[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, so with me today, I've got James McDermott from Lytics. As you might know, a few weeks ago, I think it was around two weeks ago, I posted something on LinkedIn, a new acronym in our world called XCDP. The company behind that is Lytics. And I'm eager to learn a little bit more about what XCDP can deliver, especially with their integrations with content management systems like Drupal and WordPress. But again, the proof is in the pudding. And thank you, James, for taking time this morning. And as we've just spoken before we started recording, that sunset behind you is amazing. The sun's going down here and it really emphasizes this, this global system that we work and live in and. But, yeah, but back to the topic. Cdp, as I told Michael in a previous podcast, is I think it's a fascinating outlook for 2025 just to be able to get real time profile information into the data layer on the front of for content management systems to use. That's about as far as I got with the understanding of the solution. Can you tell me a little bit more? [00:01:02] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. Thanks. Thanks for having me. And you know, when we launched our xcdp, the core premise was every time we talk to a customer, one of the problems that they were having was the complexity of personalization. I think, you know, how do we actually get this real time profile into our content management system or into our web layer so we can actually deliver these personalized experiences? And it's crazy to think that we've been, you know, on this CDP journey for the last 10 years and thinking about personalization tools and databases and Martech and companies really continue to struggle with how to deliver personalization at scale. And so what we did was we actually, we went to the content management systems and said content management systems, the open source ones like WordPress and Drupal, how do we transform those into DXPs? How do we really bring the data and the data layer directly to the content layer so that marketers can actually do personalization in real time. And so our system is really designed to do that. And over the last 10 years, I think we've learned a lot about what companies want to do with data but are unable to get there. And so that was really the genesis of the xcdp. And I think, you know, like Michael said on your podcast, your initial podcast, you know, in the CDP category, there's been this bifurcation. You know, there's really kind of two types of CDPs. There's kind of this Compostable model, as he describes it, I think probably tongue in cheek, but you know, where it sort of goes back, you know, to the old way, which is, you know, storing data in a data warehouse, really only having access to about 10% of the data that you need for personalization and really kind of using data that's at rest, you know, batch data, offline data, kind of information that might be valuable for an email campaign but isn't really as relevant or valuable for that in the moment interaction. And you know, the second type of CDP that we wanted to really introduce into the category was this X cdp, the Experience cdp. So that was really the background behind it and I think for us, really defining what that means and what are the requirements of that, that's really the next part of our process. [00:03:28] Speaker A: Yeah, and I mean, yeah, it's absolutely amazing because one of the biggest challenges I've always had as a CDP practitioner, it's not connecting the data sources or setting up the endpoints where we want to send the data to, or even building out the audience, mainly for third party remarketing or first party email campaigns, is getting that information back into the front end, into the apps, into the content management systems in front of the user at the right moment. What made you decide to, I mean, you kind of went into the reasoning behind it, but open source WordPress is one of the bigger platforms. Is it also to gain more traction or were you seeing that a lot of your customers were already using these two platforms? [00:04:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, you know, WordPress is about 65% of the kind of web content management ecosystem and Drupal is a fairly large ecosystem as well. And actually it started with our partner Pantheon, which is a, you know, kind of a web ops platform that works on Drupal and WordPress. And they, you know, they asked us, would you be able to package up some of what you do with your X CDP and provide a personalization tool to our customers. And so what we started looking at, you know, was what does it, what does it mean to be able to deliver personalization from a CDP directly to a content management system? And so we built these native connectors starting there, but we've actually expanded and now we have these native connectors to headless platforms like Content Stack. And we're continuing to expand, you know, the types of native CMS integrations that we have. So we started there to kind of prove the model. And you know, for us it's really about bringing data to those systems. I think you hit the nail on the head like Most companies can connect some data, they can build some segments, but their inability to actually get that context or what they know about that user directly into a real time experience is quite hard. [00:05:30] Speaker A: It takes a lot of development time as well, and it's very platform specific. Can you give us some practical examples of what to expect? It sounds like you're going to be delivering the data into the actual cms. Will there still be some enablement within CMS by marketeers to determine what they're