Amid the uncertainty of COVID-19, one thing nearly everyone can agree on is that the world has changed forever. Business leaders who see opportunity in change to fortify customer relationships and enhance their companies' resiliency will reap the rewards long after the crisis is a distant memory. The pandemic unquestionably accelerated digital transformation, spurring a rush to the cloud and an intensified focus on data-driven decision-making. IDG's 2021 Digital Business study found that 96% of enterprises have adopted or plan to adopt a "digital first" business strategy. E-commerce now accounts for 19% of global retail sales and the impact of digital channels on customer decisions is far greater than that. The last two years have also seen growing demand for measures that protect customer privacy, including the impending end of third-party cookies, which have long been a staple of web personalization. Seeing that online channels will be a core element of future customer interactions, marketers doubled down on investments they made in digital experiences during 2020 and intensified their focus on data quality and integration. In a market that has experienced overwhelming change in a short time, improving agility is also a top priority. Respondents to the aforementioned study listed it second only to productivity improvement on their priority list. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) address this need by connecting data in real time across teams, technologies and customer touchpoints. This combination of forces has made customer data platforms an essential part of marketers' technology portfolios, with research firms forecasting annual growth rates of more than 25% in the CDP market for the rest of this decade. To better understand how businesses are leveraging CDPs, Tealium surveyed more than 1,000 marketing and business leaders in the financial services, healthcare, media, retail, and technology industries in the U.S., Europe, and Asia/Pacific. This third annual study documents the growing centrality of CDPs to the marketing technology stack and their role in balancing the somewhat paradoxical priorities of better protecting customer data privacy, while also making the customer experience more personalized. In the following pages, learn how technology deployment plans are accelerating into a new era as well as the growing importance of integration and third-party ecosystems to marketers' spending plans