Couch Confidentials by Martech Therapy

Tiankai Feng wrote Humanizing AI Strategy because almost no one else is talking about the human behaviors that determine whether AI implementations succeed or fail. Everyone's focused on architecture and capabilities while ignoring the organizational dysfunction that sinks these projects. We covered his five Cs framework and how it applies differently to AI than data strategy, why competence now m...

Paul Meinshausen is CEO and co-founder at Aampe , where he applies cognitive science and statistical methods to consumer technology. Duarte Garrido is co-founder at DOJO AI , an integrated marketing operating system for challenger brands. Both are building products that replace marketing processes with adaptive AI systems, and both are watching teams struggle with the mental shift required to use...

This episode of Couch Confidentials was pure fun from the moment we hit record. I sat down with Elad Simon , the newly crowned ZEO of Zeotap (yes… that happened in real time), and we covered everything from CDPs and data politics to German basketball and DMEXCO culture shocks.  Elad walked me through his winding path from consulting to Google to product startups, before finding his way back into t...

When you move from consulting in Southeast Asia to leading Martech at one of the UK’s largest telcos, you notice things. Not just in how data flows or platforms integrate, but in how people work, collaborate, and make decisions. In this episode, Teik Chua from O2 Virgin Media shares his journey through those worlds, from early CDP adoption in Asia to the challenges of embedding Martech strategy in...

I’ve wanted this conversation for years. Simo Ahava, co-founder of Simmer and partner at 8-bit-sheep, sits down with me to talk about the messy middle where marketing and engineering meet. We get honest about Google Tag Manager as a bridge, not a back door. We talk governance over clever hacks, and why that choice changes how teams work, not just how tags fire. We also get into where AI actually h...

If you’ve ever tried to explain adtech to a Martech person, you’ll enjoy this one. I sat down with Bob Regular, CEO of Infolinks Media, who’s been building in this space since before ad servers even existed. We talked about what it was like when every impression had to be served manually, how hype cycles repeat themselves, and why the real progress in AI will take far longer than people think. Bob...

I’ll admit it, I’m a complete novice when it comes to AdTech. So when I sat down with Mike Hauptman, co-founder and CEO of AdLib DSP, I basically showed up with curiosity and a mild sense of panic. Mike walked me through the world of programmatic advertising, data marketplaces, and AI’s growing role in optimizing campaigns — but without the acronyms and the “you should already know this” tone that...

I sat down with Duarte Garrido and Luke Costly-White to see what DOJO AI calls an “ all-in-one AI Marketing Operating System ”. Big claims, but then again, these are undoubtedly “big claim” days we are living in, so I wanted to see what that actually looks like in practice. Luke’s story already makes this demo interesting. Luke began as a DOJO power user, then became an angel investor, and now wor...

From CERN’s particle accelerators to the messy world of marketing data, István Mészáros has seen it all. In this episode of Couch Confidentials, we trace his path from working on the Large Hadron Collider to building Mitzu, a startup rethinking how companies approach composable analytics. We talk about why centralizing KPIs matters more than shiny dashboards, how enterprise data culture often lags...

When Zack Wenthe from Tealium told me, “ the next five years of data strategy will make the last look like child’s play ”, I felt both intrigued and uneasy. Intrigued because Zack has been around long enough in the CDP world to know what he’s talking about. Uneasy because if the last few years already left most teams exhausted, what’s coming next? We circled around two big forces → privacy and AI....

I had such a pleasant conversation with Ana Mourão on Couch Confidentials. She has this rare combination of sharp Martech expertise and an optimistic outlook, even when talking about the messy side of digital transformation. What struck me most was how Ana sees Martech not just as a stack of tools, but as a system of people and processes where small wins can make a huge difference. From building 7...

In this episode of Couch Confidentials , I sit down with Guido Jansen, Spryker’s Global Business & Technology Evangelist, and someone with one of the longest job titles I’ve ever introduced on the podcast. Guido’s path is unusual: a background in applied cognitive psychology, years building the Magento community, and now leading community and customer success efforts at Spryker. We discuss wha...

Season 2 of Couch Confidentials opens with James Fang, Director of Product Marketing at Klaviyo and former VP at mParticle . We get into the weeds of Martech terminology, such as CEP, MAP, CDP, and whether those labels still mean anything when platforms are converging. James shares why Klaviyo positions itself as a B2C CRM built on a shared data platform, and how that ties into the wider trend of...

