For years, traditional customer data platforms (CDPs) promised to be the the silver bullet for marketing. They were going to deliver a true customer 360, marketing autonomy, omnichannel personalization, higher customer LTV, lower CAC, and more.
But these CDPs never truly delivered on the promises. Many customers failed to launch or took years to see any meaningful value from these investments. In fact, one leader shared with me that only 5% of their campaigns ever were used by one of these platforms.
And as we see more acquisitions of these platforms. it's clear that these traditional, packaged CDPs were not the answer.
So, what does the future hold for marketers and their goals for smarter, more successful personalization? As I discuss in the video below, I believe the answer lies in cloud-native, AI-powered solutions that leverage the value of first-party data.
Transcript
It's such a fascinating time in this industry, the last several months in particular. So I'm often asked, what do all these acquisitions of these traditional CDPs mean? For those not tracking, Lytics, Action IQ and Particle have been acquired recently. And we view this as evidence that those big promises that those types of platforms made have really been left undelivered.
So, to recap the promises that these platforms set out, to deliver were true customer 360 view, marketing autonomy, true omnichannel journeys with advanced personalization, deliver LTV, lower CAC and many other three-letter acronyms. But this is proof positive that those promises have been unkept. Many of those customers failed to launch or took years to see any meaningful value from these investments. In fact, one leader was saying to me, sharing with me that only 5% of their campaigns ever were used by one of these platforms.
So that's pretty clear that the model has run its course. I liken these to rapidly melting ice cubes. And I'd say another element of this is the source of funding for these types of companies. They mostly accepted venture capital and/or debt. Now that sounds great, but with that often comes a growth-at-all-cost mindset that often leads to some unsustainable practices that really lead to poor customer selection and ultimately churn. So when it works out and you become a household name and achieve escape velocity, that's great. But the harsh reality is for most of the companies that fail short, fall short rather of that pre-locked goal, the reality is it's not so great and you're left in a tough spot when growth slows. And that's definitely the case with these players.
And the harsh reality is, like the most recent acquisitions wiped out investors and unfortunately employees as well. So we have a lot of empathy for those teams and for the companies that chose to invest here, but it's really been a critical underlying assumption architecturally that really you need to bet on the data cloud layer. So it's very clear that smart organizations looking to find one place to store all their customer data, their marketing data and overall their business performance data have chosen a cloud data, sorry, a data warehouse like BigQuery or Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks or Azure. Those have become the de facto choice. That ship has sailed long ago and I only expect more data gravity in these platforms because of their cost and their flexibility and their ever increasing capabilities. So that's one of the things that GrowthLoop got right almost from the very beginning.
Fundamentally, it's that is your source of truth. Your cloud is your source of truth and the brain, you will, driving all of your marketing. So the marketing experience is the journey is the ability to derive actionable insights and experiments, activate across all your channels will begin and end in the data cloud. So putting this together, we see a pretty dramatic and exciting opportunity going ahead. We don't even have a name for what lies on the other side.
And that's part of the excitement for the team here at GrowthLoop. And really, If you couple two things together, the decline of these SaaS systems of record, together with the rise of agentic AI, we're really seeing this seismic shift. And it's ushering in a new generation of really cool applications and the application layers coming to life. So we see solutions that we've built with agents and workflows operating within a composable architecture sitting on top of these data clouds. We think these agents will have a very novel chat GPT-like interface that will automate both traditional tasks and outcomes. So if you think about that, tasks like organizing, labeling, golden records, and so forth, tasks typically done by humans, will be augmented and/or replaced with these agents. Probably even more importantly, they'll orchestrate the outcomes themselves. So identifying which audiences to target, designing and iterating multi-step journeys, figuring out how to design real-time experiments and personalization and decision-making, and optimizing all the content and creative and then activating it across all your channels. This is really cool. This is really exciting. So the rise of these agentic platforms will really revolutionize both the user experience, both for the end customers and the users of these products, will also allow us to better deliver outcomes.
And I do see over time business models shifting to be more results oriented. In other words, I like to say results as a service as opposed to selling seats and licenses we'll sell outcomes because you can quantify and measure them. And that's really, really cool. So that's the opportunity that we see. Again, we don't even have a name for this, we see traditional CDPs have represented failed promises over the past five to 10 years. The opportunity we're chasing represents the next five to 10.
And we'll really see marketing teams unleashed and their ability to deliver on the promises of true customer personalization at the one-to-one level and ultimately deliver results. And this is the future to us, like this agentic AI powered flywheel of sorts that will deliver compounded growth, quick results, faster to really accelerate the top line. So that's really what we get excited about here.