Conversations with MarTech
As publishers turn to low-value and AI-generated content, they’re missing out on authenticity and original points of view. Conversations with MarTech is a new series highlighting interesting points of view and interesting roles in the marketing and marketing operations space.Season 1 of Conversations with MarTech debuts in January 2025. The premier season has already recorded five episodes, including:Kara Heater, Director of Marketing for the Savannah Bananas baseball club (What can marketers learn from the Savannah Bananas?)Mark Stouse, CEO of ProofAnalytics (What do C-level executives think of their GTM strategies?)Len Devanna, VP of Customer Experience of Cortico-X. (Voice agen...
What data and AI hide about your customers
Malinda Sandman, global VP of Marketing at Typeform, discusses how AI is reshaping the landscape for B2B and B2C marketers. Malinda dives into why AI might actually be making marketing harder in the short term due to the shift toward a "clickless" environment, how marketing teams can avoid the "garbage in, garbage out" trap of AI tools, and why having more data doesn't necessarily mean you know your customer.
She also shares how Typeform uses AI to conduct scalable customer interviews and bridge the gap between B2B and B2C insights.
It’s time to re-think voice of the customer programs
Are customer surveys officially dead?
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, host Mike Pastore sits down with Mark Treschl, general manager, voice of customer at Quantum Metric and co-founder of OpinionLab.
They dive deep into why traditional long-form surveys, endless feedback requests, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are failing both consumers and brands — and what modern companies must do instead to truly understand customer behavior.
📌 Episode highlights
The Death of Traditional Surveys: Why more than 50% of consumers stop responding to direct surveys and silently walk away from brands that ignore them.
The CMO role is evolving before our very eyes
Is the CMO role truly dying, or are modern marketers just setting themselves up for failure?
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, host Mike Pastore sits down with Kyle Lacy, CMO at Docebo, to break down the real reasons major brands are eliminating executive marketing positions.
Kyle exposes the biggest traps holding modern marketers back — from over-indexing on pipeline numbers to letting AI replace human connection — and outlines what it actually takes to build a brand that is impossible to ignore.
Key Takeaways
The Production House Trap: Why viewi...
Classic Marketing Automation is Dead: What’s Next?
Are the days of classic marketing automation officially over?
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we dive deep into the massive paradigm shift happening across the marketing industry as basic, rule-based automation gives way to truly autonomous marketing.
We explore why a superficial "thin layer" of AI is no longer enough for modern marketers and look at how the next generation of tools must leverage deep customer context to remain relevant.
If you've ever wondered whether AI content creation is actually saving you time — or just creating more clutter to clean up — this...
B2B marketing attribution is messy. Can it be fixed?
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we’re joined by Mehul Nagrani, CEO of Integrate, to break down the complexities of modern B2B marketing, the reality of attribution, and where demand generation is heading over the next five years.
Mehul shares his perspective on why B2B marketing will always be a mix of art and science, how humans naturally complicate technology and measurement, and why Integrate recently acquired multi-touch attraibution platform CaliberMind.
He also touches on why chasing a single "silver bullet" metric can ruin your strategy, how marketers can bal...
AI search is changing e-commerce forever
The way consumers search for products is fundamentally changing. Instead of the traditional, rigid six-word queries used on standard search engines, shoppers are now inputting detailed, 24-word "rambling" questions packed with context and use cases.
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we sit down with Lucas Tieleman, co-founder of Opiversal, to explore the profound impact of AI search engines and large language models (LLMs) on online shopping.
This conversation dives deep into how AI-native technology bridges the gap between natural language search and traditional retail catalogs, and what it means for the f...
Does Anyone Understand the CDP Market Anymore?
The customer data platform (CDP) market has completely reinvented itself over the past 18 months, evolving rapidly in response to a landscape filled with fractured data silos and failed implementations.
Historically, many organizations were left scarred by traditional CDP rollouts — enduring multi-million dollar, multi-year projects that focused too heavily on features rather than actual customer outcomes.
Today, the integration of AI is reshaping how businesses manage customer experiences, flipping the old-school implementation model on its head to focus entirely on growth and tangible outcomes.
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we sit down wi...
Your next CMO will come from marketing operations
Is the traditional, purely creative CMO becoming extinct?
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we sit down with Valeria Balaro, CMO at the AI-native technology consulting firm Star, to discuss the big shift redefining marketing leadership.
