Compound Marketing Engine vs. composable CDP: What’s the difference?

Although marketers have access to many powerful tools to orchestrate campaigns, it feels harder than ever to keep up with customer expectations. The challenges can seem insurmountable as teams have fewer resources to navigate evolving privacy expectations, a proliferation of channels, and the continued deprecation of third-party cookies. 

Marketers need a first-party data strategy to overcome these shifts and deliver the highly personalized journeys that customers expect. The trouble, however, is most marketing technologies fail to leverage first-party data effectively.

Disconnected systems spanning cloud data warehouses, CRMs, and channel-specific tools fragment customer insights, which creates significant challenges in building campaigns that achieve organizational goals:

• Siloed data means no team has full customer insights, so the customer experience becomes inconsistent across channels, and teams miss key opportunities to personalize offerings. 

• Manual data integration processes and workarounds to connect tools require constant upkeep from data experts.

• Clunky reporting workflows make it harder to understand which strategies work, significantly slowing down campaign testing and improvement.

Traditional or packaged CDPs (customer data platforms) aimed to solve these challenges, but they increasingly fell short. Composable CDPs eventually rose as a more effective option for data activation with the necessary flexibility to connect to every martech investment. 

Now, a new solution has evolved from composable CDPs to enable rapid campaign improvement fueled by artificial intelligence: A Compound Marketing Engine. 

To help your organization unlock the full potential of your first-party data, let’s examine the differences between composable CDPs and compound marketing engines — and why compound marketing engines are the ideal solution for accelerating business growth. 

The rise and fall of customer data platforms (CDPs)

The marketing technology landscape is constantly refreshed with new or advanced solutions built to address modern business challenges and tech realities. Monolithic marketing technologies once reigned supreme, but companies now require flexibility and modularity to connect dozens, if not hundreds, of business tools. 

Customer data platforms emerged around 2013 to combine data from CRMs and data management platforms to provide a single source of truth on customers. In the early 2020s, composable CDPs evolved the concept by connecting to an even wider range of martech and applying new AI capabilities across campaigns, all powered by an organization’s data cloud. 

Despite the mass adoption of customer data platforms — 72% of marketers worldwide used CDPs as of 2024 — less than 20% of marketers report “high utilization” of their CDP.

This low use stems from an identity crisis in the CDP category. CDP vendors often promote themselves primarily as a way to build a customer 360 view and manage data collection, profile unification, and cross-channel activation. But CDPs need to accomplish much more to justify their business value.

GrowthLoop’s evolution to a Compound Marketing Engine

GrowthLoop has been the leading innovator in the composable CDP category for years and redefined what CDPs can do, earning us high ratings on G2. Countless organizations have achieved tangible business results with GrowthLoop by taking a cloud-native, composable approach that democratizes data and combines insights across channels:

• NASCAR saved more than 3,800 hours building campaign audiences and decreased email opt-out rates by nearly 15%.

• PGA TOUR achieved a lower cost-per-click on ad campaigns and delivered highly targeted upsell offers. 

• NerdWallet aligned its vertical team goals and fostered a culture of collaboration while empowering marketers to create and deploy audiences independently. 

GrowthLoop still enables these benefits, but we’ve introduced an entirely new way for marketers to partner with AI to drive rapid campaign growth and scalable marketing operations: the Compound Marketing Engine.

What is a Compound Marketing Engine?

A Compound Marketing Engine is an enterprise solution powered by agentic AI on the data cloud. It helps marketers drive compound growth by accelerating the marketing cycle to:

• Propose audiences and customer journeys 

• Trigger campaigns across channels

• Continuously analyze performance data to make suggestions for campaign optimization 

A Compound Marketing Engine has three defining features:

• Operates on top of a data cloud - This accelerates campaign launch and iteration, allows compliant access to all data, and reduces manual workarounds. It also operates on your organization’s existing data cloud (such as BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, or Amazon Redshift), so it drives faster implementation, better security, and decreased cost. 

• Operates across all marketing and advertising channels - This allows it to optimize holistically, create unified audiences and customer journeys, and measure impact more accurately.