going to do with that data? [00:05:49] Speaker B: Yeah, so a few things, I mean foundationally when we think about the xcdp, number one, it's got to be real time. So the ability to provide a real time profile, real time segments, real time data directly to the content management system is absolutely critical. The other part to that, when we think about personalization, is content. So being able to provide both user insights, like customer insights, but also these content insights. So one of the things that we do that's fairly unique is we build both this customer graph, so everything we know about this user and we build a content graph. And so inside of the xcdp there's these two graphs that exist and then we build essentially a ontology or a taxonomy that describes the relationship between these two things. And so one of the most critical aspects of a CDP or an X CDP in this case, to be able to describe these experiences and to be able to deliver personalization at scale is can you identify who is this user in real time and can you describe the things that they're interested in and then deliver that content? And so inside of WordPress or Drupal or Content Stack today, what Lytics is providing is all of that context right, directly into the content management system. So if you're setting up, you know, a program where you're like, hey, people that are coming to the website and let's say you're a university and they're, they're a prospective student and they're interested in engineering. I want to be able to show them the engineering page and the engineering content. Can I do that in real time? Can I do it inside of my cms? Is my user that's inside the content management system able to apply the data that we have from our XCDP directly into the experience. And so when you're a user inside of Drupal or WordPress or content stack, you now have access to all of the context and so you can connect it to those experiences. So whether that's like I'm going to show A, B or C to specific types of audiences or if this users is returning, you know, and we know certain things about them. Maybe it's the UTM parameters, the campaign that they came off of or I want to use. Lytics also provides recommendations. So we have the ability to do content and product recommendations, but essentially making the user data and the context of the content all available in the, in the content management system. [00:08:22] Speaker A: And would that be on a page level or also an element level? [00:08:26] Speaker B: Yeah, both. So page and element. So each element within your website you can actually kind of make dynamic based off of what you know about that user. [00:08:37] Speaker A: Interesting. Well you just mentioned Lytics also does product recommendations. And I have to be transparent here. I've never used Linux in an operational environment. Living here in the Netherlands, it's not one of the most prominent CDPs that I come across. I have heard of it. Can you tell us a little bit more? What I'm also interested in is you run solely on Google Cloud platform. Is that still the case? [00:08:57] Speaker B: Actually so we do run on Google Cloud and we've been on Google Cloud. We started on Amazon by AWS and then we moved over to Google Cloud for some variety of reasons. I mean one, I think they've got a ton of experience around data. [00:09:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:10] Speaker B: So it made a lot of sense. But now we actually we can run on both Google Cloud and on aws. [00:09:16] Speaker A: Okay, so like a marketplace solution these days. [00:09:19] Speaker B: Yeah, but Google has been a great partner for us I think for a variety of reasons. They've been kind of a co development partner and something that Brian Clifton was talking about your last show, he was talking about, you know, thinking about more context based advertising. What we know, we don't need to know who this user is, what their name is, where they live, but if we're, if we're context aware, like we understand the things that they care about on the page, can we actually deliver advertising against that? And Google was obviously going down that path, you know, with their privacy sandbox and trying to think about ways to you know, make context more of the advertising mechanism versus you know, kind of things that we know about this specific user and we were partnering with them on that. So we've done a lot of interesting things with Google. And then the fact I think that Google's in 190 countries and we can basically be available in all those countries as well. I think that's an important. [00:10:17] Speaker A: Yeah, you mentioned the previous podcast with Brian Clifton. You told me earlier that you used to be a lawyer and we had a very interesting discussion around the whole, whole start of gdpr, where did it already originate from? And I kind of want to go back to that because I actually learned something or at least it got me thinking about, wow, could this really be the instigator of what is now gdpr? And from your experience and your reasoning, you brought it back to nine of all. [00:10:47] Speaker B: Yeah, it sounded a little conspiratorial, but. [00:10:50] Speaker A: Well, you know, we're not on the Alex Jones show here, but. No, absolutely, it does sound interesting and very feasible because data protectionism, I think you pointed out it was a wild west of sending data to America to fight terrorism. How did you come about this theory? I know we're kind of side something from xcdp, but this was so fascinating. [00:11:10] Speaker B: Yeah, this is not related to xcdp, but being in the, you know, the category that we're in, I mean, and working with companies that care deeply about, you