Making Sense of Martech

Monarch
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Weekly

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.

  1. 6h ago ·  Video

    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.

    Lipstick on a Pig

  2. 18h ago ·  Video

    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 still figuring it out alongside everyone else. That's the point. His in-house career spans 13 years across WordPress, Close.com, and everything in between. Now a full-time solo creator, he runs a production stack powered by Claude and Cursor, crafts episode cover art in Midjourney by hand, and has strong opinions about why nobody should let a language model make every decision for them. This one gets into the martech island problem, what actually made Humans of Martech a viable business, the attribution philosophy battle, and why the vendors winning in 2026 are leading with humans, not features. Timestamps 03:06 — Why Humans of Martech Really Exists: Built for practitioners lost on the martech island, including people who just lost their jobs and don't know what's next. Never about consulting leads. Always about the humans. 08:00 — AI-Powered Is the Default Now: The new differentiator isn't having AI in your stack; it's how well you show the product and the humans behind it. Buyers are increasingly making decisions on vibes, not G2 scores. 18:30 — You're Not Alone on the Island: The core emotional value of Humans of Martech: knowing that practitioners at Canva, Uber, and Meta are wrestling with the same problems you are is genuinely reassuring. 25:01 — AI Mock Interview for Guest Prep: Phil uses Claude Code to build a dynamic guest persona, run a mock interview across three rounds, and surface better questions through iterative, AI-driven prep before a human ever reads the output. 33:00 — The Full Production Stack: From transcript ingestion to blog post generation to Midjourney cover art by hand, Phil walks through every node in his solo creator workflow and where human judgment still has to show up. 41:42 — The Empathy Gap in AI Hype: If you're not getting laid off, you're five times more stressed with five times more expected output. The practitioners behind the tools are caught in a genuinely difficult inflection point. 51:18 — Attribution Is a Philosophy Battle: Getting attribution right is a philosophical one: data teams think like statisticians, marketers think like investors, and those two worldviews have to be reconciled before any tool can help. 55:54 — Truth, Feeling Seen, and What's Next: The show's enduring mission: bring truth to the industry and help practitioners feel seen. One year in, that mission is just getting started. Sponsor Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom. 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.

    The Human Behind The Humans of Martech with Phil Gamache

  3. 6d ago ·  Video

    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.

    Icarus Met His Maker: Why We Trusted the Wrong People

  4. Aug 12 ·  Video

    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. It is a sharp, honest account of how the game actually works, from AI-written entries getting zeroed out in jury rooms to government budget claims that defy how policy actually moves. Jonathan also pulls back the curtain on Forbes 30 Under 30, pay-to-play structures, reader polls as legitimacy theater, and the one signal that probably tells you more about a vendor than any trophy ever will. Timestamps 02:05 — The Networking Case for Showing Up: Even if you only make the shortlist, attending the ceremony is worth it; the room is full of peers you'd otherwise never meet. 03:05 — Reverse-Engineering What Judges Want: The submitter seat teaches more than the judge seat because winning at scale forces you to systematically decode what passes the first filter before an entry ever reaches a judge. 04:32 — AI Entries Getting Zeroed Out: Judges are now zeroing out entries that read as AI-generated because reused winning phrases signal zero effort, and effort is exactly what judges are supposed to be rewarding. 14:38 — Operationalizing an Awards Campaign: Jonathan breaks down the full process of building a winning submission, from early result tracking to video case studies and cost management, and what it actually takes to scale a program to 200-plus wins on a limited budget. The unglamorous version. 22:45 — Company Awards Are Sales Tools: Best-places-to-work and technology innovation awards are fundamentally sales assets, a sticker for a deck that a salesperson shows a buyer, not signals of genuine excellence the way campaign awards are. 28:45 — DM9 vs. Havas: Which Is Worse? DM9 fabricated evidence and was caught; Havas Costa Rica's "Lessons of Shame" claimed a $73M budget shift and the reshaping of four presidential platforms. None of which could be verified. The award still stands. The case that wasn't caught may be the more dangerous precedent. 38:22 — Rating Manipulation Is Everywhere: App stores, review platforms, and survey flows are routinely engineered to funnel satisfied users toward public ratings and dissatisfied users toward private feedback, making most star-rating signals structurally gamed. 48:35 — Perception Is Reality in Awards: Winning awards cements your credibility as a leader in ways that are hard to replicate. The system's flaws don't cancel that out. Sponsor Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom. 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.

    Industry Awards: Earned, Bought, or Invented? with Jonathan Harrop

  5. Aug 5 ·  Video

    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 Hot 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.

