Sorry if this is coal in your stocking!. Actually, there are so many great things happening with customer data, 2024 will bring good tidings to all. AI is an inflection point. 2024 should be a watershed year. An evolutionary moment.
Prediction 1: MarTech tools will argue about what they are called.
The move of legacy CDP vendors to play nicely with data warehouses caused quite a bit of market confusion in 2023. Not to be outdone, services like reverse ETL and data collaboration entrenched their position as composable CDPs native to the warehouse. There are now so many orchestrators MarTech could be the New York Philharmonic. Meanwhile, brands are still struggling with lack of ROI in their data collection and infrastructure investments. Things like GA4 migrations, cookie depreciation only add to the drama. Expect more name calling and confusing definitions in 2024.
Prediction 2: Container services redefine MarTech
2024 will see the launch of Snowpark Container Services and the importance and growth of Docker continues to take hold in the cloud. Somewhere over 15,000 brands now run Docker so they have the ability to collaborate their customer data with services and applications safely and securely. This will help fuel the adoption of enterprise AI applications through quick plug-and-play use case validation as well as consumption based pricing models. By the end of 2024 it is all applications that run on a services connected to compute (the real platform). Existing data SaaS tech will have to make a choice what they are in that triumvirate. The term “CDP” becomes meaningless.
Prediction 3: Synthetic data accelerates everything.
As brands grapple with data collection and data organization the ability to generate fake data provides a world of benefits to build enterprise ML and AI applications. There are some interesting start-ups already in this space too. No doubt we will see a continued rise in synthetic data tools. I suspect in 2024 these tools will also become more vertically intelligent as well as more specific to the nuances of certain vertical operations. I also think we’ll see more synthetic data tools open sourced, further accelerating the development of AI. This will be especially important for start-ups building AI where customer data is hard to attain like healthcare and finance.
Prediction 4: Consultants will do well.
Data maturity is at various stages of early for most brands but the race to consumer’s pocketbooks through data and AI has started. As someone said to me recently their customer 360 is more like a customer 90 with the goal of it being a 180 sometime in 2024. Sort of feels like all this infrastructure SaaS was the cart that came before the horse. The good news is that data is getting out of these siloed SaaS databases and slowly into the data warehouse and unified into a table based on customer IDs. For most however, this kind of data fitness requires service partners to augment internal resources. There needs to be referees and some more players on the field between marketing and engineering or many run the risk of being left out of the race.
Prediction 5: The smartest segments win.
With consumer data privacy 1:1 marketing is dead. Meta’s Advantage+, Google’s PMAX and TikTok custom audiences all require a minimum of 1,000 IDs per target group to seed the AI lookalike matching & modeling done by the platforms. The customer IDs brands put in those audience segments make or break CAC and LTV, so in other words their entire business. On the owned media side, customer data being unified in the data warehouse provides smarter segmentation to “the Adobe Suite” and any other testing, targeting and CX tools marketers use. This operationalizing customer segmentation across touch-points and channels has been the ultimate dream for many marketers. It arrives in 2024 and will be highly transformational in both efficiency and performance.
Happy Holidays friends and colleagues!
May customer data be your gift that keeps on giving and may you learn deeply in 2024. I’ll have a lot more to share in the New Year.
Optimize & Prophesize 
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