know, being transparent and privacy and making sure that, you know, they have consent and they're managing consent appropriately. It's a topic that I spend an insane amount of time with companies thinking about and talking about and really strategizing, you know, how do we do this better? I think one thing that gets lost a little bit is, you know, companies actually do care about building a meaningful relationship with their customer and they know that at the core they need to be able to get consent and they need to be able to create this kind of first party dataset and they want to do things right. And so I think in general companies are good actors. I think they actually do a lot to protect the privacy and respect, you know, kind of levels of permission that they have to do certain things with their, with their customers. But the kind of, the beginning of all of this I would say is probably, yeah, 9, 11, and then the Patriot act, you know, the Patriot act basically was the US Government saying, hey, we, we're going to access whatever data we need in order to fight this war on, on terror. And that created, I think, a need for the EU and other countries to say, well, wait a minute, there needs to be some boundaries on the types of data that we're going to allow you to collect and allow you to bring into the, back into the United States. And so that, you know, and you can kind of look at like what was happening with Snowden and other things, like what were the catalysts for why, you know, the EU got involved and this became, you know, such a, an important topic. And it's really like, hey, we all have a reasonable expectation of privacy and we don't think that the United States government is going to have access to information that I might be, you know, doing in England or, you know, in the Netherlands. And so I think that really was the, you know, kind of the inflection point for kind of why, you know, we have GDPR and why, you know, I think consumers and privacy experts are thinking about this. Of course, you know, kind of websites are but a small portion of the data that gets collected, you know, these days. [00:13:34] Speaker A: Yeah, no, you also pointed that out. I mean, at the time, there was a lot of concern around when GDPR came into life. I remember working for a company, working late into the evening to make sure it got up and running on time. But like you said, there seems to be so much focus on the web and app collection of the data while people getting stressed out with a consent banner. I mean, we need to give people control, but there's so much happening in terms of data sharing in the background that a lot of that we don't know about. [00:14:02] Speaker B: Yeah, but. Yeah, I mean, I think I was talking to my, my wife recently and I was like, well, when we're visiting someone's house, you know, should we ask them to turn off Alexa or their Google home or, you know, do they have cameras that, that they're running or we get into somebody's car? You know, I think where, where data collection is happening, it's kind of everywhere and certainly in more private spaces. I don't think people think about the Internet anymore as a private space. Maybe they did once, but I think in general now people are aware that the Internet is a kind of an open space where things that you do will be available unless you're, you know, kind of trying to get off, off the, you know, the kind of public Web. And so, you know, what I see is a lot of regulations around kind of one type of data collection. And I think it's important and it's valuable and it's created, I think, a lot of good behaviors from companies that I think want to respect and do respect the consent preferences of their prospects and customers. But there's a lot more, I think that it's sort of happening offline that we may need to be looking at. More importantly and from an expectation of privacy, I would say if I'm in someone's home, maybe I'm thinking that I have a little bit more privacy than I actually do. [00:15:13] Speaker A: I've never thought about that one. Indeed, all the cameras that my neighbors are. Every time I ring the ring bell or the, or the nesta doorbell? Yeah, and I think, and I've got one. I mean I should be thinking about it. [00:15:24] Speaker B: I mean you walk up to somebody's house and they're recording you and you walk in and so you know, but then again that that's an individual, it's not a company, but it's also not a government. And so there's these different who has the information, how are they going to use it? You know, what's the potential for harmony? [00:15:43] Speaker A: Definitely. Well, one of the arguments that I've been hearing a lot about the data warehouse central approach with CDP or Martech in general is that security is one of them. But how do you feel that, is that still a valid argument? I mean Linux runs on aws, it's a cloud based solution and I can imagine that at some point to realize the real time features of Linux you'll need to duplicate data for performance reasons. You need to make it available. What do you think about the argument that some of these other vendors are using against data duplication, the whole zero copy topic? [00:16:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I think, you know, the compostable, I'll just continue to use that term. [00:16:26] Speaker A: We need T shirts for now. [00:16:28] Speaker B: Hat tip to Michael. But you know, a, I think of that model and you know, we launched kind of our reverse ETL or kind of composable approach, you know, in 2021. And we launched it because we had customers that had data in their warehouse that they wanted to be able to access and use inside of their XCDP for, you