Simon Data: Re-architecting marketing technology
The last decade has been a golden age for marketers. Propelled by a continuously expanding set of digital touchpoints, the growth of marketing technology providers have enabled marketers to attract and retain customers in ever more sophisticated ways. Starting from email, then expanding to the web, mobile, social, and now messaging channels, the variety and richness of data about consumers have continued to grow, and the technology barriers for leveraging this data have continued to fall. Today, marketing technology represents $30B+ of technology spend, with thousands of distinct providers.
For marketers, the growth of marketing technology has been transformational, though not without its challenges. The never-ending pursuit of increased ROI, combined with an ever-shifting landscape of consumer touch points, has led to layer upon layer of solution to optimize each new opportunity for customer engagement. In an effort to minimize integration barriers, these solutions are typically siloed, resulting in an increasingly fragmented marketing technology stack and a disjointed customer experience. Efforts to integrate across the stack are typically reliant on outdated technology architectures which were neither built to handle massive web-scale data, nor designed to enable the real-time analysis and action that many marketing use cases demand.
The marketing stack has reached a breaking point for many companies, for which a fundamental re-architecture is needed. Rather than starting with a use case and building a customer data model around it, the new approach must put the customer data model at its core. This data model and enabling technology must support massive scale and real-time querying capability, while enabling support for all types of customer data — both semi-static (e.g., CRM and transaction data) and dynamic (e.g., web and app clicks). The data model must also integrate seamlessly with existing solutions on which numerous marketing use cases have already been built.
Enter the Customer Data Platform (CDP). Over the last 18 months, CDPs have been one of the hottest new segments of marketing technology. These platforms aim to be the central nervous system for the marketing technology stack, providing a unified view of all customer data, enabling real-time querying (e.g., segmentation, event triggers), and integrating out to existing ‘execution tools’ (e.g., for sending emails or notifications). In doing so, they hope to enable a more seamless customer experience across all touchpoints and enable marketers to perform much more sophisticated targeting (e.g., segmentation queries which mix CRM, event, and transaction data).
However, all CDPs were not created equally. As the latest shiny object in martech, a huge range of martech providers have started claiming that they too are CDPs. However, in many cases, providers have simply repositioned their existing point solutions as a CDP. We believe that realizing the promise of a CDP requires a natively built solution, built ground-up to solve the inherent data management challenges for marketers.
Having met numerous exciting companies in the CDP space, we feel fortunate to have recently invested in Simon Data — a company that is setting the standard for what CDP’s can be. Jason, Josh, and Matt, the founders of Simon Data, represent the next generation of martech founders; not only do they deeply understand the needs of modern marketers, they are also world-class technologists. Already, some of the most tech-forward marketing companies, such as TrueCar, BarkBox, and BlinkHealth, have seen the value of rearchitecting their stack around Simon Data’s CDP.
The CDP market is still in its infancy. As more and more success stories emerge around this new approach to martech, we believe CDPs will become a foundational tool for all marketers. In the coming years, CDPs will become the next multi-billion dollar segment of marketing technology, with Simon Data leading the way!
