Full Transcript for Peak Martech

would have seemed like just un unrealistic, unbelievable, not credible. Surely you're kidding. Yeah. speaker-0: Yeah. But it's the reality we live in, right? And having seen that diagram and and and the landscape evolve over fifteen years, like and I guess, you know, most people's relationship with that picture will be seeing it every year, my goodness, look at the explosion in vendors. But obviously you go a lot deeper. What what is one thing you would say that you've observed over that fifteen years that perhaps people might have missed, you know, as as that number of vendors has just gone up and up? speaker-1: Yeah. A and in all fairness, this past year it kinda leveled out. so yeah, fifteen thousand. Apparently we have reached peak bartech, at least at the moment. I don't know. I mean, you know, the The thing that's always been interesting with that landscape is when you step back and you look at it at such a high level, such an aggregate view, you really do get the sense of, yeah, yeah, overall it might be growing. but it's very interesting to see like, well, which categories are growing fastest, which categories have maybe stopped growing or actually consolidating. when you look at like the types of companies that are churning versus the type of companies that are coming new into the space, you know, it starts to give you at least a little bit of a directional sense of what's happening at at a macro level. for instance, like in this past year, you know, a couple of things that became really clear. one was of course with AI, the sort of shift from like search engine optimization to increasingly answer engine optimization. but related to that, one of the things that was incredibly surprising was how much activity there was happening in the broader web experience space. Because, you know, at the beginning of the year, with everything that's been happening with AI, in particular people using these AI assistants to do a lot of their, you know, initial research and evaluation of things, you know, there's almost maybe this perception of like, well, maybe the website's becoming less important. certainly the amount of traffic that, came to websites was, on the decline. but what we've actually seen play out this year is no, just the opposite, actually. Yeah, the traffic might be less than it was before, but when that traffic comes, it is now very considered and well-informed traffic, and it's people who have a much higher expectation of what that experience is going to be. And so you're seeing a lot of creative innovation happening both with existing web experience CMS vendors, but also a bunch of interesting new entrants into the space. So anyways, the the the the Martec landscape numbers when we were looking at them coming this year sort of gave us a hint of like there's there's something really happening in this space. speaker-0: Yeah. And I guess it's amazing tracking, those different numbers, as you say, the growing categories, the shrinking categories, you get a sense for really how the market as a whole is moving and what's on marketers' minds, marketing leaders' minds, as they as they look to make those investments. And I think the point that you make around the quality of the experience is a really good one because it's certainly something that we see, which is that, you know, while overall volume might be down, as you say, when people arrive at your content when they arrive at your website, it better be good. because they've they've considered much more perhaps than they would have done previously. Yeah. so yeah, definitely a pattern we've seen. But but just to round off, where where you've been through your journey, you've also been on the inside of the machine, right? Because you've been VP of platform at platform ecosystem, sorry, at HubSpot and CTO at Ion Interactive. and I guess what would be something that you've learned from those experiences that maybe on the analyst side, you know, you you perhaps wouldn't have seen. speaker-1: well, you know, those are two very different experiences. You know, being a entrepreneur at a small startup certainly gives you a tremendous amount of empathy. you know, e every time people come into the Martech space, you know, because there are so many Martech companies out there, you know, there can sometimes be this sort of pushback like, do we really need Another Market company, and I always push back on that because the question I turn around and say, so you're perfectly happy with the way everything works. There's nothing you want to be different. Could it be cheaper, couldn't be better, couldn't be faster. And they're like, Well, okay now, those entrepreneurs who like come into this space, most of them know the odds are very stacked against them. But they're still willing to, be that man in the arena or woman in the arena, you know. And I don't know. Having been there myself, I just have a lot of empathy and respect for it. On the other side of it, you know, the role I had at HubSpot, you know, HubSpot, not a Microsoft-sized or Google-sized company, but still a fairly large company, you know, it was around 8,000 people or so, and you know, I was there. you appreciate the dynamics of how do you actually move things forward in a company of that scale. It's very different than when you're a you know small company entrepreneur. and so I don't know, like both sides of that equation. I just sort of feel like for both vendors who are creating Martech, but even honestly for companies who have to acquire and leverage these things themselves, just, you know, what do they say, walk a mile in someone's shoes? Yeah. just really, really helps you appreciate like Alright, what's probably going through their head here now? What's really the challenge that they're facing there? Because it might not be the one that, on the surface you'd think it's that speaker-0: Yeah, and I guess that's the nice way to put it, isn't it? Where through your career you

you've had one boot from each camp as you've walked those miles, right? Which has I guess given you that unique vantage point. and as you were saying before, with the with the overwhelm of of Martec, I think there was a stat that said that ninety two or was it ninety four percent of CMOs would have chosen a different career had they known just how technical the the world of marketing would become. Ha have have you seen the there be an element of and I always say this, but first we shape our tools, then our tools shape us. Where actually the the world of Martech and the Martech stack has actually come to define the way that marketing works today. And perhaps it's time and I know we're gonna come on and talk about this in a bit, for us to sort of take a fresh look at that dynamic and how that relationship works between the technology and the marketer. speaker-1: Yeah. I don't think I'd heard that stat that ninety-four percent of T I was kinda wonder if they should have had a different career. but I I can definitely empathize that the tech has had an outsized influence on marketing. And I don't know, you could argue yeah, th th there's good and bad to that. But I think one of the things that probably falls pretty clearly in the bad column is because there's just been So much change and you know, so many new things, you know, that not just CMOs, but really everyone working in the marketing organization, you know, has been asked to learn and absorb and it keeps changing faster and faster. I think it's harder and harder to get the space to step back and really be able to synthesize and look at things and and and have a clarity, you know, on strategic direction. Just the the the cadence, the pace. makes that more difficult than it's ever been. And in a ironic way, I feel that's one of the things that marketing needs more than ever, because the noise isn't just for marketers. The noise is just everywhere for everyone. And that's arguably the the number one challenge for marketing is in this world of just so much noise. how do we get a brand, you know, that stands out and holds a spot and is differentiated and people people feel an affinity to, engage with. It's a it's a really hard challenge. but that but I do think there's some interesting things that yeah, you know, it's maybe the tide is in a position where it can turn. speaker-0: Let's hope so, right. I I mean I think it's really interesting because, you know, I I agree with what you're saying. I it's more important than ever to have a brand that stands out and is relatable and that people think it really stands for something. But at the same time, you know, I I think there's this sort of legacy that's holding many marketers back as sort of outlined with that stat. where their tech stack is kind of like a in some cases like a lead weight a around their leg, right? And I know that you've got a view for how that can change, which is really exciting. But to me, even the word stack sort of implies this dependency chain of one on top of the other on top of the other, and you remove the thing at the bottom and the whole thing collapses and potentially your whole motion is is you know in the water. Like it's a it's a crazy paradigm, right? And I I guess when did you first start to realize that the the stack was perhaps the wrong metaphor and the wrong way to be thinking about this? Long, long ago perhaps. speaker-1: I I remember it very clearly. it was around twenty thirteen. I was at a conference where I'd been asked to moderate a panel of CMOs, you know. And one of the things just, you know, I figured all right, well I'm a Martech guy. I asked each of the CMOs in Vance, why don't you prepare a slide that just, you know Put up, what are the different tools that you're using? So, the audience can get a concrete sense of okay, well, what are you actually doing? I figured that would be one question. We'd spend a minute or two for each person and move on, because I had a bunch of other what I thought were probably more important questions to get to. Man, that question took up the entire like session. First of all, like the CMOs were like ridiculously proud of like the tool sets they'd had and why they chose this one and what they were doing with it. But it wasn't just them, that whole audience was like then on the edge of their seat and they were asking questions and and I was like, wow, okay, this is it's a little bit bizarre. Like I would not have predicted, particularly like, you know, 13, 14 years ago, that like CMOs would have been that passionate, you know, about about their tech stack. And again, probably a little bit of, you know, self-selection of you know, hey, con you know, session about Martech, so Where you going yet? But it it it struck me that let me let me answer it maybe this way. One of the things I have always admired about marketers categorically is I really do see them as pioneers. They just they they like to be cre whether it's like, you know, with creativity, whether it's, you know, like, hey, how do we go into this new market? and a lot of why I think marketing orgs actually did embrace a fair amount of marketing technology is because they saw it as a new frontier of like, hey, this is an opportunity for us to do things, you know, that our peers haven't yet done, you know, and this can give us an edge. and I I I think the that sort of motivation behind that, I think is actually very like a strength. I I do think it is a superpower of marketing. But I also think yeah, at this point in time, somewhere, the pendulum swung too far. yeah, perhaps instead of us controlling the tech, the tech started more controlling us. But yeah, maybe it's a good time to think about can we change that? speaker-0: Well, a perfect segue, right? Because, we we've spoken a lot on on this show in in other episodes about coming changes, paradigm changes in marketing and and what's underway. there's a huge amount of disruption to go to market motions

because of AI and a whole bunch of other things going on. But you you've spoken about the present moment, I believe, being the the dawn, if that's not too grand a term, of the third age of Martec, right? And so first age, second age we're gonna come on to. but with this third age, what's fundamentally different about it from your perspective? Is it the age where marketers get out from under the technology, or how would you describe it? speaker-1: Think there'd be two things. So when I conceived of this idea of the three different ages of Martech, the primary narrative was actually one of a shift from dichotomies to convergence. You know, if we go back to the first age, like boy, so many things in marketing, it was either this or that. Like in Martec, it was either, are you using a suite or are you stitching together best of breed? And these were two very distinct choices. in the software world there was a very distinct, were you a software businesses or services business? Cause, you can't be both. you know, and like even the question of like, do we build this or do we buy this seemed like a very binary thing of like, okay, it's either all one or all the other. And then to me, what really marked this transition in the second age, which is where I think we've been for like pretty much the past ten years, was like Actually, this doesn't have to be black and white. instead of sweet versus best of breed, most major Martech platforms sort of move to a true platform ecosystem model. Like, yeah, okay, we've got one primary system here, you know, a Salesforce, a Hubspot, you know, something like that, you know. But they're open, they have a whole bunch of partners who integrate with them, and of course you pick the other more specialized things that you want to connect into it. Same thing with software and services. You start to see software companies offering more services, services companies starting to offer software. And even the build versus buy it was a little bit of that same platform dynamic of listen, we're not gonna reinvent the wheel, but we are gonna take a commercial platform that has open APIs, and we're gonna start to customize and tailor things on top of that. To me, what is sort of like this tr trigger into the third age was it feels like even those things have converged where okay The platform and I can build things on it with AI and my services company is now s service as a software and it it's all converged together, which on one hand you would think like, my god, does that just sound like a tangled mess? But on the other hand, I almost think it's like, okay. This is a great opportunity for us to step back and just make sure we're we're asking the right questions. Because at the end of day, marketing, like our mission, like who cared if it was software services or builder bot or suite or best of I've got a job to do. I've got something I wanna make happen in the world. Here's how I want our company to move ahead. And honestly, it's that outcome, you know, that is really the thing I wanna be driving my decisions. Rather than the specific mechanics that were very, very distinct for a long time. And so again, this is this is a thing in transition. I don't wanna make it sound like, well, it's just super seamless today. It's not, but those boundaries, increasingly it feels like people just aren't making their decisions based on those boundaries. They're making the decisions based, on what they want to achieve, the outcome. And I think that's a great thing. speaker-0: Yeah, agreed. The the why and the what rather than the how. And it it's great