Episode 13: Navigating CDPs: Fact vs. Fiction with Bill Bruno CEO Celebrus Technologies

Niranjana:0:00: Hello, active listeners, and welcome to another insightful episode of Martech Cube. I'm your host, Naranjana, the Senior Communication Executive at M T C.

And today we have a very special guest who's here to debunk some very common misconceptions and shine light on the reality of customer data platforms or CDP.

Joining us today is Bill Bruno, the CEO of Celebrus, a company that is renowned for its data-first innovation and a very rich history of providing abundant individual-level engagement and behavioral data technologies.

0:41: Bill is a seasoned data expert with a passion for turning complex information into actionable solutions. He started his career in consulting before joining Celebrus that is a company that focuses on marketing and fraud challenges.

Celebrus has a very strong history of innovation and was acquired by D4t4 solutions now, which has been rebranded as Celebrus Technologies.

Our guest Bill's leadership style is hands on and he's committed to building high performance teams. Bill is a data driven leader, essentially who has built a successful career in helping businesses make better decisions and protect their assets.

1:29: Bill! It is such an honor to have you on our show today. How Are you?

Bill: 1:35: Hi. Thank you so much for, for having me.

I'm, I'm really happy to be here and appreciate the opportunity to talk through some of these complex topics and ideally simplify them.

I think that's, the best intro I've ever gotten, normally I just say “hi My name is Bill and I work at Celebrus.

Niranjana: 1:51: Right. It's, it's absolutely my pleasure Bill.

Ok, So moving into our podcast, CDPs have been the marketing world’s very hot topic as of late and with many promises and myths that are circulating about their capabilities.

2:11: Let's dive right in and get some clarity from the veteran himself.

Bill, Let's start with a very fundamental question over here.

Many CDP vendors claim to offer complete user interaction capture.

Can you elaborate on why this is often an illusion and what the limitations here really are?

Bill: 2:34: Sure. Absolutely.

I mean, I think, you know, in, in general, I think there's in our industry, you know, there's a lot of topics that are confusing.

And to be very candid, a lot of vendors that prey on that confusion, right?

And you know, when you, when you talk about CDPs, a lot of people talk about them as the silver bullet that's going to ultimately fix all of these problems.

But in reality, what what I'm seeing and what we're seeing in the industry is a lot of negativity building around CDPs and, and a lot of undelivered promises.

And I think the main driver of that is, is unrealistic expectations for what a CDP is actually going to do for your business. And I think it's also the level of, of, of experience required to truly evaluate what each CDP truly does.

You know, when I was in, in early in my analytics career, web analytics wasn't really a thing. And then suddenly it showed up on every booth in every event that I attended, that everyone was doing web analytics, right?

In many ways, it's the same thing with CDP ever. If everybody claims to be a CDP then really is anybody actually won.

And what most CDPs do at the end of the day is they offer very basic data capture for, for some, some events if they have captured at all. But the majority of them are, are assemblers of data, they're pulling data from other sources.

3:58: And the fundamental flaw to that is the CDPs are making an assumption that the data that they're receiving is accurate, complete, and usable.

And what businesses are finding out very quickly is that is not the case that the data that they have in different spots is not as clean or as organized or as structured as they thought it would be.

And so what you end up in the middle of as a marketer and as a business, it is generally a data management project that is going off the rails and this isn't an easy solve, right?

Because the, the core premise of a CD P was ultimately to, to allow you to better understand your con your customers and to use that understanding, to build better experiences and to interact with your consumers on a more sophisticated level, the secondary element to the data piece itself, then to be able to do that is to have a digital identity solution that is operable and that can actually function in today's climate.

And digital identity has never been more difficult, it's never been more difficult to be a marketer and to build profiles about individuals whether they're logged in or not is a very complex set of capabilities that 99.9% of CDPs just don't have today.

And the main driver of that is most people that are claiming their CD P S have jumped the shark from what their technologies actually are.

They've gone from being a tag management system to suddenly claiming they're a CDP or being some sort of third-party data sharing platform.

And now all of a sudden they're a CD P, et cetera.

And so you're seeing these, these metamorphoses happening.

but they're, they're trying to be something they're not.

And as a result, they're not very well equipped to solve that data challenge,

Niranjana: 5:47: Right.

So basically what we are trying to establish here is that data vendors are claim it's a myth basically that data vendors are trying to be CDP vendors when they are just data vendors.

Is that right?

Bill: 5:58: Yeah, I think that's fair, right.

If you're, if you're just policing and aggregating data and you're not actually creating and controlling it and ensuring compliance and, and solving for digital identity in a meaningful way that isn't restricted or blocked by things like Apple intelligent tracking prevention or Firefox's browser changes, et cetera.

Then then really you're just becoming a glorified data warehouse. And you know, the core premise of the CDP was to sort of give you the ability to engage with consumers immediately right in the moment while they're on that page or while they're on that screen.

And what a lot of organizations that I'm meeting with or I have met with over the years end up lamenting to me about is that ultimately, when you're bringing a bunch of data together, none of that is gonna happen in the moment that data is not going to be available for you to use right then and there for that consumer.

So the whole premise of the CDP is, has then ultimately moved on from what it was supposed to be.

And, and you'll see, you see the market course correcting a bit, you know, they bring out new terminology like a composable CDP as an example. But that composable CDP definition was actually the original definition of a CDP.

It was not originally designed as this sort of silver bullet.

It was to to the original premise was to take the best-of-breed technologies out there to solve for your digital data capture and digital identity in a frictionless way to bring that data together with some of the other information you might have about your consumers and then ultimately activate that through marketing automation personalization, you know, ad targeting et cetera, but doing all of that from as a brand owning and controlling that in a true first-party way.

Niranjana: 7:46: Right. Right.

I definitely agree on that.

And so like you said, as fast as data vendors claim or acclaim themselves to be the CDP vendors, they also mystify this thing or create this into a myth that they provide or they literally boast about it that they provide lightning-fast speeds apparently.

So what are your thoughts on this?

Bill: 8:11: Yeah, the the proverbial real-time commentary, right?

I think it there's sort of three, I think three topics floating around in the industry these days that there are a lot of confusion around, I think one is, is first party and what that means, right?

And, and the the way that I simplistically outline that is if you're sending your data, your consumer data, your behavioral data from your websites and your apps as an example out of your network to somewhere else.

That's third party, right?

No matter what they call themselves, they exist outside your network, their third party, you know, the other, the other sort of key element here is this topic of real time and everyone claims real time. But when you really dig into it, in some vendors, it means hours, in some vendors, it means days, right?

And, and that means that you really as a brand, it's it's almost unfair, right? Because you for sourcing individuals who are perhaps running RFPs for, for this or or marketers that are, are trying to sort of understand the differences between technologies that they're looking at, you know, that you really need to dig into what real-time means, right?

And what really should be driving that ultimately are the use cases that you have as a business and I'm gonna use an analogy, you know that that you people have probably heard in, in the, in the more personal relationship world, right?

But, but ultimately what, what you end up seeing when it comes into this topic of real time, when you really dig into it is that a brand has the this this lovely vision for what they want to do for consumers. They have these use cases that they want to enact, that require real time in the term of millisecond, right?

Interactions I'm on this page or I'm on this mobile app on this screen and you want to do something right now to make my experience better, to generate mutually beneficial value, et cetera. It's milliseconds, it's not days, it's not minutes, it's not hours, right, et cetera.

But you know, if you're, if you're going to sort of take that, that approach, then ultimately, you have to, you really have to dig into what that means and what those use cases are so that you don't end up settling.

And I see this a lot in organizations and I've seen it over my career where you go in with these big views of, of what you want to do for your consumers. And when you check back in 12, 18 months from now, those those views or that vision has lost a bit of luster, it shrunk a bit and it's not because the organization lacks the aspirations of doing it.

It's because the brands themselves are selling on the requirements and they're dialing back because of the limitations of the technologies that they're using.

And if brands want to avoid that or they want to break out of that vicious cycle that I see happening all across the market these days.

And, and you know, at Celebrus, we're deployed in 34 different markets today with our software.

And there's this, this example of, of settling is happening everywhere when we come across a client that's just frustrated and wants to do things differently.

You know, you really do have to question everything you do have to start thinking differently and you need to start asking some very direct questions of your vendors to better understand what you're getting into so that you don't have to settle down the line and you can, you can deliver the value that you originally envisioned delivering for your consumers.

Niranjana: 11:29: Right. Right.

That, that's, that's a very compelling perspective. Let's pack that a bit.

There have been mentions about the challenges around the digital identity and profile tracking. Why do you think the CDPs struggle with effectively tracking the user journey? And how does this actually impact the data quality?

Bill: 11:52: No, that's a that's a great question as well.

And you know, it's obviously one that's being talked about a lot because of Google's decision to not make a decision, right?

Around third party cookies and you know that that whole third party cookies and just cookie conversation in general, another click headline with a lot of confusion.

But, but ultimately, regardless of Google's decision, third party data and third party cookies are dead, right. It that writing has been on the wall for over seven years.

A lot of technologies and vendors have already moved away from it or blocked and restricted it. And that means that a lot of identity solutions for marketing technologies are heavily restricted. You know, you can, you can go to any website on safari and look at their privacy tools to see the list of technologies that are restricted from profiling you as a consumer.

You know, they're doing that because of these restrictions and because those marketing technologies are not managing identity in a compliant way.

And you'll probably see on your own website, a lot of your own vendors falling into that into that category.

And CDPs again, the majority of them are bringing data together. And when they're doing that, they're making those assumptions that I mentioned before, but they're also reliant on those other, the those sources of data to manage identity for them.

So really all you're doing in a CDP is kind of a large master data management or MDM project, which your database teams would be familiar with from the last 20,30 years.

And it's a lot of heavy lifting and it's a lot of data management. It's not a small project, right?

We, we have clients now that came to us because of failed CD P projects where they invested 12, 18 months of time, money and resource only to realize that they weren't going to get the value, they needed.

Some organizations make that decision more quickly.

One of our customers throughout their CDP vendor in about three months time when, when they came and talked to us, you know, and that's not to say I'm not, I'm not here to pitch Celebrus right. There are other options out there other than Celebrus I'm just giving you some of some of my own examples just from the last six months.

But you know, there is, there is a massive problem here with these CDP implementations because at the end of the day, all you end up building is another data warehouse that you already had.

But now you're managing two and you're, you're managing that mostly from a perspective of wrestling with a bunch of different data sources that don't have a common structure. And as a result, that's why you don't see any value, you know, the brands really and truly need to step into the conversation. I think a bit more and take ownership of their, their own channels, their websites, their apps, their kiosks in the airports, et cetera and own the collection and, and structure of those journeys versus relying on a CDP to try to piece that together after the fact.

Niranjana: 14:46: Right.Right. Right.

I, I, I couldn't agree more and not to mention the fact that this definitely raises more than single security concerns.

Bill: 14:57: No. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, yeah, we, we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about security, privacy and compliance. Right?

I mean, I think again, there's a flaw in the concept of, of assembling data as a CDP and again, it makes the assumption that the data that it's receiving is compliant, right?

Because it's relying on other technologies to manage that compliance for them; or they're relying on some very simplistic archaic javascript rules that can break on a whim anytime a website or a mobile app changes, which is quite frequently in today's day and age.

And so, you know, there's sort of two aspects I think to compliance that you need to think about as a brand;

One is managing and adhering to a user's preferences, right? And so whatever they opt into or opt out of ensuring that whatever data you're collecting is not violating that trust.

and that request, but the other is where you're sending this consumer data when it's consented.

And you know, I think that the battle for most brands these days is to avoid being in the news for bad reasons, right?

I mean, even in the last few weeks, there's been, I think five or six different stories of consumer data ending up into the hands of various hackers or, you know, various breaches. I think I I got two different letters in the mail just in the last week alone, you know, saying that my data was compromised.

And I think brands really need to lean into thinking about where they're sending consumer data. And this is where that that term I mentioned earlier around first party gets really confusing because when you read articles online, it talks about first party data, first party data ownership and control, et cetera, et cetera.

And if you're talking to your vendors and they say they're first party. You assume that, that means that, that you're, you're good, you know, the data, you, you own and control the data. But you really need to dig into again, as I mentioned before, where that data is being sent. And if you're sending it outside of your network, then you're sending it to someone else.

And that's your consumer data being sent on the internet somewhere else, you know, to an analytics platform or your tag management system or whatever the case may be.

And so what we urge our clients to do and, and what I urge people that I'm just talking to at conferences or in podcasts like this is you need to really understand and audit and govern how you're managing consumer data, how you're protecting it and what data you're sending where.

And one of the scariest things that I think people don't talk about enough is the majority of these Martech solutions out there, including CDPs that offer, you know, basic data collection are all javascript based.

That's humans, writing custom code to capture and send data.

And that is rife with errors. It's never 100% accurate and it opens the door to a lot of risk because I've met with brands who came to realize that they were sending data that they didn't even think they were to third party vendors.

And they did that because the code was written wrong or there was a mistake in the way the code was written.

So there's, there's a lot to unpack there and security and compliance. That's not enough of the conversation at this point in my personal opinion,

Niranjana: 18:16: Right!

And since, since you've already mentioned that there are multiple data vendors claiming to be CDPs given all of these challenges and the misconceptions that we discussed, what should businesses actually look for when they are evaluating CDP vendors in order to ensure that they choose a platform that truly meets their needs.

Like let's say you would give 3, 3 bullet points or three prime features that some organizations should definitely consider or look into.

Bill: 18:31: No, it's a, it's a great question.

I think I'll make a general statement around this and then I'll give you the three, the three things to dig into.

I think my general statement on this is that your RFPs are too easy to respond to and too easy to hide behind.

You know, the, the RFP process could use with a real revamp.

And I'm not, I'm not talking about the process itself.

That is what it is.

I'm talking about the questions that are asked and the level of rigor provided in how you're evaluating vendors because the market marketing speak, you know, most of the responses for RFPs are coming from the product marketing teams, et cetera with within a company.

So you're getting sort of the marketing answers if you will, right, which are always going to sound better and be prettier than what it really looks like in the real world.

Right?

And so I'd, I'd urge I'd urge brands to take their use cases and put, make their use cases part of of the RFP and ask very direct questions around how you deliver that.

I think the second theme that I'd throw out there is make the vendors that you're evaluating, show it to you working in their solution and ask really difficult question.

And I think the third thing is there are three topics that we've covered today that should be sort of interrogated to a pretty granular degree in your R F P S.

The first is around digital data collection and digital data management, sort of the structure behind that, how the data is captured, what that looks like, how much code has to be written manually, et cetera.

The second is digital identity.

How does their system manage that?

How does that work when someone's not logged in?

How does that work across channels and devices or across different websites?

You know, how does that, how quickly can you recall who someone is when they're on that website or on that screen?

And is that purely tied to when they log in or can we do that when they're not logged in, et cetera?

And then I think the third piece is around compliance and security, you know, where does the data live, who owns it and controls it?

What kind of structure exists, what kind of audit trails exist, you know, how do you govern what's actually being sent outside of your network as a brand, et cetera.

And I think if you unpack those few things, you'll end up with a much more effective RFP.

And I also think that you'll ultimately end up being able to start to weed out some of the pretenders versus the contenders.

Niranjana: 20:57: Right. Right.

Given the challenges and the misconceptions, what do you think should businesses look for when evaluating CDP vendors to ensure that they choose a platform that is, that truly meets their needs?

Bill: 21:15: It's a great question.

It's a bit of a loaded question and I, and I don't know that I'm gonna make friends when I give this answer.

Right.

But I think, you know, I've seen a lot of RFPs as a vendor, I've seen them run by the brands, I've seen them informed by solution, consulting partners perhaps that are working with those brands.

I think the first thing that that brands need to do is is identify if they're getting advice on how to put together an RFP.

I think that they need to do a little bit more diligence on potential biases that are coming in.

There are gonna be consulting partners I used to run a consulting business.

Right.

There's going to be consulting partners that make most of their money using a subset of vendors and they will guide you to selecting one of those vendors so that they can maintain the relationship with you.

Right.

I think at the same time, if a sourcing team thinks that you can do any kind of MarTech, you know, whether it's CDP or something else, you know, you gotta get well beyond the basic questions.

And you've, you've got to get into some, some workshops specific to your business use cases and you have to force those vendors that you're evaluating to show you how they deliver those use cases, using your systems, your data, your websites, your mobile apps, whatever the case may be.

But there, there just needs to be, I think a lot more rigor around how brands do this because it's very easy to just respond to an RFP.

You can say you can do anything, right?

You can, you can, you can use all of your marketing speak.

But when the rubber meets the road, that's where brands are getting, are getting hurt, right?

That's where money is being wasted.

That's where people inside organizations are using political or losing their political capital, right?

I, I could unfortunately give you probably eight or nine different stories that I've heard in just the last, you know, I'd say six months where people have lost their jobs because they picked the wrong technology.

Right.

And they, and they sort of had to take the blame for that as the business, you know, went the wrong way.

So I think a bit more scrutiny, I think getting beyond the surface level questions, you know, having solid use cases identified and, and having vendors show you exactly how they deliver those use cases, talking to other customers who have those use cases, you know, just better due diligence all around, I think would, would benefit and not just not just looking at what's in a, in a report from an analyst showing you the top vendors, right?

I mean, it's, it's a lot like when I was growing up consumer reports at one point were valuable and then consumer reports because we live in a capitalistic society had to start making money.

So people paid for their placement in those, the same thing happens in a lot of analyst reports that that's all I'll say, right?

And, and so if you're basing it off of what you're reading in an analyst report and those are the vendors and only the vendors you're looking at, then you're most likely missing someone that that perhaps is a better fit for your business.

Niranjana: 24:16: Yeah, definitely.

So we're talking about cost versus value.

So no matter what the cost over there is, the the vendor should, should provide the value that they themselves believe and even what the client or the customer or the end user expects.

Bill: 24:34: Yeah. And, and that value equation should be realistic, right?

I mean, I we just started talking to, to a, to a company who came to us because they've had a implementation with a different company that was going, that's on its 18th month and they've gotten no value. Right?

And I think, you know, brands, you've gotta look at it from this perspective too when you're talking to vendors and, and make sure that there's a value generation plan that does this in weeks, not months to at least start showing value, right?

And we're, we're just, we just don't live in a market these days, you know, with inflation and everything else and, and some of the uncertainty around the globe where you can just blindly spend money for 12, 18 months in the hope that at the end you're gonna make money right there.

There has to be a value equation that makes sense much earlier in the process.

Niranjana: 25:23: Yeah, definitely.

And adding to that, investing in a CDP can be a major financial commitment on both parties ends like from even the clients end who's investing like you said for 12 and 18 months at a stretch, company or the CDP vendor himself, who having taken the money, even if it is in batches, it is a liability that you need to complete whatever it is that you have or if not, it becomes a liability to even return the money.

And if you are going to keep up with not keeping up with the value, then of course, it's going to be a liability that needs to be returned.

So, what do you think are the hidden costs that businesses have to be aware of considering a CDP?

And how, how can they assess whether the potential value justifies the investment or not?

Bill: 26:13: No, it's a great question.

I mean, I think first and foremost, this theme hasn't changed, but it's probably never become more important is business and technology teams need to work together.

You know, there's always the business team saying technology slows them down and technology saying business isn't looking at the detail and blah, blah, blah, right?

There's always that push and pull just like between a sales and a marketing team, right?

There's always healthy friction but, but they have to work together because if you're gonna make that assessment, the problem is when you're buying a CDP, you're looking at it from a business perspective, perhaps with a few use cases.

But the technology team would look at this from a different lens because a lot of the hidden costs come during the implementation process, right?

Because it's not like you just throw a, throw a a CDP into into your technology stack and it just starts bringing in value and data, right?

That data is living all over the place. It's most likely not in good format.

It's most likely not in the format the CDP requires and it's probably not complete.

So you're gonna spend a lot of time wrangling and wrestling with data, right?

Yeah, I I know of one brand told me that they wasted about $2 million just trying to wrangle data over about an 18 month period only to consider the project of failure and walk away from it.

Right?

And I think that's the biggest hidden cost.

The the second hidden cost is all of the digital stuff that we talked about the digital data, the digital identity and kind of all the compliance that goes with that.

That's not easy either.

And there these CDPs don't offer robust solutions for that.

I mean, most CDPs called themselves CD P S in the last year, right?

And they jumped the shark from whatever their technology originally did, whether it was a tag management system or something else.

