Making Sense of Martech

As 2025 closes out, Juan and Jacqueline team up with Keanu Taylor, The Martech Weekly's Head of Research, to read the tea leaves on what 2026 has in store for marketing technology. Their forecast is a "make or break" year in which the winners won't be the loudest early adopters, but the teams whose data and operating habits are clean enough for AI actually to stick. Keanu predicts a sharper split between the AI "haves" and "have-nots," with organizational readiness acting like gravity on every agent, model, and workflow. The bet: 2026 will expose which stacks are built for decisions, not demos — and which ones were never ready for either. Timestamps 01:08 ExactTarget's 25th Birthday/Anniversary 03:54 Prediction 1: AI Agent Adoption and Readiness 10:35 Prediction 2: The Rise of AI Decisioning Silos 21:48 Prediction 3: CDP and CEP/ESP Stack Consolidation Brought 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 www.hightouch.com/msom. Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Engage with the community on Reddit and follow Making Sense of Martech on LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube. Leave a review, share with your team, and send us your questions and confessions. We may feature you in an upcoming episode! https://theMartechweekly.com/podcast/question/ https://theMartechweekly.com/podcast/confession-corner/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MSoMPodcast/comments/1morng8/office_hours_questions/

"Marketing to marketers is the dream job, but it makes everything that much more high stakes." – Jacqueline In this Hot Seat episode, Jacqueline sits down with Jason, CMO at Customer.io, to ask a simple question: what would it actually take to make martech cool again? Drawing on stints at Dropbox, BetterCloud, and Microsoft, he unpacks how brand storytelling, design, and experience can turn forgettable software into something people genuinely want to be around — and why so many teams lost that plot after the early cloud-era glory days. From Bob Ross livestreams to "Raiders of the Lost Lifecycle," this is a playbook for injecting swagger back into marketing without sacrificing pipeline, rigor, or credibility. Sponsor Brought 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 www.hightouch.com/msom. Timestamps 00:25 – First Martech tools, Mixpanel obsession, and Jason's weekly grilled cheese ritual 06:30 – Shaping brand storytelling: experience at Dropbox, BetterCloud, Microsoft 11:43 – What made early Salesforce so magnetic and why Martech lost its spark 16:40 – Making Martech cool again: inside Customer.io's Bob Ross, Hot Ones, and Raiders of the Lost Lifecycle concepts and playful brand identity 20:00 – What modern marketers actually want from live experiences 25:55 – Can mascots, memes, and influencers bring consumer fandom dynamics to Martech? Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Engage with the community on Reddit and follow Making Sense of Martech on LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube. Leave a review, share with your team, and send us your questions and confessions. We may feature you in an upcoming episode! Questions: https://themartechweekly.com/podcast/question/ Confessions: https://themartechweekly.com/podcast/confession-corner/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MSoMPodcast/comments/1morng8/office_hours_questions/ Production Credit: Edited and produced by @the32collective_ / https://www.the32collective.co/

"Adobe didn't just buy an SEO tool – it bought a negotiating position with the AI overlords of discovery." – Juan Jacqueline and Juan unpack what "more human" marketing actually looks like when AI is mediating everything from search to Black Friday deals. They break down Adobe's acquisition of Semrush, quarterly Martech earnings, the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shift toward mobile-plus-AI shopping, BNPL's surge, and ChatGPT's three-year impact on how people search, think, and buy. Brought 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 www.hightouch.com/msom. Timestamps 00:04 – MWF NYC debrief and why this year felt like a turning point for Martech 05:10 – Stranger Things and what "good" co-marketing actually looks like 10:30 – Woo-Woo vs data: how much of marketing is still intuition dressed up in dashboards 16:20 – Adobe buys Semrush: GEO data, media consolidation, and why Adobe blinked on AI search 24:40 – Quarterly Martech earnings: mid-market outpaces the enterprise and AI narratives without ROI 33:30 – BFCM early numbers: mobile-plus-AI shopping, BNPL growth, and fewer margin-killing discounts 36:56 – ChatGPT's third anniversary: national rollbacks and the societal risks of AI 42:15 – Subscriber question: How to drive change inside organizations when tooling and incentives clash? Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Engage with the community on Reddit and follow Making Sense of Martech on LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube. Leave a review, share with your team, and send us your questions and confessions. We may feature you in an upcoming episode! https://theMartechweekly.com/podcast/question/ https://theMartechweekly.com/podcast/confession-corner/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MSoMPodcast/comments/1morng8/office_hours_questions/

