Podcast · Business

Making Sense of Martech

Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 45 min
Latest: 7 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026 · 48 min

What the Buck? Marketing Wins Each Season with the Bucks' Justin Price

Justin Price is the senior manager of multichannel marketing at the Milwaukee Bucks. He built the team's SMS program from scratch inside a legacy Marketo stack. The welcome journey delivers 104x ROI and a 38% conversion rate. Checkout abandonment runs 233x. Subscriber growth hit 455%. The team behind it is five people across five brands. This conversation covers how Attentive connects to Marketo through third-party middleware, why identity resolution is the next frontier, and what actually moved the unsubscribe rate in a 32-50 year. It wasn't the record. It was the trade-rumor cycle. Sports…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E57 · 30 Sep 2026 · 40 min
What Client-Side Wishes Agencies Knew with Courtney Tierney
Courtney Tierney spent years on the agency side telling brands what their CRM strategy should be. Now she's the one whose name is on the result. As director of CRM and customer engagement at Papa John's, she owns how the brand communicates with 42 million loyalty members across email, push notifications, SMS, and in-app channels. The gap between advising and owning is real, and this conversation gets into exactly where it shows. Before Papa John's, Courtney was the senior director of account planning and research at Digital Additive, a Salesforce Marketing Cloud agency, where she worked with…
E56 · 23 Sep 2026 · 47 min
Consolidate vs. Best-of-Breed with Mindbody's Vinicius Rodrigues
"It shouldn't be consolidated or best-of-breed. I think it could be consolidated and best-of-breed." — Vinicius Vinicius Rodrigues has spent his career arguing that fragmentation is a legitimate strategy, not a failure to consolidate. He also cut six figures in martech spend through consolidation. As head of marketing technology and operations at Mindbody, now part of Playlist, he manages the global martech stack across North America, EMEA, and APAC, three regions where almost nothing about how customers respond to automation is the same. Before Mindbody, at Lojas Renner in Brazil, he ran a…
E55 · 16 Sep 2026 · 39 min
The Dumb Pipe with Peter Oleson (Part 2)
"We don't want to be the dumb pipe. We want to be the brain for your marketing. And I'm sorry, everyone can't be the brain. You can't have five brains." — Peter Peter Oleson is back, and the guardrails are off. Part 2 picks up where the dumb pipe debate left off and delves into the operational and economic realities that a composable stack actually demands of vendors, marketers, and the AI agents everyone's betting on. The thesis gets pressure-tested from every angle: vendor survival, job market implications, and whether the economics of AI decisioning even hold up yet. This episode covers…
E54 · 9 Sep 2026 · 49 min
The Dumb Pipe with Peter Oleson (Part 1)
"By definition, most marketing automation platforms are creating silos, not breaking them down. They're in the business of creating copies of data." — Peter Peter Oleson spent years inside the machine. Salesforce Marketing Cloud architect at Merkle, then Iterable, running live demos of the exact journey builders he now argues are the wrong model. Today, he's making the case that marketing automation platforms should stop trying to be the brain and start being a better pipe. That is a specific, testable claim, and Jacqueline holds it to the fire – oh, and this is just Part 1. Part 2 next…
E53 · 2 Sep 2026 · 52 min
Inside the RCS Approval Black Box with Stephanie Griffith
Stephanie Griffith has experience in retention and lifecycle marketing across brand, agency, and platform roles, making her a rare, credible voice on RCS business messaging. In this episode, she sits at the center of a real contradiction: selling brands on a channel that runs 15-30% CTR, with standout campaigns topping 50, while those same brands sit in an 8-to-16-week carrier-approval queue with no clear timeline on the other side. This is an honest breakdown of what the RCS approval process actually requires, where brands consistently blow it, and why the wait is still worth it. Stephanie…
E52 · 26 Aug 2026 · 43 min
How Babylist Gained 600 Hours Back with Elizabeth Martin
"There is a version of AI adoption where efficiency just becomes a euphemism for doing more with less: you automate 30% of somebody's work, immediately fill that capacity with more work, and just move on." — Elizabeth Elizabeth Martin's team at Babylist cut newsletter production time from 2 hours to 15 minutes, freeing up 600 hours a year, using Claude, an Iterable MCP, and a Notion-based copy pipeline. Her AI-lifecycle-marketing system has been called one of the most advanced MCP implementations among her ESP's clients, built in three months, with every failure documented along the way.…
E51 · 19 Aug 2026 · 35 min
Lipstick on a Pig