• Runs agentic AI - With human approval, agentic AI builds audiences and executes journeys across channels. A Compound Marketing Engine features a chat-based interface that allows the marketer to activate agentic AI to address multiple marketing tasks simultaneously. 

The results: compounding growth

The results have been profound for GrowthLoop customers:

• Indeed activates campaigns 8x faster with optimized audience targeting across 683 million customer records.

• Priceline drives continuous campaign improvement and powers personalized customer experiences by enabling marketers to self-serve data. 

• Allegro automates the creation of precise audiences and delivers deeply personalized advertising across channels, which has doubled its return on ad spend.

Compound Marketing Engine and composable CDP. What’s the difference?

Both a Compound Marketing Engine and composable CDP are built on top of the data cloud and use a composable architecture, meaning they preserve the single source of truth on customers and activate campaigns across every channel. 

A Compound Marketing Engine builds upon composable CDP capabilities by putting the power of agentic AI, powered by your cloud data, into the hands of your marketing team.  

Agentic AI is a critical element that makes the Compound Marketing Engine an entirely new category. These AI agents operate across an organization’s data cloud and analyze customer and campaign data to recommend new audiences, channels, and customer journeys. 

The technology is designed to help you achieve your marketing goals, large and small — from improving campaign metrics like return on ad spend to increasing overall customer lifetime value. The agents continuously learn and optimize with more precision and intelligence than humans alone. 

With these agentic superpowers, teams can perform key actions required for all marketing programs with the infinite intelligence and scale of AI:  

• Audience segmentation - Who are the perfect customers to target?

• Journey orchestration - What experiences, across which channels, are most likely to drive users toward the intended outcomes?

• Personalization - Which messages and creative are best suited for each individual within the segment?   

• Experimentation - What campaign levers should we test?

• Measurement - How did the campaign perform?

• Optimization - What did we learn to inform future campaigns?

AI agents accelerate the full marketing lifecycle from start to finish — while humans review, adjust, and approve all activities — which eliminates many of the manual processes involved with CDPs. The engine also enables AI-powered experimentation so teams can run controlled tests on messaging, timing, offers, and channels. 

Agentic AI for marketing innovation

Testing and experimentation are essential to grow marketing ROI and impact, but experimentation processes are typically inefficient. Performance metrics often live across multiple platforms and channels, and data teams must export, consolidate, and analyze the information for marketers to find insights. 

At best, this takes weeks. At worst, it takes months. By the time any actionable insights are found, the window of opportunity to make meaningful adjustments to the campaign has passed. 

The Compound Marketing Engine optimizes team time and speeds up the testing and iteration process, empowering marketers to achieve better results faster for any campaign:

• Cross-sell and upsell

• Churn winback and re-engagement

• First-time purchase

• Repeat buyers

• Loyalty and rewards

How does agentic AI enhance marketing speed and innovation?

An organization’s first-party data is its best resource for fueling these personalized experiences. Agentic AI is informed and powered by every customer detail, including their preferences and their historical campaign activity, so it can suggest omnichannel experiences that achieve higher engagement rates and increased ROI.

Moreover, marketers can save countless hours spent on routine and mundane tasks using agentic AI, freeing their time to focus on strategic priorities. Agents perform the heavy lifting of data analysis, campaign activation, and measurement.  

Marketers approve, reject, or adjust the agents’ recommendations instead of spending weeks trying to arrive at the same conclusion on their own — which rapidly accelerates their improvement cycle and unlocks compounding growth.  

A new standard for marketing growth

The GrowthLoop Compound Marketing Engine drives compound growth by accelerating the marketing cycle using agentic AI powered by enterprise data cloud.

Rapid marketing iteration across hundreds of simultaneous campaigns is now possible. A Compound Marketing Engine translates performance data into actionable insights in near real-time, and uses it to create improvements across every channel. 

Only the organizations that set the right data foundation can use AI to their advantage and guarantee lasting success, creating more productive teams, fulfilled customers, and highly streamlined operations. 

Want to see theGrowthLoop Compound Marketing Engine in action? Check out a recording of our recent webinar "First Look" complete with a demo. Watch here