Conversations with MarTech

In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, Jason Fairchild, CEO and co-founder of TV Scientific by Pinterest, breaks down the evolving landscape of Connected TV (CTV) and performance advertising. 

Drawing from more than 25 years of experience in digital marketing, Jason discusses how platforms like Pinterest and LinkedIn are expanding beyond their walled gardens and into the living room.

Discover how AI is shaping dynamic creative optimization, why CTV adoption is accelerating for mid-market and enterprise brands, and why "last-click" attribution is one of the biggest myths in modern marketing.

Key topics covered: 
• Pinterest & TV Scientific: Expanding ad campaigns to high-intent users on CTV 
• The current state of CTV adoption and B2B marketing opportunities 
• How holiday shopping dynamics and early research impact ad strategies 
• Leveraging AI and machine learning for dynamic creative evolution 
• Moving past legacy reach & frequency to performance-based TV metrics 
• The myth of cost-per-click (CPC) and why "kindergarten math" fails modern ad attribution

Episode guide

00:00 Introduction
00:36 Meet Jason Fairchild
01:40 What’s behind social platforms moving into CTV?
03:44 The current state of the CTV market?
04:54 Is the creative used in CTV getting stale?
07:30 What will be different in social and CTV next year?
11:23 Does making TV advertising more like search and social lift CTV?
15:58 What’s the biggest lie the marketing industry tells itself?

This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Paul Meinshausen, co-founder of Aampe and head of agentic at MoEngage, joins Conversations with MarTech to discuss the evolving role of AI agents in marketing and customer experience (CX). 

This conversation unpacks where the industry truly stands on the AI adoption curve and how AI-driven orchestration is revolutionizing the modern customer journey. 

Key topics covered: 

The AI agent adoption curve: Are we in an AI hype cycle? Discover why marketing teams feel both high expectations and satisfaction gaps with early agent deployments. 

Reframing customer experience: Why CX hasn't stagnated, but rather how consumer expectations and touchpoints have evolved beyond simple "top-of-funnel" click metrics to full shopping-process interactions. 

Strategic governance and organizational friction: How AI agents help navigate complex internal trade-offs, solve corporate cross-departmental messaging conflicts, and reduce operational failure points. 

The "biggest lie" in marketing: Why the answers aren't simply trapped inside static data stores, and how dynamic, iterative feedback loops and reinforcement learning hold the key to driving real results.

Episode guide

00:00 Introduction
00:26 Meet Paul Meinshausen
01:21 Where are we on the AI agent adoption curve?
03:30 Are businesses failing at customer experience (CX)?
09:59 How AI agents can help improve CX
13:57 The pitfalls of using AI gents in your CX
20:20 The biggest lie the marketing industry tells itself

This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Malinda Sandman, global VP of Marketing at Typeform, discusses how AI is reshaping the landscape for B2B and B2C marketers. Malinda dives into why AI might actually be making marketing harder in the short term due to the shift toward a "clickless" environment, how marketing teams can avoid the "garbage in, garbage out" trap of AI tools, and why having more data doesn't necessarily mean you know your customer. 

She also shares how Typeform uses AI to conduct scalable customer interviews and bridge the gap between B2B and B2C insights. 

Key topics covered:

Is AI in paid ad platforms net positive or net negative? 
Human-centric creative vs. AI scaling: Avoiding homogeneous outputs

Why 97% of marketers use AI, but lead follow-up is still lagging 
Does your marketing team actually have "enough" data? 
"Always On" research: Gathering customer feedback in 24 hours 
Bridging B2B & B2C marketing mindsets using video feedback 
The Biggest Lie in Marketing: Why more data ≠ knowing your customer

Episode guide

00:00 Introduction
00:40 Meet Malinda Sandman
01:27 Has the explosion of AI tools been a positive or negative for marketing?
05:03 Where should marketers be using their energy in the AI era?
07:11 “Marketers don't necessarily have a data problem, they have an action problem.”
08:34 The “million dollar next thing to solve.”
09:37 Fundamental marketing problems AI hasn’t addressed.
13:25 What’s working for the marketing team at Typeform?
16:59 What’s the biggest lie the marketing industry tells itself?

Connect with Us: 🔔 Subscribe to the MarTech Channel: Don't miss an episode of Season 4! Hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications to stay ahead of the latest trends, tools, and strategies shaping the marketing technology landscape. For more expert insights, articles, and marketing technology resources, visit our website at www.martech.org.

This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Are customer surveys officially dead? 

In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, host Mike Pastore sits down with Mark Treschl, general manager, voice of customer at Quantum Metric and co-founder of OpinionLab. 

They dive deep into why traditional long-form surveys, endless feedback requests, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are failing both consumers and brands — and what modern companies must do instead to truly understand customer behavior. 

📌 Episode highlights 

The Death of Traditional Surveys: Why more than 50% of consumers stop responding to direct surveys and silently walk away from brands that ignore them. 

Behavior vs. Sentiment: How pairing session-based user behavior with attitudinal data creates predictive feedback, rather than retrospective scores. 

The "NPS Lie": Why treating Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a business strategy or compensation plan leads companies to manage numbers instead of helping customers. 

Unlocking the "Silent Majority": Leveraging AI and lookalike modeling to quantify the silent middle curve of customers who never fill out a survey. 

The Thermometer vs. Thermostat Analogy: Moving from programs that merely report the news to real-time systems that trigger actions while the customer is still engaged. 

Closing the CX Loop: Shifting focus from collecting a higher volume of feedback to capturing targeted, higher-quality insights to improve retention and lifetime value.

 Episode guide

00:00 Introduction
00:36 Meet Mark Treschl
01:14 What were the traditional voice of the customer tactics?
04:02 The consumer has changed. Has voice of the customer?
09:44 “Brands have created silos.”
11:00 What does the future of voice of the customer look like?
15:35 What are the outcomes possible with a modern voice of the customer strategy?
18:54 How much does organizational culture impact how feedback is acted on?
20:46 What’s the biggest lie marketers tell themselves?


Connect with Us: 🔔 Subscribe to the MarTech Channel: Don't miss an episode of Season 4! Hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications to stay ahead of the latest trends, tools, and strategies shaping the marketing technology landscape. For more expert insights, articles, and marketing technology resources, visit our website at www.martech.org.

This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Is the CMO role truly dying, or are modern marketers just setting themselves up for failure? 

In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, host Mike Pastore sits down with Kyle Lacy, CMO at Docebo, to break down the real reasons major brands are eliminating executive marketing positions.

Kyle exposes the biggest traps holding modern marketers back — from over-indexing on pipeline numbers to letting AI replace human connection — and outlines what it actually takes to build a brand that is impossible to ignore.

Key Takeaways

The Production House Trap: Why viewing marketing strictly as a content assembly line makes your role easily replaceable by AI tools. 

The Risk of Short-Term Thinking: What really happens to pipeline 12 months after a company absorbs marketing under sales. 

Human-Centric Storytelling: Why brand story is your only true competitive edge in an AI-driven market. 

The Flaw of Attribution: Why using attribution models as "absolute truth" kills creative team innovation.

Episode guide

00:00 Introduction

00:31 Meet Kyle Lacy

01:47 A high-level take on what’s happened to the CMO role

03:18 Are B2B or tech companies more likely to eliminate the CMO role?

04:52 “We did this to ourselves.”

07:27 What is the risk you face when you eliminate the CMO?

10:26 Are more technical-minded CMOs better prepared for the future?

14:17 What’s the difference between product and brand for today’s B2B orgs?

16:20 What’s the biggest lie marketing tells itself?

18:30 “If you want to kill creatives, tell them they have a pipeline goal to hit.”

