Making Sense of Martech

Salesforce Buys Braze: Bonfire, Meet Trailblazers

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

What the Buck? Marketing Wins Each Season with the Bucks' Justin Price

Justin Price is the senior manager of multichannel marketing at the Milwaukee Bucks. He built the team's SMS program from scratch inside a legacy Marketo stack. The welco

What Client-Side Wishes Agencies Knew with Courtney Tierney

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 cu

Consolidate vs. Best-of-Breed with Mindbody's Vinicius Rodrigues

"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 frag

The Dumb Pipe with Peter Oleson (Part 2)

"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 Ol

The Dumb Pipe with Peter Oleson (Part 1)

"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

Inside the RCS Approval Black Box with Stephanie Griffith

Stephanie Griffith has experience in retention and lifecycle marketing across brand, agency, and platform roles, making her a rare, credible voice on RCS business messagi

How Babylist Gained 600 Hours Back with Elizabeth Martin

"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

Lipstick on a Pig

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

The Human Behind The Humans of Martech with Phil Gamache

"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

Icarus Met His Maker: Why We Trusted the Wrong People

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 G

Industry Awards: Earned, Bought, or Invented? with Jonathan Harrop

"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 wor

Touch Grass: What OpenAI's Summer Camp Actually Sold Us

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 programmi

With MCP, There's No Sheriff with Israa Alrawi

"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 ris

How to Be an Unhinged $1.4B Unicorn

"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 hone

You're Getting Gouged on Compute with Luke Ambrosetti

"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 Luk

Stop Ignoring the $1.3 Trillion Gap with Sarah Gallardo

"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

AI Was A Waste of Time, Until It Wasn't with Megan Boshuyzen

"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 faste

Ticket Taker vs. Problem Solver: Be Irreplaceable with Darrell Alfonso

"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." - Darrel

Martech Tools Should Serve, Not Dictate with Bree Graham, ex-CashApp & Afterpay

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 t