Articles about
cdp

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.

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

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.

Databricks launched an agentic CDP inside the lakehouse, GEO became a buyable category almost overnight, and Salesforce shipped Summer '26. A practitioner's read on week 25, and why the customer-data layer and the visibility layer just moved at the same time.

Salesforce's agreement to acquire Contentful is not just a CMS move. It is another chapter in the long-running competition with Adobe over who owns the architecture connecting customer data, content, journeys and AI execution.

Salesforce signs a definitive agreement to acquire Contentful, agentic marketing platforms converge on the same agent-plus-MCP pattern, and MCP moves beyond engagement into measurement and GTM data. A practitioner's read on why governance is becoming the real differentiator.

Activation inside the CDP, the CDP inside the CEP, or best-of-breed apart: three ways to wire customer data and engagement, and what each choice really implies.

Marketo brings MCP to the MAP layer, Iterable ships the unglamorous fundamentals, Mailchimp complicates its own strategic signal, and vendors start selling agents as a business model rather than a feature. A practitioner's read on week 23.

Zero-copy activation is not just a new integration pattern. It is a signal that customer engagement architecture is moving closer to the data warehouse, and that the composable CDP idea is becoming part of the broader engagement stack.

MCP is moving from isolated platform news to a common access layer for customer engagement platforms. Braze shows the agentic workflow direction, Adobe shows the operational discipline required, and the CDP market shows why the data foundation matters.

Hightouch at $2.75B, Canva buying Ortto, Braze's operational consolidation drop and AJO's march toward autonomous journey management. This week's signals are unusually clear about the direction of the marketing stack.

Agentic Marketing Is No Longer a Roadmap Item. A week of MarTech releases that belong together: AJO's orchestration intelligence layer, MCP going platform-wide, Klaviyo changing the e-commerce equation, Segment's warehouse-native pivot and the governance question nobody has answered yet.

Martech has a naming problem. Every few years a new (or rather, a resurrected one) acronym shows up promising to solve what the previous…

The MarTech landscape is collapsing the distance between customer data and customer action.