I keep saying, "context" is the word of the year in martech. 😀 Many facets to that, to be sure. But the most important context to understand is the context of our customers. In B2B, acquiring accurate intent signals from your target accounts, understanding them, and being able to quickly take action on them is crucial to successfully running account-based marketing. But it's become even more important as we lay the foundation for greater customer context to be captured and operationalized throughout our (increasingly agentic) martech stack. The team at Influ2 is launching a new capability with their platform to expand the circle of that intent with individual people at accounts that *should* be on your list. On November 5 at 12pm ET, I'll be joining Anna Tsymbalist and Caroline Hsu to talk through this new capability and what it makes possible. Register here to join us for the disucssion: pba.influ2.com/discovery-rel…

Want NEW data on which martech categories are "open" through APIs and MCPs? Want revisualized data on which martech categories are becoming AI-native, AI-augmented, or AI-custom-built? Good news! You can immediately download two mini-reports that cover both of those by signing up for our upcoming Martech for 2027 report and launch event. Martech for 2027 will be launched on December 1, but you'll receive links to download these two mini-reports today when you register for the event. Frans Riemersma and I have so much research data on the state of martech and where it's headed for 2027 that we can't fit it all in the main report we'll be launching. So we're packaging up several of these extra views as bonus items for our friends and supporters. There's a grid in the "How Open Is the Martech Stack?" mini-report in particular that I think you'll find especially interesting. 😀 chiefmartec.com/martech2027

Context. Context. Context. Coherence? In this week's chiefmartec newsletter, I dig into marketing's pace layers through the lens of context — which is a word that's thrown around in martech these days without a tremendous amount of clarity as to exactly what that means. Buzzwordiness aside, I genuinely believe context — getting the right instructions, relevant data, and permissioned tools to agentic experiences and workflows at the right moment — is where the most exciting innovation in martech is happening now. But it's more complex than just a couple of .md files and a log of customer interactions. Examining context at the different pace layers of marketing gives some appreciation for the depth of what it consists of in totality and what's required to leverage it programmatically. And there's some urgency for us to wrap our arms around this. Because I'm seeing the explosion of AI campaign creation and optimization opening up two significant gaps: 1. An alignment gap, where the explosion of AI-created campaigns and micro-campaigns is happening at a speed that is outstripping a lot of the institutional and tribal governance mechanisms we've had in place to keep campaigns aligned with our larger brand and business. 2. A coordination gap, where the fan-out of hyper-personalized and self-improving campaign iterations is successfully optimizing individual touchpoints while fragmenting the collective customer experience as a whole. I provide a few ideas for how to address those — and also make a promise for a much deeper dive into this as part of our upcoming Martech for 2027 report. Spoiler alert: to make context successful at speed and scale, the real challenge is how to orchestrate coherence. If you read the newsletter, I'd love to hear what you think. Are you seeing the alignment gap or the coordination gap showing up in your world? newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p…

If you attend only one online event this year... hopefully it's because you're spending more time away from your screen, touching grass, and letting the algorithms chatter without you. 🌿 But if you want the deepest, independent view of how martech is taking shape for 2027, Frans Riemersma and I will will make you 5 promises for our annual lookahead event and report: 1. The research we'll share with you — on agents, apps-to-infrastructure, the "golden context", MCP, scaled orchestration, and a value engineerng framework to make it all deliver outcomes — will be the real deal. No fluff. 2. By registering for our event, you'll be the very first to get our full Martech for 2027 report. We've got a pretty good track record of calling the industry's key themes ahead of the crowd — which will put *you* ahead of the crowd. 3. Our Martech for 2027 report is 100% designed and written by humans: me, Frans, and our insanely talented designer Angela Ribeiro da Silva. Ironic for a report that will help you harness AI? Perhaps. But we believe the passion and soul that flows from slopless, authentic human creativity is CRUCIAL to marketing in AI world. We intentionally choose every word — and every em dash. This philosophy is not incongruent with martech. It's integral to it. (See what I did there?) 4. We'll share a few exclusive bonus items that will only be available to people who register for our launch event. There's so much we've uncovered in our research this year that we can't squeeze it all into one report. But we'll share additional resources with you that I think you'll find pretty darn fascinating on their own. 5. We'll make it entertaining too — because laughter is also the spark of inspiration. 😀 To hold us to these promises, sign up for free here: chiefmartec.com/martech2027 Oh, and one more bonus promise: 6. After our keynote, the interviews Frans and I will do with executives from our sponsors will not be boring, repackaged product marketing. We'll be asking them hard questions about what went wrong in 2026, where the heck differentiation lives in a AI-saturated marketing environment, what stays human (becuse of our values or because the tech isn't ready?), and — because we want to have a little fun — which marketing acronym they'd love to kill. While they have no influence on or advance preview of our research and editorial narrative of Martech for 2027, the support of these 7 sponsors makes it possible for me and Frans to invest the months of work required for this project. You can support us by supporting them: GrowthLoop, Hightouch, Progress Software, SAS, Snowflake, Treasure AI, and WebEngage. Reserve your spot now — you won't want to miss this. Promise. ❤️