    Touch Grass: What OpenAI's Summer Camp Actually Sold Us

  6. Jul 29 ·  Video

    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 health and occupational safety, and a habit of asking the question everyone else skips: who actually owns this when it breaks? Together they tear apart the MCP hype cycle. The answer, as it turns out, is you. The brand. The business that plugged it in. This conversation is a necessary gut check before you plug in another connector: what MCPs actually do with your data, why the risk predates the protocol itself, and why the gap between adoption and accountability keeps widening for exactly the reasons you'd expect. Timestamps 03:56 — Back to Basics: Fundamentals, correctly set-up systems, guarded platforms, solid infrastructure, drive 90% of real revenue. Every shiny new tool is just an add-on to that foundation. 05:43 — Moving at 100,000mph Without a Seatbelt: Martech's move-fast culture is exactly what makes MCP adoption dangerous. Building fast without monitoring what you've built is how deliverability and data problems compound silently. 12:30 — Education Before the Checkbox: Platforms should require real education before a user can activate an MCP, not a liability-clearing terms-of-service click that nobody reads. 17:50 — The Risk Started Before MCP: Data-exfiltration risk didn't start with MCP. SaaS vendors were quietly scraping client lists out of Klaviyo three years ago. MCP is a new surface for an old, unresolved vulnerability. 20:18 — Platforms Should Build AI In-House: If a platform has built-in AI, why is it pushing users toward external MCP connectors instead of delivering those insights natively? The incentive gap is a security problem hiding in plain sight. 25:30 — The First Name Field as an Attack Vector: A malicious prompt in a first name form field can instruct an MCP to export your entire contact list. Most teams would never notice until the damage is done. 34:10 — The Business Always Takes the Hit: When an MCP breach happens, the platform, the builder, and the regulator all walk away. The only party left holding the damage is the business that plugged it in. 41:55 — Your Customers Never Consented to This: Customers gave their data to buy a product, not to train AI systems. That consent gap is a liability most brands haven't thought through once. 47:36 — Biggest MCP Risk: Your Own Employees: The most urgent MCP threat isn't an outside hacker; it's your own employees using personal AI accounts to pull company data with zero audit trail. Sponsor Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom. 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.

    With MCP, There's No Sheriff with Israa Alrawi

  7. Jul 22 ·  Video

    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 apart what actually makes a bold brand stick at scale. Together, they've spent years keeping PostHog weird, and they have the campaigns to prove it. This one covers brand autonomy, the real ROI of mascots, why AI has data but not instinct, what it actually costs to hire for taste, and why a data company running an A/B test on its own illustrations is both perfectly on brand and, in hindsight, exactly the wrong call. PostHog sells tools that optimize the B2B playbook. Their own brand is allergic to it. Timestamps00:00 — A $1.4B analytics company whose most-loved asset is governed by feel, not metrics. 08:05 — A teacher told Lottie she wasn't good at art. That summer she practiced every day — not to prove anyone wrong, but because she discovered she could get better. 09:35 — Lottie didn't iterate toward a visual ideal. She iterated toward a feeling: the hedgehog had to channel the specific personalities of the people building the company. 17:20 — PostHog shipped a competitor comparison chart that crossed from knowing sarcasm into mean-spirited. Pulled within two days. Intent was right. Execution landed wrong. 24:15 — PostHog's original marketing font was Lottie's actual handwriting, turned into a typeface called "Loud Noises" so the whole team could write in hedgehog speech bubbles. 36:20 — PostHog's hiring test isn't about polished proposals. It's about whether a candidate can decide what to do and then actually do it. 43:34 — Joe ran an A/B test replacing brand illustrations with product screenshots, found marginal differences, and concluded the test itself was the wrong call. 50:28 — PostHog's brand works because it reflects the actual personalities of the people who build it. Authenticity isn't a strategy. It's what happens when you stop performing one. 52:50 — AI can approximate taste but has no genuine intuition. It produces the average of everything else. 57:52 — Knowing when not to measure something is a more sophisticated form of data literacy than chasing every metric. Sponsor Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom. 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.

    How to Be an Unhinged $1.4B Unicorn

  8. Jul 15 ·  Video

    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 warehouse-native has become a genuine foundation or just another vendor checkbox. They cover the full arc: why schema ownership beats security as the real argument for warehouse-native, how SaaS vendors have quietly marked up compute and resold it back to brands, and what the explosive growth of MCP servers without governance infrastructure actually means for enterprise martech teams. This is a conversation about structural power in the stack, who controls the serving layer AI operates from, and whether innovative challengers or deep-pocketed incumbents walk away with the next decade. Timestamps 03:39 — Resist Buying Anything First: When building a martech stack from scratch, Luke's instinct is to resist purchasing any tool for as long as possible and start with a business conversation instead, a direct challenge to the tool-first culture of the industry. 06:30 — The Warehouse as a Serving Layer for AI: Every major platform is racing to become the governed, AI-ready data layer because whoever owns that foundation wins the next generation of martech. Luke explains why that race matters more than the CDP wars ever did. 09:29 — Warehouse-Native as a Checkbox Feature: Luke names the single most common architectural mistake he sees: brands going warehouse-native in name only, with vendors attaching the label without committing to the underlying architecture. 11:55 — Vendors Are Gouging You on Compute: Martech vendors have historically marked up cloud compute and storage and resold it to brands as SaaS fees, and warehouse-native flips that dynamic by forcing vendors to compete on actual differentiated functionality. 14:44 — Schema Ownership as the Underrated Benefit: Luke argues the most overlooked advantage of warehouse-native is not security or cost savings but owning your own definition of what a customer looks like, so you are never force-fit into a vendor's data model. 17:40 — Brands Failing Publicly With AI: Luke argues that brands that experiment with AI and fail publicly deserve more credit than those that stay too conservative; visible failure is evidence of a culture willing to learn. 26:40 — The Self-Referential Nature of Big AI Deals: Luke calls out the circular dynamic of major platforms paying each other billions in AI arrangements, while still affirming that real brand-level results keep him from writing it off entirely. 28:30 — Who Wins, Innovators or Incumbents: Luke gives his personal read on where the real competitive advantage sits as every tool races toward becoming every other tool. Sponsor Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom. 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.

    You're Getting Gouged on Compute with Luke Ambrosetti
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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Monarch
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    53
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    ©️ Monarch Advisory Partners LLC
  • Show Website
    Making Sense of Martech