listening to your talk there and and again using the word opportunity and talking about that positive mindset that runs through marketing. I think it's great. You're right. You could look at it as an all a t a tangled mess, what are we going to do about it? Or as you say, it's an opportunity and we can steal a march and we can get a couple of paces ahead. And I think it's it's a great moment to be thinking that way, personally. But but i everything you've just covered there, I think, is very connected to this idea of the great unstacking. that by I believe you've you've wrote about fairly extensiv written about fairly extensively, I should say. How would you describe that or or explain that to a CMO perhaps who's just spent the last five years buying, integrating and defending probably their their Martex stack? What does that look like for them? speaker-1: Yeah. this is one of the things that's really interesting. When we talk about the stack, the Martex stack is we'd conceived of it you know, over the past ten, fifteen years, is it was mostly a s collection of applications. You know, I have an application that does this, I have an application that does that. It's almost like that old iPhone, you know. There's an app for that. I want to do this other little special thing that these seven tools don't do. Don't worry, there's an app for that. What's happening here, and this isn't very much driven by AI, is because people can use things like Claude and ChatGPT and you know increasingly a little more sophisticated stuff for like vibe coding, whatnot, like they don't need to necessarily have some specific app for some specific task. that they're able to actually do increasingly a larger and larger of things where they work with these very sophisticated AI assistants and AI agents, and it's able to dynamically you know, answer questions for them or assemble, you know, content or campaigns for them, or you know, all these sorts of creative things that they want to do. Now, it can't just do it in a vacuum. It actually needs to do it on things like, you know, core data, core assets, core governance structure. you know, it it cannot be the Wild West, despite what some people might think. and so what's interesting is a lot of those commercial platforms that used to be very application focused. Like, I mean, let's pick Salesforce, because they're

they're one that everybody knows and they're sort going through this transition. You know, it used to be that Salesforce was an application. You logged into Salesforce and you did things in Salesforce. Whether you liked it or not, maybe that's another story, but this is just where you got your work done. with I guess it was a few months ago here, Salesforce, one of several companies in the space that's decided to say, to offer what is it, Salesforce Headless or 360 Headless, or basically a version of Salesforce that the whole proposition was you never have to log into this thing. This thing's gonna, have the structure for the data, it's gonna govern it, it's gonna make sure that there's, deterministic rules and workflows for the things where your business actually needs consistency and coherence. But the way you actually want to work with this thing is you don't want to work in RUI, you want to work in Quad or ChatGPT or any other like custom, AI app or agent that you've built. and we're sort of seeing that across the space. and I think that's That's what I ultimately interpret a bit as the great unstacking is it's becoming less and less about a collection of apps. And it's starting to simplify to okay, we have a set of infrastructure capabilities. but then on top of that, like we're much more creating and tailoring things specifically for what we want to do. And so even thinking about it as a stack. I don't know. It it feels like the metaphor is starting to fall apart. speaker-0: Yeah, I agree. It's definitely what we're seeing. And it for for me it relates a lot to the challenge of integration. So as l as long as I've been in Martech, which is not quite as long as you, but not not a million miles off perhaps. it it integration has always been a top three challenge, right? I always remember the reports. What are your challenges in integration right at the top, right? But you know, because of MCP and things like this, the ability for agents to use software and to integrate sort of very naturally across the piece. that's fueling a lot of the potential of unstacking. You spoke about Salesforce Headless, but the ability for an agent to work between Salesforce Headless and maybe five other apps in a headless way. this is what makes all of this possible, right? And and gives gives rise to the possibility of the great unstacking. speaker-1: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Which you know, this is worth celebrating that I'm not thinking so much about particular applications. I'm thinking about what do I want to do. 'Cause that's where the magic of marketing really exists. speaker-0: Exactly. Being able to ask what if and then, something somewhere coming up with ideas and potential. And how much of this do you think cause it it's a curious thing where it clearly it's been a top priority for marketers to solve this integration challenge and to be able to just ask the question and get the answer. But obviously it's been driven, so that's demand side, but obviously

it's been driven supply side as well by AI. So would you agree that there's this like wonderful convergence of demand and supply at just the right time to fix this problem? of of the great unstacking and making Martec a little bit more easier to wrap your arms around. And so we're in this golden moment where for people who move quickly and make the right moves, they can actually move quite far ahead. speaker-1: Yeah. Which again is both a a a good thing and also a challenging thing. Like, you know, we're used to you know, for like whether the diffusion of technology, you know, is typically viewed as like this this very nice bell curve of yeah, you know, the early adopters and then early majority, late majority laggards. that distribution Is not a perfectly shaped bell curve. It is becoming increasingly skewed where you have a relatively small number of you know people and companies that are really racing on the frontier, you know, of what's possible. But because it's moving so fast and it's changing so fast, I think you have a very large number of companies that are actually quite far behind in this. and it's one of those things that I feel like I'm one of the worst person people to like evaluate that because, you know, again, so much of what I do as a Maritech analyst is I'm paying a lot of attention to what's happening there on that frontier. You know, but when I go and I you know meet you know different brands and you know marketing leaders at, you know, conferences or whatnot, it is always a very humbling experience to realize that Yeah, there's a few that are really right on the frontier with us there. There's a lot that are like struggling to keep up with this because again, like, you know, I get the luxury of being able to spend all day, every day, you know, focused on what's here changing. You know, all these other folks they have real job, you know. Like they have actual marketing results and impact and, you know, business that they need to deliver on. And it is really hard to be able to do that and keep up with this crazy train of change that is continues to just accelerate. speaker-0: So Scott, you you speak about that racing train of of potential and acceleration and and technology, right? and we see this quite a lot in our world where people are being expected to keep those day-to-day results going, but also learn all of all of this new stuff almost