Making Sense of Martech

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Jun 2026

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Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.

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41 recent

June 10, 2026Episode 401 hr 5 min

It's Just Marketing Ops With Better PR with Sara McNamara

"SaaS companies are systematically undervaluing marketing ops professionals by rebranding their work with trendy titles while taking their contributions for granted until everything breaks.” — SaraSara McNamara has spent her career building go-to-market systems at companies like Slack, Salesforce, and Cloudera, the unglamorous, essential work that makes revenue teams actually function. As the revenue operations and go-to-market lead at Vector, she has a thesis about where ops is headed that challenges how many see their own roles. While AI rewires what ops teams actually do, she argues that strategic operations practitioners aren't becoming obsolete, they're becoming more essential than ever before.In this wide-ranging conversation, Sara unpacks the marketing ops erasure problem plaguing SaaS companies, explains why attribution will never be a perfect science, and shares specific AI workflows that are actually working in her day-to-day operations. She makes the case that ops professionals need to upskill now or risk having engineers and upskilled marketers fill the strategic vacuum they leave behind.Timestamps03:45 — Building Ops at Vector: How Sara approaches go-to-market operations at a Series B company and the unique challenges of scaling ops infrastructure07:20 — Career Journey Through Big Tech: From Slack to Salesforce to Cloudera, the lessons learned building revenue systems at enterprise scale10:15 — Marketing Ops Erasure Problem: SaaS companies are systematically undervaluing marketing ops professionals by rebranding their work with trendy titles while taking their contributions for granted until everything breaks18:25 — Ops Must Upskill or Lose Ground: Operations professionals need to actively learn AI tools now, or risk having engineers and upskilled marketers fill the strategic vacuum they leave behind19:15 — AI Pricing Will Follow Uber Model: AI companies will likely subsidize usage initially to create dependency, then dramatically increase pricing once users are locked in37:53 — AI as Data Hygiene Assistant: Use AI for observability and anomaly detection in your CRM rather than giving it permission to make changes45:30 — Ops More Essential Than Ever: While there's consolidation pressure in ops, strategic ops practitioners who act as the 'adult in the room' for go-to-market are becoming more valuable, not less59:00 — Attribution's Real Purpose: Attribution should be used directionally for channels and campaigns, not as a perfect science01:02:40 — AI Will Amplify Marketing Chaos: AI will create more marketing 'slop' and turbocharged outreach, making attribution even murkier while elevating the importance of relationships and event marketingSponsorBrought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.Connect & SubscribeSubscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.

June 3, 2026Episode 3934 min

Why Scott Brinker Says AI Can't Pick Your Tech Stack

"Most of marketing is not a verifiable domain. You can't outsource it to the agents. You need the humans." - Scott BrinkerScott Brinker, creator of the Martech landscape and former VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, joins Jacqueline for a no-holds-barred conversation on AI's real limits in marketing, and why the industry's confidence in what AI can do may be its biggest liability. This is a genuine stress test of some of marketing technology's most popular assumptions: that AI can replace human judgment in vendor selection, that content governance is someone else's problem, and that consolidation is always the safe bet.The episode opens on the concept of synthetic certainty: AI outputs that feel authoritative but can't actually be validated, and builds from there into a broader argument about why marketing, as a non-verifiable domain, is more defensible than people fear. Scott draws a sharp line between tasks AI can handle reliably and decisions that require taste, context, and stakes. The stakes get real when he calls out the single most dangerous assumption in martech right now: that full-stack consolidation is the goal. Spoiler: handing your entire marketing operation to one vendor isn't simplification. It's surrender.Timestamps00:57 — Synthetic certainty unpacked: why marketing is not a verifiable domain like software engineering and what that means for job security04:57 — Where AI actually breaks down: a vendor evaluation scenario and why attribution models are "delusional"12:33 — The AI content governance gap: 103 of 163 respondents doing zero verification, and whether this becomes an industry credibility crisis22:59 — The three-bucket theory of marketing roles and which bucket AI is about to crush entirely26:42 — The most dangerous assumption Martech operators are making: why full vendor consolidation is a trap, not a goal33:46 — Seventeen years of mapping the landscape: what the 2011 version of Scott would find shocking about vendors, brands, and the future of martech researchSponsorBrought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.Connect & SubscribeSubscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.

