The CDP Reboot: The Stall
When every CDP started to look the same 🍎 🍎 🍎
Welcome to Part 2 of the #CDPReboot series. In Part 1, I unpacked the promise that made Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) one of the most hyped Martech innovations of the past decade. This time, I’m digging into what happened when the hype peaked, the market flooded, and suddenly... every CDP looked exactly like the next one.
Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. But it was predictable. And frankly, we all saw it coming. When a technology trend catches fire and every vendor wants in, you don’t get clarity. You get conformity.
A feature list you’ve seen 100 times
Identity resolution. Unified profiles. Segmentation. Activation.
That’s the core feature set of nearly every CDP you’ll find in a demo room or vendor slide deck. And it’s been that way for years.
At some point, the differentiation game shifted from substance to semantics. Vendors started competing on who could say "real-time" the most, or who had more integrations listed on their website (even if half were in beta or built six years ago).
Suddenly, “real-time” meant anything from 10 milliseconds to overnight batch processing. “Unified profile” meant either a graph-based ID system or a glorified email lookup table. Buyers were left guessing. And when everything sounds the same, nothing stands out.
Even more confusing? Every vendor claimed they were unique because of how they did the same things. As if rearranging the words on a pitch slide suddenly turned identity stitching into innovation.
It all began to feel like comparing smartphones by how sharp their corners are.
“If all you need is some data movement, you don’t need us. Go with whatever the cheapest possible solution is and don’t spend more than 10 grand a year.” ~ Michael Katz
The RFP theater
This feature parity created what I call RFP Theater.
Everyone looks great on paper.
Everyone checks the same boxes.
Everyone says yes to everything.
Until the ink dries, and then you find out your CDP can’t support your actual data model, or the integration you were promised is held together with API duct tape, or the entire solution needs a six-month implementation just to send a segment to Facebook.
I’ve seen smart teams burned not because they chose the wrong CDP, but because they were evaluating sameness with no meaningful filter. It’s like trying to pick a favorite from a lineup of clones in slightly different hoodies.
In some cases, the CDP was selected because of one slide showing integrations, only for the team to realize that those “native” integrations were actually one-way data pushes with no error logging.
This kind of gap between promise and practice became standard. And it eroded trust across the board.
Analysts and acronyms to the rescue (kind of)
As confusion grew, analysts stepped in. And in fairness, they tried to bring structure to the chaos. Forrester built waves. Gartner split CDPs into subtypes. The CDP Institute published taxonomies.
But here’s the thing. Analysts are great at naming things. They’re not always great at clarifying them.
Suddenly we had “packaged CDPs,” “composable CDPs,” “smart hubs,” and “real-time customer engines.” All vaguely true and all increasingly interchangeable.
Meanwhile, vendors played both sides. Some positioned themselves as composable when talking to IT. The same week, they pitched themselves as plug-and-play to marketing. One slide to rule them all, unfortunately not what Tolkien had in mind.
As a result, stakeholders inside companies began to disagree on what kind of CDP they were buying, or worse, what they’d already bought.
"I see a lot of customers that have three or four CDPs... and in some sense, that sounds ridiculous. But if one’s for routing, one for foundation, one for orchestration, it starts to make sense. You just have to throw out the category definition."
~ Derek Slager, Amperity
(Couch Confidentials Episode 16) 👇🏻
Analyst reports started sounding more like menus than evaluations. Instead of filtering for fit, many teams used them to justify a decision they’d already made.
Why this hurt buyers
This saturation didn’t just make life hard for vendors trying to stand out. It made life impossible for buyers trying to make a smart decision.
Marketers were told CDPs were essential. But which kind? For which use case? And what would it take to actually get one working?
“One of the challenges that I see with organizations is that it probably crosses organizational boundaries. You need a bit of IT, data engineering, analytics… then you need a business team. And does analytics sit in business or IT? Depends on which business you're in. That's always a bit crazy.”
~ Mike Ferguson, RedPoint Global
(Couch Confidentials Episode 9) 👇🏻
I’ve worked with companies who burned six figures on a CDP they couldn’t activate. Not because the tech was broken, but because no one realized they’d need to rebuild their entire data model or hire two engineers just to normalize event payloads across their stack.
Others had the right tech, but lacked executive sponsorship. Or they underestimated how much work was required to get good data in, and how little their activation tools could actually do with it.
“Why are you limiting the use of customer data just to marketing?” ~ Kazuki Ohta
This isn’t failure. This is misalignment. A lot of teams bought into a category without fully understanding what they were getting or what was required to make it work.
It also led to internal politics. Marketing wanted agility. Data teams wanted structure. IT wanted security. And the CDP sat in the middle like an underloved, overhyped mediator with no real owner.
The turning point: When everyone hit pause
By 2022, something changed. RFPs slowed down. CDP pilots stalled. Some companies got rid of or deprioritized their CDP projects altogether.
Not because CDPs lost relevance, but because the air was thick with sameness and sales fatigue. Buyers needed clarity. What they got was recycled clichés and overstuffed product sheets.
Some decision-makers started asking: “Do we even need a CDP? Or did we just get caught up in the hype?”
At some point, every category goes through this phase. But for CDPs, it came fast. The very thing that made the idea powerful, its universality, became a liability. Everyone needed a CDP. No one agreed on what that meant.
There’s still value in the idea, but the delivery needs a serious rethink.
In Part 3 of the #CDPReboot series, I’ll dive into why the real problem wasn’t the platforms at all. It was us, our blind spots, our structures, and our unwillingness to admit that no piece of software could save a dysfunctional operating model. CDPs didn’t fail. They just revealed the cracks we were hoping to pave over with tech. And once the illusion wore off, all that was left was the hard part: facing the reality of our own Martech decisions. It was us: the buyers, the teams, the org charts, the expectations.
CDPs didn’t fail. They just weren’t magic.
Further Reading: