About five years ago, I was asked to evaluate whether my company should build a customer data platform (CDP). The market pressure was intense, and clients kept asking us to integrate with the platforms they were buying. It was tempting to follow the trend.
But after digging into the use cases, the economics and the liabilities associated with storing person-level data, the answer was no. It was not the popular recommendation, but it freed our team to invest in the infrastructure that would actually matter for privacy and efficiency.
Why did we walk away? A core job of a product owner is understanding whether a problem is growing or shrinking. There is no reason to invest in solving a problem that is already losing relevance.
At the time, I believed the obsession with granular customer attributes would not survive the costs and risks facing brands. If anything, that shift became clear to the market faster than expected. Understanding customers is essential. Holding all of their data is not.
The allure of identity
Brands are still buying CDPs because they think identity is a problem they must solve themselves. They want the comfort of feeling all-knowing, but the market refuses to cooperate. Identity is too distributed. Signals shift constantly. Platforms handle person-level precision far better than any brand ever could.
Identity feels like an asset, but it behaves like a liability. It’s a mistake to fixate on ownership. Define what a critical asset is to own, and let the systems that are built for activation do their job.
Reason 1: Authorship instead of ownership
Brands seek 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 shopper exited just before entering a credit card on TikTok shops. These moments feel personal. It is easy to believe that if you owned every interaction, you could explain every outcome.
But the truth is that brands do not, in fact, own these interactions. They rent them across platforms that guard their own identity systems. CDPs promise to stitch these touchpoints into a single user and make the invisible visible. The pitch is seductive. The reality is slower, more expensive and less precise than the platforms that already hold the signals.
Person-level detail distracts from the real work. Instead, brands need to focus on authoring the interactions they want to create and defining the signals that matter to their story. The value comes from understanding patterns and motivations at an aggregate level.
Owning identity does not produce understanding. Understanding comes from knowing which motivations matter and which engagements drive behavior, then shaping the messaging around them. The job of the brand is to shape the story, not stare at the data, between themselves and their customers.
Dig deeper: The CDP fantasy is over
Reason 2: Knowledge instead of liability
We just wrapped up gift season and, like everyone else, I had a list to get through. I always keep notes during the year, but without knowing what ads people are seeing, which YouTube creators they follow or what trend grabbed 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 returned dozens of strong suggestions based on patterns, correlations and whatever 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 carry the rest. They already understand the messy parts of media behavior, shifting interests and real-time attention. They know how to reach people on their own turf. That burden of liability belongs with them, not with the brand. The job is to take the knowledge brands own and use it to tell a clearer story and why it matters.
Dig deeper: Nobody 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. Rather than a single, monolithic profile, the system maintains large numbers of classified tables keyed to multiple identifiers.
That data feeds directly into the applications teams use every day — building market and channel plans, evaluating creative performance and running media experiments. Practitioners pull the data they need, enrich it and apply it to the task at hand.
The closest analogy is a hub-and-spoke. The hub creates uniformity. The spokes allow each use case to adapt and extend from a single base. The same model works for customer data, with an added layer of security.
CRM is the hub. Send that data to media partners without bias or narrow segmentation, through clean rooms or their secure matching interfaces. Their algorithms will find the overlap between their engaged users and brand-ready customers. This increases reach and speeds up ROI. Interoperability makes customer data accessible and valuable in marketing today.
Dig deeper: Why chasing shiny CDP features leaves marketers feeling like impostors
Adapting now is critical
When CDPs first arrived, the industry imagined a future where every touchpoint connected cleanly, and every customer could be understood in perfect detail. It was an inspiring idea.
The problem is that identity management is complicated, heavily regulated and increasingly risky. Regulations keep shifting toward the customer’s right to be forgotten. The more enriched data brands hold without a direct relationship, the more likely they are to cross a line they did not see.
The liability of managing that data outweighs the incremental gains it promises. Reducing responsibility and outsourcing the complexity of identity lets brands move faster toward meaningful outcomes.
If you are a brand, focus on building a strong relationship with your customers and understanding their buying cycle with your brand. Maintaining individual data points at the person-level is unwieldy and ROI negative. Distribute that liability and lighten the weight of your centralized customer data.
It’s time for brands to step into a post-CDP world that actually supports how marketing now works.
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