Connect with Us: 🔔 Subscribe to the MarTech Channel: Don't miss an episode of Season 4! Hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications to stay ahead of the latest trends, tools, and strategies shaping the marketing technology landscape. For more expert insights, articles, and marketing technology resources, visit our website at www.martech.org. 

This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Are the days of classic marketing automation officially over?

In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we dive deep into the massive paradigm shift happening across the marketing industry as basic, rule-based automation gives way to truly autonomous marketing.

We explore why a superficial "thin layer" of AI is no longer enough for modern marketers and look at how the next generation of tools must leverage deep customer context to remain relevant.

If you've ever wondered whether AI content creation is actually saving you time — or just creating more clutter to clean up — this discussion tackles the reality of human-in-the-loop design and driving true business outcomes.

Among the key topics we cover:

The Evolution of the MarTech Stack: Where does marketing automation sit today? We discuss the shifting center of gravity between CRMs, CDPs, data warehouses, and autonomous execution platforms.

The Context Challenge: Why LLMs can’t just be pointed at billions of data points, and the technical hurdles of solving "context rot" to ensure data quality and relevance.

Proactive Intelligence: How future marketing platforms will move beyond internal data to monitor external signals, competitor shifts, and website changes to recommend real-time strategies.

The Personalization Paradox: Why integrating AI doesn't automatically mean you’ve achieved true personalization, and what the "holy grail" of seamless, magical customer experiences actually looks like at scale.

What do you think is the biggest lie the marketing industry tells itself about AI? Let us know in the comments below! #MarTech #MarketingAutomation

#ArtificialIntelligence #AIinMarketing #DigitalMarketing #PredictiveAI #MarketingStrategy

 Episode guide

00:00 Introduction
00:23 Meet Chai Atreya
02:06 What’s happened since the days of classic marketing automation ended
05:37 Where does marketing automation sit in the martech stack today?
09:38 Data quality and context in AI-powered marketing automation
11:54 How do marketers feel about the AI capabilities added to their martech tools?
19:44 Are we in an AI Arms Race? How can vendors differentiate their tools?
21:24 What’s the biggest lie the marketing industry tells itself?
22:56 What’s the Holy Grail of personalization?


Connect with Us: 🔔 Subscribe to the MarTech Channel: Don't miss an episode of Season 4! Hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications to stay ahead of the latest trends, tools, and strategies shaping the marketing technology landscape. 

For more expert insights, articles, and marketing technology resources, visit our website at www.martech.org.

This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we’re joined by Mehul Nagrani, CEO of Integrate, to break down the complexities of modern B2B marketing, the reality of attribution, and where demand generation is heading over the next five years.

Mehul shares his perspective on why B2B marketing will always be a mix of art and science, how humans naturally complicate technology and measurement, and why Integrate recently acquired multi-touch attraibution platform CaliberMind. 

He also touches on why chasing a single "silver bullet" metric can ruin your strategy, how marketers can balance intent creation versus intent capture, and why the future of marketing relies on human connection and systems-level thinking.

Episode highlights
The Philosophy of B2B Marketing: Why B2B marketing is equal parts science and art.

Integrate Acquires CaliberMind: Addressing the missing links in the B2B marketing-to-revenue loop.

B2B vs. B2C Attribution: Why tracking enterprise buying committees isn't as simple as buying a pair of shoes online.

Why M&A Visions Fail: How Integrate plans to unify top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel data without falling into common acquisition traps.

The "Human Factor" in Data: Unmeasurable touchpoints, dark social, and the street light effect in marketing metrics.

Manufacturing vs. Capturing Intent: Why marketers need to focus on creating demand rather than just chasing existing intent signals.

The Long Time-Horizon Dilemma: Navigating directional measurements when long sales cycles make direct ROI hard to prove immediately.

Shifting Market Categories: How AI is disrupting traditional consideration sets and brand awareness.

Goodhart's Law & Single Metrics: Why optimizing for a single metric like MQLs or pipeline leads to bad outcomes.

