organizational structures - Martech Therapy

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 guides, debugging walkthroughs, and JavaScript examples

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 ->

Your CDP is more than just a platform

Why CDP projects unravel and what they reveal about your real digital transformation readiness

I just got back from a family trip to Paris, which was mostly great except for the hour I spent in a queue under the Eiffel Tower with my daughter constantly requesting more screentime on her phone, my wife and son (afraid of heights… like me) trying to find shade at a local cafe, and my brain, entirely on its own, thinking about CDPs and digital transformation. Because of course it did.

That moment, standing between chaos and culture, reminded me that CDP implementations are like tiny, well-lit previews of the digital transformation mess most companies are too scared to

Is the CDP binary broken?

Multi CDP Part 1: Why Dual Zone thinking matters now, more than ever.

There was a time, brief and overly PowerPointed, when the Customer Data Platform (CDP) was sold as the answer to everything: clean data, unified profiles, cross-channel orchestration, even internal peace treaties between marketing and IT.

One platform. One profile. One truth.

And then reality showed up.

Not with a bang, but with two CDPs.

The CDP Institute’s 2024 Member Survey reports an average of 2.1 CDPs per company, and Simon Data observes a drop from 2.9 to 2.1 based on that data. That might look like consolidation (down from 2.9 the year before), but it

Agentic AI in Martech: The new org chart

Part 4: Roles that emerge when AI handles execution

A friend recently asked me what a marketing ops manager actually does when AI agents are handling campaign execution, optimization, and conflict resolution. It's a fair question. If systems are making billions of decisions autonomously, what's left for us mortal humans?

My first instinct was to give the standard consultant answer about "strategic oversight" and "creative direction." But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that's probably wrong. The interesting human roles in an agentic world are likely to be things we haven't fully invented, yet.

Beyond the "Human in the Loop" fiction

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Beyond the "Human in the Loop" fiction