I was the one in the hot seat this time. Bloomreach's Divya Mulanjur flipped the mic on me... Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok , LinkedIn , and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube .
E50 · 19 Aug 2026 · 57 min
The Human Behind The Humans of Martech with Phil Gamache
"AI-powered is one thing, but I feel like we're seeing this renewed focus on human-powered. Buying the tool is just a tiny little part of that journey, making the most of it, getting it implemented; there's a human story there." — Phil Gamache One year of Making Sense of Martech, and for the anniversary episode, Jacqueline brought in her main competitor: Phil Gamache, host of Humans of Martech and one of the most honest voices in marketing operations. Six years in, Phil treats practitioners not as insight-dispensing experts but as actual humans navigating a chaotic, often lonely job. He's…
E49 · 13 Aug 2026 · 18 min
Icarus Met His Maker: Why We Trusted the Wrong People
We're going down the rabbit hole together again in this week's second Breakdown essay episode. Be sure to listen to part 1 first here . Greek mythology meets the Hunger Games. Borrowed wings, borrowed fire, borrowed trust. 🔥🪽 Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok , LinkedIn , and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube .
E48 · 12 Aug 2026 · 49 min
Industry Awards: Earned, Bought, or Invented? with Jonathan Harrop
"You're on the receiving end of a coordinated PR campaign." - Jonathan 80% CSAT wins trophies. That's a problem. What does it actually take to win an industry award worth winning? Jonathan Harrop has been on both sides: he's judged at the Drum Awards and spent years at AdColony running a $6 million global marketing budget that produced over 200 wins across Ad Age, MMA, Smarties, Adweek, and the Drum. He knows how winning entries are built, what judges are really looking for, and where the whole system falls apart. This episode is not a takedown of awards culture, nor is it a defense of it.…
E48 · 5 Aug 2026 · 14 min
Touch Grass: What OpenAI's Summer Camp Actually Sold Us
We're going down the rabbit hole together in this week's first The Breakdown episode, part 1. Part 2 will be out shortly. We'll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week with a great conversation with someone in the H ot Seat . Think Black Mirror meets Midsommar , set at a wildflower farm. Literally. 🌸🌼🌱🌺🪻🐝🍃🌻🌷🌿 Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok , LinkedIn , and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube .
E47 · 29 Jul 2026 · 43 min
With MCP, There's No Sheriff with Israa Alrawi
"MCP adoption is outpacing security, and we're waiting until something really big gets broken to even address it. We've seen this movie before." — Israa MCP security risks are moving faster than the guardrails meant to contain them. In this episode of Making Sense of Martech, host Jacqueline Freedman sits down with Israa Alwari, founder of The Winbox, an email marketing education and agency helping DTC brands scale without burning their customer relationships down in the process. Israa brings a rare lens to the MCP conversation: eight years in email deliverability, a background in public…
E46 · 22 Jul 2026 · 59 min
How to Be an Unhinged $1.4B Unicorn
"People respond to people. It's worked really well for PostHog to lean into the personalities of the people who build the company. We're being authentic, we're being honest, being unfiltered. And I think that's refreshing." — Lottie PostHog built a $1.4 billion company on a single thesis: stop guessing, measure everything. So why is PostHog's own brand, the hedgehog, the chaos, the weirdness people fight for in Slack, measured mostly by gut feeling and good vibes? In this episode, Jacqueline sits down with PostHog's marketing lead Joe Martin and lead graphic designer Lottie Coxon to pull…
E45 · 15 Jul 2026 · 30 min
You're Getting Gouged on Compute with Luke Ambrosetti
"APIs led us to data silos. MCP could lead us to context silos, and that's why I'm hoping people will be a bit more restrictive about where they hook up MCP." — Luke Luke Ambrosetti has spent a decade arguing that the data warehouse should sit at the center of every enterprise martech stack. Now, as Databricks plants its CDP flag and Snowflake expands into AI decisioning, the architecture he championed is either winning or getting absorbed into something bigger. In this episode, Luke, principal industry architect for marketing and advertising at Snowflake, joins Jacqueline to unpack whether…
E44 · 8 Jul 2026 · 52 min
Stop Ignoring the $1.3 Trillion Gap with Sarah Gallardo
"If I could live through accessibility audits and not have someone say, 'but we have alt text,' I would feel like I just entered a new realm of the world." — Sarah Email accessibility (a11y) is broken, and the industry largely knows it. 77% of brands say accessibility is a priority. Only 8% follow best practices. Only 0.1% of HTML emails actually meet the standard. That's not a resource problem; it's a myth problem, a status quo problem, and in some cases, a willful ignorance problem. The industry talks endlessly about inclusion while locking out 1.3 billion disabled people worldwide, who…
