The Godfather of MarTech on the Great Convergence: Scott Brinker on AI, First-Party Data, and the Future of MadTech
- 3 days ago
- 66 min read
In this episode, Scott Brinker discusses how the rapid growth of marketing technology has led to a major shift in the way businesses operate. Rather than relying on separate systems for marketing, advertising, customer data, and analytics, companies are increasingly moving toward AI-driven platforms that connect these functions together. Brinker argues that AI is breaking down traditional software categories and enabling businesses to make decisions, automate workflows, and personalize customer experiences more effectively.
The conversation explores topics such as first-party data, composable technology stacks, agentic AI, and the future of SaaS. Brinker explains that analytics and traditional software interfaces may become less important as AI agents take on more decision-making responsibilities. He also emphasizes that many organizations struggle not because they lack data, but because their data is fragmented and poorly organized. Ultimately, the episode argues that businesses that successfully integrate marketing, advertising, and data systems through AI will be better positioned to compete in the future.
The conversation covers:
The convergence of MarTech, AdTech, and AI
Why the traditional SaaS model is facing disruption
The growing importance of first-party data and customer context
How agentic AI could transform analytics and decision-making
The rise of composable technology stacks and custom AI software
Why companies that successfully unify data, marketing, and advertising may gain a significant competitive advantage in the years ahead
Watch the full episode and join the conversation.
🔑 What We Cover💡 Key Takeaways🎯 Why This Episode Matters
Read the full transcript below.
Brett House (00:01) Hey everybody, welcome back to Signaling Noise. I am Brett House. I'm joined by my co-host, Ria Longacre, and we've got a very special guest today, Scott Brinker. Welcome to the show. Give you a little intro. Scott, coming out of Boston, I'm a Boston boy originally, ⁓ is widely regarded as the godfather of MarTech. And I wonder, did you give yourself that or did somebody else give you that term? I think you've deserved it. I think you've definitely earned it. Rio (00:08) you there He earned it. Scott Brinker (00:26) You know, I actually resisted it for years and now I'm finally like, you know, screw it, let's just... Brett House (00:31) Yeah, it's like you're pulling a James Brown, like the godfather of soul right over there. And you're one of the most influential thinkers in the marketing technology industry. You're the chief editor of Chief Martech, which I read all the time. I've written about some of your recent reports, which we'll talk about. You're the creator of the iconic Martech landscape. Don't mistake it for the Loom escape, which is a kind of... Scott Brinker (00:36) hahahaha Rio (00:53) They're Martek 5000, right? Yeah. Brett House (00:54) Yeah, the Loomiscapes of content marketing play, the Martek landscape is actually an industry analysis, like a true industry analysis, arguably. Scott Brinker (01:01) I would Rio (01:01) I say it. Scott Brinker (01:01) say the difference between my landscape and Terry Kauaja's is Terry Kauaja makes an awful lot of money off of what he does with his landscapes. He's got a much better operating system for this than I do. Brett House (01:09) Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Selling those companies. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And you're the author of the best selling book, Hacking Marketing, which I have not read and I need to read and I apologize for, I have to admit it. It's out of date. Yeah. Things are changing, right? And your market landscape has become the industry's definitive sort of visualization, as we talked about with, with, and we've seen it go from a few hundred vendors. Yeah. Scott Brinker (01:22) It's out of date. 10 years ago. Yeah, that's another lifetime. Rio (01:33) No, we all use it. We write articles about it. We include it, right? We quote it. Yeah. Brett House (01:37) A few hundred vendors, like I would think it was like 283 or 276, something like that, up to 15, over 10,000, 15,000. Yeah, which is remarkable. But you were the VP of platform ecosystem at HubSpot, which is headquartered in Boston, you know, and you helped build their ecosystem to more than 2,000 integrations. You are, what I actually thought was really interesting, your background is that you were an MIT and a Harvard grad. Scott Brinker (01:45) Over 15,000 now, yeah, it's just insane. Rio (01:46) to attend. Brett House (02:05) But you did what I thought was the reverse of what I would normally assume, is that you went to Harvard for computer science and MIT for your MBA. I always thought it was the reverse of that. But really interesting background. Yeah. Yeah, and my brother was an HBS grad. And we love to have. And I could see why you've had such success in sort of understanding and building in the ecosystem, is because it brings together sort of the commercial intel of an MBA with the sort of hard data engineering. Rio (02:17) It's a good MBA program though. I've known a few very smart people I know who graduated from there. Brett House (02:35) of a computer ⁓ science degree, which is often the people we talk to, product leaders that also have commercial, know, CEOs, founders that also have commercial acumen. ⁓ But welcome to the show. We're thrilled to have you. We've read all your reports over the last few years. ⁓ We welcome and tell the audience a little bit about yourself if I missed anything. Scott Brinker (02:52) Thank you. Wow, mean, like, yeah, that's a pretty thorough intro on that. ⁓ Yeah, I started life as a software engineer entrepreneur. ⁓ Once upon a time, building a web development agency, back when those were things that we did. ⁓ I built a SaaS company after that. That was an interactive content platform for marketers. And it was after I sold that company that I joined HubSpot for eight years to build out their tech ecosystem. And so that Brett House (03:08) yeah. Scott Brinker (03:24) That arc was always how I made my living professionally. All the work I'd been doing around Chief Martek, frankly, was just my labor of love for these past three years. Just fascinated by this intersection and that landscape, you it was always a bit of a... I don't know, it's like one of these things where like, I'm very grateful that so many people like latched onto it and it's, you know, had a certain popularity. But to me, that was never really the story about Martek. Rio (03:33) Is your side gig, Scott Brinker (03:53) I mean, the story about Martech was like, this is changing how marketing organizations run, who works in marketing, what skill sets do they have? mean, there's some of these things. mean, the technology is sort of obviously a factor to that, but arguably it's the human and organizational dynamics of this that originally attracted me to the space and still to this day is where really the hard work remains. Brett House (04:20) Yeah. Rio (04:22) Well, Scott, we're thrilled to have you on here and like the Martech assessment, as I mentioned, like we've all used it at some point in our career. I've been in management consulting off and on for close to two decades now. And I remember when I built a Martech practice at a previous place, we had actually taken that and put it on a whiteboard and dissected it and broke it down to a way where we could go in and do maturity and capability assessments for clients. That was kind of the starting point. So it's, really helped a lot of people in terms of just a structured, disciplined way of approaching things and given a methodology that you can, you can do a lot with. So kudos to you. We've all followed. That's been very helpful. But the reason why we wanted you on here besides just wanting to have you on our pod generally and knowing we both follow you is I think it's really timely. We're one of the few podcasts that... We kind of pride ourselves on going deep on MarTech and AdTech and DataTech, but I think one of the few that really does touch those two worlds, which let's face it, have been pretty separate over the last couple of decades. MarTech is run by marketing operations people, marketing technologists, IT. Ad tech by and large has been run by media agencies, right? It's a very different model. We're going to dig into that a little bit. They've run a separate world. And when you look at the data, they capture it. Ad tech's more anonymous, ephemeral data points and interactions, right? Related to paid media execution. While MarTech is more like known customer relationships to support and building those longer like CRM, relationship management over time. First party data and identity increasingly are becoming the connective tissue. Between the two, I'm doing so much work now with connecting CRM and CDPs over to DSPs, demand side platforms to through clean rooms, not through clean rooms and identity in different places. It's getting very complex and kind of the connective tissue is that first party data. then enter now into that, whole agentic AI thing. And can agents potentially do some of these things that we've been building pipes and reverse CTLs and using APIs to connect? mean, is that the feature? So it's a really. wild time. So we wanted to get you on here, unpack these issues, talk about these two worlds and really see, are they really colliding? Are they combining? What does the future look like? I don't know we're going to solve it all, but we at wanted to talk about it with you. So welcome. Scott Brinker (06:32) Awesome, thank you. love this thesis. Okay, this is gonna be a fun conversation. Brett House (06:33) Yeah, that thesis. Yeah, we might be talking for three and a half, four hours. We're going to go full Joe Rogan in this episode. Yeah, there's a lot of that stuff that's interconnected and related, but certainly critical. I you've had this vantage point of sort of watching marketing technology evolve over the last few years, which a lot of us have. We were there in the very beginning. So I want to hear you talk a little bit about Scott Brinker (06:38) Yeah, Joe Rogan's got nothing on us here. All right, yeah. Rio (06:38) You I can't that, yeah. Brett House (06:58) Some of the stuff you've recently done, but what when did you realize that marketing and software were sort of on a collision course? Scott Brinker (07:05) I mean, that goes back to the early days of these web agencies where, you know, the one we were running, we were always being hired by the marketing department because there's always their vision of like, okay, how do we start to get customers this way? And here's what we're doing with the brand and you know, and then the marketing team would