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

martech

Will AI close the gap in Martec's Law?

Martech ships faster than any team can absorb. Martec's Law says the gap only grows. Here is the case that AI might, conditionally, close part of it.

You already know your stack ships more than your team can keep up with. That is not the interesting part, and it is not why I have been chewing on this for months.

The interesting question is whether AI is about to help with that or make it worse. Not in the abstract, but for the specific job of staying current with everything your tools ship after you have signed.

Here is the perspective I keep reaching for. Scott Brinker named the shape of this more than a decade ago and called it Martec's Law, yes, without an 'h'

agentic cdp

What an Agentic CDP actually is, and why marketers should care

The agentic CDP, defined for marketers. Where the term came from, who is bending it to sell, and what it actually changes about your job.

A category that shipped last quarter is already being talked about as though it has always been here, with the vocabulary written in advance by the companies selling it. Who would blame them? I, too, made that point in passing when I looked at how three engagement vendors handed their data layer to Databricks, and it is the reason for this series.

I am going to spend five parts taking the agentic CDP apart slowly, because right now there is almost nowhere neutral for a marketer to work out what the term means or what it asks of them.

Here

martech

European Martech events compared: which one is actually for you?

I went to MeasureCamp, The MarTech Summit, Martech World Forum and AntiCon. Here is how they differ, and who each one is genuinely for.

In the last fifteen months, I have been to four European martech events: MeasureCamp Amsterdam, The MarTech Summit Amsterdam, Martech World Forum in London, and AntiCon in London.

Four in fifteen months felt respectable until I held it up against people who do this for real. It does not come within sight of the tally Steen Rasmussen racks up, or the North American tour Juan Mendoza just put himself through, and I know both of them well enough to say that to their faces.

Juan looks like he finished a Martech marathon (Source: LinkedIn)

People tend to lump these events

customer data platform

Did CEPs just hand the data layer to Databricks?

Three engagement platforms made the same bet in the same week. Whether it pays off is more contingent than the announcements suggest.

In 2019, I had a client running both Segment and Iterable, and the recurring question was where to build the audiences. Segment could build them. It could not act on them. Only Iterable could turn an audience into a journey, so that is where the audiences got built. Segmentation followed the system that could do something with it. Segment lost that job, and before long it was replaced by Hightouch. Sound familiar?

I think about that sequence whenever the industry decides it has finally settled where customer data belongs, because the answer never stays put.

The latest move arrived in

composable cdp

Composable CDP, translated for marketers

Composable CDP hands marketers a finished system and walks away. Four questions to ask before the architecture decision is locked in.

Let's face it, most composable CDP conversations are written for engineers, which makes sense, because engineers are the ones building the thing. The cost of that arrives later, and it arrives for the marketers who run the campaigns on top of the architecture, handed a finished system and told to make it work. I've written before about the inherited costs that creates. This piece is about the part that comes earlier, when the architecture is still a decision and not yet a fact.

The question a marketer should be able to ask in that room is plain. What

customer data platform

Databricks CustomerLake: the data lakehouse is now the CDP

Databricks launched CustomerLake, a lakehouse-native agentic CDP. What it means for composable vendors, Databricks customers, and the next data platform.

Databricks announced CustomerLake at its Data + AI Summit just now, and the rumor is confirmed: it is a customer data platform. A real one. In 2026 no less. Marketer-facing, built natively inside the lakehouse, with agents doing the work that used to need a data team and a few weeks of lead time. The first agentic CDP a lakehouse has built for itself.

Only 16 people guessed right on my LinkedIn poll.

To be fair, I saw it before the keynote. Databricks invited me to a preview and asked what I made of it, which I took as a

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