Tags List
Customer Data Platform
66 postsThe biggest thread on this site. Years of CDP work condensed into arguments about what the category actually delivers, where the buying process goes wrong, and why so many implementations stall after the data lands. Claims get tested against how the technology behaves once it is actually running.
Couch Confidentials
42 postsMy podcast, where Martech people say the things that never make it into a case study. Guests come from software companies, agencies and in-house teams, and the best episodes are the ones where somebody admits what did not work.
AI in Martech
29 postsWhere AI actually lands in a marketing stack, as opposed to where the roadmap says it will. Agents, context, personalization, and the awkward middle period we are in now, when the tooling has run ahead of the operating model in most companies I work with.
Martech strategy
21 postsStrategy work that survives contact with a real stack. Pricing and negotiation, consulting method, transformation programs that stall, and the recurring question of whether the next tool solves anything the last three did not. Written while the projects are still running, which is when the awkward questions show up.
Agentic AI
21 postsDelegation is the hard part, not autonomy. These pieces work through what it takes to hand a marketing decision to an agent: the guardrails, the data an agent can actually reach, the new organization chart underneath, and what happens to the people who used to click the buttons.
Composable CDP
19 postsComposable was supposed to be the cheaper, cleaner answer to packaged CDPs. In practice it moves the cost rather than removing it. Warehouse-native architecture, what Snowflake and Databricks changed, and the inherited costs that rarely make it into a business case.
Customer data
15 postsThe unglamorous layer everything else depends on. Quality, ownership, identity resolution, collection, and the trust problem underneath all of it. Nearly every stack has a version of the same issue, which is that everyone wants clean data and nobody wants to take the trash out.
Customer Engagement Platform
14 postsCEPs took the activation half of the CDP promise and built a business on it. Where the category boundary sits now, how CEP and CDP pricing interact, and what happens when the engagement layer starts asking to own the data layer too.
Martech readiness
13 postsMost stack failures are readiness failures wearing a technology costume. This is where my Structure, Capability and Process framework lives, along with the organization design questions that decide whether a platform ever gets used: who owns it, who decides, and who is left holding it.
RFP & vendor selection
9 postsSelection processes are where good intentions meet procurement. Running and rescuing CDP and CEP selections: writing requirements that mean something, when skipping the RFP is defensible, what a reference call will tell you if you ask properly, and how the scoring gets gamed.
Contextual CDPs
9 postsA six-part series on the layer between stored customer data and an agent that has to act on it. What context has to do to be usable, where composability helps and where it hurts, contextual fluency, and the one-page audit for scoring your own workflows.
Vibe coding Martech
8 postsWhat happens when a strategist starts building instead of specifying. Notes from building Martech Stack Builder and the CDP Simulator, what AI-assisted development is genuinely good at, where comprehension becomes the bottleneck, and why the demo is always the easy part.
Digital analytics
8 postsWhere I started, and the discipline most Martech problems eventually trace back to. Measurement design, tag governance, the analyst who slowly becomes a report factory, and what happens to attribution once the collection layer moves server-side and the browser stops volunteering anything useful.
Data privacy
7 postsPrivacy as a design constraint rather than a legal checkbox. GDPR in practice, residency decisions that get made by accident, privacy-first analytics that still answer the question, and the manipulative interface patterns that made all of this necessary.
Analyst reports
6 postsGartner, Forrester and IDC shape more CDP buying decisions than any of them will claim. What the Magic Quadrant and the Wave actually measure, where the CDP category split shows up in the grids, and how much weight a mid-market buyer should give any of it.
State of Martech
5 postsAnnual commentary on the industry surveys and what they leave out. Stack counts go up, satisfaction does not, and the same readiness problem turns up in the data every year without anyone naming it as one. Also what I am watching for before each report drops.
Model Context Protocol
5 postsMCP became the connective standard for agent tooling faster than most of Martech noticed. What it is underneath the USB-C analogy, which platforms have shipped support, and what it changes about how a CDP exposes its data to something that was not built by the same company.
Multi-CDP
5 postsAlmost nobody plans to own two CDPs, and plenty of companies do anyway. How it happens, why the binary between packaged and composable stopped describing reality, the dual zone model, and who ends up accountable once the second platform arrives.
Agentic CDP
5 postsThe category is being defined in public, mostly by the companies selling it. My working definition, what changes for the marketer once the system decides, and how to evaluate one on your own terms instead of borrowing a scorecard from whoever wrote the definition.
Marketing Automation Platform
4 postsThe category everything else was supposed to replace, still standing. Where MAP ends and CEP begins, what AI-native automation actually automates, and why the process usually outlives the tool that was bought to fix it. The boundary keeps moving, which makes it a live question in almost every selection I run.
Agentic CDP series
4 postsGetting ready for the agentic CDP, in six parts. What the category actually is, how the marketer's job moves from operating to directing, how to evaluate one on your own terms, and what happens when an agent optimizes exactly what you told it to measure.
CDP Reboot
3 postsA series on how the CDP category arrived here. What it was sold as, what collapsed underneath it, and what a second version has to do differently. Written for anyone about to buy their first CDP, and for the larger group about to buy their second.
Martech entropy
2 postsMartech's Law says technology changes faster than organizations do. My extension is that the gap does not stay neutral, it decays into cost. The entropy argument lives here, along with the ROI equation that falls out of it and the Entropy Scan built on top.
