CDP - Customer Data Platforms?

[Max_Fullpath]

These kind of claims seem very fishy.

It's 100% free to do a demo and see for yourself. BTW Fullpath is AutoLeadStar who you said was a leading contender in a previous post.

 

[Alex Snyder]

Ummmm.... welcome back to the conversation from 2 years ago

 

[Max_Fullpath]

These kind of claims seem very fishy.

Ummmm.... welcome back to the conversation from 2 years ago

I think the conversation around CDPs is as relevant today as it was 2 years ago. All I suggested is that you might want to take a look for yourself. All good if it's no longer of interest to you. I started posting here again because of a recent post that hit my inbox this morning.

 

[Alex Snyder]

I think the conversation around CDPs is as relevant today as it was 2 years ago. All I suggested is that you might want to take a look for yourself. All good if it's no longer of interest to you. I started posting here again because of a recent post that hit my inbox this morning.

I agree the CDP conversation is still alive and well. What I took some offense to was being called out after 2 years of silence. Normally, people who bump a thread add to the conversation with new information rather than picking at old things that have been quiet for a long time.

Welcome back. Hopefully, in the future, you will check the dates on things before jumping back in.

 

[Ryan Everson]

@Ryan Everson nails the core issue — most "CDPs" in auto are retrofitted ad tech with a new label. The data that would actually move the needle for dealers (who's overriding sticker, which manager is discounting most, where gross is leaking at the DMS level) isn't even in these platforms.

The vendors selling CDPs want to own your customer data because it's valuable to them, not necessarily to you. Meanwhile the operational data sitting inside CDK, Reynolds, Tekion etc. goes largely unanalyzed.

For dealers evaluating where to put budget: I'd ask any CDP vendor to show you gross-per-unit improvement over 90 days with a similar-size store. If they can't, you already have Ryan's answer.

My post is over 3 years old now, back when CDPs were still pretty early in automotive. They've matured quite a bit since then, so my view on them has evolved too.

Maybe they still haven't reached the level of functionality you see outside automotive, but those platforms also usually come with $150k+/year commitments, can take a year to fully build out all the integrations and warehouse the data, and generally require a full-time person to manage moving forward. They also don't come with the more plug-and-play journeys, segments, and templates that a lot of automotive CDPs offer now.

So I do have to give Fullpath a lot of credit. They've built a ton of integrations in an industry that's historically very closed off, and they continue shipping new features on the regular (see: Feature releases - Fullpath), which you honestly don't see that often from other automotive vendor their size.

Also, email providers and cell carriers have gotten a lot stricter over the last few years. Because of that, the ability to send personalized 1:1 communication based on CDP event triggers and audience segment entry has become way more important if you want to get past spam filters and other deliverability issues that come with dealers' old favorite tactic of spray-and-pray blast campaigns.

The CDP craze in automotive may have taken a bit of a back seat to AI, but if you really want to maximize AI, it still all comes back to the data. A CDP gives AI agents unified, clean data, and the real-time context they need to actually be useful.

 

[DealerInt]

My post is over 3 years old now, back when CDPs were still pretty early in automotive. They've matured quite a bit since then, so my view on them has evolved too.

Maybe they still haven't reached the level of functionality you see outside automotive, but those platforms also usually come with $150k+/year commitments, can take a year to fully build out all the integrations and warehouse the data, and generally require a full-time person to manage moving forward. They also don't come with the more plug-and-play journeys, segments, and templates that a lot of automotive CDPs offer now.

So I do have to give Fullpath a lot of credit. They've built a ton of integrations in an industry that's historically very closed off, and they continue shipping new features on the regular (see: Feature releases - Fullpath), which you honestly don't see that often from other automotive vendor their size.

Also, email providers and cell carriers have gotten a lot stricter over the last few years. Because of that, the ability to send personalized 1:1 communication based on CDP event triggers and audience segment entry has become way more important if you want to get past spam filters and other deliverability issues that come with dealers' old favorite tactic of spray-and-pray blast campaigns.

The CDP craze in automotive may have taken a bit of a back seat to AI, but if you really want to maximize AI, it still all comes back to the data. A CDP gives AI agents unified, clean data, and the real-time context they need to actually be useful.

@Ryan Everson ,fair evolution, and the Fullpath point is well taken. The plug-and-play angle solves a real problem for stores that can't justify a full-time data person.

The AI angle is interesting though — clean CDP data helps AI agents communicate better with customers. But the data gap I keep hearing about is upstream of that: the desk decisions that never make it into any system cleanly. A CDP can tell an AI agent "this customer bought at $X" but not "the manager discounted $2,400 off structure at 8pm on a Saturday to hit a unit number."

That context is what's missing when dealers try to use AI for coaching or profitability analysis. The AI is only as good as what got recorded — and most DMS logs don't capture the why behind the number.