15 January 2025

CDP: build or buy

Updated: 6 February 2026

This article is not written, or presented as legal advice nor opinion. Readers should neither act, nor rely on opinion(s) in this article and linked materials without seeking legal counsel.

In summary

• As first-party data becomes the backbone of customer intelligence and addressable media, and a powerful signal for AI media buying optimisations, organisations are under growing pressure to manage, govern and activate it effectively.
• The convergence of marketing, data and IT has accelerated, making shared ownership and accountability critical to CDP success.
• Australia’s Privacy Act reforms are no longer theoretical. With enforcement scans underway, consent and collection guidance, governance and scalability are now hard privacy by design constraints.
• The question is no longer whether to invest in CDP capability, but how to build, buy or compose it in a way that delivers immediate business value without locking in cost or compliance risk.

What is a customer data platform (CDP)?

Traditionally, a customer data platform (CDP) has been defined as a packaged software solution that enables end-to-end data collection, storage, identity resolution and real-time activation, as described by the CDP Institute.

That definition still broadly holds, but the architecture has radically evolved.

Today, CDPs increasingly compete with analytics products, data lakes, cloud data warehouses and modular cloud services that can perform many of the same functions. Many of these vendors flipping to alternate software categories, chasing seed round investment or funding. As a result, the concept of a composable CDP has gained momentum. This approach builds customer profiles inside an organisation’s enterprise data warehouse, rather than within a standalone vendor-controlled CDP database. Consent can be applied alongside marketing preferences and data sensitivity labelling.

This shift reflects a broader reality: customer data is no longer something marketing can own in isolation. It is now the core operating infrastructure.

Should you build or buy a CDP?

Positioned as the centrepiece of customer intelligence, CDPs often sit alongside legacy systems controlled by IT, analytics and data teams, frequently duplicating storage, identity or activation functionality.

For this reason, CDP decisions should never sit solely with marketing. The most effective outcomes come when marketing, IT, data, legal and finance work together to define what success looks like.

The build-versus-buy decision remains complex:

• Marketing teams prioritise speed, usability and activation.
• IT teams focus on security, scalability and maintainability.
• Finance teams assess long-term cost exposure.
• Legal and risk teams now play a far more active role as privacy enforcement tightens.

Each perspective materially shapes the outcome.

Determining project sponsors, owners and outcomes

CDPs have historically been positioned as marketing tools for audience segmentation and personalisation, making ease of access and usability key considerations.

That hasn’t changed, but expectations have.

Packaged CDPs often come with volume-based pricing, identity resolution costs and feature-tiered licensing that can escalate quickly. Implementation effort is frequently underestimated, particularly where data quality, consent enforcement or ownership are unclear.

Building your own CDP capability is not straightforward either. While cloud data engineering skills are more accessible than they were several years ago, success depends on:

• Clear cross-functional ownership
• Defined activation pathways
• Strong governance around access, consent and purpose limitation

Reverse ETL and modern activation tools have reduced friction between data warehouses and downstream platforms. However, they also increase the importance of governance, poor controls now propagate faster than ever.

Building a time-to-value approach

Before implementing any CDP solution, organisations need a clear understanding of:

• What data exists
• Where it lives
• How it is collected
• Who controls it
• Whether it can legally be used

This process typically starts with a detailed data architecture and data-flow map, not a vendor demo.

For many organisations, proving value through a limited use case is more effective than attempting a full-scale CDP deployment. A staged, time-to-value approach allows teams to:

• Test consent enforcement in real conditions
• Validate identity assumptions
• Measure commercial uplift
• Avoid premature long-term licensing commitments

Full CDP deployments can still take 18–24 months in complex environments. Incremental value matters.

The demand for flexibility in a changing landscape

Packaged CDPs offer advantages, including pre-built schemas, deterministic identity resolution and out-of-the-box integrations.

But those same frameworks can immediately become constraints.

As consent acceptance rates fall and deterministic identifiers become scarcer, rigid identity models struggle to scale. Probabilistic approaches, aggregated insights and cohort-based strategies are becoming increasingly important, and not all CDPs support this well.

Large vendors will continue to release features at scale. The challenge is relevance. Outside high-volume e-commerce, many organisations pay for functionality they never meaningfully use.

In this environment, flexibility, and the ability to adapt addressability and match logic, not feature breadth, is increasingly the differentiator.

Preparing for tightening data compliance

Australia’s Privacy Act reforms passed in late 2024, and 2025–26 has marked a clear shift from guidance to enforcement.

Key implications include:

• Stricter expectations around consent, purpose limitation and transparency
• Increased scrutiny of third-party data sharing
• Data sovereignty and APP compliance of data destinations
• Greater accountability for data controllers

While on-shore storage is currently mandated only in regulated sectors such as finance and health, broader expectations around disclosure of offshore processing are rising, and compliance with APP for these destinations.

Consent depletion is also real. Many organisations are already seeing significant reductions in addressable audiences. In this environment, fixed-cost CDP pricing models tied to the volume of stored customer records can quickly become inefficient as addressable populations shrink.

Louder’s recommendation

Louder helps organisations take a measured, outcome-led approach to customer data strategy, particularly where privacy reform, consent depletion and cost pressure are reshaping what “good” looks like.

Rather than defaulting to a full CDP purchase, we focus on proving value first, using what’s already in place and only scaling where outcomes justify it.

Our typical approach includes:

• Identifying project owners, sponsors and contributors
• Defining priority use cases aligned to commercial outcomes
• Mapping current data architecture, data flows and governance
• Assessing effort versus impact to stage delivery
• Consolidating data into a controlled central source
• Activating initial audiences across priority channels
• Iterating based on performance, compliance and scalability
• Proving value in practice

One Louder client was heavily invested in the Adobe Marketing Cloud, yet omnichannel personalisation remained a challenge due to limited known identities and reliance on cookie-based audiences.

Rather than committing to an additional CDP licence, Louder designed a composable solution using Google Cloud Platform. First-party data from multiple systems was consolidated in BigQuery, where intent-based audiences were defined and activated across Google Ads, DV360, Meta and Adobe Campaign.

The result was a 47% uplift in CTR versus baseline performance, with continued expansion into new use cases, without locking into an inflexible platform or cost model.

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