May 27, 2026Episode 3840 min

Why Everyone in Martech Feels Behind Right Now with Scott Brinker

"Content was king. Now context is the monarch." — Scott BrinkerScott Brinker has been mapping marketing technology longer than most practitioners have been in it. In this Hot Seat episode, Jacqueline puts the godfather of Martech in the chair to pressure-test the 2026 State of Martech Report, and what emerges is a surprisingly honest reckoning with where AI in marketing actually stands. The landscape has hit a historic plateau, the stack is stratifying into competing gravitational layers, and the organizations holding it all together are marketing ops teams that didn't sign up to be system administrators in the first place.The conversation moves from the chrysalis metaphor anchoring this year's report – AI everywhere, integrated nowhere, necessary mess – to the bifurcation Scott predicts between infrastructure consolidation and an explosion of ephemeral, app-like software. From content marketing's category collapse to Salesforce and HubSpot's reluctant pivot to headless architecture, this episode maps the strategic fault lines every B2B and B2C martech practitioner needs to understand. It closes on a tension Scott can't fully resolve yet: synthetic certainty, and why the most dangerous problem in the stack may be the one nobody has named.Timestamps02:05 — Rapid fire: first martech tool, what's overrated, and one word for martech in 202609:12 — AI everywhere, integrated nowhere: the chrysalis metaphor and the messy middle16:10 — The landscape plateau: less than 0.1% growth after 15 years of expansion: pause, peak, or bifurcation?21:00 — Content marketing's category collapse and why the first wave of AI-native tools was always going to burn fast27:19 — Pace layering, composability, and how to make stack decisions when the ground won't stop moving32:56 — Stack stratification: the battle for the center of gravity between SaaS incumbents (Salesforce + HubSpot), data warehouses, frontier labs, and the multi-front war for the center of gravity38:14 — MCP's rise and the governance problem nobody is solving yet44:44 — Synthetic certainty and the unnamed problem to be discussed in Part 2SponsorBrought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.Brought to you by Bloomreach’s Innovation Fest on June 3. A 60-minute live virtual event built around one idea: value before volume. While the rest of the market races to announce more AI agents, they're making the case for fewer, better ones — agents actually held to a standard of moving revenue numbers. Worth attending if you're tracking where agentic AI in commerce is actually going. Sign up here!Connect & SubscribeSubscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.

May 20, 20260 min

Making Sense of Martech Trailer

We host unfiltered conversations with the people shaping the industry. We track the biggest shifts in the marketing technology landscape and ecosystem.Cutting through the noise to spotlight what matters, who’s leading (and lagging), and what’s next for modern marketing teams. In this industry, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.Connect & SubscribeSubscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.

April 22, 2026Episode 3729 min

Hello {{firstname}}, Meet The Execution Gap Killing Personalization

"The goal is not to personalize everything. You need to personalize what matters so that you can prioritize it internally in order to execute it well." - JacquelineScaling personalization in marketing technology remains one of the most persistent and painful challenges in the Martech landscape, and the data makes that brutally clear. Nearly 75% of buyers expect companies to understand how and when they want personalized interactions, yet 53% of companies admit they don't know when personalization is actually valuable. Only 12% of brands qualify as true leaders in this space. In the sixth and final episode of their Pain Points series, Jacqueline and Juan break down exactly why personalization keeps breaking down and what marketing technology leaders can do to fix it.The conversation moves through three core failure modes: personalization without context, the speed-versus-scale trade-off, and the operational and cultural bottlenecks that quietly kill even the best-intentioned programs. From a global financial institution waiting six months to unlock a logged-in experience, to year-in-review campaigns that landed with a thud, the episode is packed with real-world examples of what happens when strategy and execution fall out of sync. The antidote isn't doing more — it's doing less, better, with sharper insight and tighter alignment.Timestamps00:33 — Pain point #6 introduced: scaling personalization, execution speed, and global complexity02:09 — The data paradox: 75% of buyers demand personalization, but 53% of companies can't measure its value04:38 — Why only 12% of companies qualify as true personalization leaders and what's holding the rest back09:30 — The insight foundation: why every personalization program needs it14:50 — The six-month Adobe Target story: when tech implementation has no personalization strategy behind it20:21 — The execution problem hiding as a personalization problem and how centers of excellence can fix it26:45 — Four solutions: prioritize moments that matter, simplify, build for speed, and align teams on shared incentivesSponsorBrought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.Connect & SubscribeSubscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.

