Making Sense of Martech

In this episode of Making Sense of Martech, I'm joined by Alex Murrell. He's the strategy director at Epoch in the UK. Epoch is a brand agency and he's worked with seven of the 10 top largest FMCG companies and has a unique voice when it comes to understanding the role in which advertising and marketing agencies play in their client's growth, culture and society at large. Alex recently published a paper that was featured in TMW number #30, titled Adland is an Island. And in it, he unpacks some of the research into the dissonance between the demographics, culture and the interests of agency people, those who do the work for brands and the general population of people who actually receive the works featuring those marketing and advertising efforts. In this episode, we're going to have a very interesting conversation unpacking Adland's demographics, nature of agency work and the, the lives of people who actually do it. Subscribe to The Martech Weekly Newsletter here: www.themartechweekly.com Go here for show notes, links, and resources. Follow Juan on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode of Making Sense of Martech, I'm joined by Ben Mosior, who goes by the moniker of "hired thought." Ben is a writer, podcaster, and strategy consultant who is focused on the principles behind Wardley Mapping, a novel way to work out how to connect your strategies to your customers and their needs. Ben has been featured numerous times in The Martech Weekly Newsletters, including Ben's article - Nobody Cares About Your Precious Framework. We talk about the dysfunctions of product and digital teams in enterprise organizations, how Wardley Mapping works, and creating situational awareness to help teams understand their customers and the competitive landscape better. We also talk about the complex nature of language in emerging industries such as technology, the various stages of company evolution within commercial systems, and connecting purpose to work across organizational structures. Subscribe to The Martech Weekly Newsletter here: www.themartechweekly.com Go here for show notes, links, and resources. Follow Juan on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode of MSoM I'm joined by David Raab, the founder of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) Institute, a vendor-neutral platform that supports the Martech industry with methods, issues, education, and best practice guides for using and managing customer data. Mr. Raab has been consulting in this space for many years, even coining the term "CDP" way back in 2013. We talk about one of David's recent articles - have we reached peak Martech? Which was featured in TMW #030. We explore the state of the marketing technology industry, whether or not it's hit a "peak moment" and what the outlook is for the future of Martech, consumer privacy, and data collection. Subscribe to The Martech Weekly Newsletter here: www.themartechweekly.com Go here for show notes, links, and resources. Follow Juan on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode of MSoM I have a conversation with Peep Laja, the founder and CEO of CXL an e-learning company for digital marketing, Wynter a B2B messaging research platform, and the founder and now board member of the newly rebranded Speero agency, previously the CXL agency in Austin Texas. Peep is someone who has pioneered data-driven marketing and optimization for over a decade, working with some of the world's most sophisticated brands and building unique products to empower people in the industry to get more value out of their data and content. We talk about strategic positioning, the value of messaging over copy, the state of the SaaS and Martech vendor industry, particularly the saturation of technology, and the ways in which companies playing in this space are beating out the competition in their categories. We also touch on discovering unsold problems through customer research, the disconnect between strategy and execution layers in a business, product message fit, and the lack of creative imagination in the marketing technology industry. Subscribe to The Martech Weekly Newsletter here: www.themartechweekly.com Go here for show notes, links, and resources: www.themartechweekly.com/msom-006-peep-laja-on-technological-saturation-and-strategic-positioning/

In this episode of MSoM I have an in-depth conversation with Geoffrey Keating, the head of content marketing at Segment, on the CDP report, an in-depth look into how organizations are using CDPs – exploring the data they're collecting, and the apps they're using to manage it. It was the most clicked-on feature in the TMW newsletter, #028. The report covers trends such as industries adopting CDPs, how brands are now inundated with data, the increasing adoption of CDPs for advertising purposes, and the shift away from channel centric to customer centric approaches to data collection. We talk about the state of CDPs in the market, how Segment was able to process more than a trillion API calls a month, how the landscape of data infrastructure in companies is changing globally and the increasing commoditization of data platforms. Subscribe to The Martech Weekly Newsletter here: www.themartechweekly.com

In this episode of MSoM I had an in-depth conversation with Aarron Spinley on one of his recent articles discussing how the digital industry defines the concept of "experience" which was in the top three clicked of TMW #026. Aarron is a leading growth futurist, doing important work in experience anthropology, customer experience and economics. Aarron has worked at SAP, and most recently works as the SVP of Thunderhead APAC, a cloud based customer engagement platform that was named as a leader in journey orchestration platforms by Forrester in 2020. Aarron lives and breathes understanding the experiences of customers and is currently working on a series called "I beg to differ" a series of articles for marketers, leaders and thinkers. We talk about how ill-defined concepts like customer experience can be a shortcut for confusing an entire industry, the way other industries approach standardizing the definitions of important concepts, how the word experience has become so central to how marketers and digital professionals explain their work, the difference between the service and experience layers in digital strategy, the importance of our emotional state and experiences with a brand and transitioning some of the languages in the industry from experience to engagement. Subscribe to The Martech Weekly Newsletter here: www.themartechweekly.com

In this episode of MSoM I had the pleasure of interviewing Charles Burdett, the founder of Product Club and Workshop Tactics. Charles is a world-class expert in design and UX and his products are trusted by companies like IDEO, Facebook, Lyft and Stanford University. I covered Charle's first product workshop tactics in TMW #007 and since then it's evolved into a thriving community of product and design thinkers from all around the world. We talk about how design-led organizations create better products, why Charles built a company around design culture, how companies and the designers in them are changing how they work, and storytelling in business. We also talk about making the perfect omelet 🍳.

In this episode of MSoM, I'm joined by Ben May the Founder and MD of The Code Company. We talk about the downstream impact of the news media bargaining code and how it changes how publishers do business. Ben has over a decade of experience working with news publishers and media businesses in Australia, particularly from an infrastructure front, building the digital solutions that make news publishers run on the internet. We talk about how media companies should approach Google's News Showcase from an audience, discoverability and data front, the idea of a walled garden approach to hosting news, the real value of Facebook audiences for publishers, and how media companies are already investing in deleveraging the influence and risk associated with big tech.

Making sense of Martech is an irregular set of interviews with some of the most interesting people working in marketing and technology. This podcast is an extension of The Martech Weekly newsletter by going deeper into the most popular topics covered there. You can subscribe at themartechweekly.com In this first-ever episode, I'm joined by Dr. Augustine Fou a marketer of 25 years and a world class expert in advertising fraud. He's taught marketing at NYU and Rutgers University and has worked at companies like American Express, Intel, Omnicom and McKinsey and Company. We discuss the place of academic marketing theory, like the 4 Ps (Product, Price, Promotion and Place) in a world where technology has changed the game for what marketers focus on day to day. We talk about the relevancy of the 4P's during technological disruption and some alternative frameworks. This conversation also sits in the context of Dr. Augustine Fou's defense of a young marketer online and we converse about how marketers should approach public discourse. We also talk about the state of digital, programmatic advertising, its future, and risks on the horizon for advertisers and brands.