Last chance! Weigh in on what's the context that *really* matters at your company. All the AI tech-talk of context windows, context graphs, context engineering, might turn out to be the smallest part of the equation. But Frans Riemersma and I need to hear from you to get the ground truth: surveymonkey.com/r/TheContex… We'll be doing our analysis next week, so please take a couple minutes to weigh in. It's good martech karma, and there are some bonus thank-you's you can opt in for. Thank you! 🙏 ♥️

“Build me a beloved brand, a consistently great customer experience, and an ecosystem of partners and customers who enthusiastically recommend us. Budget: unlimited tokens.” There’s a problem with this prompt. And it ain’t token budget. Mimicking what a great business says and does isn’t the same as building an organization that consistently delivers it or earning the relationships that make it possible. You can vibe code a feature. You can’t vibe code a brand. AI can accelerate the work. It can’t replicate the advantage embedded in an organization’s DNA — how its choices, trade-offs, relationships, and follow-through fit together, reinforce each other, and compound over time. That’s what I explore in my latest chiefmartec newsletter through two under-leveraged sources of differentiation: experiences and ecosystems. It also led me to an unexpected upside of Martec’s Law: The same forces that make organizations slow to change can make their advantages slow to copy. newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p…

Too snarky to say that spending $22.5 million in tokens to win a $1 million prize is “so AI”? 😂

In the age of AI image generation, be careful what you say. That’s one takeaway from my recent interview with the creative The Martech Weekly crew, discussing the keynote I’ll be delivering at Martech World Forum in New York, November 4-5. To not bury the lede: I’m super excited to be joining Juan Mendoza, Keanu Taylor, and team for what’s going to be a superb event focused on enterprise B2C martech. And New York in early November? That’s a pretty sweet location. Speaking of sweet, I’ve also got a sweet discount code for you to take 25% off a ticket — which combined with 33% early bird discount you can get until September 25, is nearly HALF OFF. I’ll share the code below. So what will I be presenting at the forum? Martech’s Transformation from Applications to Infrastructure I’ve been writing about that all year, and as we come toward the end of 2026, I’ll be able to share the full picture of how this has played out — and how it’s shaping up for the year ahead. You’ll also hear from John Hardy of the ANA, Geoffrey Bell of Ford Credit, James Holliday of Subway, Adam Greco of Hightouch, Steve Petersen of Wyndham — who I’ll also be having a fireside chat with on the subject of real-world “vibe coding” in enterprise marketing — the amazing Tony Byrne of Real Story Group, Chris Vitti at The Cigna Group, Jeffrey Blum of MAC Cosmetics, and more. You can check out the full agenda and snag that sweet ticket deal here: accelevents.com/e/martech-wo… Oh, yeah, so about this image. In the interview, they asked if The Godfather was my favorite movie given the whole “godfather of martech” moniker I’ve been tagged with. I said I liked the film — especially for the fun riffs you can do on iconic lines, such as “keep your content close, but your context closer” — but that my guilty cinematic pleasures leaned more towards Star Wars and Indiana Jones. (Yes, I was a child of the 80’s.) So they made this promo card. It kinda suggest that my keynote will be about archaeology, organized crime, and the Force. Which, when I think about it, is a pretty good characterization of martech. Hope to see you there!