hire us. But since I was on the tech side, it would be my job to go and talk to their IT department because they couldn't talk to their IT department and not actually in my opinion, because of like some sort of hostility. Brett House (07:28) Yeah. Yeah. Scott Brinker (07:35) Like they just didn't like speak the same language. They had like the conceptual, they were just in different worlds, you know. Yet if you set aside that, you I always think of the high school guidance counselor, you know, having like, okay, on this end of the spectrum, you could go into ID and software and on this end of the spectrum, you could go into marketing and you know, they're not as far apart as you can get, you know. You could become a peace activist or you could become a general in the army. I mean, you make some choices. ⁓ Brett House (07:38) Yeah, it's like who serves as the translator? You Rio (07:54) Right as neither are, yeah. Brett House (07:54) Yeah, communications and liberal arts, right? And they're very different. Scott Brinker (08:04) You know, but it's like, even though there was that, that, that distance, you know, like culturally and, just from a mental model perspective, when you looked at like where the world was actually heading and like what customers wanted, I mean, like behavior is so clear, like, okay, this is, this is going to be how business runs. Is it just going to be marketing sales go to market? It's just going to be totally entangled in these digital channels. And anytime you have anything that's digital, you have software. That's, that's what makes it all. Brett House (08:31) Yep. Rio (08:32) funny. I wrote a blog, I used to run a blog for, I think one of the marketing magazines, 2010, 2011, at least target marketing. then I remember one post I wrote was of how this new CMO was going to be more like making decisions based on data, was going to have to be really deep in technology. I've never gotten so much hate mail. I mean, it was like, you don't know anything about marketing, you're a complete idiot, you're a moron. I think it's 2010, 2011, right? Brett House (08:53) How many years ago was this? Yeah, yeah. You're failing to separate art versus science, you know? Rio (08:58) Right. You don't understand that, you you don't understand the art of it. It's about persuasion. It's about creative. Like not to say it's not, but like I've never seen so many people get so angry and irritated. It was, was usually a block. would get like one or two comments. I think I got like 30 really nasty ones, but I think it said something about, kind of the transition back then and you were really early doing this. So back then I wonder like, did you have any idea that you would be over 10,000, we're not over 15,000 martech tools. Scott Brinker (09:25) God, no, no. When we did that first landscape and the whole reason I did that original one was because that exact phenomenon you're talking about, had all these like senior marketing executives who didn't want anything to do with technology. And I was originally just assembling the chart to be like, Hey, listen, you're relying on this technology for this thing, this technology for this thing. You might have no interest in technology whatsoever, but your actual ability to execute here is now becoming dependent on all these things. Rio (09:54) You need it. Brett House (09:54) Yeah. Scott Brinker (09:55) You might just want to consider the possibility of getting some tech. You don't have to become technical, but you might want to get some technical talent inside your organization. ⁓ Brett House (10:03) Yeah. And that resistance from the marketing teams to your point Rio is kind of problematic, right? And we keep talking about it to this day that CMOs have to be more technical. They need to understand exactly how these things are architected, built and how they interact with ⁓ other platforms. Rio (10:11) That continued. even if they don't they better hire people to do i mean i think that's the thing right Brett House (10:23) Yeah, yeah, it's a critical, it's a critical place. So I think, I think it would be helpful for the audience. And I know you're going to love this is, is I wrote an article that you commented on Scott around with Databricks, I believe it was right. Called the new MarTech stack for the AI age. And you outlined. Yeah. And I, and I, I was, I like read that report. One of my, partners of high signals, Mark Sabatini ⁓ sent it over to me and it just published. Rio (10:38) Yeah, was a report that you put out. It's good. Brett House (10:49) And I read it and I thought, God, I got to write about this. that shows that you kind of inspired me. like, you know, it might've been imitative, but I was like, this is worth the time to analyze and understand its implications, right? And you outlined basically three ages of MarTech. And so the reason why I wanted to kind of get you to chat about what those ages are, the first age of MarTech, which was the 90s to 2010s, I think of like the sales forces. Scott Brinker (10:54) Thank you. Brett House (11:14) of the world. Tell me if I'm interpreting this right. The second age of MarTech, which like mid 2010s to 2020s, I think you start to get the marketing cloud world, right? You get to a bunch of platforms that are becoming platforms or ecosystems, right? And then this third age of MarTech, which I think is super interesting, and we've seen this term a lot in the ecosystem, composable canvas. You kind of defined it slightly different from kind of a classic composable architecture, but can you kind of walk the audience through Scott Brinker (11:15) Yeah. What? Brett House (11:42) that because I think that will give us a really good grounding in of Marp tech and how you think about it. Scott Brinker (11:47) Yeah. I mean, again, like the original days of Martech, were so much of this is tied to not just Martech. It's tied to basically the evolution of software as an industry, as a business, as a discipline. And we came from a world of traditional client server apps where, okay, there's going to be one, there'll be two or three companies, they'll battle it out. You're going to have then finally Oracle or whatnot is going to win. And this is going to be the thing. Brett House (11:55) Yeah. Yeah Scott Brinker (12:15) And so that was the mental model that so many of these companies had when they were coming into Mardek as a space was like, okay, well, we will either build or acquire and just assemble everything and we will be the solution. And they were very resistant to like, ⁓ Brett House (12:21) Yep. Rio (12:31) And this is precess, this is before there was really a cloud of any sort, right? This is when people were, you know, were. Scott Brinker (12:34) Right. But then even when they moved to the cloud, right, it was still this thing is they brought that mental model with them of like, no one vendor to rule them all. and so for years when I started doing that early MarTech landscape, ⁓ you want to talk about like hate. Boy, people really had a lot of hate associated with that thing. ironically, we'll come back to this. The second thing I've gotten the most hate for in my life. and I want to thank you for inviting me for this particular podcast. Brett House (12:40) Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Scott Brinker (13:03) ⁓ is anytime I'd said, you know, I really think Marthec and Antec should be ⁓ viewed as like one cohesive whole. Boy, does that unleash hate unlike... Rio (13:10) Yeah Brett House (13:12) Yeah, it's very tribal. It's very tribal. Rio (13:15) Yeah. Well, you know, it totally does. I mean, if you, if you find people who are like really concerned with those deep in ad tech, they will scoff at MarTech. Like they'll say like, we're not interested, totally different. Like, and with MarTech, I think most MarTech people, they don't understand the model behind ad tech about what your role of the agencies, what, know, working media versus tech tax versus, you know, like any of this, like, I think, so it's a very different world, different languages. I agree the technologies have become like, especially as we've moved to the cloud, there's been a lot more, and we'll talk about this, there's been a lot more convergence, but no disagreement. Scott Brinker (13:46) All right, we'll Brett House (13:47) Well, hold on, Rio. Scott Brinker (13:48) come Brett House (13:48) He hasn't gone through his evolution for... I think you're moving towards the second age of MarTech. Yeah. Scott Brinker (13:48) back to that one. Yeah. Okay. All right. So we had the big sweep. Yes. You know, I think the second age was basically when those companies finally came to the realization they couldn't build it all. There just wasn't enough things to build. I couldn't buy it all, you know, and so somewhat reluctantly. Rio (13:51) Yeah. Brett House (14:02) Yeah. Scott Brinker (14:08) they started to say like, okay, we'll open up, we'll have an ecosystem. In some cases, I mean, for Salesforce, they build actually a pretty profitable business around an ecosystem on that too. So it worked out, you know, but. Brett House (14:19) Yeah. Rio (14:19) Remember Salesforce used to have the no software load. That was the whole thing, right? Brett House (14:22) No, yeah. Yeah. The new software, the big anti. And then that's where sort of API started to come into play and direct integrations for capabilities that you didn't have. HubSpots, another company that built a huge ecosystem of partners for capabilities outside of their kind of core competency. Scott Brinker (14:34) Yeah. So instead of it being like this choice of you're either sweet or best of breed, it was this recognition like, well, you can kind of have a little bit of the best of both. having major platform at the center of your stack, in some cases people have multiple big platform, but the nice diagram would be, have a major system that's the center of gravity, the cohesion in the stack, but then augment that with any other specialist apps that you need. And so you started to Brett House (14:45) Yep. Rio (15:04) And the high water Mark Scott for this would it be like 2018, 2019, think 2020, like the peak of that kind of like monolithic, like let's say we're going to go, you know, going on suites, but get a suite, maybe like whether it's Adobe or Salesforce. Yeah. Scott Brinker (15:15) I think it crested even a little bit earlier than that. I want to say in Martek, 2014, 2015, I remember very clearly, ⁓ Marketo was one of the first ones to really lean, I think the original name might have been LaunchPoint and whatnot. They've gone through changes over the years. But originally, John Miller, ⁓ Phil Fernandes, they're like, no, we're now opening up this ecosystem. Here's this marketplace. Brett House (15:44) Yeah. Scott Brinker (15:44) And then immediately after that, Eloqua was like, okay, yeah, we've got a marketplace and we'll do