Conversations with MarTech

Start-up marketing isn’t for the faint of heart, and if you want to learn how it’s done well, you can check out the highlight reels on LinkedIn, or you can spend time with someone who’s scaled marketing start up and discuss what they’ve learned. In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, Abby Strong , chief market officer and chief customer officer at Cribl , joins us to share her insights on...

Is your marketing organization still viewing AI as a simple cost-cutting tool? In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, Teresa Barreira , CMO of Publicis Sapient , explains how her organization uses AI to reinvent work itself.  Teresa and her team shifted the focus from roles to tasks and redesigning workflows with an "AI-first" approach. This approach dramatically increased speed...

As brands face an explosion of content across global channels, AI is being used not just to generate the content, but to solve the increasingly difficult challenges of organization, findability, and workflow acceleration. In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, Erica Gunn , CMO at Canto , discusses the evolving landscape of digital asset management (DAM) and the significant impact of artifi...

Marketers have more channels at their disposal than ever before, but somehow we’ve managed to fill each and every one of them with an awful lot of noise.  For some marketers, the return of in person events after the pandemic provided an opportunity to build community, create connections, and escape from the noise.  In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we’re talking to Tara Corey , SVP of...

Many marketers missed the initial opportunity to reimagine their organizational models before implementing AI technology. Now, they find themselves at the evolving intersection of AI, data, and modern marketing strategy. In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, Ryan Warren , Chief CRM Officer at Razorfish Warren discusses why many organizations struggle to realize the full potential of their...

Are consumers at a breaking point with email and text message marketing? In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we sit down with Eric Miao , chief strategy officer at Attentive , to discuss the evolving landscape of mobile communications. Eric and I dive into how brands can move past the "quantity over quality" era of spam and leverage AI-driven personalization to build genuine c...

As vibe coding, AI, and data play a bigger role inside revenue teams, a shift from fragmented best-of-breed stacks toward unified, AI-native operating systems is taking shape. Naman Khan worked for legacy giants like Salesforce and Dropbox and now serves as CMO at Reevo , a challenger brand in the revenue platform space.  In this episode of Conversation with MarTech, we discuss the evolution of ma...

Are your team's high performers disengaged? It could be burnout. But it could also be bore-out. Unlike burnout, which happens when people are over-worked, bore-out is caused by the boring repetitive tasks that sap purpose and meaning from the work people do. AI could actually help with both of these issues, for teams that play their cards right. And if they do, people will be freed up to work...

Television has dominated the advertising market for the better part of 75 years, despite an explosion in channels and an entire makeover of the media landscape. Despite advances in targeting through CTV, we know consumers will skip ads when it’s possible. As a result, TV advertisers are seeing ROAS go down and fewer opportunities to insert more ads into content.  Advances in AI now allow advertise...

It’s an interesting time to be a CMO. Marketing spend is under scrutiny, as it so often is, buying habits are changing and AI is threatening to upend a number of aspects of sales and marketing we thought we knew. All of that adds more complexity to a leadership role that already requires people skills, an analytical mind and a healthy dose of creativity. In this episode of Conversations with MarTe...

There are more ways to reach consumers than ever before, and the retail media space is a great example. What started as ads on ecommerce sites to put brands in front of consumers at the point of purchase now includes financial services and even delivery services. Today, the retail media space has a fragmentation problem, because marketers who want to buy media across the different channels and sit...

Adtech vendors were among the early adopters of machine learning, using it to help optimize campaign performance over the past decade. Social media platforms use AI to help build creative units. But there are a number of use cases for AI and agents in the advertising ecosystem, including audience research and insights,which are flying under the radar but hold tremendous potential for both advertis...

You don’t need billions of data points to tell you that the digital experience has changed significantly in the past few years, but when you have them, they tell quite a story. Just a few years ago, many digital experiences started with what we now call “traditional search.” But as traditional search gave way to AI-powered search, it created a shockwave across the digital landscape. Organic traffi...