The most important questions in martech... are often not about martech. I suspect you've been hearing the word "context" a lot recently. From vendors. From AI experts. From analysts. (I'm guilty — heck, I even put it on a t-shirt.) But while there's definitely a technical dimension to bringing the right context, to the right decision, at the right time — the work of context engineering — the hardest challenges of context aren't technical. People. Process. Org structure. Culture. We nod in acknowledgement of that. But there's not a lot of data that diagnoses those challenges more precisely — which is the first step in solving them. Frans Riemersma and I want to tackle that, but we need your help. We do two major industry reports a year. The State of Martech in May. And a preview for the year ahead in Decemeber — the upcoming Martech for 2027. We distribute these reports free and ungated to everyone. More than 150,000 people read them. No lead form. No credit card. But we have one request in return. For each report, we ask the marketing community — looking at you — to participate in a short survey that examines an under-analyzed topic that we believe is critical for us all to understand. For Martech for 2027, that topic is context... beyond the tech. Please, take a few minutes to contribute: surveymonkey.com/r/TheContex… Aside from earning good professional karma — couldn't we all use some of that? — you have the *option* of receiving a credit in the Martech for 2027 report and being entered to win a 30-minute consulting sessions with me and Frans. At least take a look at the questions. For context (ha). I think you'll see why this will be useful for all of us in the marketing community. Thank you.

Coffee first. Martech trends second. ☕➡️ Join @chiefmartec & @RiemersmaFrans for a relaxed chat on why martech may be heading toward "headless everything" & what AI has to do with it. Grab a coffee and tune into the second ep of the Caffeinated Confessions series. 🎥

The AI SDR demo was flawless. Then it met an actual buyer. In the wild, bad AI sales agents tend to mutate into a few recognizable species: ❌ The Pretender Tries so hard to sound human that the eventual reveal feels like deception. ❌ The Hallucinator Doesn't know the answer, but admires its own confidence. ❌ The Bulldozer Interprets every buyer question as consent to book a meeting. ❌ The Silo Has a fascinating conversation, then tells the CRM absolutely nothing about it. ❌ The Escape Room There is theoretically a path to a human. You just have to solve six puzzles and find the hidden key. ❌ The Demo Queen Magnificent under controlled lighting. Collapses upon contact with an unscripted objection. ❌ The Cost Bonfire Turns inference tokens, integration work, and human oversight into a warm orange glow. ❌ The Zombie Launched nine months ago. Still confidently quoting the old pricing page. Which of these have you met in the wild? I'm fairly sure I've been on the receiving end of at least half a dozen. (And if you've got one that isn't on the list, I want to hear it. Bonus points for a good name!) On August 5, Jonathan Kvarfordt of @1mind and I will dig into how to avoid these anti-patterns and build buyer-centric revenue agents that create a terrific experience instead of inventing new forms of friction. Beyond the AI SDR: Building Buyer-Centric Revenue Agents Register: chiefmartec.com/ai-sdr-webin…

My B2B GTM friends: Your AI SDR may be hitting its number... but that's not the same as doing its job. Meetings booked is a local metric. Efficient revenue is the global goal. Optimize hard enough for the first, and the agent will find the peak of the wrong curve and sit there looking successful. The typical AI SDR is only Level 3 on a 5-level scale. It qualifies, routes, and schedules. Useful work. But narrow work. Its objective effectively ends the moment the invite hits the calendar. Agents above Level 3 have to understand the buyer, answer real questions, take meaningful action, coordinate across the journey, and know when to hand off to — and possibly work alongside — a human rep. That takes more than a smarter model. It takes four experience layers the buyer actually feels: knowledge, context, conversation, and action. And three trust layers rarely on display: infrastructure, governance, and learning. Underweight the second set, and your agent degrades the buyer's first impression. Then the second. Then the third. (If they make it that far.) On August 5, Jonathan Kvarfordt of @1mind and I are digging into the question nobody's answering well yet: what does a revenue agent owe the buyer? We'll discuss the optimization trap and how to escape it, what differentiates the 5 levels of revenue agents, and the 7 layers of capabilities any agent should be evaluated against. You'll leave with the questions that separate successful deployments from flashy demos. Beyond the AI SDR: Building Buyer-Centric Revenue Agents Register: chiefmartec.com/ai-sdr-webin… Buyers don't grade your agent on autonomy. They grade it on whether it was worth their time.