that. Yeah, well, and hopefully that's part of it. ⁓ Although both of those ended up. Rio (15:48) Yep. And they both get acquired. Brett House (15:53) Yeah Do you think the marketing animation platforms that you just eloquip, HubSpot, Marketo, do you think those ⁓ are places where that really started to show itself earlier maybe than some of these other places or that was it kind of a concurrent evolution with? Scott Brinker (16:06) I mean, certainly in MarTech, yeah, certainly in MarTech, they became the prime examples of, okay, this is the platform ecosystem play. You're ⁓ still selling the suite you had before, but it's now open and you now actually have a management control over other ⁓ integrations or partners in that ecosystem. So that you could, again, it didn't have to be entirely suite or best agreed. could be... Brett House (16:22) Yeah. Scott Brinker (16:36) The best of both. Rio (16:36) And it's kind of like an app store or partner place where you could go, like you could, you know, that had built in connectors to different partners that added complimentary services. That being the premise, right? Scott Brinker (16:45) Yep. And then people started to compete on that. They're like, yeah, do you have more connectors than I do? But anyway. Brett House (16:49) Yep. Yeah, and now the third, what about the third age of MarTech in this composable canvas concept? Scott Brinker (16:58) All right, so here's the thing. What we've mostly been talking about is that sort of convergence around major suites versus these app ecosystems. The thing is there were a lot of other things that were treated as dichotomies before. There was this dichotomy of you're either a services company or a software company. If you're a software company, you're not allowed to do services because we're going to penalize you for that. ⁓ Brett House (17:09) Yeah. Rio (17:21) Not beyond a certain amount, not beyond like 10 % or something, right? Scott Brinker (17:24) Yeah, and Brett House (17:24) Yeah. Scott Brinker (17:24) if you're a services company, like, we're not sure we trust you building software. There was also like the dichotomy of build versus buy. It was pretty binary. I'm either going to build this or I'm going to buy it, you know, and it was Rio (17:36) And there were organizations that would say like we like philosophically, we like to build and or philosophically within there. I would run into that a lot. That's funny. Scott Brinker (17:44) Yeah, Brett House (17:44) Yeah, Scott Brinker (17:44) yeah. Brett House (17:44) yeah. Scott Brinker (17:45) And in a lot of cases, they were building things that they didn't need to build. But so the second age was like, OK, those dichotomies started to blend. So it was sweet versus best breed platform ecosystem. On the services side, you started to see more more blending of software companies offering more and more services. Services companies actually starting to bundle up apps often in these ecosystems and turning that into a real business lever. Brett House (17:47) Yeah. Scott Brinker (18:10) And then even the build versus buy, because of the APIs that got opened up as part of the platform ecosystem play, you start to see more and more companies be like, okay, well, we're going to buy the foundational elements. Like, I don't want to write my own email server, you know. But on top of this, we can start to, yeah, customize and build, you know, specialist thing. So that was the second age. To me, what makes the third age like this pinnacle of convergence is even the blend. Brett House (18:25) Yeah. Rio (18:26) Unless you're Walmart, right? Scott Brinker (18:40) between like platforms and apps and services companies and what am I building and what are you building? It's kind of all converging, know, and then this is, you know, there's several different reasons for that. But the most obvious example you look at is what's happening right now with AI where people are using like, you know, Claude and ChatGPT and these MCP servers and they're connecting across all these different systems, commercial systems they own, ⁓ custom things they built themselves. And it's almost like at that level, know, inside cloud, it doesn't really care what was a commercial product, a custom built product, a service or whatnot. And Rio (19:22) So is this latest age, Scott, a continuation of the composable age? Did you just put an AI, like, veneer on top of it? Or is this, do you consider this a distinct age? Scott Brinker (19:31) I think it is composability. The art towards greater and greater composability, where it's not just composability from a technical perspective. It's like, am I buying a software or am I buying a service or am I building something myself? Even at a strategic level, the interchangeability and composability of these things is becoming much more fluid than it ever was before. And I think we're very early in this, we're in the middle of this, so it's like, it's very chaotic and confusing. But think part of why it's chaotic and confusing is because you can intermix these things. Brett House (20:01) Yeah, and you Yeah. Yeah. you, you, you had it. Yeah. And I think it was your quote. said, MarTech no longer sits on top of the data. It is the data, which I mean, if you think about the profundity of that statement, simple, but it's like, it's not data is the new oil. Rio (20:25) That's what AI is doing to it, mean, if you're going to be having, if you get... Brett House (20:27) Yeah. Like, yeah, like, like, can we throw that comment of data is the new oil just into the garbage can? I can't, know, anybody that says that again, data is actually the, operating layer and the way that you, can you break down how you actually tell you actually talk about data? It's not literally just data. It's content. It's the semantic capabilities of controlling and the sort of the dictionary and how to manage and control the data underneath. Can you talk about how you think about that from an operating layer perspective? Scott Brinker (20:54) Yeah. Well, in some ways, this is a theme that again, ties back to our main topic around like, you know, the silo-ization between Antec and Martec, you know, is we have treated all of these different kinds of data in very hard silos. All right, here's where I'm keeping my customer data. In fact, we have multiple silos of different customer data. Here's my... campaign data that's going to be in some separate thing, my finance data is in something else. my content. Okay, I'm going to have that in a dam that's a separate system. I'm building some code or software. Okay, I'm going to manage that in some other thing. ⁓ And the thing that, I mean, the reason why that came up in the report that I did that was in partnership with Databricks was because the sort of thought exercise there was, like, okay, well, wait a second. You know, if all of these different kinds of data at some level, Brett House (21:22) Yep. Scott Brinker (21:45) can like be all deployed as the wrong word for it. If they can basically all live inside like a common data substrate, then like this distinction between what was customer data versus company data versus content versus code. Not that we might not want like certain government's distinctions between them, but the ability for us to treat that as a much more fluid relationship, that's actually a really Brett House (21:55) Yep. Yeah, you're almost redefining. Yeah. Scott Brinker (22:14) Mind-blowing concept. Brett House (22:16) Yeah, and one of the topics... sorry. Rio (22:18) But that distinction, like, let's say breaking down those walls as it becomes just a substrate you can access with an agentic layer using AI tools that hop across, you can really get rid of the front end. mean, think philosophically, you even think, remember, Brett, our first episode of Signal of Noise we interviewed, Wild, well, the second one, Ben Wild, where he talked about the future. This is even before the SaaS apocalypse. This is early. We were even talking about what's going to the impact on the SaaS business model. Brett House (22:36) Stephanie Laser. ⁓ Ben Wild. Rio (22:45) Philosophically, it challenges it, right? But then financially, when the SaaS business model is billing for seats, for licenses, for number of people using things, I mean, it does call it into question or at least put pressure on. Brett House (23:01) Yeah. Yeah. Whereas this kind of new model, it's, it's, you're basically building sort of a compute layer. You're paying for compute and you're paying for, you're paying for decisioning and all of that. If you've got agents that sort of sit, sit on top of this content and this data, which the data you're, you're defining is very different than I think most people define data content. Most people wouldn't put into. Scott Brinker (23:01) 100 % Mm-hmm. Brett House (23:23) the data category. People think ones and zeros, decimal points, et cetera, with the data and IDs, know, ID graphs, things like that. Rio (23:31) Yeah, but the rule is content has metadata, content has a taxonomy, you know, there's a lot of data that goes with content, so. Brett House (23:34) Yeah, it's all the raw fodder, right, that powers this learning system to power some sort of decisioning layer. Is that the right way to think about this? Scott Brinker (23:43) Yeah. Well, also like, mean, content used to be expensive. You know, I mean, it just keeps getting cheaper by the minute. ⁓ A whole debate we could have about quality of content. But again, at the end of the day, just this ability to have a fluidity with content means we actually can start to think about how we manage and operationalize that in a way that looks a little bit more like a software than it did just some sort of like static asset. Brett House (24:13) Yeah. Yeah, it looks a little bit more like data, right? is this, yeah, the other kind of data. So is this a conversation? like all the AI companies that I'm talking to and that we're consulting with, you know, talk about sort of context, you talk about context graphs and, and, you know, in how you build these sort of context engines that are kind of these, these learning systems. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about that? Scott Brinker (24:19) Yeah, other kind of thing. Exactly. Yeah. Rio (24:21) Yeah. Scott Brinker (24:44) Yeah, I have nominated context as the word of the year here in Marrintech for 2026. We are all going to be sick of it by the end of this year. Partly because the word keeps getting overloaded. Like we use context to mean a lot of different things. You know, there's the context window of, you know, particular AI is like just kind of almost it's like working memory. Brett House (24:51) How have you? Officially. Ha! Yeah. Scott Brinker (25:11) We talk about context engineering of like, well then how do I optimize what I'm putting into that working memory? The context graph concept, which is something that folks at Foundation Capital, you know, sort of pulled out in there in December of being like, you know what's kind of missing in all this stuff is nobody actually has good records of like how decisions get made and you know, like how the actual operating institutional knowledge, you know, of a business. Boy, if you could have that. And since they wanted to come up with a name that Brett House (25:38) Yep. Scott Brinker (25:41) wouldn't cause any confusion whatsoever. They're like, well, let's call that the context graph. So now people talk about context, and it means so many different things. But if you try and synthesize it to what the English language, simple colloquial definition of it's like, yeah, just understanding the thing we are doing right now, what is that in the context of, that is a really powerful opportunity for us overall. I think the thing that I just flag is every time I scratch at that, the depth of the rabbit hole, like the amount of work that is going to be required to actually turn that fluffy vision into reality is massive. Brett House (26:19) my god. Yeah. Rio (26:26) Just something real, Brett House (26:26) Yeah, and there are companies that are doing that on the rev-op side. So we talk to a company all the time and are partnering with them at HighSignal, it's called FullCast that's doing that, where they're looking at multiple, like in the amalgamation of email, Slack, CRM, and using that for basically signal predictive analytics. So they're looking for signals and signs to help predict churn. to help predict likelihood of upsell, cross-sell, right? So there's all these insights that can be derived from stuff that people are storing and communicating across multiple platforms within their organizations or within their own head. And none of it can be decided upon because it's so fragmented and siloed. And so there's a lot of companies that seem, yeah, so they're trying to tackle that, right? But how accurate is that, are those outputs is the question, right? In terms of... Rio (27:13) or even analyzing it would be so difficult, right? mean, that's something you can only probably do with AI. Scott Brinker (27:15) Yeah. No, yeah, I mean, again, this is super, super early on it, which is this goes back though to actually why I'm relatively bullish about these major MarTech platforms. Not to say that I don't think they have their challenges, but I think the work involved in managing context at scale. is massive. And I think it's different than being, mean, all these systems have had context, but that hasn't really been what they've been selling. They've been selling a UI and a workflow and all that. And that's the stuff that's getting disrupted to hell, you know? But the context piece of it, that's actually becoming more and more valuable. And so I think the degree to which you see, whether it's the incumbents or new players who come into this space are like, okay, we can actually provide context as an infrastructure capability. Brett House (27:51) Yep. Scott Brinker (28:10) in domains like marketing or customer service or whatnot. Rio (28:12) Yeah. Yeah, Scott, Brett House (28:12) Yeah. Rio (28:13) it's interesting what you just said though, because like one thing we wanted to talk about was convergence of MarTech and AdTech. But I think this is like, this is like, this is an interesting point. So Brett, in order to do some of the things you're talking about, taking, let's say financial data, which may come from your accounting system, which may be from your ERP. mean, that's, definitely not MarTech. That's more like a different types of tech that are used by different parts of the organization on a finance tech or sales tech, whatever. mean, like, or accounting software, right. But like, I'm seeing some interesting stuff go on kind of like we just described Brett, where like AI is enabling us to maybe begin to look across the organization into different data silos and use that for insights, combining it with Scott, like different data and signals. you know, I think we tend to call stuff in media more signals than data these days, but looking at that across the enterprise, it's more enterprise play more than it's a martech play even. Does that make sense? Scott Brinker (29:06) Oh yeah, mean 100%. Yeah, I mean this is... This is, I think this is actually why the theme of this whole conversation, like all ties together, we've come from a world where things are remarkably siloed and fragmented. And we are finally now starting to see pathways where those silos are being breached. ⁓ and boy, it's starting to open up some really interesting ideas. feel like, well, wait a second. We can now actually start to connect these dots. You know, the ad tech, martech thing in some ways is like a subset example. Brett House (29:25) Yeah. Scott Brinker (29:42) you know, things that for variety of reasons had their silos, there's a lot we can do when we can rise at a level above that. Rio (29:50) In fact, I think some of the other enterprise stuff is probably easier to do because at least everything's in the same enterprise. It might be they have the SaaS accounts. They'll have, I mean, to a certain extent. But I think with ad tech, and we'll get into this, you start to see the data sitting other places entirely. But yeah, you're right. I think it does unlock some ability to do things. And so imagine you're combining all these data sets together that never were combined together. Like Brett, your point, maybe you could unlock some credible insights that would allow you to identify Brett House (29:50) Yeah. Rio (30:17) to turn or identify higher value customers or identify maybe white spaces for your organization, combining this stuff together that you never would have seen before because there was just so much data and just the ability to gather it and process it would have taken forever. Brett House (30:31) Yeah, no, and I've already seen a ton of tools like this that are that are kind of BI tools in addition to the one that I talked about that look across a stack and pull a bunch of insights and give you acts of actionable reports in, you know, could be in preparation for a QBR. And to be able to do that agnostically, I think that the whole notion here is you're moving away from sort of a world that was relying on integrations. And there was sort of an integration tax. That was not just money and time. It was money and it was also time. huge amounts of time we've spent. mean, think about all the CRM integrations. I mean, I've been through multiple and the challenge of that. Rio (31:05) You need on integration spread, even connecting the systems, you have to normalize the data and then you have to make sense out of it. It's not easy. Brett House (31:13) Yeah. So, do you think this is freeing up people to innovate, you know, when you remove some of that time that's normally spent on, on data integration, on tech integration, on et cetera, et cetera. Scott Brinker (31:26) I think it's opening up the integration space because for a lot of people, ⁓ it's ⁓ just the cost. ⁓ Time, expertise, availability, opportunity cost, and doing one things. People are just only willing to do so much. And so as a reality, most systems were not integrated. Even systems that were integrated, most of them were pretty shallow integrations. There's usually a pretty narrow subset. and I've shared across them. And so I think. Rio (31:58) You had to. You couldn't just dump all the data in there. You wouldn't really do anything with it. Scott Brinker (32:01) Right. Well, again, to actually then make it work, you had to do a lot of work of, let's understand the context of that, the semantics of it. I think, yeah, AI is particularly, I mean, not just AI, it's like this perfect storm of MCP is a standard that's essentially like, OK, we can actually sort of simplify the connection portion of this. Brett House (32:26) Yeah. Scott Brinker (32:26) The fact that the demand for ⁓ people do stuff in AI is really forcing more vendors to make more things, more API access available. ⁓ And then to have AI be something that's actually pretty good at then being able to synthesize things when you connect them across. Yeah, I think it's like a, an industry that has spent as long as I've been around 20 plus years ⁓ wrestling with integration. Brett House (32:53) Oh, you stopped counting at 20. Scott Brinker (32:55) At that point in time, nobody... Yeah, I'm 29. Brett House (32:57) I stopped at 25. I stopped at 25. Rio (32:59) We all have. Oh, you're 25. OK. Scott Brinker (33:02) Wasn't that obvious? But I think MarTech and its heyday is probably like a 20-year thing. Before that, was much more... Rio (33:03) Yeah. Brett House (33:10) Yeah, that's true. That's true. So you've kind of painted this picture of and you've tracked this, which must have been a kind of a mind-bending experience of going from 200 and whatever the number was, just under just south of 300 to 15,000. And actually, you probably leverage the little AI to do some of the counting because I'm sure that's pretty takes some rigor, right? Scott Brinker (33:29) Well, now we have an AI system that like, yeah, it's like the first pass of like evaluating like, okay, are folks still in business? Are they still operating like new things that get submitted? How do we validate them? Yeah, I mean, we still have like a human layer, like the human in the loop to oversee that and double verify. But yeah, the first pass of all of that, that was done with it. Brett House (33:37) Yeah, so you can validate the count, right, versus just the. Rio (33:48) Yeah, well have firms been Brett House (33:48) Yeah. Rio (33:49) acquired? they gone out of business? Yeah, there's probably a lot of... Scott Brinker (33:51) Yeah, there's a lot of things you can sort of pick up programmatically Brett House (33:51) Yeah. So you described this shift, you know, sort of with that in mind of tracking that and kind of getting to this large number that we're seeing, and now it's starting to decrease a bit. ⁓ You know, you talk about this commercial long tail ⁓ as of a custom build martech, right? Which is what AI, you know, anybody with a, with a cloud account and in a replet ⁓ account or a lovable account can build some sort of prototype that eventually needs some engineering. Scott Brinker (33:53) at this point. Brett House (34:18) Ackerman behind it. But you call this the sort of hyper tail, which I thought was a really interesting idea of sort of, you know, it's kind of similar to your ⁓ first, second and third generation of MarTech, sort of this notion of like a head, which was your major platforms, a torso, which was sort of horizontal software, which probably integrates into some of those things, a tail, which ⁓ can you walk people through that, that sort of thinking, because I thought that was really interesting. And then this hyper tail where