Driven by the rise of AU, increasing revenue accountability, and the absolute demand for clear ROI, the CMO role is rapidly transitioning from a creative focus to a critical technology leadership position. Because marketing leaders can no longer delegate technical data and infrastructure decisions, the path to the top is changing.
Valeria shares insights fr...
What’s Next in Content Operations? Agents (What Else?)
The sheer volume of content modern marketing teams are expected to produce is reaching a breaking point. Between shifting global regulatory landscapes like the EU AI Act, constant updates to copyright laws, and the pressure to maintain an authentic brand voice, marketers are caught in a permanent state of triage.
In the season four premiere of Conversations with MarTech, we sit down with Misti Vogt, SVP of Engagement at Orange Logic, to discuss why the traditional ways of managing digital assets are failing, and why the future of content operations belongs to "agentic" systems.<...
Practical advice for scaling start-up marketing
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 the realities of scaling marketing for early-stage startups.
Abby discusses the critical importance of clarity, earning founder trust, and building a technic...
How Publicis Sapient transformed its marketing organization
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 and capacity — reducing campaign go-to-market times from 20 days down to just three.
Among the topics discussed in this episode:
Why deploying technology to fix broken systems doesn't work and how to rethink wor...Managing marketing content in the age of AI
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 artificial intelligence on marketing operations.
Among the topics we cover:
Managing the proliferation of digital assets and the necessity of human judgment in an AI-driven era
Moving beyond translation to localization to...
How events are helping marketers cut through the noise
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 marketing at Optimizely, to explore how brands are cutting through modern content bombardment by prioritizing human connection and immersive storytelling by leaning on the value...
AI won't save a broken organization
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 martech stacks and how to pivot for an AI-driven future.
Among the topics we discuss:
• Navigating the complexity of legacy applications and point solutions by focusing on eight essential technology domains.
• Viewing the flow...
What's the future of AI and RCS in mobile messaging?
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 customer loyalty.
Discover why RCS (rich communication services) is becoming a game-changer for branded, engaging, and trusted messaging, and learn about the technical "tightrope" brands m...
A challenger brand takes on the stacks
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 marketing technology and the "integration tax" companies pay when managing complex, brittle tech stacks that can lead to data loss and inefficient sales processes.
Khan also shares ho...
How to focus marketing on high-impact work
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 on the strategic and creative tasks that challenge them and turn out to be fun.
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we’re ta...
A whole new way to think about TV advertising
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 advertisers to insert their products and brands into TV content in a programmatic-like way, on short notice, with targeting, adding a whole new wrinkle to a medium that’s ruled the a...
Lessons from a first-time CMO
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 MarTech, we’re talking to Steven Quach, CMO at Pipedrive, about his first few months as a CMO.
...
What to expect from the next phase of retail media
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 sites often find themselves working with each individual platform.
Retail media will also face a challenge from AI, as LLMs and AI agents begin to flatten the traditional...
The agentic web meets the digital ad ecosystem
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 advertisers and publishers.
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we’re talking to Karim Rayes, chief product officer at programmatic advertising platform Nexxen, about how the ad ecosystem uses AI now...
Decoding today’s digital experience
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 traffic is down. Discovery is more fragmented. LLM visitors behave differently from search visitors and time on websites is decreasing.
All of these data points impact how mar...
The age of the AI shopping agent isn't here... yet
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 in their shopping; what stands between AI-assisted shopping experiences and AI agents that do the shopping for us; and how brands are keeping pace wi...
AI’s disruption of online commerce is just starting
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 the use of AI agents to do your holiday shopping for you is still quite a ways off for many people, AI will still create si...
Your technical debt is crushing your bottom line
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 martech stack is no exception.
In this episode, we’re talking with Tara DeZao, senior product marketing director at Pegasystems, about technical debt, whether AI can help solve the problem and how all of this play...
The secret to happy customers is...your data layer
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 data, and it’s continued to evolve to real-time data and now an AI-powered data layer that helps deliver real-time conversations to customers.
In this...
Struggling with marketing measurement? You're not alone
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 improvement.
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we’re talking to Matt Spiegel, EVP of growth for TransUnion’s TruAudience business, about the state of marketing measurement, the role of AI and what’s ahead...
It's time for AI to join your workflows
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 Conversations with MarTech, we’re talking to Jason Ing, CMO of Typeface, about integrating AI into workflows, managing hybrid teams of humans and AI agents...
