cdp - Martech Therapy (Page 5)

Shopify isn’t enough

…and deep down, you already know that.

There’s a moment that creeps in somewhere between “should I try another email pop-up plugin?” and “why don’t my reports ever answer real questions?” It’s a quiet realization. The platform that made it beautifully easy to launch your store might not be built to help you scale your marketing or understand your customers beyond last Tuesday’s sale.

Shopify does many things well. It’s clean, manageable, and doesn’t ask you to learn code or bribe a developer friend. It’s perfect for what it is: a commerce platform. Not a data platform. Not a campaign

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

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,

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: Composable, not chaotic

Part 5 of 6: Contextual CDPs need lightweight structure, not heavyweight rebuilds

By now, we’ve explored what context can unlock in a CDP, from dynamic profiling to real-time orchestration and trust. We’ve talked about layering memory and inference without blowing up your current stack. So in this fifth part, let’s look at what happens when you want to make these contextual layers stick… without making everything feel like a pile of duct-taped services.

Because that’s the risk. Composability gives us incredible flexibility, but without some architectural discipline, it becomes hard to explain, harder to maintain, and impossible to govern.

Let’s explore how to structure context-aware systems in

Agentic AI & the art of letting go

When control gets in the way of progress

Paul suggested the idea of doing something different. No intro. No big kickoff. Just two people talking.

That’s how this episode with Paul Meinshausen (CEO at Aampe) started and I’m glad it did. Because I fumbled at the beginning (you can skip ahead in the podcast...).

Feeling like a one-trick pony, I tried to steer the conversation toward my usual topics: CDPs, AI, use cases, and organizational challenges. But it quickly became clear I was trying to force an idea, a vision, onto something I hadn’t fully wrapped my head around yet. Paul helped me take a

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