Scott Brinker (34:36) What say? By the way, that's a really interesting connection. I had never made that association between, yeah, sort of the dynamic of those three ages and how that was moving and, yeah, along with self. Thank you for that. I'm like, all right. ⁓ Brett House (34:53) Yeah? I think conceptually, yeah. Whether it's inaccurate, but the hyper tale is this notion that you're gonna have lot of custom built democratized ⁓ build in terms of both startups and people that are able to do this internally to build core capabilities. Yeah. And then you get this massive multiplication of agent built software, of people develop, citizen developed software as you call it. Rio (35:11) You're seeing that now. Scott Brinker (35:12) Yeah. Brett House (35:21) Walk us through how you guys are thinking, how you're thinking about things. I found that super fascinating of what we're gonna see. That 15,000 number is gonna grow dramatically, right? Scott Brinker (35:25) Yeah. So this becomes very interesting questions of where you want to draw the line on that which just as one example that for instance ⁓ There's a case I could make that there's 80,000 MarTech products out there just by saying like you know I'm gonna go to the WordPress ecosystem and I'm gonna say every single like, you know plug-in that exists for WordPress technically speaking it could be a market so, you know, you have to Brett House (35:35) Yeah. Yeah. Rio (35:50) Go to the app store, right? Brett House (35:56) No. Scott Brinker (36:00) you choose your judgment line on that. But anyway, so not go down that rabbit hole too far. Yeah, I mean, the long tail was always the commercial apps. And to me, there's a line that gets drawn and says like, okay, when a company starts building their own things. And they've always done that to a certain extent, but for a while it was like, ⁓ professional engineers, IT, was a small number of stuff. For like the past 10 years, we'd seen a general rise in what was called Brett House (36:01) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Scott Brinker (36:27) no code. So when you start doing things with like Airtable or Zapier or things like that, you know, we could debate is that making software or not making software. I think if you just let go of any sort of philosophical debate there, the reality is, yeah, there are people like using this stuff to like, okay, this is kind of building my app or my workflow or my automation the way I want it. AI has now obviously like accelerated that phenomenally for professional developers for Brett House (36:47) Yep. Scott Brinker (36:56) amateur developers, five coders. But the thing that's actually really wild is these AIs are like building and executing software at a phenomenal rate that nobody even realizes. And like I, there's an example I give where like, you if I go to Claude and I'm like, Hey, can you get me a graph of, want to see, you know, top 20 most valuable companies in the world over the past 20 years, divide them up by tech versus non-tech and, you know, put this in an area graph for me, you know, and Turns away, it comes back, I get my graph. I'm like, wow, wasn't that nice? know, behind the scenes, because you click the little icons, you want it. It wrote a freaking Python program, you know, and like went off, it got the data, it crunched this, it executed the program, and then threw the program away. Now, maybe it's a philosophical bait. Was that actually a piece of custom software or not? I actually proposed to you it is. It is a little piece of software, and there's billions of these things, yeah. Brett House (37:34) Yeah. It's yeah, it might be use case narrow and use case specific Rio (37:52) And it might only be used for a short time, right? But it still was while it existed. Scott Brinker (37:54) It might be used for 10 seconds. Exactly. ⁓ But I think it is this reality that the reason I do think of it software is because it is actually running these programs as we increasingly figure out how we're going to manage governance and what tools it can use, what data it can access, what other store stuff. It is very much a part of the overall tech stack operations for the company. And I don't think we've even begun to get our arms around. I mean, there's a lot of this is happening, but it is not very well understood. Rio (38:23) But it's almost like we need a new definition of software. If software becomes something almost ephemeral that could be created quickly, dissolved rapidly after a couple of uses, reconstituted in different ways. mean, that's definitely not like when we think of software today, still in enterprise software, that's not how we think of Brett House (38:44) Yeah, it's. Scott Brinker (38:44) Yeah, although it's ironic, it's at enterprises where most of this like hyper tail of custom stuff is like flourishing. ⁓ Brett House (38:51) Yeah, it's sort of composability, next generation composability. mean, it's like you're going down to kind of this micro use case level and developing something to your point. I've seen Python more in my life as just a code base that I have in the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years, just because I was not a developer, right? But you're seeing, and so yeah, you're seeing that there's a multiplication of that within organizations, which does there need to be a governance around this? mean, when you have a lot of this... Scott Brinker (39:18) Yeah, no, this is what mean by like it right now. It's actually pretty chaotic. and it's not very well, it's not, just about governance. It's about even understanding what's going on and how do we choose to like orchestrate this? Is there a strategy of like how we get these things to like align and work together? ⁓ one of the big open questions right now, in my opinion is people use different language for it. We'll the term most popular called orchestration. Brett House (39:39) Yeah. Scott Brinker (39:48) It's like, I've now got all these moving parts inside my organization and they're multiplying at a ridiculous rate. Brett House (39:54) Now every other AI company that comes to market is talking about orchestration. They're beating the hell out of that term. Scott Brinker (39:58) Everyone's talking about it, but when you actually like I have have yet to come into an actual organization where they're like, yes, and this is what we have that like orchestrates all of this shit for us. Rio (40:10) Well, they have one orchestrator agent, right, to rule the other agents. Brett House (40:12) Yes! Scott Brinker (40:13) That's the aspiration, of course. Yes. The orchestration right now is done through a bunch of humans who are trying to hold it together with, know, bailing wire and, know, killing guys. Brett House (40:22) Yeah, and they're to build agents to help with that. Rio (40:25) I've heard the sort of CMO is becoming more of an orchestrator in this new environment. Anything, Brett, I'm sorry cut you off. Brett House (40:32) Yeah, so you had a really interesting quote. believe it was in that same paper from Megan Eisenberg, the CMO of Samsara. ⁓ And she said, and this was an interesting point about kind of SaaS evolution and defensibility from a tech product perspective. She said, if a SaaS product is just making data easy to access, and I've been with SaaS companies that do that, companies are increasingly going to do that themselves. So vendors need something more defensible. Scott Brinker (40:40) Mm-hmm, yeah. Brett House (41:01) at the experience layer. Can you talk about what that means to you? Because that experience layer is critical, as opposed to just a wrapper around that's protecting a valuable asset, and you're just getting access to that asset, like data. What do you think about that quote? How do you interpret that? Scott Brinker (41:18) Yeah, I mean, I would use a slightly different term than experience because I think experience can be one subset. Like there's a lot of debate right now about the death of UI. I actually don't think it's the death of UI. I think there is a new UI paradigm that is subsuming a bunch of things. But I do not think the text chat box UI is the universal cheat code to everything we want to interact with in the world. Rio (41:43) I think this is the final, I think this, Star Trek, hey computer, I think this is where we're going. Scott Brinker (41:48) Yeah, well, even they had visualizations associated with that. you know, totally fun stuff. Computer, all right. ⁓ Rio (41:50) Yeah, I don't think you are just gonna die. I'm just being hyperbolic, but. Brett House (41:52) You Yeah, so you're saying a paradigm shift in UI, which means we have to redefine what UI means and conversation will might be part of that, but it's much broader than that. It's not just what we do with LLMs. Scott Brinker (42:08) Yeah, okay. But anyway, so there's the experience piece of that. That's one subset. I would argue what we were talking about earlier, this idea of like a context management layer is actually where there's far more value and opportunity because again, like the raw data and you were making this point earlier, Rio, I mean, why integrations were never easy. It's just throwing the raw data around. And actually now that we've got even more data than ever, it's more of a problem. when it's just the raw data on its own, you need this sense-making system that provides some sort of taxonomy, semantics, like what's the organizational structure for it? And I think there's so much opportunity for platforms to, in their domains of expertise, be that authoritative arbiter of context for all of that data. Brett House (42:43) Data dictionary, yeah. Yeah, so they're building their own semantic layers. They're building their own sort of data dictionaries or text anonymization of their data, right? Is that? Scott Brinker (43:05) So that's one variation. Like if you talk to the data layer companies, they talk about this very much from like, well, this is the semantic layer that you put on it. But I think it's more than just semantics because I think it's a lot of relational process know-how. ⁓ I was just having this debate with someone else earlier today that ⁓ You know, this idea that the AI companies are going to come in and like, okay, yeah, you don't need your Salesforce, your Marketo, any of those platforms. We just automatically can do this for you. Rio (43:41) Yeah, we'll create a CRM for you. We'll send out emails for you. We'll manage cases, you know, that stuff. it's not going to work that Scott Brinker (43:43) Yeah. I just, to me, it just shows a ⁓ lack of just how much and a lack of understanding of just how much sophistication in the actual process of how marketing runs and how things get done. It's, it's massive. And even if a lot of that has also been in the human layer of how we run marketing, if we truly want to ⁓ bring more agentification to those things, well, It