Martech readiness: structure, capability, process

Finding the Martech Goldilocks zone

With 15,000+ martech tools out there, the problem isn’t choice, it’s fit. The “perfect” solution rarely exists. The real challenge is finding your Goldilocks zone, where technology, people, and process are balanced enough to actually make things work.

If you’ve followed my writing for a while, you’ve probably noticed I have a bit of a thing for astronomy metaphors. We’ve talked about entropy creeping into martech stacks, and how data gravity quietly pulls everything toward the warehouse, turning tools into satellites orbiting a growing center of mass.

So let’s add another one to the collection.

The Goldilocks zone.

And yes, before anyone jumps in, I know. For some, Goldilocks is a fairy tale about porridge, chairs, and questionable home invasion ethics. For others, it’s an astronomical concept, describing the narrow band around a

The Martech Readiness Gap

The technology arrived before the organization was ready to operate it. That distance between what you believe you're ready for and what you can actually sustain is the Martech Readiness Gap. And it's getting wider.

In my last piece, I wrote about Scott Brinker's composable canvas and the distance most organizations still have to travel before they can operate that way. I ended with the observation that data gravity and organizational distance are two forces that haven't quite caught up with each other yet, and that the gap between them isn't a problem to solve in one go, it's something to navigate.

That question, how far are we from being able to operate this way, has kept coming up in conversations since. So this piece is an attempt to name what'

Why AI strategy fails for the same reason data strategy did

Tiankai Feng on the human behaviors that determine whether your AI implementation accelerates dysfunction or actually solves problems.

Tiankai Feng has been doing a publication tour for his new book, Humanizing AI Strategy, and he noticed something odd about the conference circuit. He keeps getting invited specifically because he talks about the human side of AI, which apparently makes him an outlier. Everyone else is presenting on architecture, model comparisons, and technical capabilities.

This feels like a replay of what happened with data strategy about five years ago. Companies invested in platforms and governance frameworks while assuming the technology itself would solve their problems. It didn't. Most data strategy failures traced back to human behavior, organizational dysfunction,

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.

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 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

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