know, real time triggers or for different types of campaigns. And so I think of that as a, as a feature. The ability to connect data from a warehouse and get it into, you know, your xcdp. It's certainly a valuable feature I think. And then there's a lot of marketing around that, you know, is it more secure, zero copy, you know, all of those things. I think the challenge is like, like I said, companies have been storing data in warehouses for a long time, building up customer profiles. You know the challenges there are clear one, it's, it's a small percentage of the data that you really need in order to kind of connect with your customer and do personalization. It's at rest, it's not real time. As Michael points out, and I think rightly so. It's also really expensive. It's a really expensive way to kind of store data, compute. I mean the storage is cheap but the computation that's happening kind of on the warehouse in order to kind of get it into all of your activation systems it's not a very efficient kind of tool. And then I'd say, you know, from a security perspective and the zero copy, where have we seen kind of breaches, you know, snowflake, you know, where. And I think it's probably because inside of the warehouse, you 100% depend on the individuals, you know, that are kind of building up, you know, the data set and managing the data. I think in our software industry, like, people spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do we encrypt data at rest, how do we encrypt it in transit, how do we have, you know, different kind of permissions and access roles and all of the things that we do in software to ensure that the data is protected. So you may not necessarily have all those mechanisms on your internal team with your internal data set. And I think, you know, the zero copy question is kind of. It's the wrong question to be asking. Like, that's sort of a data question. What you really should be asking is, are you doing enough to help your customer? [00:18:47] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, are you solving the problem. [00:18:49] Speaker B: Providing enough value on top of the data that you've spent a lot of energy and money collecting? Yeah. So if you kind of reverse the question, it's like, well, are you, do you have the right information to actually do the types of personalization that are valuable for your customer? And often, you know, that that doesn't have anything to do with, you know, one copy or two copies or three copies. It's. It's really about, do you have that information and do you have it in the tools that you need, you know, that are at the point of experience, like where the experiences are happening? And so I think there's, you know, there's this conundrum in our space which is, should the data be owned and managed and secured by the internal teams, the IT teams? And the answer is probably yes. But then how do we make sure that it's available and accessible and useful and valuable to that end customer, and that that requires marketing and other teams to be involved. And so, you know, certainly this is a team sport, but I think that more often than not, companies that are implementing a cdp, they get lost in the data and the complexity of the data and the accuracy of the data and the fidelity of the data, and they never get to that other part, which is the value that you can deliver to a customer. [00:20:06] Speaker A: And so too much from a product perspective, instead of the value that it's going to, it should be bringing. [00:20:13] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, from our perspective, that's why the XCDP really matters. Because one, it's got to be available in real time. Two, it's all about what you know in terms of the content. Like personalization is the instantiation of the value of this data for the most part. You know, I think all of the use cases, or many of the use cases that create value relate to what do I know about this user, what do I know about the things that they care about, how do I then deliver relevant experiences to them? And then how do I do that? You know, the other thing is how do I do that at scale across every channel? [00:20:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:20:48] Speaker B: So I think a lot of the CDPs are probably good at building segments for email, you know, or maybe getting those. Ad suppression, you know, ad suppression. But what about all the other use cases? You know, 95% of most of the people that we want to interact with are actually anonymous. They're not known to us. And so how do we then make sure that we're, we're able to activate the data for those anonymous use cases? [00:21:13] Speaker A: So when you talk about xtp and it might be the marketing or the blog, the vision I had is that it's, the scope is web and app, but when I hear you speaking, it sounds like the scope is a lot larger than that. [00:21:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I think if you say experience cdp, you're talking about all experiences. And so I think, but, but you know, kind of our perspective is one, you've got to be able to really understand the content, the context of that user. And that's where this kind of content graph that we build is so different because it allows us to build this bridge, this taxonomy that helps us describe what your prospects and customers are interested in. And then that allows you that taxonomy which is common with your web layer, your email, like basically being able to understand all of your content, the images and the photos and the text, the videos, whatever it might be, that's important to be able to describe that and then describe how users are interacting with that and then