Martech Therapy (Page 3)

strategy

The inherited costs of the composable stack

In Martech, every pricing model hides a workload. Suites sell convenience. Composable platforms sell control. Either way, you pay for someone to hold the complexity, the only question is who.

Last week, in the first part of this series, I shared some experiences on how to read Martech pricing. In this second part, I want to examine the other end of the product spectrum and learn to live with it. Once you understand how vendors define usage, value, and fairness, a new question appears:

What happens when you try to escape those models altogether?

That’s where composability enters the story. It promises freedom from rigid licenses, bundled modules, and predefined ways of working. Build your own stack, plug in best-of-breed tools, let each component scale on its own terms.

strategy

CDP & CEP pricing strategies for the uninitiated

CDPs charge for the data you hold. CEPs charge for the actions you take. “Usage” sounds simple, but every vendor defines it differently. The Hidden Logic of Martech Pricing reveals what those definitions really mean for your budget and your business.

Every vendor promises the same thing “you only pay for what you use”.

It’s a comforting line, one that suggests control and fairness. But in Martech, especially when you look at Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Customer Engagement Platforms (CEPs), the definition of use changes depending on who you ask.

Most CDPs still price around data management, how many profiles you store, how many events you collect, or how many systems you connect. It’s a model born from infrastructure.

Meanwhile, CEPs are leading the move toward usage-based pricing, a model built

Podcast

Crossing worlds: Teik Chua on Martech, culture, and the global CDP perspective

Teik Chua from O2 Virgin Media reflects on how Martech and CDP strategy differ across regions, and why culture often defines transformation more than technology. A grounded conversation about growth, context, and perspective.

When you’ve spent most of your career in one market, it’s easy to assume Martech challenges are universal. But move across regions, and suddenly familiar frameworks start to look very different.

That’s what struck me while talking to Teik Chua, now Head of AdTech & Audience at O2 Virgin Media, who previously worked across Southeast Asia with Accenture and other large consulting projects. Teik has seen Martech maturity through several lenses, from fast-moving experimentation in Asia to slower, highly structured transformation programs in Europe.

“Consulting gives you frameworks, but leading Martech in-house teaches you patience. You can’

agentic ai

Aampe and DOJO AI show why AI-native marketing starts with people, not tools

AI-native marketing won’t fix marketing’s problems, but it might fix how teams work. From Aampe’s change management approach to DOJO AI’s human-in-the-loop philosophy, the real transformation starts inside the organization, not the model.

As I stated on LinkedIn last week, it was a wild week of news. Lee Hammond mapped the chaos in a post on LinkedIn after his visit to CDP World, while David Raab imagined the redesign after challenging ChatGPT. And somewhere between the two, I found myself in a demo with Aampe, realizing just how hard it is to think differently.

Towards the end, I stopped Aampe’s Amaan Kulatunga and admitted, almost out loud:

I’m still trying to fit this into campaign logic.

I was still thinking like a marketer from 2015. And that, I suspect, is what

governance

Governance is everything: Simo Ahava on making GTM a bridge, not a back door

Simo Ahava joins Couch Confidentials to talk GTM as a bridge between marketing and engineering, why governance beats hacks, how BigQuery replaced the GA UI for real work, and where AI helps or hurts. Practical, candid, and immediately useful.

I've been wanting to have this conversation with Simo Ahava for years. Not because I needed a hot take or a cool quote, but because Simo is one of the few people in this industry who made me better at my job without trying to sell me anything.

If you've worked with Google Tag Manager, server-side tagging, or any kind of client-side data collection in the last decade, you've probably landed on one of Simo's blog posts at 2am trying to figure out why your tracking is broken. The man has been writing technical guides, debugging walkthroughs, and JavaScript examples

martech

Why we keep solving human problems with robot solutions

The Martech industry keeps solving human problems with robot solutions. While vendors launch AI agents and blame data quality, the real issue is organizational dysfunction. Why architecture, not technology, determines if marketing teams succeed or fail.

Ok, I need to get this off my chest. This week in Martech feels like watching an episode of the Twilight Zone. Treasure Data launches their AI Marketing Cloud. Hightouch teases new Agents feature. Tealium rolls out their Behavioral Insight Agent. Meanwhile, McKinsey drops a report essentially saying "your technology is writing checks your operating model can't cash", and Hightouch's "Has Martech failed marketers" report includes data showing that marketers think their tools are broken.

Now take a sip of your coffee before I reveal the plot twist. Ready? Everyone's basically saying the same thing without saying it ->

Martech Therapy

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