has to translate from the human layer into systems. And at least the way things are structured today, I just don't see the frontier labs being that source of that system. Rio (44:25) Well, even looking at UX, Scott, too, like I think that's a good point you made that it's not decided how things are going to look. It's not as though like the chat, the prompt is the final destination or anything we've seen now is the final destination. Even like SaaS UX took like a good decade to even mature, react and other like technologies needed to be created in order to make it more dynamic. And I mean, there was a lot of technology went into that and thinking. so I don't know. people who are proclaiming the end of the front end, I think it's a little premature. I think it'll look different than we expect and probably different than it has been, but I don't think it devalues necessarily the UX profession. I just think we're in the unknown right now. And people are guessing at what the answer might be and many of these guesses will be wrong. I think that's where we are now. Scott Brinker (45:20) Sorry, camera is just ⁓ in this like, I don't know, every now and again I go like fuzzy. Okay, autofocus. ⁓ See, AI isn't here yet. I'm like computer, autofocus and yeah. Rio (45:24) this little. Brett House (45:28) You are here. We can hear you. We can see you. Rio (45:29) Yeah. Yeah, well, the sound is great. So we can hear you fine. like most people listen. OK, well, I guess, but going back to one of the topics you wanted to talk about was kind of AdTech, MarTech conversion, Scott. So like one way to look at it, looking at the data, be MarTech is more deterministic and durable identities versus AdTech that's more kind of ephemeral and probabilistic. ⁓ Again, one way to look at it, love your thoughts on that and maybe we can use that as a starting point for kind of talking about the two worlds. Scott Brinker (46:06) Short answer is yes. I just know I'm going to get a ton of hate mail from this one. ⁓ Brett House (46:13) Haha speak your mind Scott Brinker (46:18) My point about architecting AdTech and MarTech is part of the same system. I don't mean the same system like, the same piece of software or even necessarily the same vendor or necessarily even the same team. I'm just saying there is some level you go up. We don't have a chief marketing officer separate from a chief advertising officer separate from a chief. So, you know, there's marketing. And this whole spectrum of how we engage with people across own channels, paid channels, earned channels, like at some level marketing has to be thinking about how are we orchestrating across these things and really like getting the synergy and the alignment and the consistency for them. And that's just, this is again, this is the thing that just gets me in trouble every single time. I'm just like these debates that happen at the level down of like, well, this is a different system and it works on different algorithms where it different data and this one we had the agency do and this one we ever had. I'm like, yes, but there's gotta be a level above this my friends. Like this is the wrong level to be having the debate of like MARTEC and ANTEC. Brett House (47:15) Yeah. This was my. Yeah, yeah. Well, and those, yeah, well, those are the people within, yeah, those are the people within the organizations that have moats to protect their fearing disintermediations. So I think it's fundamentally driven by fear to say, we've got a moat. We've built a moat. Rio (47:37) And by the way, Brett, ad tech people, you say average housing is a subset of marketing and ad tech is a subset of martech, that's when you get hate mail. Brett House (47:46) Yeah, yeah, that's interesting, right? Yeah. Rio (47:48) That'll drive people crazy, right? I don't think I agree with it either, by the way, but let's keep going. So Brett, you were saying like they're protecting their motes. Brett House (47:53) Yeah, it's a well, it's all yeah, they're protecting their modes and I think it's self interest and it's short termism. ⁓ But if you think about marketing as a whole, I we talked about this in a few episodes ago, is this notion that the entire media ecosystem, the advertising ecosystem is competing for basically 25 cents of every dollar spent by big brands. The remaining 75 % is being done in shopper marketing environments. It's being done by the CPG companies within stores, the end caps. Rio (48:22) But pre- That's a point you just made. If you look at how marketing spend divvies up, basically, it's 25 % goes to Martech, typically. 25 % goes to media. Obviously, this will change depending on the industry, but 25 % goes to media. Then you have operations and salaries. Martech is roughly the same as is paid for media, which I think is fascinating. When you follow the money, I think that's where you start to get this difference because Martech is paid for, usually paid for out of IT or marketing budget is procured by marketing Brett House (48:32) Yeah. Rio (48:56) in collaboration with IT. A lot of time it's managed by IT or at least supervised, right? And then, I mean, that's a debate, right? A lot of times, but then I think media is different because media comes out of a media budget, which pays for ad tech and it pays for media. And out of working media, you have your tech tax that pays for the ad tech, as well as other things that go into advertising, including brand safety, brand suitability, ad verification, all these other little taxes that come out of there, come out of working media. And it's usually Brett House (49:20) Yep. Rio (49:26) invisible to the head of media and the CMO. They just know they're paying this much money for media and get performance reports back. So it's a very different way of actually buying technology. You're buying through intermediary. In one case, you're buying directly from the vendors for the most part. And the other thoughts on that. Scott Brinker (49:45) I mean, again, this is where I feel like I'm speaking a different language ⁓ than everyone else on this. Like, I will grant you all of that. Where do they converge? Where is the level at which someone actually connects the dots here? Because I know we're going to get into a little bit of like, we are now seeing more intersections between these worlds and they're Brett House (49:58) Yep. Yeah Scott Brinker (50:12) actually proving to be really exciting because this ability to align insights we have on the first party side to the opportunities that we have with audiences in these media. But there's some actually really creative innovation that's happening there. And it kind of pisses me off that I don't see any reason why we couldn't have potentially been pursuing that innovation a hell of a lot earlier in this process. But all right, I'm willing to let that go. Brett House (50:37) Yeah. Yeah. Scott Brinker (50:41) Here's the analogy I would give it. You were saying earlier, Brad, about like, OK, this thing like, say with Claude, you're like, ⁓ OK, I can connect. I'm not putting words in your mouth. But this idea of like, well, with Claude, I can say like, yeah, connect to my Salesforce or my CDP. And you can connect to my accounting system. And you can connect to my customer service thing. And now I'm able to see insights across this. Now, it is 100 % the case that every single one of those applications that you're connecting, they're run by different companies, they're run by different teams, the economics, totally different. It doesn't change the fact that, holy shit, now that I can actually start to connect the dots across this, the opportunity for me to have greater insight and rethink my strategy, it's a huge unlock. And that's the analogy I keep wanting to feel for Ad Tech and My Tech, Brett House (51:24) Yeah. Scott Brinker (51:28) I get all the distinctions between the systems and who owns this and how it operates. We need to operate at a level above this, please, for the love of God. Brett House (51:32) Yeah, and those are all just- Yeah, yeah. It's a unified operating environment that you're talking about it. And Rio, what you just described is basically the economics, the incentive structures and how deals are made in technologies bought and sold, which has nothing to do with where we should be going to your point, Scott. Right. Rio (51:54) Nothing to do with what the customer, like if you really think about CX as the customer, putting a customer first, working backwards, there's no way in a million years we would design it this way if we could purposefully design this entire system. Totally agree. Brett House (52:01) Yeah. Yeah. It's like, if we could say we could help you better predict churn rates, if we pull in all, and this is your context engine argument, right, Scott? You could pull in context, not just from this narrow subset of the stack that you use in the marketing department or you use in the, the, you know, rev ops department, but from a broader set of places. that are part of your broader set. Maybe it'll give you just more predictive capacity on who's likely to churn, who's likely to upsell, whatever the use case might be. But you need to give more context because you don't know where that data or those insights are gonna lie. And the fact that we separate it out doesn't, to your point, doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of. Scott Brinker (52:42) Because the insights I get from what I'm running with Antec and media, can the insights from that help inform the decisions of what I want to do in my first party market and vice versa? You know, like, can it inform that? And that's all I'm saying. I'm just like, I just like us kind of like to work together in a mode of like, okay, how do we think about the marketing experience as a whole and ways in which we can optimize across Rio (52:50) They should. Brett House (52:53) Yeah. Yeah. Scott Brinker (53:10) This fragmented silo meant Rio (53:11) Yeah. We talk about journey orchestration, right? If you really want to orchestrate incredible experiences and journeys right across the entire, like every single touch point, every different channel. I mean, you would certainly need to look at it holistically and you certainly need to be looking tied to together. So, no disagreement with there, but I think that you would need a complete reordering and restructuring Brett to your point of the way, the way things are bought and sold. Right. I mean, you would need like, even now, if you said to a brand, Hey, go get, go get data from. They wouldn't even know how many DSPs they're using for activation typically, but let's say they're using five DSPs, right? Their agencies are. They might not even have the ability to access those DSPs because the agency would say, we've got other brands in there. We can't give you access to that, right? It's not even your instance, it's ours. We're paying for the