be able to make recommendations based on that. And so, you know, we, we think of the problem as personalization being, you know, the user, you know the content and you know the relationship between the two. And you can deliver against that, and you can deliver against that at scale, meaning email, ads, web. It's not just mobile, it's sort of all channels. I mean, CDP, inherently, if you're collecting data from multiple channels, you should be able to serve the customer in multiple channels. So I think one of the inherent promises of a CDP is Omnichannel. And actually, if you're collecting data, coming back to the consent question, if you're collecting data from all of these different channels, shouldn't you be able to connect and serve the customer in meaningful ways across all those channels? And so I think, you know, we have this new flows product or orchestration product which makes it really easy for our customers to be able to connect their email programs with their web personalization, with their mobile experiences and their ad campaigns. And I think, you know, today when you look at most of the kind of orchestration tools, they're very narrow in terms of being able to maybe support, you know, messaging, outbound messaging. But what about all those web experiences? And so XADP is just, yes, of course we can support ads and email and kind of mobile messaging, but what about web and then the kind of in app experience? [00:23:43] Speaker A: Would customers need a solid digital asset management in place to identify the right media and right content across these various platforms? You mentioned email and web, if you want to continue kind of the discussion that they've been viewing on web into email. [00:23:59] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great point. And it's actually why we've expanded. So we started this XCDP journey by really building these native connectors into WordPress and Drupal, which is almost 70% of the market. And we really looked at what Adobe was kind of trying to do, I think with their, you know, kind of real time CDP and their kind of experience cloud. And you know, obviously that it's insanely expensive, it's very difficult to get off the ground. You know, it's, it's kind of a, I don't want to say Frankenstein, but it's kind of a collection of different acquired tools. And so is there a more kind of modern stack that can do exactly what you just described? And so we started with Drupal and WordPress and now we've expanded to Content Stack, which is a leader in the headless space. They have this incredible kind of data store and the ability to kind of have all that information available in many variants to be able to deliver personalization across any channel. And so we see this incredible opportunity to finally meet the needs of the marketer who's been saying, I want to do personalization at scale, but it's too complicated and it's too expensive to get there. And I think the last you talked a little bit with Michael about AI, generative AI in particular, I think the last kind of the missing component has been can we generate enough content to support personalization? And the Answer is yes, most definitely. Now I think with some of the AI tools that we have, you can generate more content, it can be more personalized, it can be available and accessible as long as you have the user data, the content graph and then the ability to deliver at scale, data quality. [00:25:41] Speaker A: Another hot topic for 2025. As long as everything's up to par there. I think that's the biggest link to CDPs or at least data management at the moment around AI is that if your data is horrible to work with, your results are going to be horrible as well. [00:25:59] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think, you know, we, we think of data quality maybe in kind of in a one dimensional way. We actually have like this, it's a, it's a survey, it's called D360 Readiness Index. And we score you across seven different dimensions of data quality and fidelity. And do you have all of the IDs that you need? Do you have. You know, identity resolution is a really important, obviously kind of foundational part of a cdp. You know, we've been, we built our identity resolution capability that's proprietary to us and it's best in class because we're able to do kind of the deterministic matching. Plus if you want to do probabilistic, you can in your warehouse. But there's the identity and then there's like, do you have all of the content? Do you have all the behaviors? Do you have all of these different dimensions that we think of in terms of quality of data, which, which really means the quality of personalization? Like, do you have the right context to be able to deliver the experience that your customers. I mean, the whole reason we're collecting this information is to be able to provide meaningful value back to the customer. [00:27:04] Speaker A: And how will you monitor that? I mean, gen AI is relatively new and one mess up in your data point could mess up the message to the customer. [00:27:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I think. Well, I mean, obviously inside of Lytics, like everything that we do kind of on this deterministic graph, it's really like what we know based on the consent that we have from that customer. And so everything stored inside of Lytics is kind of known and it's observed and it's correct, let's say the generative AI question. I think people are solving that right now in terms of like, do we have guardrails around content generation? You know, can these LLMs, they can't do it on their own. And so we're starting to work with some partners that are doing some pretty exciting things, I