Generative, Dynamic, Composable
At CES this year, WPP Media's CEO made a bold prediction: “By 2030 no human will touch a media plan.”
I think he is both generally right and specifically wrong. (And, I hope the corollary “By 2030 all media plans will touch a human” also remains mostly true.)
In an era where machines increasingly outperform humans in audience decisioning and campaign optimization, the human role in media is evolving - from tactical execution to higher-order responsibilities like upfront strategy, consumer insights and partner development.
This shift underscores the growing reliance on machine learning and automation in marketing, and it also highlights the need for brands to have a well-organized, privacy-inherent data foundation.
At the center of this transformation is the shifting balance between 3P audience and 1P customer data.
Gartner’s report, The End Game for DMPs, argues that the era of the Data Management Platform is ending. Once the backbone of audience targeting, DMPs depended heavily on third-party cookies. With the deprecation of 3P cookies and the rise of privacy regulation, their usefulness has waned. Marketers are now shifting their focus from audience data they buy to customer data they own - 1P data that lives within their ecosystems.
Enter the Customer Data Platform (CDP).
Unlike DMPs, which primarily ingested 3P data for anonymous targeting, CDPs ingest first-party data - permissioned data collected directly from customers - and unify it into persistent, individual profiles. These profiles can power personalized marketing, loyalty programs, omnichannel experiences and even AI-generated content.
The Gartner report points to CDPs as the natural successor to DMPs, and as an essential part of the future marketing stack.
The CDP market is growing at a CAGR of 23%, propelled by customer demand for both personalization and privacy. This growth is also driven by the rise of composable data stacks, the need for AI-ready infrastructure and business strategies that center on total experience (XO, experience orchestration) - a blending of customer, user and employee experience. But CDPs alone aren’t enough; they require well-defined use cases, clear business logic and accessibility by experience makers (partners) to have real value.
Leaders in the CDP space include Adobe, Salesforce, Epsilon and Twilio, according to IDC. CRM vendors, in particular, are well positioned for this shift. CDPs are a natural extension of their core capabilities - managing relationships, tracking behavior and orchestrating communications. CRM systems already house rich, structured customer data, and integrating CDP functionality turns them into even more powerful engines for customer engagement.
Yet as the market heats up, CDPs face pressure from hyperscalers and SaaS platforms that want to own the entire AI and data stack. Hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Meta provide the infrastructure and analytics tools that many CDPs depend on. If CDPs don’t define their unique value - particularly their role in marketing use cases, identity resolution and experience orchestration - they risk being subsumed or rendered irrelevant.
Hyperscalers that are also marketing platforms, like Meta, offer powerful advantages over CDPs: massive scalability, access to cutting-edge AI tools, constant innovation and executional convenience/efficiency. Their investments in generative AI and machine learning are reshaping how customer experiences are created and delivered. As such, the lines between infrastructure provider, marketing platform and data orchestrator are blurring. This convergence forces CDP vendors to double down on differentiation and interoperability. Especially interoperability, which is where the hyperscalers have a weak point.
The future of marketing and media will be increasingly generative, dynamic and composable.
In this future, CDPs are not just data stores - they are enablers of real-time, adaptive customer experiences. Whether through product recommendations, personalized content or automated service workflows, the value of CDPs lies in turning raw customer data into better experiences and business outcomes. Their success depends on creating IP around marketing and media use cases, not just data pipelines. And finding a way to co-exist with the hyperscalers.
As all media ultimately consists of just two things, content (what we pay attention to) and audience (who is paying attention), it’s no surprise that the ability to individualize messaging and offers at scale is becoming central to media strategy. First-party data and the platforms that activate it will define how brands communicate in the post-cookie world. Investing in CDPs like Adobe, and hyperscalers like Meta, is investing in the infrastructure of the customer experience economy.
Machines may soon plan the media, but it is still up to marketers to shape the experience, define the audience and ensure the outcome. And that requires not just data, but human judgment, creativity and a deep understanding of what it means to serve customers and prospects in a privacy-first, AI-enabled world.