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Is Martech work slowing down?

Is Martech work slowing down?

Five conversations, one pattern. What actually slowed martech contract work, what AI changed, and the review problem nobody has priced.

I recently returned from my holiday without some magical Martech insight. What I did pick up was a plethora of LinkedIn posts and private messages from people who have been let go from their positions, or who are sharing their experiences of a perceived drop in Martech-related contract work.

And an announcement from my friend Daniel Heer. More about that later.

In total, a handful of conversations over the last few months, from three different parts of this industry, all describing the same thing.

I will try to tell the story, using some light-hearted references to one of

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Identity Resolution: a practitioner's guide to who owns the match

Identity Resolution: a practitioner's guide to who owns the match

Identity resolution is a set of business decisions about who counts as the same person. Five approaches, and what each one costs you in ownership.

In part 4 of the Agentic CDP series I made a claim and then moved on rather quickly.

Identity resolution stops being a data-team hygiene project and becomes a precondition for anything agentic being trusted with a budget.

That deserved more than the paragraph it got, so here is the longer version.

Your agentic CDP will optimize whatever you measure
Every agentic CDP will be sold on goals-based marketing. That assumes a goal an agent can chase and a signal fast enough to learn from. Most teams have neither.
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Your agentic CDP will optimize whatever you measure

Your agentic CDP will optimize whatever you measure

Every agentic CDP will be sold on goals-based marketing. That assumes a goal an agent can chase and a signal fast enough to learn from. Most teams have neither.

The last dimension on the scorecard in part 3 was goal and measurement fit.

Can the tool take the goals and the clean signal you can actually give it?

I saved it for its own part because it is the dimension the entire category rests on, and the one where the distance between the pitch and the average marketing team is widest. And it bears the roots of my entire post-military career.

Every vendor is selling you goals-based marketing

Before we jump into the deep end, let's briefly look past the architecture arguments, and you will see

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How to evaluate an agentic CDP on your own

How to evaluate an agentic CDP on your own

Vendor litmus tests are built so the vendor wins. A fit-to-need scorecard for evaluating an agentic CDP, where different tools win for different buyers.

In part 1 I showed you a scorecard.

It was the five-point "litmus test" on cdp.com, the page that ranks first when you search for an agentic CDP, written by Treasure AI's CEO, and it scored Treasure AI five out of five and its rivals one and two.

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.

Where that scorecard came from ☝️

That test is not

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Right-time marketing and the speed of context decay

Right-time marketing and the speed of context decay

"Real-time" hides three different clocks. What it means from a data warehouse, why context decay is the real metric, and where five CDPs draw the line.

Every customer data vendor sells real-time. It's on the homepage, in the demo, in the answer to question fourteen of that RFP in front of your nose. The word carries a lot of weight, yet most of that weight stays out of view.

Ask what real-time actually means once the data lives in a warehouse, and that single word splits into three separate jobs that you can remember with the CDP acronym, too.

The first is collect: getting an event into the system at all. A click, a purchase, a page view, arriving through an SDK, a

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How Snowflake recruited Zeotap's composable CDP

How Snowflake recruited Zeotap's composable CDP

Zeotap's composable CDP now runs inside Snowflake as a Native App. Snowflake recruited it, the way Databricks built CustomerLake.

Zeotap's composable CDP is live on the Snowflake Marketplace, running inside your own Snowflake account as a Native App. That is the announcement, and it is the boring half.

The half I care about came from Jonaten Kraus at Snowflake, who spent about six months on this before it shipped and then wrote up what really happened on LinkedIn. His framing is the whole thing. Snowflake wasn't deciding whether to approve another marketplace app. It was deciding whether to treat Zeotap as a partner instead of a customer.

Snowflake picked a category vendor and pulled it deeper into
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