April 15, 2026Episode 3628 min

AI Theater to Trojan Horse: Surviving the AI Adoption Pressure Cooker

"The only thing propping up Martech budgets right now is AI." — JuanAI adoption pressure has become one of the defining pain points in marketing technology, and the numbers make the case starkly. In this Office Hours episode, Jacqueline and Juan dig into the $1.4 billion-to-$1.48-trillion explosion in AI spending from 2023 to 2025, the Gartner prediction that at least 30% of gen AI projects would be abandoned post-POC, and the uncomfortable reality driving it all: executives are demanding AI strategies from Martech teams that are still fighting foundational data and stack issues. This is the fifth in a six-part pain point series, and it may be the most urgent.The conversation covers three interlocking dynamics: the "virus" of AI hype spreading from boardrooms to vendor positioning, the peril-versus-promise tension forcing every executive to pick a side, and new enterprise research showing that companies without a dedicated AI budget face a 60% decrease in Martech investment versus a 65% increase for those who have one. They also walk through a role-play scenario, offering practical language for Martech leaders when asked, "What's your AI strategy?" and why pushing back is often the most valuable thing you can do.Timestamps00:41 — Pain point five: AI adoption pressure without clear value realization02:35 — The "I Love You" virus and the Y2K parallel — why AI hype rhymes with tech history06:07 — The 100x spending surge and why 30% of gen AI POCs are abandoned09:54 — AI theater in Martech: when every vendor renames itself an "agentic intelligence platform"13:10 — Peril vs. promise: LLMs as the first marketing channel that talks back, and AI as cloud cover for layoffs19:14 — The budget data shock: companies without an AI budget face a 60% decrease in Martech investment22:03 — The Trojan Horse strategy: using AI budget to fix your broken stack23:06 — Role-play: how to push back when an executive demands an "agentic AI strategy in 30 days"SponsorBrought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.Connect & SubscribeSubscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.

April 8, 2026Episode 3539 min

Bad Data, Dark Data, & Why Your North Star Keeps Moving

"We built an entire industry on the promise of precise measurement, and most of us don't actually trust the numbers." — JuanMarketing technology promised precision, but the reality is far messier. In practice, only 3% of CMOs can reliably demonstrate ROI on more than half their total marketing spend. In this Office Hours episode, Jacqueline and Juan unpack the measurement and attribution crisis plaguing enterprise marketing teams. From data fragmentation and siloed dashboards to leadership instability and organizational misalignment, the conversation covers why the ROI gap persists, and what to actually do about it.They go deeper than dashboards, introducing the concept of an "epistemological crisis" in analytics: when teams can't agree on what's true, the entire measurement stack collapses.But it’s not all doom and gloom. Jacqueline and Juan break down practical ways forward from fixing taxonomy and defining a measurement tree to embracing uncertainty and speaking the CFO’s language. Better decisions, not perfect data, should be the goal.Timestamps00:20 — Martech World Forum recap, data releases, and renewal horror stories04:34 — The uncomfortable truth about ROI and attribution gaps07:08 — The “epistemological crisis” and why marketers don’t trust data13:32 — Leadership churn, siloed teams, and broken measurement24:27 — Fixing the foundation: taxonomy, definitions, and data hygiene28:11 — Measurement trees, North Star metrics, and the case for measuring less33:57 — Speaking the CFO’s language: customer margin and commercial impactSponsorBrought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.Connect & SubscribeSubscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.