Where B2B Demand Gen Is Headed in Five Years: The return of the pendulum toward systems thinking, creative strategy, and human-to-human connection.

The Biggest Lie Marketers Tell Themselves: Why "more is not always more" when it comes to tools, channels, and leads.

Episode guide

00:00 Introduction
00:20 Meet Mehul Nagrani
02:50 “The math behind attribution is hard.”
05:48 Acquisitions don’t fail because of lack of vision.”
07:41 “Half the job of marketing is to manufacture intent.”
09:48 The challenge of measurement in B2B marketing
12:13 AI is creating upheaval for B2B consideration sets
13:29 What’s the most important metric in B2B marketing today?
14:37 What does B2B marketing look like in five years?
17:31 What’s the biggest lie the marketing industry tells itself?

Connect with Us: 🔔 Subscribe to the MarTech Channel: Don't miss an episode of Season 4! Hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications to stay ahead of the latest trends, tools, and strategies shaping the marketing technology landscape. For more expert insights, articles, and marketing technology resources, visit our website at www.martech.org.

This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

The way consumers search for products is fundamentally changing. Instead of the traditional, rigid six-word queries used on standard search engines, shoppers are now inputting detailed, 24-word "rambling" questions packed with context and use cases.  

In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we sit down with Lucas Tieleman, co-founder of Opiversal, to explore the profound impact of AI search engines and large language models (LLMs) on online shopping.

This conversation dives deep into how AI-native technology bridges the gap between natural language search and traditional retail catalogs, and what it means for the future of ecommerce.We discuss the rise of "agentic" technology, explaining why bots — not humans — are behind a massive surge in web traffic, how retailers can adapt their product feeds, and why the ultimate lie in marketing is the obsession with finding just "one right answer."

Episode highlights

The Widening Search Gap: Consumers no longer feel the need to "dumb down" their search queries. They expect search platforms to inherently understand their context, personal brand preferences, and specific family dynamics.

The Evolution of the Query: Traditional Google searches averaged about six words, whereas the average LLM-driven query has expanded to roughly 24 words, complete with conversational adjectives and specific use cases.

Websites as Living Organisms: With AI dropping the incremental cost of content creation, retailers can now build and manage custom landing pages at scale to match shifting social trends and natural language queries.

The Reality of Agentic Shopping: While autonomous AI agents aren't doing the actual buying for consumers just yet, they are heavily driving research traffic. "Bot traffic" is soaring as LLMs crawl retail sites to answer user prompts, changing how marketers look at impressions versus sales.

The Feeds Matter More Than Ever: To remain discoverable, retailers must prioritize feeding highly structured data, conversational attributes, and detailed FAQs directly into AI and advertising platforms.

The Biggest Lie in Marketing: Lucas shares his belief that the industry falsely obsesses over finding a single right answer. In reality, modern technology allows marketers to test multiple paths and fail efficiently to find what works best.

Episode guide

00:00 Introduction

00:33 Meet Lucas Tieleman

03:20 What’s different about how consumers shop online today?

05:49 “The same product can be different things to different people.”

08:10 How do changes in shopping behavior affect retailers and marketers?

10:13 What were the limitations of the “old way” of building catalog and product pages?

14:32 Will we finally see people using AI agents to do their shopping?

21:05 What’s the biggest lie the marketing industry tells itself?

21:45 “With the technology that you have now, you can be wrong a lot more efficiently.”

22:35 “Apple is the proof that UX and design are important; Amazon is the proof that it isn’t”

Connect with Us: 🔔 Subscribe to the MarTech Channel: Don't miss an episode of Season 4!

Hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications to stay ahead of the latest trends, tools, and strategies shaping the marketing technology landscape. For more expert insights, articles, and marketing technology resources, visit our website at www.martech.org. 

This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

The customer data platform (CDP) market has completely reinvented itself over the past 18 months, evolving rapidly in response to a landscape filled with fractured data silos and failed implementations.

