Just two weeks after telling Street Fight that retail media “needs a rebellion” and imploring retailers to “seize control of their platforms,” Kevel CEO James Avery has a surprise up his sleeve. His company is launching its own retail-ready customer data platform, or CDP.
Avery made the announcement at the ShopTalk conference in Las Vegas this week, telling the crowd that Kevel Audience CDP will be specifically built for digital retailers to better maximize first-party data opportunities and seamlessly switch between various channel partners to create tailored customer experiences.
“We created this CDP out of a need to reset a landscape that continues to rely on platforms designed for speed and short-term results,” explained Avery. “With Kevel Audience, retailers can invest in themselves, take ownership of their data, and harness personalized user experiences without compromising.”
The launch of a CDP could be seen as a bit of a pivot for Kevel, which primarily works in the platform monetization space by providing infrastructure APIs for ad serving, targeting, and reporting. Kevel counts high-profile brands like Ticketmaster, Yelp, Strava, and Klarna as customers.
In September, Kevel announced the launch of a set of APIs called Relay, designed to allow publishers and their ad tech partners to build their own programmatic stacks.
With its new retail-ready CDP, brands will be able to collect first-party data from any source — including e-commerce, mobile apps, brick-and-mortar stores, and through their own CRM platforms — and then unify and segment users. The result is a comprehensive solution that allows personalized audiences to be activated wherever brands need it.
Other key features in Kevel Audience CPD include individualized RFM segmentation, custom retail event predictions, and a personalized marketing playbook.
“Audience is a unique CDP for a privacy-conscious future. It was built to enable digital retailers with secured first-party data and out-of-the-box advanced segmentation for audience outreach needs,” said Kevel Audience General Manager Paulo Cunha. “Kevel Audience is a sustainable CDP offering with hundreds of retail-specific attributes and segments for retailers to create custom audiences. This is how Kevel Audience sets itself apart from privacy black-box players who come with risks.”
Hot Market for CDPs
The market for customer data platforms is boiling in 2023, with companies like Affinitiv entering the space and legacy players like Adobe expanding their platforms with integrated generative AI and other buzzworthy technology enhancements. CDPs have become trusted repositories of customer data in recent years. As the supply chain that connects customer devices to brand platforms has grown deeper, the demand for modern CDPs is clearly on the rise.
As of July, there were 161 defined vendors in the CDP space, however, that number is clearly growing. Campaign and delivery CDPs are the dominant types of vendors in the industry, making up a combined 68% of all CDP companies.
Kevel is taking a unique position in the space, given its extensive experience in platform monetization. The company is already known for creating popular retail media programs, and now it’s leaning heavily into first-party data as a way to set itself apart from what it calls “privacy black-box” firms.
With the CDP market clearly in flux in 2023, and more firms entering the fray, we’ll be watching closely to see how the space shakes out. Stay tuned.