And so you're dealing with platforms that don't have enterprise sort of battle tested solutions in the first place.

So there are going to be all kinds of things from capturing data to to data, digital or just general data management and that's not even covering off them.

So if you get all of that sorted, how you get, then now this new block of data accessible where you need it and in the right time frames and that's not something that a business team on their own can, can put together either because chances are you're using databases, some of your warehouses, maybe some of your cloud data stores, all of your websites, et cetera.

There, there's a lot of people that have to get involved and that's why these projects drag on so long.

And that's why I generally, when someone comes to me and says, we're thinking about a CDP project, I say, oh, so you're interested in just wasting a bunch of money and not getting any value?

And because I think we need that honesty now in, in the industry because it's nobody wants to waste that kind of money and your consumers aren't gonna wait for you to get it right.

They're just gonna, they're just gonna start working with brands that do.

Niranjana: 29:04: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

That is quite a very apt perspective that you have kept in front of us, Bill.

It's been a very fascinating discussion.

Thank you so much for shedding light on the realities of CDP and helping us and my audience understand how to navigate through the myths and misconceptions.

Bill: 29:27: No worries, no worries.

It's been, it's been a pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me and and for asking some great questions, I've, I've really enjoyed it.

And thank you.

Niranjana: 29:34: Likewise. Likewise.

So before we wrap up, is there any final advice you'd like to share with our listeners or like a quote maybe?

Bill: 29:40: You know, I think,, I think what I, what I would tell your listeners is that when it comes to Digital Identity and all of the things that I've talked about today, you know, if it feels daunting it should, it's, it's a lot of complex topics, but there are good ways of approaching this.

So if you're, if you're interested in hearing some of those stories or perhaps even talking to some of the brands that I've, that I've mentioned, you know, just reach out, you know, you can, you can get in touch with me on linkedin, you can reach out to us for at celebs dot com as well.

You know, anything that you've heard here that sparks any interest, you know, don't hesitate to ask, I think that, you know, at the end of the day, you know, there are ways to do this, right?

It just so happens that the majority of the writing out there and the majority of the instruction right now in the industry is leading you down the wrong path, right?

Niranjana: 30:30: Thank you, Bill and thank you to our listeners for tuning in.

We hope you found today's episode very enlightening.

Stay tuned for more deep dives into the world of marketing technology on MartechCube.

Until next time, this is Niranjana encouraging you to keep questioning and learning!

This podcast episode with Bill Bruno sounds both insightful and engaging! The discussion on the myths and misconceptions around CDPs is particularly valuable for listeners navigating the complex landscape of data management.

1. Misconceptions About CDPs: Bill explains that many vendors claim to offer complete user interaction capture, but this is often an illusion. CDPs are frequently just assemblers of data from other sources, and they assume that the data they receive is accurate and complete. This can lead to significant data management challenges and unmet expectations.
2. Real-Time Capabilities: The term "real-time" is often misused in the industry. Bill emphasizes the importance of understanding what "real-time" truly means for a CDP and stresses that the ability to interact with customers in milliseconds is crucial, rather than hours or days.
3. Challenges with Digital Identity and Tracking: Tracking user journeys and managing digital identities is a major challenge for CDPs, especially with the decline of third-party cookies. CDPs often rely on external data sources and assumptions, leading to issues with data accuracy and completeness.
4. Security and Compliance: There are significant concerns about security, privacy, and compliance with CDPs. Many rely on outdated methods for managing data compliance, which can lead to vulnerabilities and data breaches. Bill advises brands to carefully audit how their data is managed and protected.
5. Evaluating CDP Vendors: When choosing a CDP, Bill suggests focusing on:
   • Digital Data Management: Understanding how data is collected, structured, and managed.
   • Digital Identity: How the CDP handles identity management across different channels and devices.
   • Compliance and Security: Where the data is stored, how it's controlled, and the audit trails in place.
6. RFP Process: Bill critiques the RFP process for being too easy to respond to with marketing speak. He advises brands to rigorously evaluate vendors by testing their solutions with actual use cases and understanding how they handle real-world scenarios.

This conversation provides valuable insights for businesses looking to invest in a CDP, highlighting the need for careful consideration and thorough evaluation to ensure they select a platform that genuinely meets their needs and delivers real value.