I had lunch in Simi Valley, CA over the weekend. While driving back with my friend - a Chief Technology Officer at an AdTech Software as a Service (SaaS) company- I realized that the last time I had been there was to evaluate a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) vendor for MTV Networks (MTVN) websites in 2006. At the time, Google was rapidly becoming the way that MTVN websites would be found by younger generations of audiences.

It was a paradigm shift for the entire media industry playing out in real-time and MTVN had been behind the curve on SEO. We were playing catch-up with a steep learning curve because MTVN websites had not been built with SEO as an objective (a relaunch of MTV.com had been built entirely in Adobe Flash, Google’s algorithms could not read Flash, so no one could find MTV.com via Google search), and Google Search had not been on Viacom management’s radar as an immediate disruptive threat to the business. 

Over lunch, my friend and I discussed whether Consumer Data Platforms (CDPs) marked another paradigm shift for media. A CDP is software that combines data from multiple tools to create a single centralized customer database of data from all consumer touch points and interactions with a product or service. 

Investors want to see greater Average Revenue per User (ARPU) in streaming, and CDPs are built to enable marketing to and monetizing users in multiple ways across multiple channels. Apple, Amazon, Disney and Netflix have businesses built upon what I have been describing as “CDP business logic”. 

My friend pushed back on the premise that CDP *software* represented a paradigm shift in media. Even if “CDP business logic” is emerging within businesses, his point was that having the operational set-up to maximize a CDP is more important than the software itself. And, as coincidence would have it, that mirrors the lessons I learned during the paradigm shift to intent-based search and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in 2006.