The customer data platform (CDP) market is facing a reckoning. After the buying frenzy of recent years, Australian businesses are now reassessing their investments with tighter budgets and a sharper focus on outcomes rather than architecture.
In Mi3, Andrew Birmingham breaks down the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant rankings which see Salesforce dominating and traditional leaders like Tealium slipping, and explores why “buyer’s remorse” is setting in across the industry.
While the global rankings paint one picture, the view on the ground in Australia is different. The conversation has shifted from “one platform to rule them all” to a more pragmatic approach: strategy first, technology second.
The “single view” myth
Spinach’s Head of Innovation, Richard Taylor, contributed to the discussion, highlighting why the “single view of the customer” once the holy grail of marketing is being questioned.
With economic pressures mounting, Richard noted that many organisations are finding it harder to justify monolithic CDPs when execution platforms like Braze or Bloomreach already offer robust, built-in personalisation capabilities.
“The money people have for tech is reducing, along with the budget for everything else,” Richard told Mi3. “So when they’ve got a platform like a Braze or a Bloomreach that does their personalisation for them, it makes sense to utilise the built-in CDP of those platforms.”
While this fragmented approach might mean sacrificing a technically perfect unified profile, Richard argues that the changing privacy landscape has made that ideal increasingly difficult to achieve anyway.
“When Tealium first introduced the 360 view of the customer, I thought that was the way to go… But we can’t really do that anymore because of cookie policies and everything else. So the whole rationale for using the CDP is slowly deteriorating.”
Read the full analysis
The article also features insights from Mangrove Digital’s Tim Armstrong and Helium’s Puneet Srivastava on the rise of composable stacks and the need for operational playbooks over pure software solutions.
For a detailed look at the new Gartner rankings and what they mean for your martech stack, read the full article on Mi3 here.