The CMO who blew up her company's website
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 exploring how to move past traditional text-and-image layouts to build a site that actually works as hard as your team does.
Episode guide
Episode guide
0:45: Meet Danika Wong & Satisfi...
Your SEO Playbook is Toast: Welcome to Search in 2026
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. This is a practical, no-nonsense guide to rebuilding your SEO playbook for the future.
Episode Guide
00:00 Introduction to Playbook Broken
00:08 Meet Miriam Jesse: The SEO Expert
00:31 The Broken SEO Playbook
What’s the state of the enterprise B2B buyer?
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 buying for the enterprise. Not only is it easier to conduct research with LLMs, but AI’s ability to spawn companies quickly means the market is as crowded and noisy as ever.
The CDP Fantasy Is over: Data Chaos Ends Here with Tejas Manohar
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 organizations still struggle to activate their data, and how AI is finally enabling the kind of individualized marketing the industry has chased for decades. From broken batch-and-blast tactics to the rise of automat...
Why isn’t there more creativity in B2B marketing?
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 difficult to measure. And that’s part of the point behind an endeavor like ROI: The Musical — it would be challenging to measure the ROI of the musical itself.
Blowing up the Dashboard: Rethinking Data, AI and the Real Customer Journey with Philip Armstrong
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 how Fear of Better Options (FOBO) shapes customer behavior, why no one truly “owns” the customer journey, and how generative AI is changing...
What comes after 'data-driven' marketing?
For the past several years, “data-driven” and “marketing” have gone together like milk and cookies. You might even describe yourself as a “data-driven” marketer in your LinkedIn profile.
But have you thought about what comes next?
Neej Gore, chief data officer at Zeta Global, says advances in AI and predictive capabilities might soon mean data-driven is looking backwards, which is exactly the opposite of what everyone was hoping to accomplish with being data-driven in the first place.
I sat down with Neej at Zeta Live!, the company’s annual event in New York City, t...
Your Workflow Is Dead! How AI Just NUKED Marketing as We Know It
This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.
How to make sense of all of that marketing data with Anssi Rusi
Marketers are collecting more data than ever before in the rush to be data-driven, but the amount of data is overwhelming, especially for small teams that don’t have access to data scientists.
In this conversation with Anssi Rusi, CEO of Supermetrics, we dive into the challenges marketing teams face with their data and whether AI is the force equalizer to help marketing teams find the insights and value hidden in their data faster.
We also discuss the state of the customer data platform (CDP) market, as earlier this year Supermetrics acquired real-time CDP...
Playbook Broken: Mind Over Machine: Nate St. Pierre's AI Uprising
Playbook Broken: Mind Over Machine: Nate St. Pierre's AI Uprising
Join us as we discuss with Nate St. Pierre, founder of Youbots.ai, about democratizing AI, the nuanced role of AI in creativity, and the balance between human ingenuity and automation. Discover insights into marketing strategies in the age of AI, evolving agency playbooks, and enabling small businesses to punch above their weight class using AI tools. Nate shares his inspirational journey from a marketing strategist to an AI builder, emphasizing the power of context in utilizing AI effectively. #AI #MarketingStrategy #Youbots #Creativity
00:00 Introduction to...
Content and brand tips for the AI era with Drew Brucker
AI is creating a lot of anxiety among content creators and creatives, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
AI can help these teams scale their work, deliver better results and assist in amplification in ways humans alone could only dream.
Among the tasks where I can help creatives:
Atomizing long-form content.Assisting in draft and ideation.Helping keep content on brand.In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we’re talking to Drew Brucker, head of brand and content at webinar and video platform provider Goldcast, about how AI can boost...
Broken Playbooks and Broken Bones: Reinventing B2B with Ryan Nelsen
In this episode of Playbook Broken, Marc interviews Ryan Nelsen, CMO of StackAdapt. They delve into AI-fueled advertising strategies, enterprise marketing, and the reinvention of high-performance marketing at scale. Ryan shares his experiences from his career, which includes helping companies like Qualtrics and MX achieve significant growth. They discuss topics such as the shift from tools to revolutions in marketing, the importance of blending B2C tactics into B2B strategies, and the challenges of launching innovative products.
Ryan also recounts how he overcame a broken femur just weeks into his n...
