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

state of martech

The pilgrimage to MartechDay, and what I’m actually watching for

Brinker and Riemersma drop the State of Martech 2026 report on May 5. One week to form your own view before the social feed fills with hot takes. Three things I’m watching for: the maturity gap, what AI is doing to roles in the middle of the org chart, and whether the composable canvas is real.

There’s a sequence in Star Wars’ Andor where the pilgrims walk to the Eye of Aldhani. Once a decade, a meteor storm lights up the sky above a remote plateau. The faithful trek for days, sleep on rocks, and look up. It’s beautiful. It’s also, in the show, the perfect cover for a heist. Everyone’s distracted by the lights.

I keep thinking about that scene as May 5 approaches.

That’s when Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma debut the State of Martech 2026 report and the updated 2026 Marketing Technology Landscape on MartechDay. It’s the

Discover Martech

Discovering Martech is like getting lost in London

Even after 20 years in Martech, I recently felt lost. With 15,000 tools and constant change, the problem isn’t access to information, it’s knowing what actually matters. This piece explores why teams struggle to navigate Martech, and where decisions really break down.

I’ve been doing this work for close to twenty years now.

Helping companies make sense of their data and marketing technology, guiding selections, fixing what doesn’t work, occasionally building something in between. It’s been a fairly consistent thread.

And recently… I found myself staring at it all thinking:

“I’m not entirely sure where I’d start anymore.”

That’s not something I say lightly.

It has been half a year since the State of Martech 2026 edition was published. It included a staggering 15,000+ tools.

Fifteen thousand.

At that point, it stops being a catalogue.

business decisions

Announcing Piedmont: why I restructured my practice around building, not just advising

Piedmont is French for Niederberger. Foot of the mountain. It's where most organisations find themselves when they reach out. I built a practice around that moment. Here's what it looks like.

If you read my post at the end of last year, you know that my client work changed toward the end of 2025.

It wasn't dramatic. No single conversation triggered it. But looking back at December, roughly 20% of what I was doing had moved from strategy and advisory into actually building things. Custom data apps, operational tools, activation layers that clients needed but couldn't find off the shelf. By April 2026 that number was closer to 50%.

When half your work has subtly become something different from what your practice was named for, it's time to pay attention.

What

Martech Goldilocks Zone

Finding the Martech Goldilocks zone

With 15,000+ martech tools out there, the problem isn’t choice, it’s fit. The “perfect” solution rarely exists. The real challenge is finding your Goldilocks zone, where technology, people, and process are balanced enough to actually make things work.

If you’ve followed my writing for a while, you’ve probably noticed I have a bit of a thing for astronomy metaphors. We’ve talked about entropy creeping into martech stacks, and how data gravity quietly pulls everything toward the warehouse, turning tools into satellites orbiting a growing center of mass.

So let’s add another one to the collection.

The Goldilocks zone.

And yes, before anyone jumps in, I know. For some, Goldilocks is a fairy tale about porridge, chairs, and questionable home invasion ethics. For others, it’s an astronomical concept, describing the narrow band around a

Martech Readiness Gap

The Martech Readiness Gap

The technology arrived before the organization was ready to operate it. That distance between what you believe you're ready for and what you can actually sustain is the Martech Readiness Gap. And it's getting wider.

In my last piece, I wrote about Scott Brinker's composable canvas and the distance most organizations still have to travel before they can operate that way. I ended with the observation that data gravity and organizational distance are two forces that haven't quite caught up with each other yet, and that the gap between them isn't a problem to solve in one go, it's something to navigate.

That question, how far are we from being able to operate this way, has kept coming up in conversations since. So this piece is an attempt to name what's actually sitting inside that

composable

The composable canvas & the cosmos

Data gravity is pulling everything together. AI is accelerating the journey. But for many organizations, the distance between systems, teams, and reality is still expanding. The future is clear. The path is less so.

I’ve been reading Databricks' and Scott Brinker’s recent paper on the New Martech Stack for the AI age. It’s one of those pieces that, just like studying astronomy, feels both clarifying and slightly unsettling at the same time.

Clarifying, because it puts words to something many of us have been feeling for a while. The stack is creaking. Integration is still eating time and energy. Data sits everywhere, but rarely works together in the way we need it to. So, the idea of moving toward a shared data foundation, with agents operating across it, makes intuitive sense.

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