think in terms of like, there are guardrails that you can put around these LLMs that make sure that the quality of the content that's being produced to match what you know about these users is accurate and of high enough quality that you could serve that, you know, that's moving really fast. And I think the opportunity, when think about people, think about the modern stack and what they're trying to do, it's like, well, what's your goal? You know, I think oftentimes I'll talk to prospects and it's like, are you just trying to collect data and store it in a warehouse or are you actually trying to deliver better experiences? And if you work back from your goal and you start to think about what are the things that we need in order to do that, you may change your approach and you may change the tools that you have, you know, in your stack. And I think that's, we're heading into 2025 and certainly like the world is changing with AI and all these new opportunities. Companies need to rethink their stack right now and they need to think about what is it that they're trying to do with data, how are they trying to use that information, how are they making their customer life, their customers lives better? [00:28:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm seeing that quite often. A lot of companies, they jumped on the bandwagon when the first tools arrived on the market and they're running into limitations now. So I definitely see that migration now to, I think Scott Brinker pointed that out, the whole consolidation and not necessarily the consolidation as a term, but the full review of their current stack and seeing how does it deliver value, because that was one of the drivers for that move is people companies are having a hard time seeing a return on investment on these type of solutions. [00:29:26] Speaker B: I think the amazing thing about being in the space is how fast it moves. It's incredible, you know, and that's an opportunity, you know, I think every company needs to really think about what is available to them now and how do they take advantage of that. One of the things that we did that I also think is really critically important for XCDP is making the tool accessible. So, you know, we created a developer tier which is free, so you can actually go to Lytics, you can sign up, you can get access to the XCDP and you can start using it and you can actually execute use cases with it. And so it's not a gimmick, it's not a free trial, it's actually a. [00:30:11] Speaker A: Product you can get full hands on. [00:30:13] Speaker B: That people can use. And we did that because we looked at the WordPress ecosystem and we looked at all those plugins and we thought, well, there's no great plugin right now for personalization. We have these capabilities. Let's democratize access, give people the tools so that they can start doing personalization and then mature, I think, into, you know, more of an enterprise XCDP set of capabilities. [00:30:37] Speaker A: Yeah, you might be tapping into a new market now and you look at. [00:30:41] Speaker B: But it's really about, you know, we believe that every company should be doing better by their customers and using the data in a meaningful way to drive personalization. And so making that accessible, making that just available in the market was really important to us. Like, if you have $20 million to spend, you can go look at Adobe. But if you don't, you know, and you, and you want to do this and you want to try it and you want to see if it's actually possible. Because I think a lot of, if you talk, you know, you've been in the space for a long time. I think many people are disillusioned. They've tried Adobe, they've tried Salesforce, they've tried optimize it, they've tried these tools and they haven't worked in the way that they wanted them to. And so, you know, the opportunity is to try it for free and see if it works and then scale it across your organization in a way that works for you. And so that's another key part of the xcdp which is democratize the availability of the tool, the modern stack, to actually do personalization. [00:31:49] Speaker A: That's an interesting approach. The whole, Is it a limited trial pro or kind of a limited time trial or just a limited intern? [00:31:55] Speaker B: Limited, yeah, not limited by time. It's. There is a cap on the number of credits basically that are available to you, but for the most part, you know, any, any company can, can sign up and any company can use it. And the cap just means that we won't be. Continue to collect the data. Yeah, no, we'll sort of reach a certain amount of kind of processing and then, and then we kind of cap that. But you can continue to use the tool. There's no limit. [00:32:22] Speaker A: Well, you guys are definitely at the forefront of innovation for 2025. Like I said, the whole XCDP is very interesting. The whole try it out, try before you buy. I like it as well, because you're spot on in saying that a lot of companies get disillusioned in the entire assessment process where they think they Found the right solution, then get hands on and six to nine months down the road discover, hey, this is not the match we're looking for. And having the opportunity to play with it before you actually sign a contract. Yeah, I think it's definitely going to attract the right people. Looking at the time. Do you have time for one more, two questions? [00:32:57] Speaker B: Sure. [00:32:57] Speaker A: So when Lytics gets pitched, the biggest, some of the biggest discussions I have is this split in camps. You have your marketers, you have data. And I've only come across one customer so far that when I joined them to help them with the implementation