overnight. And that's that's a real challenge. but but what's sort of the the brutal version of where this ends up? You know, people are having to learn these new things and and there's all different categories of solution emerging. which categories, which market categories do you see specifically? are are on borrowed time, are likely to not be necessary or not be needed, at least in their current form, as we race forward with all of this technological advancement. speaker-1: Yeah, it's it's a great question. I feel like one one area that's a fairly clear answer on that is what's been happening around just the fundamental data that we work with in marketing. because for a long time when Maritech first started, you had all these different apps. Every different app had its own set of data, and part of the integration challenge was like, Okay, how do we get these different silos to throw things over the wall to each other? Yeah, it was that that was hard. you know, over the past five to eight years, you've really seen the rise of cloud data warehouses and lake houses, not just in marketing, really across the organization as a whole, that have become this universal data layer where pretty much every app is pushing data down into it. Increasingly almost every app has the ability to pull data out of it. and that's a really big step forward in being able to Get out of the business of you know, piece by piece, you know, trying to like throw you know data around these different apps and just being like, okay, there's a substrate of the data that the company operates on. However, that is not without cost in the MarNTEC industries because, again, there were a lot of products, you know, the classic one probably being the CDPs, customer data platforms where That was their job was, to be the unifier of that data and marketing. And, as these universal data layers with, a Databricks or a Snowflake or Google BigQuery is they've risen. yeah, the CDPs they they've taken different strategies, but most of them have essentially moved up. be like, okay, all right, we're not really about owning the data. You probably have the data, in your warehouse. What we're gonna do is add this new layer of intelligence and activation on top of it, which I think is a perfectly reasonable path to go. I think there's a lot of headroom for what can be, created up there, but it's it's a really interesting shift. I think the part that makes this more challenging I I I think like most marketers can kind of get their head around that. That's not a Huge leap, you know, cognitive leap, being like, okay, yeah, I sort of follow that. Where there's just a lot more questions, and I'll confess I have these questions, you know, is this mode where you see people who are leveraging Claude and Chat GPT and really at the level of like, I'm doing this with Claude you know, code or Claude Cowork, and you know, I've created this, whole nested set of skills, and I've got these agents that are running there, people who are again, on that frontier, remaking the entire way in which you would think about operating marketing in an AI native way. And that world is very much in flux. there's certainly people who are doing this on their own with ChatGPT and Claude. There's a lot of companies that are trying to do very interesting things in building out. And the the the term in the AI land that's popular right now is this idea of a harness. Okay, yeah, it's this harness that provides structure around how we're using, these AI engines. And just Claude Code is a harness for developers, product X

is gonna be the harness for marketers, what they're doing. but it's it's just very much in flux. And so, you know, yeah, for for actual marketers who aren't, you know, complete tech junkies. It's a little bit mysterious as to like, okay, well, where's this going? What is this going to look like a year from now? Because there's really interesting things happening now. Not entirely sure that what's happening right now is gonna be reflective of what's gonna look like a year from now, much less two years from now. speaker-0: It's really hard to say, isn't it? And I think, at this point, I think I'm right in saying Claude Claude Code is still only what 18 months, two years old. And yet the projection is that what is it? Like I don't know, 30, 40% of all commits on GitHub will be authored by Claude Code by the end of the year or something crazy. And it's like, like you say, it just moves so quickly. But I I think one thing that we can be relatively certain of it is I I think the grand unifying theory of Martec that I think is in the report that you produced with Databricks, which is that single sentence. Everything is data, which you t touched on just there before, but how how can we explain that in a way that that CMOs can get and perhaps can take into the boardroom to explain, what that means and some of the implications? speaker-1: All right, I will explain it, but I will I feel like I should caveat. this is that is one of the things here that is very much on the frontier of, you know, how this is materializing. But I do think it is going to shape the way marketing marketing technology evolves over these next several years, which is the idea we're so used to thinking in marketing around one kind of data. Which is essentially customer data, like I've got customer records, or I've got prospects, or I've got behavioral data about them, or yeah, maybe data enrichment that I'm getting, or how do I like take these audiences and put them into an ad campaign, a walled garden. But it's all like data around the customer. Super important. What we have less well structured is, you know, Well, and there's other kinds of data that I'd I'd say are very well-structured data that we don't use as much in marketing, but we probably should, which is like, well, what about, really the data on what's happening with the finance of these customers, what's happening in the support and interactions we have with them, product interactions. You're starting to see marketers take advantage of more and more of that. But that is still also just one kind of data. Another thing that we have in marketing is all this idea of content. But we've treated content very differently than data. It's like, well, we have this lock of text or description that's maybe in a product information system or a CMS, or you know, maybe we have these image assets that are in a digital asset management platform. but really they are data. And historically, we've had a very difficult time actually intersecting you know, the world of that customer data with this content. But this is one of the things that AI is starting to make easy is this idea of no, actually we can synthesize across, you know, unstructured content, you know, and structured customer data. So that's two kinds of data, right? You know, the the the classic data and the content data. But there's more than that. You know, code. you know, the stuff that everyone is checking into GitHub, you know. That's really just data. It's readable. part of why Cloud Code does the magic it does is it treats all these code repositories as data that it can use to synthesize, an analysis of it, make recommendations on how to change it, actually take actions, you know, in working with it. And when you think about it, marketing has a lot of code too. All of these things like, you know, our workflow automations, our you know, sales sequences that we might have. content production pipelines. There's all this stuff that actually it's code. And when you think about that as a kind of data, now you're like, well, hey, maybe I can again have AI that's synthesizing between, what I know about customers, what sort of content I have access to, how do I actually want to execute