Thoughts and rants from a veteran CDP contractor and interviews with my peers.

martech

An open letter to Martech vendors: let's do better

Vendors, buyers don’t want theatre anymore. They want honesty, focus, and fewer ego-driven detours. After a year of back-channel Slack messages and mid-demo rescues, here’s my open letter for a more grown-up Martech industry in 2026.

As 2025 winds down, I’ve been thinking about all the demos I sat through this year. Probably more than any reasonable person should. And at some point you start to recognise patterns that you wish you didn’t recognise. Patterns that make buyers question their presence in the demo, glaze over, or quietly message me on Slack asking, “Did they really just say that?”

A meme floated past my LinkedIn feed a little over two weeks ago, joking that traditional platforms “lie”. And a screenshot sent by an industry peer from a presentation in which the vendor told the

cdp

Meet the CDP Simulator, the easiest way to finally understand your data stack

The CDP Simulator is a free, interactive way to see how customer data actually moves through traditional, composable, and hybrid stacks. Click, explore, and watch the architecture come alive without needing a single slide.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to explain a CDP diagram that looked like someone spilled spaghetti on a slide. If you’ve ever been in a meeting where five people are discussing “real time” and each one means something completely different, you probably know the feeling.

So instead of drawing yet another arrow-filled diagram, I built something people can actually play with.

CDP Simulator displaying David Chan's inspired Hybrid architecture.

The CDP Simulator is now live. It’s free, and you can get started in about three seconds. No signup, no marketing pop-up

Podcast

When AI replaces processes, not people

A conversation with Paul Meinshausen and Duarte Garrido about the mental models teams struggle with when adaptive systems replace rule-based workflows. Most marketers aren't ready for this shift yet.

I set up this conversation with Paul Meinshausen from Aampe and Duarte Garrido from DOJO AI because I've been watching the same pattern repeat across different companies. Teams bring in AI tools, get excited about automation, then hit a wall when they realize the technology isn't just doing their work faster. It's doing it differently. That difference requires a mental model most marketers don't have yet.

Watch the full episode here ☝

Paul's background is in cognitive science and decision-making under uncertainty. Duarte came up through big brand marketing before building tools for challenger brands with smaller teams. Both of them

strategy

Negotiating the New Martech Economy

Most Martech vendors talk about “transparency,” yet the real negotiation is about who ends up carrying the complexity. Part 3 explores how ownership, definitions, velocity, and data reality shape what you can truly negotiate in today’s CDP/CEP market.

The reactions to last week's part 2, The inherited costs of the composable stack, revealed something important about Martech today. People disagreed with one another, yet they were all touching the same truth from different angles. Some pointed out that composable savings mostly show up in use-case velocity rather than infrastructure. Others argued that cloud costs are a black box, no matter what you buy. A few reminded us that the data warehouse remains the gravitational center regardless of whether your CDP is composable or packaged.

What everyone circled around, though, was the same underlying question: who holds the

Podcast

Should your CDP take a year to implement? Zeotap CEO Elad has thoughts

A lively, no-nonsense chat with Zeotap’s ZEO Elad Simchon. We talk CDPs, audience boosting, European data culture, why US vendors misread Europe, and what’s coming next in AI-powered marketing.

If you ever wanted to hear two grown men bond over Bayern Munich, data sovereignty, and the existential mystery of why CDP projects take a year and a half to get going, you’re in the right place.

This week on Couch Confidentials, I sat down with Elad Simchon, CEO – sorry, ZEO... of Zeotap. Yes, ZEO. I accidentally coined the term mid-recording, and Elad immediately claimed it for the brand. Fair play.

Our chat was one of the most jovial conversations I’ve had all season. We wandered everywhere: his “midlife-crisis startup,” Germany’s secret basketball empire, DMEXCO survival

strategy

The inherited costs of the composable stack

In Martech, every pricing model hides a workload. Suites sell convenience. Composable platforms sell control. Either way, you pay for someone to hold the complexity, the only question is who.

Last week, in the first part of this series, I shared some experiences on how to read Martech pricing. In this second part, I want to examine the other end of the product spectrum and learn to live with it. Once you understand how vendors define usage, value, and fairness, a new question appears:

What happens when you try to escape those models altogether?

That’s where composability enters the story. It promises freedom from rigid licenses, bundled modules, and predefined ways of working. Build your own stack, plug in best-of-breed tools, let each component scale on its own terms.

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