AI is making its way into online retail for both consumers and sellers. Consumers are increasingly using AI tools for product discovery, while retailers are deploying AI-powered agents to help with the customer experience. But true AI shopping agents are still rare to find, at least for now. In this episode we’re talking to Grant Deken , director of product at Klaviyo , about how consumers use AI...

Consumers jumped on the AI search bandwagon soon after ChatGPT launched. More than half of shoppers use AI as a research supplement, and nearly 20% are moving to AI-powered LLMs for all or most of their search needs. Brands, on the other hand, are focusing on AI to power chat and customer experiences. That creates a gap between consumers and brands when it comes to how they’re adopting AI. While t...

Did you know technical debt costs global enterprises approximately $400 million annually? It’s a staggering amount of money, and that debt arises from — among other things —  a cultural resistance to change or budgetary limitations, which lead organizations to add new applications rather than replacing outdated systems. Technical debt can accumulate practically anywhere in an organization, and the...

Marketers who are building campaigns and thinking about the customer experience probably don’t often think about the data layer of their martech applications. But the data layer is the key to customer relationships, and according to Mike Anderson , co-founder and CTO at Tealium , we’re now in the fifth era of the data layer. Anderson says the data layer’s evolution goes back to early web analytics...

Measurement poses a challenge for many marketers thanks to the explosion in marketing channels, the overwhelming amount of data in marketing today and the complicated relationships between marketing leaders and other C-suite executives. But how do marketers feel about their measurement? Research says many marketers are happy with their measurement, but that there’s still plenty of room for improve...

We’ve all dealt with data silos and organizational silos, but as organizations struggle to develop an AI strategy and centralize around AI tools, we’re now at risk for AI silos as well. The real benefit of AI is integrating it in your workflows, where it can help ease the manual tasks associated with campaign creation, for example, and act like a partner for human marketers. On this episode of Con...

The core mission of many websites — to deliver information to visitors using text and images  — rarely changes. Most website redesigns are just fresh coats of paint on 30-year-old frameworks. Danika Wong , CMO of Satisfi Labs , broke that cycle by anchoring her brand’s entire digital presence in an AI-powered agentic experience.  We're kicking off season three of Conversations with MarTech by...

In this episode of Playbook Broken, host Marc sits down with Myriam Jessier , SEO Exec at Pragm and Neurospicy to explore why traditional SEO strategies are collapsing in an AI-driven search world. Myriam breaks down what’s actually changing, why privacy-first SEO matters, how to build authority when zero-click results dominate, and what brands must understand about context and relevance today. Th...

For years, buying enterprise tools and tech followed a fairly predictable playbook. Enterprise buyers started their research on Google and consulted peers and colleagues. They downloaded content assets and attended events or webinars. All of that activity put buyers on the radar of the vendors and put into motion their sales and marketing efforts. AI has fundamentally changed the game of B2B buyin...

Customer data platforms promised clarity, unity, and true personalization — but reality didn’t live up to the hype. In this episode, Hightouch Co-CEO Tejas Manohar joins Marc Sirkin to dismantle the outdated CDP playbook and reveal why modern teams are shifting toward composable data architectures and AI-driven decisioning.  Tejas shares the inside story of the CDP market’s evolution, why most org...

Are B2B organizations passing up an opportunity to resonate with their prospects and customers because their messages lack creativity?  Today, I’m talking to Jacob Sanders, Scott Monty and Ryan Wellman, the creators of ROI: The Musical, to discuss why so many B2B organizations seem to steer away from getting creative in their marketing.  Creativity is risky, it’s subjective and it can be terribly...

What if everything you thought you knew about being “data-driven” was wrong? In this episode of Playbook Broken, host Marc Sirkin talks with Philip Armstrong , SVP and Go-to-Market Head of Insights & Analytics at Truth in Data (and formerly of Nike ), about why most dashboards fail, how to overcome data paralysis, and why AI might be breaking more playbooks than it’s fixing.  Philip unpacks ho...