Centraals groups CDP vendors into three main categories (CDP types). The categorization is based on the functionality provided by the systems.

• Own channels based CDPs. Main functionality of every single CDP – to be able to manage customers’ profile and transactional data. These CDPs gather customer data from varied sources, link them to customer identities, and store the results in a database available to external systems. In practice, these systems base only on profile / transactional data that are linked to customers permanent identifiers, such as email or phone number. The delivery channels are mostly restricted to direct marketing channels (own channels).
• Activation CDPs. These systems extend data assembly to tracking users behaviour in digital channels and provide users’ targeting in external media channels dynamically stitching anonymous users’ identifiers across different channels (programmatic, social media, search, own channels, etc). The delivery channels are no more restricted to own channels only but users can be targeted in paid channels without the use of 3rd party cookies.
• Analytics CDPs. These systems extended data modelling and segmentation functionality, machine learning, predictive modeling, or revenue attribution.

Centraals does not classify CDPs based on their ability of building campaign, delivering messages or personalization . Addressing users, running outbound marketing campaigns, orchestrating customer treatments across channels and delivering messages across varied marketing channels is not a role of a CDP. Marketing Automation technologies hardly replaces basic CDP functionality, and if at all they can only address own channels and could be classified within the first group only.

Learn more about CDPs here: centraals.com/cdp