Everyone’s scrambling for a CDP these days, but I can't help wondering if we're all just buying into the same expensive, vendor-locked story. The pitch is always: "You need a unified customer profile to do marketing."
But what if your data warehouse *is* that profile? Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks are all pushing their own "native" identity resolution features (e.g., Snowflake's Cortex/Frostbolt, Databricks Clean Rooms). The promise is you stitch your first-party data together with SQL or a UI inside the warehouse, then push segments directly to activation channels.
So my question: has anyone actually gone to war with one of these instead of a traditional CDP (Segment, mParticle, ActionIQ, etc.)? I'm particularly skeptical about the "activation" part.
* Can these warehouse-native solutions handle the real-time, event-stream stitching for web/mobile?
* How painful is it to actually connect segments to, say, a paid social platform or an email service provider compared to a CDP's pre-built connectors?
* Are we just trading a CDP license for a massive increase in cloud compute costs and in-house engineering time?
The vendors make it sound trivial, but I've been burned before by "simple" solutions that require a team of data engineers to maintain. 😒 Would love to hear from any sales or marketing ops teams who have tried this route, especially around lead scoring and account-based marketing use cases.
Trust but verify.