The Identity Tax: Why Unified Customer Profiles Decide Agency Retainer Renewals

Every personalization promise an agency makes collapses if the client's customer data sits in six disconnected systems, because segmentation, journey logic, and reporting all inherit that fragmentation. The CDP decision is therefore not a tooling choice but a margin choice: heavyweight suites and composable warehouse-native layers carry different cost curves, and picking the wrong weight class burns retainer hours on plumbing instead of campaign work.