of their cdp, they had a whole team in place. They had a data scientist, architect, a front end, back end, project manager, everything in place and even we had someone to talk to. With compliance with Lytic and especially lowering the bar with people onboarding people with a free solution. What kind of people does Lytics usually engage with? When you go into these sales cycles, do you still see the split in camps or are companies wakening up to the fact that this is a multidisciplinary sport? [00:33:44] Speaker B: I wish I had a different answer to this question. [00:33:48] Speaker A: That's okay. Some things never change, right? [00:33:50] Speaker B: You know, I think we have hundreds of enterprise customers and in general, I think the enterprise approach is pretty challenging in that you have two teams, you have kind of an internal data or IT team that's responsible for customer data and then you have another team which is, you know, kind of responsible for campaigns and activation. And in general we see this kind of two phased implementation. The data team kind of owns the first part and then they do this handoff to marketing. And I think in general the model for that is deeply flawed because from the very beginning, the user of an XCDP must be a business person, must be somebody who understands the strategy that the company is trying to use to engage with the customer. Because the translation of the data into something of value is the required know how. Now we're doing a lot, you know, inside of our tool with inspiration and recipes and templates to kind of bridge that gap. But overall, I think you, you know, the data team just thinks that they can hand this kind of data set to a marketer and that they're going to know what to do with it. And I think that that's where a lot of the CDP implementations kind of fall down. It's like they spend a year or six months or three months trying to get the data right and then they get it right. It's implemented. We now have information on profiles, marketing team you know, do your magic. And I think that that's a really challenging model. We try to flip that script where, you know, we kick off and the kickoff really starts with the marketing team with use cases. What are you trying to do? And so there is some, if you could call that change management. I guess that's what it is. But where we've seen success is when we work with agency partners. So the way 100% of our implementations are done by partners. And so when we work with partners that have a methodology that starts with use cases and marketing teams and what goals do you have? The implementations are much more successful. But I think it is, you know, it's this, it's this kind of, this gap that exists between the data teams and the marketing teams. And the CDP or the X CDP is intended to fill that gap. [00:36:09] Speaker A: Oh, I hope it does. I mean, there's a lot of ego in play during those assessment phases and implementation phases. Who's going to take ownership? Who's going to lead the project? Who's going to determine what the data catalog looks like? And at the end of the day, I mean, you're absolutely right. It needs to be where the business has determined where the value can come from or needs to come from, and that needs to roll back all the way to the source of that data so that you know what to collect. Yeah, I mean, it's been great talking to you. And like you said, we're on the, on the precipice of 2025. What are your, your hopes? And I ask this of everyone. What are your kind of, your hopes or expectations of 2025? On the topic of Martech or CDPs or in general, I'm going to leave that open to you. [00:36:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think we, you know, we, we've been on this journey for 10 years and we've been really kind of working on trying to solve this one problem, which is how do we enable companies to get access to the right data and then use it in ways that help them personalize and create more convenience and value for their customers? And I think 2025 is going to be the year that really unlocks the value of xcdp. You know, I, I think that all of the capabilities are finally in place. One of the most important pieces is what we kind of think of as orchestration and being able to connect what you know and the content that you have across all of these channels. This has long been kind of the goal of marketing. You know, the algorithm of marketing is really combining what, you know, about somebody with all of your great content and then matching that up and delighting them. And I think we're there. I really believe that 2025 is going to be the year that people look back and go, wow, we finally started delivering on that promise. I do think there's some things that people need to change in terms of the way that they think about maybe the data that they have or they think about the way that they set up and run these programs. But what we're already seeing kind of in our developer tier is we have thousands of companies that have signed up that are leveraging kind of this personalization tool and getting value in less than 30 days. And so this kind of promise, it's real. And I think 2025 is going to be the year that enterprise companies start to figure out, like, if we don't catch up, we're already behind. [00:38:42] Speaker A: Yeah, the S&Ps might take over. It's interesting developments and I'm definitely going to keep my eye on what's going to happen with XCDP in 2025. James, thank you again for joining. It's been a true pleas. Pleasure talking to you on not just xcdps, but just the market in general and hearing your thoughts about it. [00:39:01] Speaker B: Definitely great to great to catch up here.