Writing

CDP is the acronym that beat every rival to become the default name for the customer data layer, then began dissolving into packaged, warehouse-native and agentic patterns. Winning the naming war did not settle the architecture.

DMP ran a decade of digital advertising and then collapsed. The strange part is that the standalone marketing DMP collapsed even though the event meant to kill it never happened. Third-party cookies survived Google's 2025 reversal. The DMP died anyway.

Hightouch's LiveRamp bid, Zeta's Palantir partnership, Databricks CustomerLake and Tealium Context API all point to the same shift: the identity and context layer is contested ground again.

Why LLM agents grounded by feedback, memory and constraints feel so unsettlingly familiar, and what that means for MarTech architecture.

Customer Engagement Platform absorbed ESP and MAP, then collided with CDP. That is why it is useful, vague, and dangerous to buy against.

Marketing Automation encoded the funnel into software. It still fits B2B well, but its campaign-tempo model explains why B2C moved toward event-driven engagement.

The Email Service Provider faded as a category, but its function still sits inside every modern engagement stack: delivery, reputation, consent, and suppression.

Salesforce agreed to acquire Fin for $3.6B and MoEngage acquired Aampe's per-customer decisioning engine. A practitioner's read on week 26, and why the agent story is shifting from build to buy.

After mapping the three CDP–CEP wiring patterns, this is the practical framework for choosing which architecture fits your organisation.