things around that with code? and I think like you know, one of the last versions would be, okay, well all that stuff that's happening It can't be the wild west. There needs to be some, governance and structure and permissions, how are we validating all that? But even all that configuration and information, that's data too. That AI can read that as well too and synthesize and how it's working with those other kinds. And so yeah, this idea of just the grand unifying theory of Martec is if you just think that everything that happens in marketing. Really ultimately is a kind of data, then this ability to say, you know, we maybe have a lot more opportunity to recreate just the way we run marketing organizations, the way we work as marketers, that is less about those classic boundaries. And again, more about getting to the you know, the real work to be done as marketers, which is imagining, you know, what's possible? What can I do that's going to stand out and really make an impact? speaker-0: It reminds me of something you said right at the start, Scott, about just the amount of noise that's out there. And I'm thinking both externally and internally. And the way I I think about it, I think it's a really exciting idea s modeling as much as possible as data. because it it means that that can all then be, as you say, ingested by an AI, by an LLM. and that can help to separate the signal from the noise and can help us, as you say, to have more time to focus on the opportunities. And so really wade through all of that stuff, which previously would have been totally impossible for any reasonably sized marketing team to do to find the patterns, to find the signal within the noise in any kind of real time fashion. and so I I think that that's

sort of that that's the benefit of having modeled everything as as data, isn't it? Is is the ability to then use AI to go and find all the signal within all of the noise. Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah, it's yeah, it's just one of those things I you know, so I I started life as a as an engineer, as a computer science student, you know, and that's one of these things you learn early on in computer science with like Turing machines and this idea of like, well wait a second, you know, the actual code, that is data too. And you get into some fun things of like, okay, well how do you evaluate that when you're treating it as data? I don't know. It it blew my mind at the time. but yeah, coming full circle and seeing that same possibility around the entire operating system of marketing. and again, just one disclaim, like this is super early. you know, I I I know of companies that are doing pieces of intersecting that. I haven't seen anyone who's like brought that whole thing together and like, yeah, it's just one seamless, you know, data canvas. But you look at the pieces of what people are starting to do and how that arc is evolving here, and you're like, I think that's actually where we can get over these next few years. And again, I just I keep coming back, what gets me excited around marketing is the creativity, you know. And in some ways I feel like Martech, perhaps artificially, but you know, Martech has been seen in a lot of s areas of marketing as something that limits creativity. Trying to fit it into, this box or this workflow or this template or this structure, you know. And so I kept actually really excited about the possibility of, well, wait a second, what if actually this next generation of Martech was itself this incredibly creative canvas? let your imagination go wild, because you know that's a marketing superpower. speaker-0: Yeah, I I totally agree. And I I share the same view and it's been wonderful to see some of the businesses that we work with really embrace some of that potential. And I I agree with you, still it feels like most people are are quite early in that journey, but they're definitely trying to head down that road. and and, you know, we see a few a few businesses who are really moving towards thinking thinking about more stuff as data, but it's a journey and it's gonna take years and years and years. But I think chipping away at it we'll get to a a really exciting place, similar to the one that you outlined. But The the five classes of data I think you've you've mentioned is is customer data, company data, content code and control, which is the governance piece. Is there one of those that you see marketers at the moment being somewhat unprepared for? an area where perhaps they could get caught out or hurt in the future if they don't start thinking about it early? speaker-1: I think the one that is going to be the most foreign to marketers, because I've just never thought about it this way, is the code. This idea of like, okay, all of our workflows, our production processes, even like, you know, sort of the automations we have on different, you know, customer touch points and whatnot. Just not used to thinking of that as having the same malleability or ability to even be dynamically personalized the way, no, all right, content and yeah, customer data, we know that inside out, company data, I guess I can see it. those things people have their arms around, but this ability to have much more fluidity in like how things operate, rather than like, no, I just have to do it the way the software told me I should do it, or hmm. I have to file a ticket with IT and they'll get back to me sometime between three months and, you know, three decades. like this ability to have this as a new dimension for what h how how how marketing can like, you know, recreate what they're doing, reinvent what they're doing. I think it's just new. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's exciting, right? It's exciting. And and I guess another area within that within that data landscape is is content, right? And I think you you wrote that under agents or in the agentic world, content moves from being a bottleneck at the end of a process, or perhaps at one of those workflows you were just describing there, which we're now gonna model as as data, content shifts to being one of the main leverage points that agents have to drive conversion. I I see it a similar way, but but Perhaps you could expand on in your own words, Scott, and help people to understand a little bit more what you meant by that. speaker-1: Well, we the the easiest example to think of is just your own interactions with you know, like a cloud or a chat GPT versus the way you used to interact with, you know, like Google. like this this ability to have a conversation that the LLM is truly synthesizing. I mean, talk about personalization. Like if we were looking for something in the world that we're like, what would personalization look like if it was really, really good? Those conversations, speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: that's personalization. you know, and I think this this you know recognition of like, okay, I mean, yeah, these LLMs, they're drawing upon a very large training set and all sorts of, you know, enormous amounts of content. In marketers and businesses, it's actually a much more narrow set of like, listen, okay, this is the content that is our content, you know, our products, you know, our experience, our you know, customer, The ability to draw upon that to now synthesize truly personal interactions, it's kinda kinda here. you know, and I think I think we're we're certainly used to thinking of that, well, I should say we're getting increasingly used to thinking of that from a text generation perspective, because you know, plugging in LLMs to you know help with text on that pretty easy. But I think it is more than. It is, you know, any sort of like, you know, like imagery, how does it interplay with that? When you talk about even

