martech - Martech Therapy

An open letter to Martech vendors: let's do better

Vendors, buyers don’t want theatre anymore. They want honesty, focus, and fewer ego-driven detours. After a year of back-channel Slack messages and mid-demo rescues, here’s my open letter for a more grown-up Martech industry in 2026.

As 2025 winds down, I’ve been thinking about all the demos I sat through this year. Probably more than any reasonable person should. And at some point you start to recognise patterns that you wish you didn’t recognise. Patterns that make buyers question their presence in the demo, glaze over, or quietly message me on Slack asking, “Did they really just say that?”

A meme floated past my LinkedIn feed a little over two weeks ago, joking that traditional platforms “lie”. And a screenshot sent by an industry peer from a presentation in which the vendor told the

When AI replaces processes, not people

A conversation with Paul Meinshausen and Duarte Garrido about the mental models teams struggle with when adaptive systems replace rule-based workflows. Most marketers aren't ready for this shift yet.

I set up this conversation with Paul Meinshausen from Aampe and Duarte Garrido from DOJO AI because I've been watching the same pattern repeat across different companies. Teams bring in AI tools, get excited about automation, then hit a wall when they realize the technology isn't just doing their work faster. It's doing it differently. That difference requires a mental model most marketers don't have yet.

Watch the full episode here ☝

Paul's background is in cognitive science and decision-making under uncertainty. Duarte came up through big brand marketing before building tools for challenger brands with smaller teams. Both of them

Negotiating the New Martech Economy

Most Martech vendors talk about “transparency,” yet the real negotiation is about who ends up carrying the complexity. Part 3 explores how ownership, definitions, velocity, and data reality shape what you can truly negotiate in today’s CDP/CEP market.

The reactions to last week's part 2, The inherited costs of the composable stack, revealed something important about Martech today. People disagreed with one another, yet they were all touching the same truth from different angles. Some pointed out that composable savings mostly show up in use-case velocity rather than infrastructure. Others argued that cloud costs are a black box, no matter what you buy. A few reminded us that the data warehouse remains the gravitational center regardless of whether your CDP is composable or packaged.

What everyone circled around, though, was the same underlying question: who holds the

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 ->

If CDPs are dead, they’ve donated their organs...

Despite the headlines, Customer Data Platforms aren’t dead. Their best parts now power engagement platforms and data warehouses. This article explains why CDPs still matter, especially for mid-market businesses driving the next wave of customer data innovation.

Every week a new headline drops like a bomb. This company's app just killed another company's app, blew up something else, or declared the death of a technology category. As a military veteran, I find it strange how casually our industry borrows the language of conflict. There’s enough of that in real life.

Take Customer Data Platforms. Depending on who you follow, CDPs are either dead, obsolete, or absorbed beyond recognition. But as Brian Blessed once roared in Flash Gordon, “GORDON’S ALIVE!”

If he worked in martech, he’d be shouting, “CDP’S ARE ALIVE!”

When a Martech guy walks into AdTech... and lives to tell the tale.

I was entirely out of my depth in this one. Sitting down with AdLib co-founder Mike Hauptman turned into more than just an AdTech crash course.

I’m a complete novice when it comes to AdTech and raising my two teenage kids. And Mike brought me up to speed on one of those topics.

Programmatic, DSPs, audience segments… it’s always sounded like a parallel universe to the Martech world I live in.

So when I sat down with Mike Hauptman, co-founder and CEO of AdLib DSP, I treated it as a chance to get schooled and he didn’t disappoint.

We talked about how programmatic advertising actually works, why it got so complicated, and how AdLib is trying to make it as easy as Google

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