Martech strategy that survives contact with the stack

Discovering Martech is like getting lost in London

Even after 20 years in Martech, I recently felt lost. With 15,000 tools and constant change, the problem isn’t access to information, it’s knowing what actually matters. This piece explores why teams struggle to navigate Martech, and where decisions really break down.

I’ve been doing this work for close to twenty years now.

Helping companies make sense of their data and marketing technology, guiding selections, fixing what doesn’t work, occasionally building something in between. It’s been a fairly consistent thread.

And recently… I found myself staring at it all thinking:

“I’m not entirely sure where I’d start anymore.”

That’s not something I say lightly.

It has been half a year since the State of Martech 2026 edition was published. It included a staggering 15,000+ tools.

Fifteen thousand.

At that point, it stops being a catalogue.

Announcing Piedmont: why I restructured my practice around building, not just advising

Piedmont is French for Niederberger. Foot of the mountain. It's where most organisations find themselves when they reach out. I built a practice around that moment. Here's what it looks like.

If you read my post at the end of last year, you know that my client work changed toward the end of 2025.

It wasn't dramatic. No single conversation triggered it. But looking back at December, roughly 20% of what I was doing had moved from strategy and advisory into actually building things. Custom data apps, operational tools, activation layers that clients needed but couldn't find off the shelf. By April 2026 that number was closer to 50%.

When half your work has subtly become something different from what your practice was named for, it's time to

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

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

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

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

Posts tagged with Martech strategy