David Raab
David Raab
David Raab is a consultant specializing in marketing technology and analysis. Clients have included major firms in financial services, retail, communications, and other industries. His B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool provides detailed information and guidance to buyers of marketing systems. Mr. Raab has written hundreds of articles for DM Review, DM News and other industry publications. Many of these are available without charge at www.archive.raabassociatesinc.com.
Is the Bloom off the Blockchain Tulip?
Blockchain is the sort of cool technology that should excite me, but for some reason it does not. Part of my resistance is the whiff…
Adobe’s Magento Deal Makes Great Sense
Adobe yesterday announced its purchase of the Magento Commerce platform, a widely used ecommerce system, for a cool $1.68 billion.That Adobe would purchase an ecommerce…
Will GDPR Burst the Martech Bubble?
Some people have feared (or hoped) that the European Unions’ General Data Protection Regulation would force major change in the the marketing and advertising ecosystems…
Facebook, Privacy, and the Future of Personalization
Readers of this blog and the CDP Institute newsletter know that I’ve been fussing for years about privacy-related issues with Facebook, Google, and others. With…
What I Learned at the Customer Data Platform Workshop
I ran a four hour workshop on Customer Data Platforms this week at the MarTech Conference in San Diego.* The attendees were a mix of…
Building Trust Requires Innovation
Trust has been chasing me like a hungry mosquito. It seems that everyone has suddenly decided that creating trust is the key to success, whether…
Adobe Adds Experience Cloud Profile: Why It’s Good News for Customer Data Platforms
"A CDP by any other name still stores unified customer data." Adobe on Tuesday announced the Experience Cloud Profile, which it described as a “complete,…
Salesforce Buys MuleSoft and Offers It as a Data Unification Solutions
The Customer Data Platform industry is doing very well, thank you, with new reports out recently from both Gartner and Forrester and the CDP Institute…
Picking the Right First Project for Your Customer Data Platform
For the past year, the most common question about Customer Data Platforms has been how they differ from Data Management Platforms. Recently that seems to…
State of Customer Data Platforms in Europe
The Customer Data Platform Institute will be launching its European branch later this month with a series of presentations in London, Amsterdam and Hamburg. We’ve…
Will CDP Buyers Consider Private Clouds as On-Premise Deployment?
Most Customer Data Platforms are Software as a Service products, meaning they run on servers managed by the vendor. But some clients prefer to keep…
How Customer Data Platforms Help with Marketing Performance Measurement
John Wanamaker, patron saint of marketing measurement. If you’ve been following my slow progress towards a set of screening questions for Customer Data Platforms, you…
Will GDPR Hurt Customer Data Platforms and the Marketers Who Use Them?
Like an imminent hanging, the looming execution of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has concentrated business leaders’ minds on their customer data.…
Celebrus CDP Offers In-Memory Profiles
It’s almost ten years to the day since I first wrote about Celebrus, which then called itself speed-trap (a term that presumably has fewer negative…
Collapse of Civilization Makes Marketers’ Jobs Harder
Political situations come and go but trust is the foundation of civilization itself. So I was genuinely shaken to see a report from the Edelman…
Simple Questions to Screen Customer Data Platform Vendors
I’ve been working for months to find a way to help marketers understand the differences between Customer Data Platform vendors. After several trial balloons and…
The Light Bulbs Have Ears: Why Listening Is Voice-Activated Devices’ Most Important Skill
If one picture’s worth a thousand words, why is everyone rushing to replace graphical interfaces with voice-activated systems?The question has an answer, which we’ll get…
What’s Next for Customer Data Platforms? New Report Offers Some Clues.
The Customer Data Platform Institute released its semi-annual Industry Update today. (Download it here). It’s the third edition of this report, which means we now…
Surprising Results in Customer Data Platform Survey
The Customer Data Platform Institute (CDPI) recently surveyed its members about their customer-facing systems and CDP deployment plans. (Click here to download the full...
Here’s a Game to Illustrate Strategic Planning
My wife is working on a Ph.D. in education and recently took a course on strategic planning for academic institutions. Her final project included...