"If you're not treating deliverability as revenue insurance, you're already losing money." — Matt This Hot Seat episode puts Matt McFee, an email veteran and founder of Inbox Monster, under the microscope. Jacqueline digs into how he went from Wall Street and Yahoo to co-founding BriteVerify, acquired by Validity, and why he thinks most brands are still wildly underestimating deliverability. He unpacks why inbox placement is really a revenue insurance program, not just a technical hygiene task, and why the real customer "moment of value" usually happens months after the contract is signed. Brought 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 www.hightouch.com/msom. Timestamps 01:03 – What would make Martech better? 05:22 – What 25 years in email have taught him about the inbox 07:32 – Lightbulb moment that led to found BriteVerify and Inbox Monster 11:58 – AI previews, creative rendering, and why annotations actually matter 15:48 – What marketers should be paying more attention to in deliverability 19:55 – Quantifying deliverability as a revenue insurance program for stakeholders 25:02 – Opinions on industry innovation and consolidation 28:23 – What vendors can do to better help marketers Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Engage with the community on Reddit and follow us on LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube. Leave a review, share with your team, and send us your questions and confessions. We may feature you in an upcoming episode! Questions: https://themartechweekly.com/podcast/question/ Confessions: https://www.themartechweekly.com/podcast/confession-corner/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MSoMPodcast/comments/1morng8/office_hours_questions/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/making-sense-of-martech

"Zero party data reflects what customers say they want; first party data reveals what they actually do." – David In this Hot Seat episode, Jacqueline sits down with David Joosten, co-founder of GrowthLoop and coauthor of First-Party Data Activation, to unpack why so many brands are "doing" first-party data yet still serving generic experiences. They dig into the tension between what customers say versus how they behave, and why marketers need to reconcile that gap with experimentation, empathy, and better use of their own data. Discover why embracing AI decisioning and continuous experimentation are crucial, and learn how to navigate the ethical red lines of using first-party data and AI responsibly in marketing. A must-listen for marketers looking to future-proof their data strategy. David goes deep on why composable should be the default (not a buzzword), how to think about clean rooms without creeping out your customers, and what AI decisioning actually changes about the marketer's job. From compound growth engines and agentic workflows to team structures and org politics, this is a roadmap for leaders who want first-party data to drive real, measurable growth — not just prettier dashboards. This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our sponsor Hightouch. Looking for a smarter way to activate your customer data? Hightouch is 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 www.hightouch.com/msom. Timestamps 01:03 - Rapid Fire: AI generated content (Yay or Nay) and the marketing buzzword that needs to go. 02:30 - Is there ever a time to use third-party data ethically?. 03:54 - The most underrated skill for marketers today. 07:06 - Reconciling the gap between zero-party data (aspiration) and first-party data (behavior). 09:16 - The evolving role of first-party data in the next 3-5 years. 11:50 - Can clean rooms truly scale without compromising trust, and what's the next evolution of ethical data collaboration? 17:18 - What a "future-ready" Martech stack looks like in practice. 21:30 - Ethical red lines for AI: ensuring innovation respects privacy. 33:53 - The three-part advice for CMOs looking to future-proof their data strategy. Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Engage with the community on Reddit and follow Making Sense of Martech on LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube. Leave a review, share with your team, and send us your questions and confessions. We may feature you in an upcoming episode! https://theMartechweekly.com/podcast/question/ https://theMartechweekly.com/podcast/confession-corner/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MSoMPodcast/comments/1morng8/office_hours_questions/