The State of Customer Data Platforms in 2018
A snapshot of the customer data platform category in 2018: how it differed from a DMP, which vendors defined it and why GDPR made first-party data valuable.
The customer data platform category had a name and a defined shape by 2018, thanks in large part to the CDP Institute, founded in 2016 specifically to draw a clear line around what counted as a CDP and what didn’t. That definitional work mattered, because the term had started getting applied loosely to almost any tool that touched customer data.
What distinguishes a CDP from a DMP
The confusion in 2018 usually came down to conflating customer data platforms with data management platforms, an older, adjacent category. A DMP is built around anonymous, cookie-based data, mostly for advertising audiences, and that data typically expires within weeks or months as cookies age out. A CDP is built around persistent, identified customer records, tied to a real person across devices and channels, meant to be kept and built upon indefinitely rather than refreshed on a rolling basis. The practical distinction: a DMP helps you target an anonymous audience segment with an ad; a CDP helps you recognize the same known customer whether they’re on your website, opening an email or calling support.
Why the category grew through 2018
Two forces pushed adoption. First, marketing teams were increasingly frustrated by data scattered across separate systems, an ecommerce platform, an email service provider, a support tool, each holding a partial view of the same customer with no easy way to combine them. A CDP existed specifically to solve that unification problem without requiring a custom data engineering project. Second, GDPR’s enforcement beginning in May 2018 made first-party, consent-based data meaningfully more valuable relative to third-party data, since first-party data collected directly from a known, consenting customer sat on much firmer legal ground than data purchased or scraped from elsewhere. A tool built to organize exactly that kind of data arrived at a useful moment.
Who was using them
Early CDP adoption in 2018 concentrated among mid-size to large ecommerce and subscription businesses, companies with enough customer volume and enough separate data sources that manual unification had become painful and enough marketing sophistication to act on a unified profile once they had one. Smaller businesses with a single sales channel and modest customer counts generally had less to gain from the category at this stage, since simpler tools could unify their more limited data without the added cost and complexity.
What a CDP could realistically do for a business in 2018
- Build a single customer profile spanning web behavior, purchase history, email engagement and support interactions.
- Feed that unified profile into other marketing tools (email platforms, ad platforms, personalization engines) so they could act on the full picture rather than a fragment of it.
- Support segmentation and basic predictive scoring based on a complete view of each customer.
Where the category still had rough edges
Implementation in 2018 was rarely plug-and-play. Getting a CDP to unify data well required real setup work, defining how records from different systems should match to the same person, cleaning up inconsistent data formats and deciding which of several competing definitions of a “customer” the platform should use. Vendors varied significantly in how much of that heavy lifting they handled versus left to the business’s own team.
By the end of 2018, customer data platforms had moved from a niche, poorly defined idea to a recognized category with real vendors, real customers and a real use case: giving marketing teams a unified view of each customer at a moment when that kind of clean, consented, first-party data had just become more valuable than it had ever been.
More from the Marketing Analytics archive, everything published in 2018 and the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