There’s a lot of noise around AI and identity right now. Hightouch just launched Adaptive Identity Resolution, Meiro is leaning hard into real-time CDP-native matching, and Amperity continues to push its probabilistic + deterministic blend for enterprise brands. But when someone asked me whether GenAI could solve identity resolution, I went straight to someone who’s seen the inside of the problem:...

Phil Gamache said, “I ask questions like an analyst, but I listen like an operator.” And that’s exactly why I invited him onto Couch Confidentials, for quotes like that. At the end of the day we are all trying to achieve the same. He doesn’t just host Humans of Martech, he’s built a platform that holds up a mirror to the way we actually work. The late-night migrations. The marketing ops arguments....

I finally sat down with Adam Greco for what turned into one of those conversations that explains how we got to this beautiful disaster we call modern martech. Adam earned the nickname "Omni-Man" back when he was basically Adobe Analytics incarnate, the guy who could fix your broken implementations and somehow make eVars seem less like a cruel joke played on marketers by bored engineers. For years,...

CDP Institute ’s David Raab coined the term Customer Data Platform, which makes him either the godfather of modern Martech or the guy responsible for every PowerPoint slide with a data unification triangle on it. Possibly both. In this episode of Couch Confidentials , we talk about the slow death of CDP hype , why AI is just a mirror for your data mess, and why companies keep renaming “data plumbi...

Some conversations catch you off guard in the best possible way. This one with Steen did exactly that. We were meant to talk about analytics, why it still doesn’t deliver on its promise, despite all the new tools and fancy dashboards. And we did. But what surprised me was how personal it got. Not emotional, but honest in a way that made me uncomfortable in a good way. The kind of uncomfortable tha...

Paul suggested the idea of doing something different. No intro. No big kickoff. Just two people talking. That’s how this episode with Paul Meinshausen (CEO at Aampe ) started and I’m glad it did. Because I fumbled at the beginning (you can skip ahead in the podcast...). Feeling like a one-trick pony, I tried to steer the conversation toward my usual topics: CDPs, AI, use cases, and organizational...

In this episode of Diagnosis Demo, I sit down with Sav Khetan and BJ Allmon from Tealium to explore their recent implementation of MCPs (Model Context Protocols). We discuss what MCPs mean for real-time AI integration, how Tealium positions itself as an AI enabler, and why the future might just belong to multi-agent architectures. We also demo a real use case that shows how fast and powerful Teali...

In this special Diagnosis Demo episode, we sit down with Lloyd Hofmeyr, co-founder of Multiplied , to explore what happens when brand storytelling meets hyper-personalized media at scale. Forget the usual "Dear {first_name}" stuff, Lloyd walks us through real campaigns for BMW, financial apps, e-commerce brands, and more, showing how smart data and creative vision can turn abandoned cart emails in...

In this latest installment of the CDP Reboot series , I sat down with Dylan Flye (Simon Data) and Oussama Ghanmi (DinMo) for a brutally honest discussion about the current and future state of Customer Data Platforms. What started as a debate about the fate of the CDP category quickly turned into something more revealing. We explored why the original promise of CDPs may have overreached, how wareho...

What happens when the tools we think are helping us today aren't ready for the future we’re speeding into? In this episode of Couch Confidentials, Michael Katz (CEO of mParticle) joins me to talk about where AI is really at, why most CDPs are stuck in the past, and why success in Martech now depends less on the tech itself and more on how you think about it. We dive into: * Why "People overestimat...

I’ve just kicked off a new blog series on something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: how customer data platforms could work if they were built around context, not just profiles. This short video (<4 minutes) is a personal reflection on what led me to write the series, what I’m exploring, and how memory, inference, and nuance might change the way we think about CDPs. Curious what you think...

This week, I sat down with Kevin Swelsen , longtime friend, freelance digital analytics and CDP consultant, and one of the organizers behind Measurecamp Amsterdam . We dive into how the event was born, what makes it work, and why community still matters in a vendor-heavy Martech world. Kevin shares how a trip to Measurecamp London inspired a decade of volunteering, what it means to remain independ...