again, like sort of like how you know, next steps or you know, offers and the way in which they're made. this is all a kind of content that is now much more malleable and can be much more personalized than ever before. So again, just another dimension in which like I think. the creative what's the word I'm thinking of here? Like the aperture, you know, of what's possible creatively is expanding at an incredible rate. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, it certainly is. And the the other thing in the content realm that I'm I'm personally really excited about is also the stuff coming back the other way. so the way I see it is that is that content is that last mile of the journey to the customer, to the end user, but it should also be the first mile on the way back. And there I'm referring to all the data that can be collected as people interact with whatever it may be. And I've felt for a long time that that data is really valuable, but not properly leveraged. And I think part of the reason why is there's just so much of it. every time someone interacts in any meaningful way with a piece of online content, it creates hundreds, if not thousands, of different data points. And so sifting through all of those to understand, you know, what does it mean? What are the patterns, you know, what is this correlating to in terms of a buying group forming or a buying journey progressing? that that for me is like a really fascinating opportunity as well in in terms of all of that rich data. I don't know, you do you do you see a similar thing, Scott? How do you how do you think about that side of things? Yeah. speaker-1: Well actually one area that I think is particularly exciting is all right, let me answer it this way. one of the the biggest challenges that marketers are feeling right now is the way they'd optimize things in the day of days of SEO through classic Google and, you know, paid search. It was Very much this easy way to like sort of understand, like, okay, people were hunting for this keyword, they were looking for this thing, it showed up here, I've got some intent, let me take it from there. You know, in the world of AI assistants, where people can spend a fair amount of time having a discussion with Claude or Chat GPT, and the marketer has absolutely no visibility into that whatsoever. I mean, the thing that really like burns marketers about, you know, these AI assistants isn't the fact that it's hard to get in influence them, they're we're constantly trying to figure out how to do that. What really burns marketers is like we're just not invited to the conversation really at all. we have no idea what's happening there. And that makes it really hard. it's almost like we're back in the 1980s. but what's fascinating is, you know, we s we're talking about this earlier. People do ultimately come to websites. You know, it's perhaps a little bit later in their journey, but when they do come to their website, they typically have like much clearer questions about what

they want, you know, much more higher expectations about being able to get a deeper level of information specific to that company compared to, you know, what they got in their AI assistant. And right now, websites that are sort of organized just with the classic information architecture and nav, they actually are pretty constrained in being able to answer those questions. But you're seeing more and more companies start to move in this mode of like, well let's actually bring a little bit of conversational interface To the website. And I don't mean the little chat box off in the corner that now everybody has chat box blindness to that feels like something pasted on, you know, the main web experience. No, like actually embedded in the web experience. You know, one of the easiest places actually even being site search, which, let's be honest, for like 20, 30 years has largely sucked. You know, but now, like, site search can actually be what really effective. It's connected to the right knowledge bases, the right content repositories. And so what's awesome is you start to give people this ability to have conversational interactions with you. First benefit is it does actually help them get what they wanted quicker. It matches a level of experience that they've sort of grown accustomed to. But this is a conversation that you have full visibility into. And so being able to now actually now look at these conversations and look at the patterns, they may not be exactly the same conversations that they're having in, Claude or Chat GPT, but they're probably pretty close proxies for that. And again, like right now, I think most companies like they they just either aren't collecting that data or they don't really know how to leverage that data. But I think as you start to go in this direction of more conversational experiences on the website itself, boy, that's gonna be a huge s repository of insight, both to help that individual, you know, customer, but also in aggregate, being able to understand our audience and the segments within them at a much higher level of fidelity than anything we've had before. speaker-0: Yeah. And the wonderful thing about that, I think, from what you read about how people use it for medical conditions is as in sort of Claude and and ChatGPT is people are much more candid with AIs than they are perhaps to another human being. And so people using, you know, whatever the the next version of site search might be, they're they're probably going to be much more candid around the pro problem they're trying to solve or the challenges or the things that they're looking for. And so a huge gold mine, I think, not just for marketing, but for the whole business to actually understand the people that they're trying to sell to and that they're trying to serve. Yes. speaker-1: Full stop, yes. speaker-0: So so thinking about all of this and how it all fits together, we've got this idea of having everything modeled as data and everything talking really seamlessly to each other in a a headless way potentially. when does this start to massively impact marketing oper operations? Does it just totally fundamentally change the the remit? Does it mean that the role isn't needed? does it elevate the remit perhaps to something else? How do you think marketing operations is going to be affected by all of this? speaker-1: yeah, I think it's the golden age of marketing operations. There's so much marketing operations work to be done on all of this. in fact, I've sometimes drawn a diagram where I'm like, all right, if you were to grossly oversimplify marketing, you know, I'd put in three buckets, right? There's the strategy and creative, there's the production and analysis, and then there's sort of the marketing ops and marketing tech. And the creative and strategy is what we've always put on the pedestal. And I would argue we often spend very little time on. The vast majority of time in marketing has been the production and analysis work in support and whatever, you know, glimmer of strategy and creative we had. AI is completely hollowing out the amount of work that's required on the production and analysis side. But that sort of moves the the leverage points to be, okay, certainly for strategy and creative. Like again, this is your time. I'm just I I keep repeating myself here, but really leaning into wow, what can we do now? That wasn't even conceivable before. But to actually be able to do that and do it reliably, consistently, coherently, I mean the infrastructure underneath this stuff, it is more sophisticated than anything marketing dealt with before in the days of like, we got this sort of stack of apps that sort of connect to each other. you know, and so I think having really great marketing