Skip to Content

Posts by Matthew Niederberger

The evolution of Omni-Man

The evolution of Omni-Man

From debugging eVars to preaching composable gospel -> Adam Greco's 25-year journey through martech's identity crisis

I finally sat down with Adam Greco for what turned into one of those conversations that explains how we got to this beautiful disaster we call modern martech.

Adam earned the nickname "Omni-Man" back when he was basically Adobe Analytics incarnate, the guy who could fix your broken implementations and somehow make eVars seem less like a cruel joke played on marketers by bored engineers. For years, he was the poster child for mastering one platform completely.

Which makes his current crusade for composable CDPs either beautifully ironic or perfectly logical, depending on whether you've had your coffee yet.

His

The evolution of Omni-Man Read More

Agentic AI in Martech: From complicated to complex

Agentic AI in Martech: From complicated to complex

Part 2: What happens when your Martech stack becomes a rainforest?

Last week I wrote about the scale problem with agentic AI, how systems making billions of decisions weekly break traditional governance models. But there's another dimension to this. One that goes beyond just volume.

It's about predictability. Or rather, the slow erosion of it.

Your Martech stack used to be a Ferrari. Now it's a rainforest.

Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma used this metaphor in the State of Martech 2025 report to explain how AI is changing martech systems from "complicated" to "complex." They were focused on the technical implications. I want to explore what this means for governance and

Agentic AI in Martech: From complicated to complex Read More

Data is boring. And by extension, CDPs are kind of boring too

Data is boring. And by extension, CDPs are kind of boring too

A candid conversation with CDP Institute founder David Raab on AI delusions, data denial, and the awkward art of explaining Martech to your in-laws

CDP Institute’s David Raab coined the term Customer Data Platform, which makes him either the godfather of modern Martech or the guy responsible for every PowerPoint slide with a data unification triangle on it. Possibly both.

In this episode of Couch Confidentials, we talk about the slow death of CDP hype, why AI is just a mirror for your data mess, and why companies keep renaming “data plumbing” as “activation” in hopes it’ll feel more important.

We also cover how vendors are racing to bolt AI onto every surface like it’s a startup-themed version of Iron Man,

Data is boring. And by extension, CDPs are kind of boring too Read More

Agentic AI in Martech: The billion decision problem

Agentic AI in Martech: The billion decision problem

Part 1: Why scale changes everything about AI in Martech

I've been having a strange, recurring thought lately. It started after my conversation with Paul from Aampe, when he mentioned their AI agents handle somewhere between 15 and 200 billion decisions every week.

I love astronomy and the awe-inducing scale of the universe. Nevertheless, that number still amazed me, probably because I couldn't quite wrap my head around it. So I did what any reasonable person would do. I grabbed a calculator and started doing some deeply unnecessary math.

Let's say you're a marketing ops manager making about 50 meaningful decisions per day. Which segment gets the email blast, what

Agentic AI in Martech: The billion decision problem Read More

Contextual CDPs: Contextual Fluency

Contextual CDPs: Contextual Fluency

Part 6 of 6: Being contextual is also about competence.

Over the last five posts, we’ve moved from speculative to strategic to practical. We’ve looked at how memory, inference, and model context protocols can enhance personalization, orchestration, governance, and architecture in and around the CDP. So, where does that leave us?

Right here.. yes, with the last post in the series, but more importantly, with the people, with YOU!

Because it’s one thing to build a system that can understand context. It’s another thing entirely to make that understanding usable across your organization. That’s what this final piece is about, turning contextual awareness into team

Contextual CDPs: Contextual Fluency Read More

The trophy analyst, the hippo CMO, and the myth of “just one more tool”

The trophy analyst, the hippo CMO, and the myth of “just one more tool”

But Steen tells it like it is... It’s not the tool. It’s us.

Some conversations catch you off guard in the best possible way. This one with Steen did exactly that.

We were meant to talk about analytics, why it still doesn’t deliver on its promise, despite all the new tools and fancy dashboards. And we did. But what surprised me was how personal it got. Not emotional, but honest in a way that made me uncomfortable in a good way. The kind of uncomfortable that makes you realize how often we’re just going through the motions, pretending things are working because admitting otherwise might mean admitting we don’t really

The trophy analyst, the hippo CMO, and the myth of “just one more tool” Read More