← All topics
Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 9, Week 26

Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 9, Week 26

Salesforce agreed to acquire Fin for $3.6B and MoEngage acquired Aampe's per-customer decisioning engine. A practitioner's read on week 26, and why the agent story is shifting from build to buy.
The CDP–CEP Architecture Decision: How to Choose the Right Pattern - Part 2

The CDP–CEP Architecture Decision: How to Choose the Right Pattern - Part 2

After mapping the three CDP–CEP wiring patterns, this is the practical framework for choosing which architecture fits your organisation.
Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 8, Week 25

Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 8, Week 25

Databricks launched an agentic CDP inside the lakehouse, GEO became a buyable category almost overnight, and Salesforce shipped Summer '26. A practitioner's read on week 25, and why the customer-data layer and the visibility layer just moved at the same time.
Salesforce, Adobe and the New Battle for the Content Layer

Salesforce, Adobe and the New Battle for the Content Layer

Salesforce's agreement to acquire Contentful is not just a CMS move. It is another chapter in the long-running competition with Adobe over who owns the architecture connecting customer data, content, journeys and AI execution.
The CDP–CEP Architecture Decision: Three Patterns, Three Different Bets - Part 1

The CDP–CEP Architecture Decision: Three Patterns, Three Different Bets - Part 1

Activation inside the CDP, the CDP inside the CEP, or best-of-breed apart: three ways to wire customer data and engagement, and what each choice really implies.
Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 6, Week 23

Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 6, Week 23

Marketo brings MCP to the MAP layer, Iterable ships the unglamorous fundamentals, Mailchimp complicates its own strategic signal, and vendors start selling agents as a business model rather than a feature. A practitioner's read on week 23.
Zero-Copy Engagement: When the Warehouse Becomes the Campaign Brain

Zero-Copy Engagement: When the Warehouse Becomes the Campaign Brain

Zero-copy activation is not just a new integration pattern. It is a signal that customer engagement architecture is moving closer to the data warehouse, and that the composable CDP idea is becoming part of the broader engagement stack.
Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 4, Week 21

Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 4, Week 21

AJO's May release, Bloomreach's governance update, and Klaviyo's AWS Marketplace listing all point in the same direction: the infrastructure layer of enterprise customer engagement is being rebuilt, quietly, one release at a time.
Email Isn't Dead. It's Being Rebuilt From the Inbox Up.

Email Isn't Dead. It's Being Rebuilt From the Inbox Up.

After 25 years, email is still the highest-ROI channel in the stack. But the platforms delivering it in 2026 are fundamentally different and the practitioners who treat email as a legacy channel are falling behind.
The Year the Editor Came Back

The Year the Editor Came Back

A personal reflection on how AI-assisted work reshaped my practice: from AI as a thinking surface to AI as a building partner, and what that means for MarTech architecture.
Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 2, Week 19

Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 2, Week 19

Hightouch at $2.75B, Canva buying Ortto, Braze's operational consolidation drop and AJO's march toward autonomous journey management. This week's signals are unusually clear about the direction of the marketing stack.
Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 1, Week 18

Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 1, Week 18

Agentic Marketing Is No Longer a Roadmap Item. A week of MarTech releases that belong together: AJO's orchestration intelligence layer, MCP going platform-wide, Klaviyo changing the e-commerce equation, Segment's warehouse-native pivot and the governance question nobody has answered yet.
Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me — Part 0

Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me — Part 0

For 25+ years I tried to stay current in this industry through newsletters, bookmarks, RSS feeds and conference roadmaps. None of it worked as a system. What I needed wasn't more sources, it was a process. So I built a reading agent that scans official release notes every week and gives me a structured picture of what actually changed.
AJO March 2026 Release: Landing Page Custom Forms Reach GA and Why That Matters More Than It Sounds

AJO March 2026 Release: Landing Page Custom Forms Reach GA and Why That Matters More Than It Sounds

Adobe Journey Optimizer's March 2026 release promotes Landing Page Custom Forms to General Availability. A practitioner's look at what first-party data capture directly in AJO actually unlocks, and the other quiet-but-important updates in this release.
MDP, CDP, CEP: The Acronym War Nobody Asked For (But Every Marketer Needs to Understand)

MDP, CDP, CEP: The Acronym War Nobody Asked For (But Every Marketer Needs to Understand)

Martech has a naming problem. Every few years a new (or rather, a resurrected one) acronym shows up promising to solve what the previous…
2026 Field Notes on Customer Engagement Platforms — Part 4: Adobe Journey Optimizer

2026 Field Notes on Customer Engagement Platforms — Part 4: Adobe Journey Optimizer

Why Adobe Journey Optimizer is Part 4 (and why “suite gravity” changes everything)
2026 Field Notes on Customer Engagement Platforms — Part 2: Bloomreach

2026 Field Notes on Customer Engagement Platforms — Part 2: Bloomreach

Why Bloomreach is Part 2 (and why it’s a very different CEP story than Braze)
2026 Field Notes on Customer Engagement Platforms — Part 0

2026 Field Notes on Customer Engagement Platforms — Part 0

Why this series exists
When CDP Meets CEP: The Convergence of Data and Activation in the Age of Algorithmic Empathy

When CDP Meets CEP: The Convergence of Data and Activation in the Age of Algorithmic Empathy

The MarTech landscape is collapsing the distance between customer data and customer action.
The End of Batch-and-Blast: From Marketing Automation to Agentic Engagement — Part 2

The End of Batch-and-Blast: From Marketing Automation to Agentic Engagement — Part 2

The architectural revolution that eliminated Latency Debt: the mandatory leap from slow batch processing to Real-Time Intelligence.
The End of Batch-and-Blast: From Marketing Automation to Agentic Engagement — Part 1

The End of Batch-and-Blast: From Marketing Automation to Agentic Engagement — Part 1

After 25 years in MarTech, I’ve watched “Marketing Automation” die a slow death. The modern customer demands a Real-Time System of…
🧬 PART 3 — Agentic Marketing: The Next Frontier Where AI and Human Creativity Meet

🧬 PART 3 — Agentic Marketing: The Next Frontier Where AI and Human Creativity Meet

The future of marketing isn’t automation — it’s collaboration between human imagination and machine intelligence.
⚙️ PART 2 — The AI Imperative: How Intelligent Systems Are Transforming Customer Engagement

⚙️ PART 2 — The AI Imperative: How Intelligent Systems Are Transforming Customer Engagement

The Leap from Static Rules to Algorithmic Personalization
🪄 PART 1 — The Day We Traded Empathy for Efficiency: Why Marketing Automation is Broken

🪄 PART 1 — The Day We Traded Empathy for Efficiency: Why Marketing Automation is Broken

How the pursuit of scale led to the Algorithmic Apathy — and why the next years belong to real-time, event-driven Customer Engagement.