April 1, 2026Episode 3445 min

Inside Paramount: March Madness & Martech Chaos with Ian Reisman

Martech and data strategy promise control, personalization, and scale, but in practice, they often deliver technical debt, fragile systems, and operational chaos. In this episode, Ian Reisman brings a hard-earned perspective from 17 years inside Paramount, where he managed billions of emails across in-house platforms, enterprise tools, and high-stakes moments like March Madness war rooms that stretched well past midnight.From 3 AM warehouse refreshes to a Salesforce Marketing Cloud migration, this conversation breaks down the build vs. buy dilemma from both sides. Ian explains why no vendor demo survives real data, how DIY martech quietly accumulates risk, and why most organizations underestimate the operational burden of scaling personalization.The discussion goes deeper into platform trade-offs: why Braze raises the floor but lowers the ceiling, how Adobe CDP failed to scale in practice, and why Salesforce’s most powerful features are often the least marketed. Along the way, Ian calls out the hidden costs of consulting agencies, the compounding impact of layoffs on martech operations, and why AI in marketing is still just predictive intelligence — not magic.Timestamps05:20 — Ian's very first Martech platform and early in-house systems13:40 — The DIY mindset: great in theory, brutal in practice 20:40 — March Madness war rooms and real-world stress testing24:14 — Braze vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud: raising the floor, lowering the ceiling 27:07 — Three years of Adobe CDP and nothing to show for it31:03 — The consulting agency trap and how to keep them on rails 37:47 — Martech fragility and leadership blind spots41:33 — When institutional knowledge disappears overnight42:04 — AI in Martech: predictive intelligence, not magicSponsorBrought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.Connect & SubscribeSubscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.

March 25, 2026Episode 3355 min

Cut Your Marketing Budget by 50% with Calm's Jeff Lee

Jeff Lee doesn't just build marketing campaigns. He engineers lifecycle systems that quietly power billions of customer interactions. As the lifecycle marketing technical lead at Calm, Jeff runs a team of four, shipping 240+ distinct email campaigns a year and moving data across Databricks, Iterable, and Amplitude with precision most teams can't match. In this conversation, he makes the case for marketing engineering as a distinct discipline, sitting between data engineering, product, and marketing to solve problems no one else owns. We dig into the "Sorting Hat" automation that prioritizes message delivery at scale, why he'd never build an ESP in-house again, the downstream cost of a three-line code bug that tanked opt-ins by 60%, and why attribution, personalization, and end-to-end lifecycle orchestration depend on engineers who think like marketers and marketers who think like systems architects.Timestamps05:12 — The three-line code bug that killed 60% of email opt-ins overnight 22:03 — Inside the "Sorting Hat": How Calm prioritizes lifecycle messaging without global caps 31:47 — Why cutting your martech budget by 50% should start with list hygiene, not tools 37:14 — Jeff's dream stack and why CDPs are overrated 46:16 — Where AI breaks in lifecycle marketing 52:26 — Making "marketing engineer" a real job titleSponsorBrought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.Connect & SubscribeSubscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.

March 18, 2026Episode 3251 min

Personalization, Profit & the CFO: Scaling Martech Engines with Eloise Gillespie

"Personalization is finding that balance — you can give customers everything they want, but it doesn't make the business happy. True personalization is finding the perfect balance." – Eloise Personalization only works when the infrastructure beneath it is built for business reality, not hype.In this episode, Jacqueline sits down with Eloise Gillespie, Associate Director of Personalization and Martech at Optus, to unpack what it actually takes to make AI and personalization deliver at scale. Eloise brings hard-won experience from telecom, wagering, and hospitality, including managing a nine-figure bet budget and building customer-level optimization engines that won CFO approval by anchoring every decision in margin, ROI, and commercial viability.They cover the infrastructure work that must happen before AI can deliver value, why treating data as a product changes everything, and how to make personalization credible to finance teams. If you're done with quick fixes, this one is for you.Timestamps 01:19 — The biggest bet: betting on yourself04:14 — How Salesforce Marketing Cloud changed everything08:45 — Why LTV is dead (or at least overrated) and what metric actually matters18:05 — Leading with commercial impact: a $XXX,XXX,XXX budget gap to win CFO trust 26:08 — Proving personalization to the CFO: Leading with dollars, not fluff38:22 — System of record vs. system of context: What CDPs actually do45:38 — Building an incentive optimization engine across bet types, margins, and interaction contexts 52:07 — AI-driven personalization: What's real today vs. what's still on the horizonSponsorBrought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.Connect & SubscribeSubscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.