The marketer is being asked to acquire users, not make it look pretty behind the scenes. In the testing phase, it's way better to use Zapier to get things done fast. Then you can revisit and scale later with a proper solution if it turns out to be a productive campaign.
I don't think anyone using Airtable as a CRM has those sorts of concerns, however.
But there in is the problem. Most Marketers I've had the pleasure of working with/for will never come back and implement the proper (scalable, secured, etc) solution. By the time this first ad-hoc creation has either failed horribly or taken off, they're off on the next new "idea".. there's no time to property revisit that last one, why would we? It's either dead and forgotten or working as I gloriously intended!
I've actually already seen Zapier go 'full lifecycle' in two separate environments. It went from "cautiously approved" to "banned by both name and by functionality" both times due to the marketing team zapping their collected data off to, lets call them.. overly public output storage locations.
If it's a typo, then sorry. But ETL is the same beast. I have few ideas where to start thanks to my programming background, but I can't imagine the marketing department guys do any of it.
Non-ideal but less expensive is still better than nothing (or too expensive to stay profitable). Not all operations are huge companies that can afford IT teams working on their behalf.
Both offer no-code tools to help non-technical users make use of the data.
T - Transform
L - Load
Yeah you can pull data and create snapshots to preserve views, but given the direction privacy and regulatory environments have been going with user data, it's incredibly sexy to be able to not have to dump data in yet another data warehouse just to use a new tool.
This is the real future of 'unbundling'.
I love reading this article because while it sets up the problem and solution proposition quite well, all I could think of was how the author is proving reverse-ETL engines (& not their own platform) are the best investment right now.
Solutions to that problem can take shape as a CRM (and keeping it updated) or something as dumb as a dashboard of dashboards.
In fact, it's "assembling" that most people hate. Which is why products that sacrifice power to limit assembly tend to be successful.
> nice and tidy. And then the marketers can do what they need in the platform, and they're able to iterate and learn at a much faster pace. It changes the whole game.
The reality is, marketers will frequently plug in any and every thing they can without thinking about the broader context. Sure you can plug all this stuff together, or you can spend a bit of time with ETL and rETL tools and develop a stack that isn't reliant on a bunch of third party silos.