Agile Marketing with a CDP: Insights from an Industry Leader

In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, customer data platforms (CDPs) have emerged as a crucial tool for enabling agile marketing strategies.

At CDP World 2024 powered by Treasure Data, we had the opportunity to hear from Anushil Kumar, Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and Innovation at Constellation Brands (maker of iconic beverage brands like Modelo, Corona, Svedka, etc.), about his experiences implementing and leveraging a CDP for agile marketing.

Q: How have you structured your teams to manage the change that comes with implementing a CDP?

Anushil Kumar: We actually went with this concept of product teams, which was really a cross-functional team staffed with IT, marketing, and marketing technology teams within marketing. This cross-functional team has been driving change management across the organization.

Our key push was to transform the thinking of the marketers to be more agile and nimble, and really leverage this technology in a much faster way to optimize campaigns on the go.

Anushil went on to describe their approach:

We use an enablement team to run pilots with different brand teams. We include marketing team members in the pod, run experiments, show success metrics, and then showcase the results with the rest of the brand marketing teams. It's about constantly building excitement through the success of these experiments and then enabling the teams to go after particular marketing campaigns and show the ROI.

Q: How are you leveraging AI within your CDP to enhance agile marketing efforts?

AK: For us, one of the issues was that we couldn't afford to hire and retain a lot of data scientists. So we focused on making it very easy for the marketers to use predictive modeling capabilities coming out of our CDP, Treasure Data.

We've been able to deploy LTV and RFM models very easily to the business. As for generative AI, we've started leveraging some of the most proven aspects around creativity, using it to generate variations of creatives for different campaigns.

Anushil also highlighted the potential of AI to make data insights more accessible to marketers:

We see a lot of possibilities in making it very easy for marketing folks to interact with data and learn insights. Being able to understand what's going on through a generative AI conversational interface would be a game-changer.

Q: What strategies are you employing to future-proof your CDP and agile marketing approaches?

AK: For us, it's really about enabling innovation in marketing with this technology stack. As the organization becomes more data-savvy, we're improving our ability to experiment and run campaigns across large data clean rooms. We're trying partnerships with the NFL and MLB to see what works and what doesn't.

Scaling the CDP beyond day-to-day operations is enabling continuous innovation because this ecosystem is changing so fast. We're enabling marketers to keep trying new approaches and see what sticks.

Q: What would be your top budget priority for next year to enhance agile marketing capabilities?

AK: I would definitely prioritize innovation with generative AI because that has the biggest promise. It will be hugely disruptive in the marketing space, potentially revolutionizing how we approach agile marketing.

Going fast to go far

Anushil's insights highlight the transformative potential of CDPs in enabling agile marketing practices. By leveraging cross-functional teams, embracing AI, and continuously innovating, organizations can use CDPs to become more responsive to market changes and customer needs.

CDP World 2024 was filled with valuable knowledge from global brand executives and industry leaders like Anushil, sharing their strategies for CDP success and next-gen marketing. To dive deeper into these topics and hear from experts, binge-watch the featured sessions on our YouTube playlist.

And while you’re at it, save the data for Agentic World 2026, hosted by Treasure Data this coming October.