One predictable side effect of martech's gravity (and capital flow) shifting from apps to infrastructure: lots of ventures now calling themselves infrastructure. One simple litmus test for the veracity of that label: Do other products — apps, agents, etc., commercial and/or custom — leverage you or build on you? If the answer is "no," you're not infrastructure.

Everything you ever wanted to know about vibe coding in marketing? Well, maybe not *everything*. But a ton of data and insights from 302 marketing leaders whose teams are actually vibe coding with Claude Code or Cowork, Codex, Lovable, Replit, etc. ➡️ Which tools are they using? ➡️ What are the building with them? ➡️ Are they replacing SaaS products? ➡️ What are they integrating with? ➡️ How does MCP adoption fit in the picture? ➡️ What governance guardrails do they have? ➡️ How long does it take them to show value? ➡️ What are the hurdles many still face? ...and much, much more from a major research report jointly produced by chiefmartec and UserEvidence. In today's chiefmartec newsletter, I discuss several of the findings I think are most compelling — and most vindicating for those (ahem) who have been championing the democratization of no-code capabilities in marketing for nearly a decade. Yeah, I have some pretty strong opinions about no-code — now vibe coding — empowerment of marketing teams. But this time I brought data! newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p…

Excited today to release a brand-new report on vibe coding in marketing, a joint research project between @chiefmartec and @GetUserEvidence. We surveyed 302 SaaS marketing leaders, managers, and practitioners currently using these tools to understand their vibe coding adoption: what they're building, how they're governing it, and the benefits they're seeing. There's a ton of questions I've had about this topic for months, and now I *finally* have some quantifiable answers. ❇️The real action is backstage, not customer-facing (for now) The most common use cases are operational: workflow automations, custom integrations, data pipelines, internal utilities. ❇️Vibe coding is starting to bend the build vs. buy equation 62% of the respondents who report that vibe coding is fully embedded in how their team operates have replaced a SaaS tool (vs. 39% of experimenters) ❇️There is governance, and it's an accelerant, not a brake 92% of fully-embedded orgs have formal governance in place — approved tools, data restrictions, QA processes, security reviews, usage tracking — and it correlates with both maturity and speed ❇️MCP use is a multiplier — and a correlated maturity metric 75% of respondents use MCP, and MCP users are more likely to have built custom integrations and customer-facing apps (non-MCP users skew toward simpler projects) ❇️The talent story is "more leverage," not "fewer people" Vibe coding has changed hiring decisions: 40% have changed the skills they prioritize, and 36% say they can do more without adding headcount ...and that's just a handful of our findings! I'll have more reflections on this in my next newsletter tomorrow. In the meantime, you can pick up a free copy of the report here: userevidence.com/vibe-coding…

The martech world is on 🔥 this year! @MoEngage, a leading customer engagement platform, just announced the acquisition of Aampe, an agentic marketing platform that was one of the pioneers of applying reinforcement learning in for personalized experiences. Aampe's architecture of assigning an individual AI agent to each individual customer was prescient. This has echos of the Braze acquisition of OfferFit by Braze, which I also thought was a smart combination. (I was an advisor to OfferFit.) If you were looking for a further sign that the battlefield for martech platforms has moved to decisioning and orchestration in an agentified environment, this would be big, bright, blinking neon one. Kudos to Raviteja Dodda and Paul Meinshausen and their teams. Two very sharp leaders, and I'm excited to see where they take this. moengage.com/blog/moengage-a…

