But after digging into the use cases, economics, and liabilities associated with storing person-level data, the answer was no. It wasn’t the popular recommendation, but it gave our team the freedom to invest in the infrastructure that would actually matter for privacy and efficiency.
Why did we run away? A core task of a product owner is to understand whether a problem is getting bigger or smaller. There is no reason to invest in solving a problem that is already losing relevance.
At the time, I believed that the obsession with detailed customer attributes would not survive the costs and risks that brands faced. In any case, this shift became clear to the market faster than expected. Understanding customers is essential. Holding onto all their data is not.
The appeal of identity
Brands still buy CDPs because they think identity is a problem they have to solve themselves. They want the comfort of an omniscient feeling, but the market refuses to cooperate. Identity is too spread out. Signals are constantly changing. Platforms can handle person-level precision far better than any brand ever could.
Identity feels like an asset, but acts like a liability. It is a mistake to fixate on ownership. Determine what is a critical asset to own, and let the systems built for activation do their work.
Reason 1: Authorship instead of ownership
Brands are trying to establish their identity to clarify what drives customer decisions. They want to know why someone chose their product as a gift, why someone complained on Reddit, or why a customer left the store just before entering a credit card into TikTok stores. These moments feel personal. It’s easy to believe that if you owned every interaction, you could explain every outcome.
But the truth is that brands don’t actually own these interactions. They rent them out through platforms that monitor their own identity systems. CDPs promise to integrate these touchpoints into a single user and make the invisible visible. The field is tempting. The reality is slower, more expensive and less accurate than the platforms that already contain the signals.
Person-level details distract from the real work. Instead, brands should focus on writing the interactions they want to create and defining the signals that are important to their story. The value comes from understanding patterns and motivations at an aggregate level.
Possessing identity does not lead to understanding. Understanding comes from knowing which motivations matter and which commitments determine behavior, and then shaping the message around it. The brand’s job is to shape the story between themselves and their customers, not stare at the data.
Dig deeper: the CDP fantasy is over
Reason 2: Knowledge instead of liability
We just wrapped up gift giving season and like everyone else, I had a list to complete. I always keep notes throughout the year, but without knowing what ads people see, which YouTube creators they follow, or what trend caught their attention last Tuesday, I know I probably won’t buy the one thing they really want.
This year I tried something different. I told Gemini about the people on my list, added a little context from our conversations, and asked for ideas. It produced dozens of strong suggestions based on patterns, correlations, and what the internet is currently obsessed with.
Apply that idea to customers. Brands know what they buy from them. They know when customers are buying for themselves or their household. They understand the basics of how buyers navigate their ecosystem. That is the core knowledge that shapes the brand’s story and creates value.
Let publishing partners and data platforms take care of the rest. They already understand the messy aspects of media behavior, changing interests and real-time attention. They know how to reach people in their own area. That burden of liability lies with them, not with the brand. The job is to own the knowledge brands and use them to tell a clearer story and why it matters.
Dig deeper: No one knows what a CDP is anymore – and that’s the problem
Reason 3: Flexibility of lightweight central management
A useful way to think about this approach is as a lightweight operating system built on clean, contextualized data. Instead of a single monolithic profile, the system maintains large numbers of classified tables associated with multiple identifiers.
That data feeds directly into the applications that teams use every day to build market and channel plans, evaluate creative performance, and run media experiments. Practitioners retrieve the data they need, enrich it, and apply it to the task at hand.
The closest analogy is a hub-and-spoke. The hub ensures uniformity. The spokes allow any use case to adapt and expand from a single base. The same model works for customer data, with an extra layer of security.
CRM is the linchpin. Send that data to media partners without bias or narrow segmentation, via cleanrooms or their secure matching interfaces. Their algorithms will find the overlap between their engaged users and brand-ready customers. This increases reach and accelerates ROI. Interoperability makes customer data accessible and valuable in today’s marketing.
Dig Deeper: Why Chasing Shiny CDP Features Makes Marketers Feel Like Imposters
Adapting now is critical
When CDPs first arrived, the industry envisioned a future where every touchpoint was neatly connected and every customer could be understood in minute detail. It was an inspiring idea.
The problem is that identity management is complicated, highly regulated and increasingly risky. Regulations continue to shift towards the customer’s right to be forgotten. The more enriched data brands possess without a direct relationship, the more likely they are to cross a line they didn’t see.
The liability of managing that data outweighs the additional benefits it promises. By reducing responsibility and outsourcing the complexity of identity, brands can achieve meaningful results faster.
If you are a brand, focus on building strong relationships with your customers and understanding their buying cycle with your brand. Tracking individual data points at a person level is difficult and the ROI is negative. Distribute that liability and reduce the weight of your centralized customer data.
It’s time for brands to enter a post-CDP world that actually supports how marketing works now.
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Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the supervision of the editors and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. The contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of it Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
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