operations, leadership, to be able to provide the architecture as much as the operations, you know, to enable all that amazing strategy and creative and then how it gets executed. Yeah. I th I think those two careers in marketing have a very bright future. speaker-0: Yeah, agreed. I I think it's really interesting to hear you talk through that because we've had conversations with a few people on this series so far around paradigm shifts in terms of how people are buying differently, or at least how people are modeling the buying journey differently to how they've done it before. How strategy you know is evolving in the in the world of AI and as everyone is more reachable and distribution is is sort of not a solved problem exactly, but is is massively moving in that direction. We've had conversations with people about how you know employers now are looking for different skills in the world of AI. So it's fascinating to hear again at the same time, we've got this convergence of all of these things, plus, which is I think the point you're making around the the data and the ops and the technology, which means that all of the strategy and creative stuff, first of all, what can we do today that we couldn't do

yesterday? And also, what can we stop doing today that was pinning us back yesterday? I think those two are really interesting questions for marketers to consider as they think about this through sort of an opportunity lens lens rather than a a risk or maintenance one. So it's it's fascinating to hear that that come through here as well. But I guess as as we move on, thinking about those 15,000 products going all the way back to the Martech diagram, you I think you've you've spoken about the coming hypertail of of solutions, right? Which is the thousands or potentially millions of apps that get built perhaps off that fundamental sort of data architecture that gets spun up and created. by companies that they create them for themselves. when do you think we're gonna we're gonna start to see that? How confident are you in that view? And it is do you think that's an inevitability at this point? speaker-1: I would argue it's pure today for a lot of companies. again, well that the future's already here, just not evenly distributed, that phrase. yeah, I mean like think of something like what's one of the high high flying startups of our age, lovable. You know, this ability for just people to I want an app to do this. They describe it, they create it, they use it. you know, lovable is at least So far, it doesn't seem like a flash in the pan. That thing keeps accelerating. initial concerns were like, Yeah, well, can it actually be enterprise safe? And no, of course it can. Here's how we build out all the support for that and make sure the permissions are right and the compliance, you know. But like, yeah, you start giving people this creativity. hell, there's a lot of it even now. Like, Yeah, this just happened to me today where I was asking Chat GPT something, and it's like Hey, do you want me to run a task to automatically check in on this category for you and send you updates? And I'm like, sure. a few years ago, that would have required me to be like, okay, I need an app for competitive intelligence that's gonna go out and we'll configure this stuff and we'll keep you know, now it like created this little agent for me. Honestly, if I'd blinked, I would have missed the fact that any sort of software was actually being created custom for me on the spot. But that's actually what was happening there. And so to that to me, the the the hyper tale is this idea of my goodness, forget about a world where we're obsessing about thousands of apps. It's literally software is just going to have millions and millions and millions of things, so much so that honestly we just stopped even paying attention to it, as software. speaker-0: Yeah. I guess it it just becomes part of the ether. And you you can imagine a world where actually agents go and create software for one off purposes in order to solve a particular subtask of something that you've asked it to do. So software could even be created and used on your behalf without you knowing, right? That's one of the really exciting possibilities. speaker-1: That is the thing that is both amazing and for more than a few CIOs, one of the most terrifying you know, things about this new world. But yes. speaker-0: Yes. Well well you you mentioned CIOs, so let let's talk about those guys, right? Governance. I've I've been at a few CMO marketing leader type events and with all the excitement around AI, everyone obviously is is thinking in that marketing way about what's what's possible today that wasn't possible yesterday. But governance it comes up as a massive not blocker but but sort of consideration and challenge. how do you think people are going to be able to manage the subject of governance when we've got all of this, you know, potentially thousands, tens or millions of applications being spun up and and used perhaps on a one off basis. How do you think governance gets solved in all of that? Do you think that's going to be a a major challenge? speaker-1: Yes. But I don't really think we're up for the challenge. and this is I mean again, like there's some historical precedent to this. Is you know, I mean like the original thing of like PCs, my god, you you are not actually talking about giving every employee their own computer the chaos that you know would ensue. or like, my god, you're not actually gonna let them just hook up to the internet and go out anywhere, you know, and do anything out there. That's insane. we've we've just gone through these things where yes, it's it's an a it is a crazy shift in the empowerment and the democratization of capabilities. At the end of the day, it becomes a huge competitive advantage, you know, for companies that are able to harness and leverage that. And at the end of the day, we do find ways to govern that. We found ways to kind of govern the fact that everybody had their own computer, you know, that yeah, they can connect to the internet, but you know, there's a whole bunch of sites that aren't safe for work, and we're not gonna let you do that. and I think also here with what you're seeing with the hypertail, it's like, okay, listen, you can't just because you're having your own little agent or app doing something very specific for you, doesn't mean you all of a sudden have unlimited access to every possible piece of data in the company and the ability to execute, you know, any interaction. No. You have access to what you have access to, you know, and if you want to leverage this new tool to do a you know, to be able to Create or do something better or more efficient or more effectively with that. Yes, Again, I'm oversimplifying. There's a there's a lot, a lot to be done. And this this wave is the wave that we're we're in, you know, versus those other ones we look back and we're like, yeah, we kind of solved that. This one we haven't we haven't fully solved yet, but we're making progress. And I will say one of the things I actually find there there are two themes that have happened this year in Martech that I didn't

