The MarTech Matrix

Most marketers use Reddit personally and have no idea how to think about it professionally. This episode changes that. Jonny Waite is the co-founder of RECHO — one of only two full-service White Hat Reddit agencies in the US. With 17 years in digital and deep roots in SEO, paid search, and omnichannel strategy, Jonny has built Reddit programs for some of the biggest brands in the world. In this co...

Most DTC brands aren't losing customers because they stopped caring. They're losing them because they started taking them for granted. Agnes Seville is the Head of Paid Media at Little Sleepies — a fast-growing DTC children's pajama brand with over 500,000 members in their community. In this episode of The Human Side of MarTech, Agnes breaks down the real drivers of DTC customer retent...

Most ecommerce brands think their retargeting is handled. They're running Criteo or Performance Max, hitting their ROAS targets, and moving on. Here's the problem: their platform is only reaching 15–20% of the visitors who bounced from their site. The other 80–85% never see their brand again. In this episode of Inside the Blurb, I sit down with Jason Blom — VP of Strategic Opportunities at...

Your marketing team is investing in technology — but the ROI isn't showing up. Tools go underused. Stacks overlap. Every new rollout feels like dragging people through mud. That's not a vendor problem. It's a structure problem. Jean Guan spent 15 years at CDW building the company's MarTech enablement team from the ground up — from a server sitting under someone's desk to a full...

Most companies are either racing to bolt AI onto everything or frozen because they don't know where to start. Angela Hill does neither. Angela runs e-commerce for Batteries Plus and has spent 20+ years in the industry — enough hype cycles to be skeptical of the next one. Her rule: test it, use it if it solves a real problem, fire it if it doesn't. In this episode of The Human Side of MarTe...

Raf Lopez de Azua graduated from the Naval Academy months before 9/11. By the time he got to his ship, everything had changed. What followed was a career built across government consulting, a Cornell MBA, global brand training at P&G, and now Coty — where he runs global media effectiveness and serves as the company's AI champion. In this episode, we get into: → What 22-year-old wartime lea...

Last-click says one thing. Your CFO doesn't believe it. Your incrementality test says something else entirely. None of those numbers are wrong — they're just not measuring the same thing. In this episode of Inside the Blurb, I sit down with Madan Bharadwaj, founder and CEO of M-Squared. Madan has built four companies inside the attribution and measurement space, including Visual IQ (one of...

If you've been part of an ecommerce replatforming project, you already know the feeling. Six months of your life disappear. Your team can't think about anything else. And at the end of it, you're not even sure the new platform is meaningfully better than the one you left. Steve Deller has watched this story play out for 25 years. As CEO of Virid (https://www.virid.com) — an ecommerce p...

Most vendor outreach fails before it's even opened. And most demos lose the deal before the second slide. In this episode of The Human Side of MarTech, Sean Simon sits down with Chris Seahorn, Co-founder of Boundless Digital — a fractional CMO agency he started two years ago with a longtime colleague after 25+ years in digital marketing at companies like eBags, MapQuest, Naked Wines, and other...

Most DTC brands aren't losing customers because they stopped caring. They're losing them because they started taking them for granted. Agnes Seville is the Head of Paid Media at Little Sleepies — a fast-growing DTC children's pajama brand with over 500,000 members in their community. In this episode of The Human Side of MarTech, Agnes breaks down the real drivers of DTC customer retent...

Most brand marketers talk about what tools they use. Sean Agatep talks about why everything has to earn its place on the P&L. Sean is the co-founder and operator of Vincero Watches — a brand he launched in China with his college friends in 2014. From Kickstarter experiments to Facebook mastery to navigating the AI era, he's built one of the most disciplined approaches to marketing technolo...

Most people in MarTech have sat on one side of the table. Thomas Mercier has sat on all of them. Vendor. Agency. Brand. Publisher. Consultant. From Quantcast to OMD to Activision to WildBrain — Thomas has seen how technology gets bought, sold, evaluated, and ignored from every angle. That makes his take on vendor pitches, ethics, and sustainability unlike almost anyone else's. In this episode,...

The data warehouse model is 60 years old — and AI is about to expose every flaw in it. In this episode of Inside the Blurb, Sean Simon sits down with Kyle Csik, CEO and co-founder of Adaly, to get into what's actually broken about how enterprises handle data, why marketing has been set up to fail from the start, and what a genuinely different model looks like. Kyle spent 15 years on every side...