Historically, many organizations were left scarred by traditional CDP rollouts — enduring multi-million dollar, multi-year projects that focused too heavily on features rather than actual customer outcomes.

Today, the integration of AI is reshaping how businesses manage customer experiences, flipping the old-school implementation model on its head to focus entirely on growth and tangible outcomes.

In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we sit down with Melissa Murray Bailey, CEO of Blueconic. Drawing on over two decades of enterprise software and marketing experience from roles at LinkedIn and Hootsuite, Melissa outlines how a strong first-party data foundation coupled with AI can finally deliver on the decades-long promise of true personalization.

Key topics discussed in this episode: 

The Rise of Agentic CDPs: Is "agent-washing" the new corporate tagline trend driven by executive AI mandates, or is there real transformative power in AI agents built from the ground up?

The Holy Grail of Personalization: How AI allows B2C marketers to move past static automated email campaigns and manage infinite customer segments with real-time adjustments.

Creepy vs. Helpful Marketing: Where is the line for consumers when it comes to hyper-personalized experiences, and why being helpful is the ultimate test?

Blueconic's Strategic Growth: The vision behind Blueconic’s recent acquisitions of Jebbit and Blueshift to build an end-to-end powerhouse for first-party data capture and customer engagement.

The Industry's "Biggest Lie”" Melissa pulls no punches when answering what the biggest lie the marketing industry tells itself today regarding customer experience.

Whether you are navigating fractured data silos or looking to deploy real, AI-driven customer journeys, this conversation provides a blueprint for modern marketing success.

🔔 Subscribe & Stay Connected: Don't miss an episode — hit the subscribe button to follow Conversations with MarTech right here on YouTube! For more expert insights, articles, and marketing technology resources, visit our website at www.martech.org. 

Episode guide

00:00 Introduction
00:44 Meet Melissa Murray Bailey
01:40 Melissa takes us on a tour of the CDP market
03:41 CDPs as the ERP of the martech stack
04:15 Are people agent-washing the CDP market?
06:11 The good, the bad, and the ugly of AI agents
08:12 Are consumers ready for AI-level personalization?
10:32 BlueConic's acquisition strategy in an M&A-fuled CDP space
14:30 What's the biggest lie marketers tell themselves?

This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Is the traditional, purely creative CMO becoming extinct?

In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we sit down with Valeria Balaro, CMO at the AI-native technology consulting firm Star, to discuss the big shift redefining marketing leadership. 

Driven by the rise of AU, increasing revenue accountability, and the absolute demand for clear ROI, the CMO role is rapidly transitioning from a creative focus to a critical technology leadership position. Because marketing leaders can no longer delegate technical data and infrastructure decisions, the path to the top is changing. 

Valeria shares insights from recent research conducted with Forrester, revealing why a formalized martech background is becoming mandatory and why the next generation of CMOs will inevitably rise from marketing operations.

In this episode, we discuss: 

The shift to technical leadership: Why modern CMOs must personally master technical workflows and data architecture to survive.
The CMO-CIO "power duo”: Exploring the shared ownership of technology investments, and navigating the friction between marketing's desire for speed and IT's focus on governance, security, and risk.

The reality of data integration: Why only 8% of organizations have achieved seamless data integration with agency platforms.
Automating vs. safeguarding: How Star uses AI agents to build a "go-to-market brain" for process automation, while fiercely safeguarding authentic human insight and thought leadership.
The biggest lie in marketing: Why viewing AI as just a campaign tool — rather than a fundamental structural shift to the entire marketing function — is a critical mistake.

If you are a marketing professional looking to future-proof your career or a leader navigating the intersection of data, AI, and corporate strategy, this conversation is a must-watch. 

About our guest
Valeria Balaro is the CMO at Star, an AI-native technology consulting firm. Bringing a unique background in innovation and a highly technical mindset, she leads a team of 20 marketers across brand, demand generation, and content from London.

Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell for more insights from season 4 of Conversations with MarTech!

This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.