Making Sense of Martech

Tony Byrne spent 25 years telling us not to trust futurists, because nobody holds them accountable. Then he wrote a book called MarTech 2030 . So today, Jacqueline holds him to it. Jacqueline and the founder of Real Story Group pressure-test the book's big claims. They cover why the average enterprise sits at MarTech 2.25, why outbound messaging could disappear as a category, and what a brand sees...

Salesforce agreed to buy Braze for $5.66 billion. On paper, it fills the real-time gap. In practice, Salesforce is buying back the customers who fled Marketing Cloud. In this episode of The Breakdown, Jacqueline reads her essay on the deal.  She traces a decade of Salesforce buying, merging, renaming, and retiring platforms. Then she asks what happens to Braze once it plugs into Data 360 and Agent...

Justin Price is senior manager of multichannel marketing at the Milwaukee Bucks. He built the team's SMS program from scratch inside a legacy Marketo stack. The welcome journey runs 104x ROI at a 38% conversion rate. Checkout abandonment runs 233x. Subscriber growth hit 455%. The team behind it is five people across five brands. This conversation covers how Attentive connects to Marketo through th...

Courtney Tierney spent years on the agency side telling brands what their CRM strategy should be. Now she's the one whose name is on the result. As director of CRM and customer engagement at Papa John's, she owns how the brand communicates with 42 million loyalty members across email, push notifications, SMS, and in-app channels. The gap between advising and owning is real, and this conversation g...

"It shouldn't be consolidated or best-of-breed. I think it could be consolidated and best-of-breed." — Vinicius Vinicius Rodrigues has spent his career arguing that fragmentation is a legitimate strategy, not a failure to consolidate. He also cut six figures in martech spend through consolidation. As head of marketing technology and operations at Mindbody, now part of Playlist, he manages the glob...

"We don't want to be the dumb pipe. We want to be the brain for your marketing. And I'm sorry, everyone can't be the brain. You can't have five brains." — Peter Peter Oleson is back, and the guardrails are off. Part 2 picks up where the dumb pipe debate left off and delves into the operational and economic realities that a composable stack actually demands of vendors, marketers, and the AI agents...

"By definition, most marketing automation platforms are creating silos, not breaking them down. They're in the business of creating copies of data." — Peter Peter Oleson spent years inside the machine. Salesforce Marketing Cloud architect at Merkle, then Iterable, running live demos of the exact journey builders he now argues are the wrong model. Today, he's making the case that marketing automati...

Stephanie Griffith has experience in retention and lifecycle marketing across brand, agency, and platform roles, making her a rare, credible voice on RCS business messaging. In this episode, she sits at the center of a real contradiction: selling brands on a channel that runs 15-30% CTR, with standout campaigns topping 50, while those same brands sit in an 8-to-16-week carrier-approval queue with...

"There is a version of AI adoption where efficiency just becomes a euphemism for doing more with less: you automate 30% of somebody's work, immediately fill that capacity with more work, and just move on." — Elizabeth Elizabeth Martin's team at Babylist cut newsletter production time from 2 hours to 15 minutes, freeing up 600 hours a year, using Claude, an Iterable MCP, and a Notion-based copy pip...

I was the one in the hot seat this time. Bloomreach's Divya Mulanjur flipped the mic on me... Connect & Subscribe Subscribe 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 . 

"AI-powered is one thing, but I feel like we're seeing this renewed focus on human-powered. Buying the tool is just a tiny little part of that journey, making the most of it, getting it implemented; there's a human story there." — Phil Gamache One year of Making Sense of Martech, and for the anniversary episode, Jacqueline brought in her main competitor: Phil Gamache, host of Humans of Martech and...

We're going down the rabbit hole together again in this week's second Breakdown essay episode. Be sure to listen to part 1 first here . Greek mythology meets the Hunger Games. Borrowed wings, borrowed fire, borrowed trust. 🔥🪽 Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok , LinkedIn , and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouT...

"You're on the receiving end of a coordinated PR campaign." - Jonathan 80% CSAT wins trophies. That's a problem. What does it actually take to win an industry award worth winning? Jonathan Harrop has been on both sides: he's judged at the Drum Awards and spent years at AdColony running a $6 million global marketing budget that produced over 200 wins across Ad Age, MMA, Smarties, Adweek, and the Dr...

We're going down the rabbit hole together in this week's first The Breakdown episode, part 1. Part 2 will be out shortly. We'll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week with a great conversation with someone in the H ot Seat .  Think Black Mirror meets Midsommar , set at a wildflower farm. Literally. 🌸🌼🌱🌺🪻🐝🍃🌻🌷🌿 Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wher...

"MCP adoption is outpacing security, and we're waiting until something really big gets broken to even address it. We've seen this movie before." — Israa MCP security risks are moving faster than the guardrails meant to contain them. In this episode of Making Sense of Martech, host Jacqueline Freedman sits down with Israa Alwari, founder of The Winbox, an email marketing education and agency helpin...

"People respond to people. It's worked really well for PostHog to lean into the personalities of the people who build the company. We're being authentic, we're being honest, being unfiltered. And I think that's refreshing." — Lottie PostHog built a $1.4 billion company on a single thesis: stop guessing, measure everything. So why is PostHog's own brand, the hedgehog, the chaos, the weirdness peopl...

"APIs led us to data silos. MCP could lead us to context silos, and that's why I'm hoping people will be a bit more restrictive about where they hook up MCP." — Luke Luke Ambrosetti has spent a decade arguing that the data warehouse should sit at the center of every enterprise martech stack. Now, as Databricks plants its CDP flag and Snowflake expands into AI decisioning, the architecture he champ...

"If I could live through accessibility audits and not have someone say, 'but we have alt text,' I would feel like I just entered a new realm of the world." — Sarah Email accessibility (a11y) is broken, and the industry largely knows it. 77% of brands say accessibility is a priority. Only 8% follow best practices. Only 0.1% of HTML emails actually meet the standard. That's not a resource problem; i...

"You should be layering AI on top of what you're already doing to make you more efficient. It should not be doing the bulk of the work. It should just be making you faster." — Megan Email development has long been the graveyard of good design intentions where beautiful mockups meet the harsh reality of Outlook's rendering engine, dark mode disasters, and code that would make any web developer weep...

"I really think that most companies' problem isn't efficiency, oftentimes. It's just like a lack of direction, strategy, or, you know, bad leadership practices." - Darrell This spring, commencement speakers were booed off the stage for telling graduates that AI is their future. Meanwhile, marketing ops teams are getting leaner, and job listings are down. The people who built careers on technical f...

Most marketing teams have more tools than strategy, and now they're layering AI on top of that mess. When you scale fast in the wrong direction, fixing it requires more than just throwing AI at your existing martech sprawl. It demands architectural thinking, data governance discipline, and genuine cross-functional partnerships that most organizations simply haven't built yet. In this episode, Jacq...

"SaaS companies are systematically undervaluing marketing ops professionals by rebranding their work with trendy titles while taking their contributions for granted until everything breaks.” — Sara Sara 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 rev...

"Most of marketing is not a verifiable domain. You can't outsource it to the agents. You need the humans." - Scott Brinker Scott 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 gen...

"Content was king. Now context is the monarch." — Scott Brinker Scott 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 lan...

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 & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Ma...