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

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.

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

The second is

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

agentic cdp

From operator to director: the marketer's job after the agentic CDP

When the agentic CDP builds the campaign, the marketer's job moves to briefing and judging. What changes, what gets harder, and a brief to start.

In the first part of this series I defined the agentic CDP as a platform you mostly stop operating by hand, where you set the goals and the limits and check the work. Without many of you realizing it, that sentence hides a career change, so this part is about the job on the other side of it.

For about a decade, being good at martech meant being good at the tools. You knew where the audience builder kept the condition you needed, you could get a journey out of the platform without filing a ticket, you remembered which export

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

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