E43 · 1 Jul 2026 · 48 min
AI Was A Waste of Time, Until It Wasn't with Megan Boshuyzen
"You should be layering AI on top of what you're already doing to make you more efficient. It should not be doing the bulk of the work. It should just be making you faster." — Megan Email development has long been the graveyard of good design intentions where beautiful mockups meet the harsh reality of Outlook's rendering engine, dark mode disasters, and code that would make any web developer weep. But while most of the industry gets swept up in AI hype promising magical solutions, actual email developers are quietly discovering what works, what doesn't, and what's dangerously oversold.…
E42 · 24 Jun 2026 · 55 min
Ticket Taker vs. Problem Solver: Be Irreplaceable with Darrell Alfonso
"I really think that most companies' problem isn't efficiency, oftentimes. It's just like a lack of direction, strategy, or, you know, bad leadership practices." - Darrell This spring, commencement speakers were booed off the stage for telling graduates that AI is their future. Meanwhile, marketing ops teams are getting leaner, and job listings are down. The people who built careers on technical fluency are wondering if it's still enough. Darrell Alfonso has lived on both sides of this. He led marketing ops at AWS and Indeed, wrote the book on the field ( The Martech Handbook ), and built a…
E41 · 17 Jun 2026 · 58 min
Martech Tools Should Serve, Not Dictate with Bree Graham, ex-CashApp & Afterpay
Most marketing teams have more tools than strategy, and now they're layering AI on top of that mess. When you scale fast in the wrong direction, fixing it requires more than just throwing AI at your existing martech sprawl. It demands architectural thinking, data governance discipline, and genuine cross-functional partnerships that most organizations simply haven't built yet. In this episode, Jacqueline Freedman sits down with Bree Graham, who spent seven years leading growth and marketing platform transformation at Afterpay, designing the composable infrastructure that powers engagement and…
E40 · 10 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
It's Just Marketing Ops With Better PR with Sara McNamara
"SaaS companies are systematically undervaluing marketing ops professionals by rebranding their work with trendy titles while taking their contributions for granted until everything breaks.” — Sara Sara McNamara has spent her career building go-to-market systems at companies like Slack, Salesforce, and Cloudera, the unglamorous, essential work that makes revenue teams actually function. As the revenue operations and go-to-market lead at Vector, she has a thesis about where ops is headed that challenges how many see their own roles. While AI rewires what ops teams actually do, she argues that…
E39 · 3 Jun 2026 · 35 min
Why Scott Brinker Says AI Can't Pick Your Tech Stack
"Most of marketing is not a verifiable domain. You can't outsource it to the agents. You need the humans." - Scott Brinker Scott Brinker, creator of the Martech landscape and former VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, joins Jacqueline for a no-holds-barred conversation on AI's real limits in marketing, and why the industry's confidence in what AI can do may be its biggest liability. This is a genuine stress test of some of marketing technology's most popular assumptions: that AI can replace human judgment in vendor selection, that content governance is someone else's problem, and that…
E38 · 27 May 2026 · 40 min
Why Everyone in Martech Feels Behind Right Now with Scott Brinker
"Content was king. Now context is the monarch." — Scott Brinker Scott Brinker has been mapping marketing technology longer than most practitioners have been in it. In this Hot Seat episode, Jacqueline puts the godfather of Martech in the chair to pressure-test the 2026 State of Martech Report , and what emerges is a surprisingly honest reckoning with where AI in marketing actually stands. The landscape has hit a historic plateau, the stack is stratifying into competing gravitational layers, and the organizations holding it all together are marketing ops teams that didn't sign up to be system…
20 May 2026 · 1 min
Making Sense of Martech Trailer
We host unfiltered conversations with the people shaping the industry. We track the biggest shifts in the marketing technology landscape and ecosystem. Cutting through the noise to spotlight what matters, who’s leading (and lagging), and what’s next for modern marketing teams. In this industry, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it. Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok , LinkedIn , and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube .
E37 · 22 Apr 2026 · 29 min
Hello {{firstname}}, Meet The Execution Gap Killing Personalization