have on my bingo card. One was what we talked about earlier about web experiences hot again. it's maybe one of the hottest categories in Maritech right now. The other one is for years, governance was always just things seen as friction. for markets, like, yeah. I mean, we'll we'll do what we have to do. Actually, in a number of cases, maybe we won't do what we have to do, but like, you know, governance is seen as something that like slows down. that creativity and that speed at which marketing needs to move. Well, because of the fact that AI has like 10x, the speed of what we can do and like the scale and scope of it, people are coming to the realization that actually governance around this is not so much a source of friction, it's actually an accelerant. Because, you know, now that we're like throwing stuff off by like, you know, this incredible speed and scale. What's happening is things break a lot easier. people get overwhelmed. There's wait, something went wrong with this. How'd this happen? Everybody has to stop, figure out what went wrong with that. that that that move fast and break things, Actually, when you start really moving really, really fast and really, really breaking a lot of things, all of a sudden that doesn't sound so cool. and so I think you know, I've just been hearing from more and more marketers, you know, in this space of like, yeah, yeah, actually what we really want is want a governance system because like if we have this stuff like structured and we can make sure it's following, you know, these standards and how it flows, wow, that will just allow us to move at the speed we want to speed move at without having to like every other week, like, you know, it's been what's the you know, like those industrial accident signs. It's been, you know, four days since we screwed the pooch. with some AI generated thing. getting getting that sort of safety infrastructure in place. I now hear a lot of marketers who are like, yes, please, can we have some governance for this? And that's why not turnaround from what what the story was not too long ago. speaker-0: I think that's a really brilliant and interesting point, which which is that switch from governance being a friction to being an an accelerator. Because if if marketers are spending more time on the creative and the strategy, well if if it's all sort of entropy and and you know, things just diffuse and and there's no signal, you know what I mean? And things go off the rails, like all of that thinking and all that great creativity is for nothing. And so I it's I've never thought about it before. But this governance piece actually becomes the marketer or the strategic marketer's best friend because it means that the strategy actually gets executed. coherently and accurately and gets brought to market in a way which is gonna have the desired impact. speaker-1: Yeah. It's again, this is which it is a good thing because, you know, so many of the challenges we were just talking about, like, okay, well, how do you really harness things like this hypertail potential? Like if you don't have good governance in place, it gets really messy and really dangerous, you know, really. But if you get governance in place, you know, you can harness this. And so but that that that requires a certain it's it's not a tech problem. So much as it is a willpower, probably a decision to yeah, no, we are actually going to do this. We are going put this in place. And so yeah, having senior marketing leaders who are like, Yes, we are gonna put that in place. yeah, I that's a really good step. speaker-0: Yeah, governance is now cool. That's my that's my main takeaway from this. I never thought sexy even more than governance is sexy, even better. Well, look, think thinking about CMOs and and marketing leaders, what's your advice for for a CMO perhaps who's who's just listened to us have this conversation? and you know, let's say say they've listened at the weekend and they're going into work Monday morning and I am what's the first thing on their agenda? What should they start thinking about? amidst all of this accelerating technology and potential and opportunity, where do they even begin? speaker-1: I'm not sure there's an easy you know, answer to that. but I guess I would say The thing for a CMO that we need more than ever is that strategic perspective. like, you know, what I'm not gonna recommend is hey, CMO, like, yeah, you should go in and you should be like, yeah, make sure you've set up your Claude code and are, you know, getting your skills. Yeah. No, I mean, I think the problem we have right now is again, just so much of marketing is so overwhelmed, you know, trying to absorb this, you know, crazy. Pace of change brought by AI, that is harder than ever, you know, to sort of keep that strategic perspective of like, okay, we gotta prioritize. What's more important, what's less important, you know. yes, we need to be investing in this evolution of our technical skills and capabilities, but more than ever, you have to be selective. about like okay where are you gonna spend those calories you know and how do you evaluate them in a way that isn't like a sort of sugar rush version, you know, of embracing this stuff, but actually, you know, has some protein and you know, like vegetables and you know, like it it's helping us build, you know, real muscles. Okay, this metaphor has clearly been overextended, you know, but it's like, yeah, how do we actually start to build foundations that are gonna be stable for us? I think for the CMO to look at it that way and to really challenge, their immediate circle, of leaders to do the same, it's probably more of a competitive advantage than anything else. speaker-0: So so that shift from I guess, you know, trying to reweight from sort of tactical thinking to strategic thinking. Again, we're we're kind of back there, I think, from what you're saying, which is that becomes the the unlock for so much of this, which is the having that right foundation, that right strategic thinking that other things can be built from. speaker-1: Yeah, w I think we actually even began on this idea of like you know Martec in some ways being the tail wagging the dog. CMO really needs to be the dog wagging the tail. Like, you know, it's not sure that's a flattering metaphor on that. But the big dogs. Okay. Yeah. speaker-0: It's better than the other way around, right? Better than being the dog getting wagged by the tail. So like pick pick which end. But yeah, I agree. It makes makes perfect sense. Well look, Scott, it's been brilliant speaking with you, right? really, really enjoyed the conversation. But to to close on this, the show's called Real Seekers After Truth. so in your view, what's one thing that every real seeker should stop doing and one thing they should start doing? speaker-1: I think I think the answer for me is the same in both of those directions, which is you know, the the the praise about strong beliefs loosely held. You know, this idea I think people i i particularly in this time more than ever, you know, like you really do need to move forward with a confidence about like, okay, this is what I wanna do, this is what I think this opportunity is, you know, because if If you spend too much time weighing and thinking there's just too many choices and they move too fast. But at the same time, I think the the the that that works to a point of which you also just have to have the humility that like your priors, you know, you may very quickly at some point get evidence that seems to suggest, actually, I might have been wrong about that, you know, and the willingness to like embrace that and understand that and then update. your strongly held beliefs. I don't know. I think that's where what seeking truth is all about. speaker-0: That's a really fascinating point to end on. It that idea of developing those personal characteristics of of humility and judgment and all of these sorts of things has come through really strongly in so many of the conversations we've had. So it's a a brilliant, a brilliant point to end on. look, Scott, it's been wonderful talking. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have. Thank you so much for for joining me. speaker-1: no, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for having me. speaker-0: Awesome. Thank you and hope to speak again soon.