customer data - Martech Therapy

Shopping like a human & the quiet rise of Conversational Commerce

Conversational commerce is reshaping how people discover and buy online. From Bloomreach’s Clarity module to OpenAI’s new ChatGPT apps, a more human form of shopping is quietly emerging, one built on dialogue, not dashboards.

I spent yesterday morning at the Bloomreach Partner Enablement Day event in Amsterdam, where Adam Hackett spoke about conversational commerce and the company’s new Clarity module. It wasn’t a pitch, more a quiet look at how online shopping is beginning to resemble an actual exchange, less filtering, more asking. The kind of conversation that once happened with a store assistant, now expressed through an interface.

Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer sharing Clarity at the Bloomreach Partner Enablement Day.

Bloomreach’s framing felt grounded, it really did. They’re not trying to turn shopping into a chatbot novelty, we are no longer

From particle physics to privacy-first analytics

Mitzu's István Mészáros explains why the future of Martech runs on composable data

From CERN’s particle accelerators to the messy world of marketing data, István Mészáros has seen it all. In this episode of Couch Confidentials, we trace his path from working on the Large Hadron Collider to building Mitzu, a startup rethinking how companies approach composable analytics.

We talk about why centralizing KPIs matters more than shiny dashboards, how enterprise data culture often lags behind the technology, and why privacy is becoming as big a driver as scale.

I loved how István described the “people-pleaser” instinct that shaped his career, always chasing faster answers for colleagues, which eventually grew into a

Why the next five years of data strategy will make the last look easy

Season 2, Episode 4 of Couch Confidentials with Tealium’s Zack Wenthe

When Zack Wenthe from Tealium told me, “the next five years of data strategy will make the last look like child’s play”, I felt both intrigued and uneasy. Intrigued because Zack has been around long enough in the CDP world to know what he’s talking about. Uneasy because if the last few years already left most teams exhausted, what’s coming next?

We circled around two big forces → privacy and AI. Not in the shallow “AI will optimize your campaigns” sense, but in the way these forces are already reshaping human behavior. Zack made the point that customers

The CDP RFP Dating Game

How agencies, vendors, analysts, and executives hide behind the smiles

On paper, a Request for Proposal (RFP) looks like the fairest way to choose a Customer Data Platform, or anything else for that matter. I am sure if my wife had known about RFPs when we met, I would have been on the receiving side of one. Good thing she didn’t. An RFP is an attempt to make sense of vastly complex and different products through structure, neutrality, and vendor A vs vendor B data in neat columns. But if, like myself, you’ve been in this business for a while, you know the truth 👇🏻

Most RFPs are wired

Hotel 626 was “fun” until the phone rang

How far marketers went before privacy caught up... back in 2008!

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting on the couch with my son, letting Youtube autoplay its way into the stranger corners of the internet, when we landed on a video from the channel Visual Venture. It was a video titled “Kids Games Too Disturbing For Kids” which included a piece on a sinister game from 2008 called Hotel 626.

He laughed at the grainy graphics and theatrical jump scares. Don’t judge him, he was born in 2013 and never experienced graphics like we did. I sat there thinking, this was the kind of lead magnet marketers could

The CDP Reboot: The Promise

Part 1 of 4: Exploring the original promise of CDPs.

This is Part 1 of my four-part #CDPReboot series, where I take a critical look at the evolution, saturation, and potential rebirth of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) category.

In this article, I explore the promise that launched the CDP category: what it was supposed to solve, why it caught fire so quickly, and how that same momentum led us into murkier territory. It all started with good intentions, a mess of Martech tools, and a lot of scattered data pipelines.

The Context: Data fragmentation was killing marketing

So, in the early 2010s, I watched marketing departments struggle with a

Posts tagged with customer data