"The goal is not to personalize everything. You need to personalize what matters so that you can prioritize it internally in order to execute it well." - Jacqueline Scaling personalization in marketing technology remains one of the most persistent and painful challenges in the Martech landscape, and the data makes that brutally clear. Nearly 75% of buyers expect companies to understand how and when they want personalized interactions, yet 53% of companies admit they don't know when personalization is actually valuable. Only 12% of brands qualify as true leaders in this space. In the sixth…
E36 · 15 Apr 2026 · 28 min
AI Theater to Trojan Horse: Surviving the AI Adoption Pressure Cooker
"The only thing propping up Martech budgets right now is AI." — Juan AI adoption pressure has become one of the defining pain points in marketing technology, and the numbers make the case starkly. In this Office Hours episode, Jacqueline and Juan dig into the $1.4 billion-to-$1.48-trillion explosion in AI spending from 2023 to 2025, the Gartner prediction that at least 30% of gen AI projects would be abandoned post-POC, and the uncomfortable reality driving it all: executives are demanding AI strategies from Martech teams that are still fighting foundational data and stack issues. This is…
E35 · 8 Apr 2026 · 39 min
Bad Data, Dark Data, & Why Your North Star Keeps Moving
"We built an entire industry on the promise of precise measurement, and most of us don't actually trust the numbers." — Juan Marketing technology promised precision, but the reality is far messier. In practice, only 3% of CMOs can reliably demonstrate ROI on more than half their total marketing spend. In this Office Hours episode, Jacqueline and Juan unpack the measurement and attribution crisis plaguing enterprise marketing teams. From data fragmentation and siloed dashboards to leadership instability and organizational misalignment, the conversation covers why the ROI gap persists, and…
E34 · 1 Apr 2026 · 45 min
Inside Paramount: March Madness & Martech Chaos with Ian Reisman
Martech and data strategy promise control, personalization, and scale, but in practice, they often deliver technical debt, fragile systems, and operational chaos. In this episode, Ian Reisman brings a hard-earned perspective from 17 years inside Paramount, where he managed billions of emails across in-house platforms, enterprise tools, and high-stakes moments like March Madness war rooms that stretched well past midnight. From 3 AM warehouse refreshes to a Salesforce Marketing Cloud migration, this conversation breaks down the build vs. buy dilemma from both sides. Ian explains why no vendor…
E33 · 25 Mar 2026 · 55 min
Cut Your Marketing Budget by 50% with Calm's Jeff Lee
Jeff Lee doesn't just build marketing campaigns. He engineers lifecycle systems that quietly power billions of customer interactions. As the lifecycle marketing technical lead at Calm, Jeff runs a team of four, shipping 240+ distinct email campaigns a year and moving data across Databricks, Iterable, and Amplitude with precision most teams can't match. In this conversation, he makes the case for marketing engineering as a distinct discipline, sitting between data engineering, product, and marketing to solve problems no one else owns. We dig into the "Sorting Hat" automation that prioritizes…
E32 · 18 Mar 2026 · 52 min
Personalization, Profit & the CFO: Scaling Martech Engines with Eloise Gillespie
"Personalization is finding that balance — you can give customers everything they want, but it doesn't make the business happy. True personalization is finding the perfect balance." – Eloise Personalization only works when the infrastructure beneath it is built for business reality, not hype. In this episode, Jacqueline sits down with Eloise Gillespie, Associate Director of Personalization and Martech at Optus, to unpack what it actually takes to make AI and personalization deliver at scale. Eloise brings hard-won experience from telecom, wagering, and hospitality, including managing a…
E31 · 11 Mar 2026 · 38 min
Integration Complexity, $215B Losses, & Why Your Stack Still Doesn't Talk
"If you don't understand your internal customer, you're failing both the internal customer and the business." Jacqueline Jacqueline and Juan tackle Martech's second-biggest pain point: integration complexity, data silos, and the operational fragmentation that's threatening to cost the industry $215 billion by 2027. Drawing on McKinsey's latest research and exclusive insights from enterprise leaders preparing for Martech World Forum Melbourne, the hosts dissect why marketing technology stacks are still failing to connect — and what you can do about it. From the composability-versus-suite…

About Making Sense of Martech

Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.

Making Sense of Martech is a English business podcast from Monarch. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Monarch
Language: English
Category: Business
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 45 min
Latest episode: 7 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1553198974

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