I spent the weekend synthesizing my thoughts from the Databricks summit last week and the launch of their agentic CDP, CustomerLake. Upon reflection, three things stood out to me: 1. The border between applications and infrastructure in martech has now been officially overrun. It's happening in both directions. However, it's still very early, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next 12-18 months. I predict the bigger disruption will be as other leading infrastructure players cross the app/infra boundary. I bet we will see other data/cloud platforms offer their own CDP-like solutions. But I think they'll also slide into other categories that were previously held by pure-play martech application platforms. 2. Getting a front-row seat to everything Databricks launched last week, I found it remarkable how their portfolio of products now spans the entire "composable canvas" model that I developed in a research report with them earlier this year — The New Martech "Stack" for the AI Age. Obviously not entirely coincidental. But I honestly hadn't mapped all the pieces concretely against that conceptual framing. That doesn't mean I see Databricks as the one-platform-to-rule-them-all. I am quite certain martech is going to remain a diverse, heterogeneous environment. But especially for the hypertail of custom-built apps and agents, the tip-to-tail reach of their platform is impressive for the gravitational cohesion it can offer. 3. I was happy to see them riff on the "Golden Context" — a concept Frans Riemersma and I laid out last month in our State of Martech 2027 report. I humbly — well, maybe not so humbly — think the goal of overlapping customer context, company context, and the systems context to make it actually visible and actionable in pursuit of the Golden Context should be the overarching focus of marketing and marketing operations ahead. Full discussion in my latest newsletter, which also links to The New Martech "Stack" report and State of Martech 2027 report, if you haven't yet picked them up. newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p… Most definitely never a dull moment in martech.

Three years ago — what now feels like three centuries ago — I wrote a post about the 2nd-order effects we could expect from generative AI in marketing and martech. The 1st-order effects were pretty easy to extrapolate. AI was going to create an abundance — colloquially a metric crap-ton — of content and code, but also access to information and automated activity. That's mostly come to pass. (Bot commerce, or what we now more poetically call agentic commerce, being the most notable exception. So far.) But the fun thought exercise was contemplating the 2nd-order effects that would be reactions to that abominable abundance. (Marketers who slept through calculus, this is the only time second derivatives will ever matter to your career.) So in this week's chiefmartec newsletter, I revisit those 2nd-order effects and where we're at with them now: Content abundance → buyer filtering and trust scarcity Instant software → the hypertail of disposable apps and agents AI answers → context as the new supply chain AI actions → APIs and MCP as first-class marketing channels And if you want to join in, I'd love to hear what you think will follow as a result. What are the 3rd-order effects we should be thinking about for the next three years? newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p…

Coming to the Databricks Data + AI Summit next week? If you're working in marketing and martech, don't miss their inaugural Marketing Forum on Wednesday. If you read the research report on "The New Martech 'Stack' in the AI Age" that I published in partnership with Databricks earlier this year, you'll have the chance to hear directly from a number of the marketing leaders who were interviewed for that report. The architectural and strategic shift we described in that report is not a hypothetical concept. It's already being brought to life by major enterprises who are forging this next generation of marketing capabilities. The speakers at Marketing Forum will explain how they're doing it. Rick Schultz, Databricks' own CMO, will kick off the Forum. There will be a fireside chat with Horacio Miranda, SVP of Marketing Transformation, and Kumar Ram, VP of Marketing Data Sciences at HP. Dan Morris, Databricks' Global Head of Marketing Solutions, will follow them with a presentation on agentic marketing in practice. I'll then close out the Forum leading a candid discussion of how several different companies are navigating their evolution from martech stack to agentic marketing with Bryce Peake, VP of AI Engineering at FanDuel; Chris Wissing, Chief Product Officer at Epsilon; and Jay Malepati, Global Director of Data Science, Customer and Marketing Strategy at Circle K. If you're able to join us, please come say "hello" afterwards. I'd love to hear your thoughts about the ideas and experiences these speakers will share. I think it's going to be a very interesting afternoon. databricks.com/dataaisummit/…

AI platforms, business platforms, and data platforms are locked in a three-body problem. Each wants to be the center of gravity your marketing stack orbits. In this galactic struggle, where will context live? In the AI agent's memory and reasoning? In the business platform's domain model and structured processes? In the data platform's governed semantic layer? The unsatisfying but accurate answer today is "yes." Context is currently scattered (or distributed, if you want to be kinder) across all of them. In this week's chiefmartec newsletter, I map six categories of martech infrastructure colliding in intensifying coopetition: the gravitational pull each one exerts, where the cross-competition is fiercest, and how they map to the composable canvas. The martech infrastructure wars have begun. Which platform is pulling hardest in your org? newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p…