDP selection process, with operations (19%) and IT (11%) also predominantly involved.
• While marketing and sales teams see the most value from a unified customer data foundation, customer service, data science, operations, and executive teams also have a strong demand for and appreciation of data connectivity.
• To date, CDPs are often used to connect marketing, sales, and customer service data, but data source connections do not have to stop there. Almost a quarter (24%) of enterprises identify supply chain and inventory data as the top data source for CDPs to connect.

Trusted by over 450 organizations including Beam Suntory, Shane Co. and The Pokemon Company, Treasure Data was named 2022 Technology of the Year by InfoWorld and named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Technologies, Q2, 2022.

The survey findings are based on a national survey of 100 U.S.-based martech decision makers from companies of 1,000+ employees who use CDPs. For the full report findings, please visit here.

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About Advertiser Perceptions
Advertiser Perceptions provides research-based strategic market intelligence and expert analysis to the media, advertising and ad tech industries. We study the decisions of brand marketers, agency executives, media specialists and IT leaders through our curated and proprietary Ad PROS™ Network to provide clients with an unbiased view of the market, competing brands, and customer experiences. These actionable insights allow clients to inform both strategic and operational decision-making to improve their products and services, strengthen their brands, and drive higher ad-related revenue.

About Treasure Data
Treasure Data helps enterprises use all of their customer data to improve campaign performance, achieve operational efficiency, and drive business value with connected customer experiences. The Customer Data Cloud, our suite of customer data platform solutions, integrates customer data, connects identities in unified customer proles, applies privacy, and makes insights and predictions available for Marketing, Service, Sales and Operations to drive personalized engagement and improve customer acquisition, sales, and retention. To learn more, visit www.treasuredata.com.