Articles about
martech

CDP is the acronym that beat every rival to become the default name for the customer data layer, then began dissolving into packaged, warehouse-native and agentic patterns. Winning the naming war did not settle the architecture.

DMP ran a decade of digital advertising and then collapsed. The strange part is that the standalone marketing DMP collapsed even though the event meant to kill it never happened. Third-party cookies survived Google's 2025 reversal. The DMP died anyway.

Hightouch's LiveRamp bid, Zeta's Palantir partnership, Databricks CustomerLake and Tealium Context API all point to the same shift: the identity and context layer is contested ground again.

Customer Engagement Platform absorbed ESP and MAP, then collided with CDP. That is why it is useful, vague, and dangerous to buy against.

Marketing Automation encoded the funnel into software. It still fits B2B well, but its campaign-tempo model explains why B2C moved toward event-driven engagement.

The Email Service Provider faded as a category, but its function still sits inside every modern engagement stack: delivery, reputation, consent, and suppression.

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.

After mapping the three CDP–CEP wiring patterns, this is the practical framework for choosing which architecture fits your organisation.

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'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.

Salesforce signs a definitive agreement to acquire Contentful, agentic marketing platforms converge on the same agent-plus-MCP pattern, and MCP moves beyond engagement into measurement and GTM data. A practitioner's read on why governance is becoming the real differentiator.

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.

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 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.

MCP is moving from isolated platform news to a common access layer for customer engagement platforms. Braze shows the agentic workflow direction, Adobe shows the operational discipline required, and the CDP market shows why the data foundation matters.

Agentic AI promises to make powerful MarTech platforms easier to use, but unless the architecture underneath is ready, it may simply move complexity from the interface to the operating model.

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.

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 Insider One/Bluecore acquisition reframes the CEP M&A logic, Klaviyo reveals the full scope of its B2C CRM ambition, HubSpot builds AI inbox simulation into pre-send review, and Salesforce MCN's consent gap finally closes.

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.

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.

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.

Why Iterable Is Part 6 (and Why It Is the Moment Engine Archetype)

Eight Canvas journeys, seven email templates, a 110-user CSV, and two Word documents, how the operational layer of a Braze sales demo gets built, and where AI assistance ends and human judgment begins.

How I designed and built a working Braze sales demo for an enterprise prospect, why I chose a real site instead of a sandbox, and where Claude Cowork genuinely accelerated the implementation.

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.

A personal reflection on building a website with Astro, Vercel, and Claude Cowork and what AI-assisted development reveals about prototyping, authorship, and the return to hands-on building.

Martech has a naming problem. Every few years a new (or rather, a resurrected one) acronym shows up promising to solve what the previous…

Why Salesforce is Part 5 (and why “CRM gravity” is a different kind of gravity)

Why Adobe Journey Optimizer is Part 4 (and why “suite gravity” changes everything)

Why Insider One is Part 3 (and why it sits at the crossroads of CEP and “Experience Optimization”)

Why Bloomreach is Part 2 (and why it’s a very different CEP story than Braze)

Why this series exists (and why I’m starting with Braze)

Why this series exists

The MarTech landscape is collapsing the distance between customer data and customer action.

The architectural revolution that eliminated Latency Debt: the mandatory leap from slow batch processing to Real-Time Intelligence.

After 25 years in MarTech, I’ve watched “Marketing Automation” die a slow death. The modern customer demands a Real-Time System of…

The future of marketing isn’t automation — it’s collaboration between human imagination and machine intelligence.

The Leap from Static Rules to Algorithmic Personalization

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