Summary In this conversation, Sean Simon and Matthew Liu delve into the intricacies of customer intelligence and how brands can leverage behavioral data to make informed marketing decisions. They discuss the methodology behind Insighta, a platform designed to help marketers understand their data, optimize ad spend, and drive growth. Matthew shares insights on the importance of predictive lifetime...

Marketers talk about content like it’s oxygen, but most teams are still short of breath. Budgets are tighter, channels keep multiplying, and the demand for high-performing creative never slows down. That’s the backdrop for my conversation with Tom Logan, CEO of Cohley , on Inside the Blurb . Cohley sits at the intersection of creators, AI, and operations, helping mid-market and enterprise brands t...

In this episode of The MarTech Matrix , Sean Simon sits down with Daina Burnes , CEO & Co-Founder of Bold Metrics , to explore how AI-driven fit intelligence is transforming apparel commerce. Daina shares the origin story of Bold Metrics, how the company predicts over 50 body measurements using simple customer inputs, and why fit uncertainty remains the biggest reason shoppers fail to convert...

Episode Summary Most retailers still sell like it’s 1999: flat product photos, isolated PDPs, and generic campaigns that ignore how people actually use what they buy. In this episode of The MarTech Matrix , Sean sits down with Michelle Bacharach , CEO & Co-founder of FindMine , to talk about how AI-powered styling can finally connect merchandising and marketing — turning single products into f...

For years,  ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)  was the go-to metric for performance marketers. It was simple, clear, and instantly gratifying — the higher, the better. But as  Mark Deruyter  points out in our latest episode of  The MarTech Matrix , that once-reliable metric has quietly become one of the most  misleading KPIs  in modern marketing. We cover: The Problem with ROAS The Better Stack: MER, CAC,...

Presented by The MarTech Matrix — a Blurbs production helping marketers find clarity in the chaos of MarTech. No fluff. Just the truth. Summary Marketers have been “data-driven” for years—but mostly by proxies . In this conversation, Attain President & COO Ben Kartzman joins host Sean Simon to show how connecting ad exposure to permissioned, first-party purchase data changes everything: measur...

Podcasting has never been more culturally relevant. Listeners are engaged, loyal, and attentive — yet the channel continues to punch below its weight when it comes to marketing budgets. Despite commanding millions of daily listeners and deep audience trust, podcast advertising still accounts for a small fraction of total media spend. So what’s holding it back? And what will it take for audio to cl...

Welcome to the Martek Matrix, where we delve into the dynamic world of Connected TV (CTV) advertising. Hosted by Sean Simon, alongside industry experts Dan Larkman, CEO of Keen’s Digital, and Rick Egan, owner of Riviera Marketing, we explore the challenges and opportunities in the rapidly evolving CTV landscape. From fragmented platforms to innovative solutions, our discussions aim to provide clar...

In this episode of the MarTech Matrix, Sean Simon interviews Arthur Root, CEO of Nostra, discussing the critical importance of site speed for e-commerce brands. Arthur explains how Nostra enhances website performance through its Edge Delivery Engine, optimizing load times and improving personalization without compromising user experience. The conversation delves into the technical aspects of site...

Takeaways Pixels are broken.  Nearly half of online conversions (42%) go untracked due to blockers, privacy settings, and attribution window limitations. Sales aren’t just on your site.  40% of eCommerce sales happen off-site (Amazon, Walmart, marketplaces), invisible to pixel tracking. Ad spend leakage.  17% of spend goes into channels like audio and TV that pixels can’t measure, leaving major bl...

In this conversation, Andrew Maff and Sean Simon delve into the complexities of marketing in the e-commerce landscape, particularly focusing on the challenges and strategies surrounding Amazon selling and direct-to-consumer (D2C) approaches. They discuss the importance of balancing Amazon sales with D2C growth, the operational challenges brands face, and the significance of utilizing the right mar...

In this engaging conversation, Sean Simon and Robert Davidman explore their intertwined careers, starting from their early days at AudioNet and Broadcast.com to the evolution of marketing technology. They discuss the impact of the Yahoo acquisition, the rise of Fearless and LS Digital, and the importance of integrating technology into marketing strategies. The conversation also delves into the rol...