license coming out of the working media. So even getting access to that would be incredibly problematic. Some brands are doing that. They're actually going paper direct with AdTek Platform, Because they want log level file access, they want the ability to look at like what... like actually look at the bids themselves and the ability to, again, take the learnings from there and pipe them back into like a more holistic CRM program. I'm starting to see some of that, but like that's just like, that's a small subset of the world. Most of it does not operate. You would need a complete restructuring. I think that's very fascinating. Scott Brinker (54:29) I don't want to downplay the hurdles and the challenges to it. The. Don't let the improvement, the perfect be the enemy of the incremental improvement of anything, right? It's just like, listen, yeah, I fully get why we are not going to turn around tomorrow and there's going to be this perfect alignment across the entire Ad Tech, Martech universe. I just like the resistance to even wanting to consider, there incremental ways in which we can make this better and smarter and when? There's just been such... Brett House (54:44) Good enough. Rio (54:45) Good, yeah. Scott Brinker (55:09) cultural resistance to it. I'm like, okay, I mean, come on. And I think what's fascinating here is now that the hand is being forced, you know, for a variety of reasons of these changes, yeah, people are like, oh, actually there are, turns out there are some interesting things we might be able to do here. And the fact that it's imperfect and it may never be perfect. Yeah, welcome to technology. But. Rio (55:34) One place you mentioned incremental change in one place. I am starting to see differences with, let's say within advertising, the use of first party data from owned and CRM channels for activation and media, whether it's actually activation of a direct audience or creating a seat or look alike in order to extend it. I'm seeing some incredible stuff going on there, uh, where there's a realization I think was initially pushed by the vendors, but I think many brands and CMOs now are getting on board. Like, Hey, we have this incredibly valuable first party data. We should be using it. We're spending a croplet of money in media. If we can use it to get better return and ad spend, better targeting, better measurement, or better customer experience, God forbid, we should be using this stuff. And I've seen some pretty outstanding results. I think that's one place I'm starting to see a little bit of change. Brett House (56:20) Yeah, well, that's on the buy side. And then you have on the sell side, we just talked to Joe Root, the CEO of Permitive or Permitive. Yeah, and on the publisher side, they have a huge store of first party data, especially for authenticated audiences that are subscribers to premium. Yeah, yeah. And this data is not being pushed into the audience segmentation and targeting ⁓ ecosystem because it just would cause... Rio (56:25) This is super cool. Yeah. Beyond bid stream, we're talking just the first part of data they have. Brett House (56:45) you know, of bandwidth, you know, they're narrowing the pipes to maintain cost control over sucking in all of the data. Rio (56:52) Neither by our cell side could absorb, like ingest all this data. The processing would just be astronomical. It also be too slow and you have two milliseconds to serve up, to serve up ads. Brett House (56:56) Yeah. Yeah, and so they're finding a way where it's basically more of a direct connection between publishers, premium publishers that have authenticated traffic and subscribers to brands and removing the middle end. it gives a direct source of incredibly rich contextual, behavioral, historical, so temporal data for their audiences to the brands, which brands right now in the digital ecosystem have an access to a ⁓ super small sub-segment of that data simply because it would cost too much and it would cost too much compute. Rio (57:31) All they might have is the ID, right? And the DSP is prioritized like IDs over everything else, right? So all you're getting is IDs and basic, maybe a couple of contextual signals. You're really not getting a lot, right? And so the bid, so the argument then is if we had access to this, you'd be more intelligent bids, better targeting. It'd be better for publishers too, because they could keep a bigger percentage of the share. Brett House (57:51) Yep. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So data unification. So what are your kind of top takeaways from some of the research that you've done most recently? mean, we talked about the report. Do you have another report coming out? I think I've missed one of your most recent pieces of research. Scott Brinker (58:09) I don't know. I seem to be writing a lot of reports these days. You'd be forgiven for losing track of them. ⁓ Well, we did publish this state of MarTech report ⁓ just a couple of weeks ago that has the data on the landscape, but also some data on ⁓ trying to answer actually this build versus buy question where people were using existing SaaS, new AI, native products. ⁓ And we did that over 70 use cases across marketing. ⁓ I guess the... Brett House (58:18) Yes. Scott Brinker (58:37) the punchline version of it is it speaks to the convergence story. wasn't build versus buy. was in almost every single one of these use cases. People are like, yep, we're buying these things here and we're building these things here. And we have a mix of that. And, you know, some use cases more than others, but the overall arc is unmistakable. It's like, yeah, we're building and Brett House (59:03) Yeah, so how do you, how are you, you know, and do you consult with companies in terms of how, like, as we move towards this, this notion of like a third era of MarTech, right, in this composable canvas you talked about, not to belabor the point, but how would you suggest brands prepare for that? I mean, is it, you know, like how do they set themselves up for success in kind of a changing world order when it comes to SaaS and MarTech? Scott Brinker (59:30) Let's see, can we sum that up in a few short things? ⁓ I guess there's three things I would suggest. ⁓ First of all, getting that data layer in order. mean, again, for a of companies, this is still a mess. It isn't just a MarTech thing. It is very much an enterprise-wide thing. But almost all of the really fun and sexy stuff we want to do moving forward, it's predicated on getting the data layer in a much better shape. So there's that. The second is when you start looking at applications and platforms that you're doing on top of that, openness matters more than it ever has. So it's certainly a dimension that as you're evaluating both your vendors and renewals and what you do next, ⁓ those that are embracing this world of open APIs and connectivity and composability, I think those are the wide choices. They're going to give you the most optionality and the most flexibility in what is still a very foggy future Anyone who tells you they know how your marketing organization is gonna need to run like two three five years from now Yeah, I mean they're trying to they're smoking something or selling something, you know, but we do know it's gonna change Yeah, maybe both ⁓ But we do know it's gonna change and so a lot of this comes down to like being able to build optionality, you know into your infrastructure in your system so that you can adapt and then the third thing is yeah, the Rio (1:00:36) They're probably not telling the truth. Yeah. Maybe both. Brett House (1:00:39) Hahaha. Scott Brinker (1:00:57) people dimension of this. ⁓ I'm very bullish in marketing employment overall because I think the amount of work to be done in marketing in this next era far exceeds the hours in the day. But it is very different skills that are having to be developed and a lot of learning. And I think both for individuals but also for companies. who really are investing in that change management and that learning and that upskilling. Anyway, those are the three things I would suggest. Rio (1:01:32) Scott, that's a good point. But by the way, that last point I really like, I kind of liken it to what we're seeing with coding, right? Like there's this hypothesis, like I've just heard a lot of people say, it's all between Claude code and Codex and cursor. All the developers are going to be unemployed. Well, it turns out like very few of them are if any, right? And it turns out that there was a huge, there was like unmet demand for coding. And now that coding, the cost has dropped down. guess what? Like there's, like this weight, there's There's way more demand for it. So I actually think with Jevons paradox, exactly. think, I think we're going to see the same thing with marketing. think we're going to realize marketing has always been really hard. It's been very labor intensive. It's been very operational, like 70, 80 % of it, like the iceberg has always been operational. Right. And I think we're going to find as less of it becomes operational in terms of percentage of overmarket and we're going to find, wow, we can do a lot more marketing. Well, guess what? Like we'll need more. We're going to need more people anyway. What they do may change. It may be less operational, but we're going to need more people. So I totally agree with you. Scott Brinker (1:02:03) Jevin paradox Brett House (1:02:05) Moon out. And definitely less Mad Men oriented, but like some of my key takeaways from, from, know, reading the last couple of reports that you've written, Scott was one, you know, the obvious one, get the data foundation, right? Right. And, think of the foundation as beyond how you normally or traditionally define data, right? It's content. ⁓ It's, it's the whole notion of building a context engine, right? Give, give your decisioning systems the ability, as much context as they can possibly have, because that's going to make their predictive capacity better. and you'll able to just do things faster and more accurately, right? The other one is sort of, and you kind of hit on this before, it's sort of, without using the word semantic, but I'm gonna use it just for lack of a better word, is sort of build the semantic layer before you overbuild. Yeah, but before you overbuild the agentic layer, build, because you talked about it as sort of core IP, meaning hey, you've got this IP on how you manage ⁓ the... Rio (1:03:14) Threat loves semantic layer, by the way. He uses every podcast. Brett House (1:03:29) all of the data stores that you have and what the governance layer is, how you organize and structure this. You want to get that right, it sounds to me like that's where a lot of the IP lives before you actually plug in a bunch of agents. Is that inaccurate? Scott Brinker (1:03:41) Yeah, otherwise, like, you're just plugging into chaos. Yeah. Brett House (1:03:45) Yeah, and then I think ⁓ it's like moving the attention from plumbing. We've spent a lot of time with integration plumbing. I saw it in my last company from a CRM integration perspective, the amount of time it took to combine instances of Salesforce in this particular case, which ⁓ really slowed down our ability to act on very important statistics within the organization, like churn rate. who was churning based on what products they bought, based on their history with the organization. And we had none of those insights for months and months and months. So it's sort of this notion of how do you get from plumbing to decisioning? And is that a, think those are three good areas and would you add anything to that mix? Scott Brinker (1:04:29) No, think, yeah. I mean, start there. Like, let's face it, just those things we've named, like that's gonna keep you busy for the next year. When you get that homework assignment done, come and see me. I can give you the next one. But that's a lot there. Brett House (1:04:34) He... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like we're still wrangling the same problems. ⁓ Rio (1:04:46) Scott, looking at the Martech framework and I sent you over an ad tech one as well, you know, we, had simple, it was, was purposely simplified because it's something we work with in clients and we're helping identify, okay, what tools do you have? What tools do you not have? Let's map the, what capabilities do you have for start and then not having, and we eventually map those to tools if they need us to. it's funny, I showed those to a couple of Martech guys here and, and they said, they showed me their Martech framework, which had like a little box or ad tech, right? Like, all your stuff fits right in there. I said, come on, like, like you just get like. Brett House (1:05:12) Ha! Rio (1:05:15) You're itching for a fight, aren't you? Right. So, so it's funny. So I don't, I don't think that'd be the right way to do it. I do think there's probably some better way to display. Let's say the worlds of MarTech and AdTech together, probably based on Brett, to your point earlier on the customer, right? Like based on the customer jury. I don't know. There's gotta be a better way to do this. I would, I don't know you have any thoughts on that, but I, I think there's gotta be a way that can keep everyone happy and can be up because they should be. Brett House (1:05:17) Yeah, it's so funny. Rio (1:05:40) If not combined, they're at least converging, right? And there's a ton of like overlap now. And let's say if the goal is to service the customer, whether it's the CMO or the end customer, whether it's B2B or B2C, I think these things probably should be looked at in one continuum. Scott Brinker (1:05:55) Yeah, I guess, and this is where I understand why it becomes fighting words, is in Antec and Martech, I mean, even within Martech, there's just a tremendous amount of specialization that is needed on the actual ground of where things happen. Brett House (1:06:09) Yeah. Scott Brinker (1:06:13) Sorry, but the way the social media system works and the way you manage your email for deliverability and you know the way in which you manage personalization on your website. These are very, very different things. And you know, you generally don't have people who are absolute experts in every single one of them. And so I have a lot of respect for again, everything from the ad tech universe as well too. That's just, there's a lot happening there. To me, getting this alignment at a higher level. of like, and I think it's the perfect way look at it. It's like, we just look at this through the customer's journey, the customer's lens, you know, like, how are they going to do it? And like, given that, how do we start to leverage what we have across all of these different systems, you know, to make that better and more effective and more efficient for us. And that doesn't mean that it's poo pooing or somehow downplaying the expertise or the specialization in the particular pieces. It's just. Brett House (1:06:48) Yeah Scott Brinker (1:07:09) recognizing there's another level at which this game is being played and we've ignored it for just too long. Brett House (1:07:14) Yeah, yeah. Well, it reminds me of like some of the leadership lessons I've learned when you're sitting back and you're bringing in various executives to kind of present their side of the story. You know, the head of product, the head of sales, the of customer success. They all seem, you know, the good leaders, the good executives will think much more holistically about how this applies to the overall organization. The more myopic leaders or more immaturity in their career. Rio (1:07:38) or bloodthirsty ones. Brett House (1:07:39) Yeah, well, yeah, bloodthirsty ones will think very narrowly about their lane, what their moat, their team, and they won't be able to see outside that lens, which is fundamental for when you're making large enterprise tech and data decisions. You need to be able to think outside of the lenses of where you're coming from. And I think that's kind of a... Scott Brinker (1:07:41) Politics. No, yeah, and I appreciate the real politic of it. I'm just saying like the way this ultimately plays out in the market is there will be some companies that bridge that. And my bet is they're going to be more effective and more efficient and they're going to win. And there are going to be companies who are going to resist that for all sorts of variety of reasons, real politic probably being at the end of the day, the real one. And they're going to be disadvantaged. And that's ultimately, I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Brett House (1:08:10) Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Scott Brinker (1:08:26) This is my thesis. It'll either prove out in the market that it is or it proves out that I'm just delusional or both is. Brett House (1:08:26) And yeah. Yeah, well, in Rio, we had a conversation with another guest, Jennifer, that talked about sort of the depth of specialization, right? How agentic AI is sort of enabling us to think more holistically because you don't need to be specialized in each, know, like think from a functional level. Rio (1:08:47) Yeah, you can get specialized in for like a detailed information or anything right. It's right there for 20 bucks a month or whatever. Brett House (1:08:51) Yeah, because you don't need to be an email specialist because you can actually have something automated that's running and has got the detail in terms of how to manage the nuts and bolts of that system. Right. And so she talked about it as sort of the rise of the, what, the hyphenated job description or the hyphenated job title. Like I am a, you know, Rio (1:09:09) Yep. That was cool concept, yeah. Brett House (1:09:11) Yeah, yeah, it's like data tech, know, dash dash dash dash, which is interesting because it sort of shows that as executives in the industry, you should start to think of yourself as more of an orchestrator than a conductor, right? As opposed to a specialist. Rio (1:09:25) I read something crazy. tweeted about this morning, Brett, about how, and I thought this was insane. saying like 89 % according to some Gallup poll of leaders, I don't know what they mean by leaders, said that like they found AI did not help productivity. It's like, who would they talk to? Like this is the most incredible hack for productivity. We use it like for almost everything. I used to write emails, right? Because it's dictate, boom, the email's done in two seconds. Brett House (1:09:50) Yeah. Rio (1:09:53) very good, maybe edit a couple of things. mean, it's such an incredible productivity hack. I just find it astounding. And I think either these people don't want to use it and are avoiding it, or I don't know how you could not know how to. I I see some more junior people struggling because maybe they don't have the right context to feed it and for inputs to get the right outputs. like, if you've been in business world a long time and you can't leverage this tool to make your life easier and do things quicker, like, I don't even know what to tell you. Brett House (1:10:19) Yeah, deep research. Think of the countless, you've done a lot of deep research, Scott. Think about the countless hours that it took before you had the deep research models that could go and just scour the world, know, humanity's information and come back. Yeah, you have to curate it and manage it and validate it. But point being that type of work could take dozens, if not hundreds of hours. And you can do it in 15 minutes and go, my God, I didn't even realize it. Where did they get this information? Yeah. Scott Brinker (1:10:39) Yeah. Rio (1:10:43) It's good. You need check it, but it's really good. Scott Brinker (1:10:47) Well, is yeah, the irony is, you know, lot of those executives who haven't really leaned in to figuring out how to use his hands on, you know, are also some of the same very people saying like, all right, and all of you people need to use AI. I want to see how AI is being used more. And yeah, and you wonder why there's sort of like chaos, you know, in the organization. Rio (1:11:01) Yeah. Brett House (1:11:06) Yeah, you gotta be able to show versus just tell, like some basic instruction on how to... Rio (1:11:10) Or, they're the same ones hiring Accenture to do like chat GPT training. Yeah. ⁓ it's, it's, it's crazy. Yeah. Scott Brinker (1:11:14) It's a good time to be a services, you know, business. Brett House (1:11:15) Yeah, because it can't amplify the noise. mean, that may be part of what that research from the Gallup was hinting at, though, is that it amplifies noise, it amplifies because everybody's got access to this kind of machine. And if it's not governed and managed and structured and strategic, you can just have every room, every voice in the room is suddenly amplified and larger and is backed by the world's knowledge base. You know, it can create, yeah, a slap cannon. Rio (1:11:45) Well, yeah, it's slop cannon. I love that word. if you don't have judgment, but you have access to AI, you can therefore become a slop cannon pretty quickly. Or if you don't have judgment or taste, but okay, look at AI, SaaSpocalypse. I think we have to touch on this a little bit. I love like, that a real thing? mean, SaaS valuation has gotten pounded. think HubSpot, where you were for a long time, they're like, their stock's way down. I think it's like two times earnings now, right? I mean, Salesforce has gotten pummeled. Brett House (1:11:53) Yeah. Rio (1:12:13) I unfortunately had some Adobe stock and it has not done very well and Figma got absolutely crushed, right? So like thoughts on SaaSpocalypse? Is it legit? Will these stocks, I mean, obviously no one can predict the market, but long-term prospects for these companies or at least midterm thoughts? Scott Brinker (1:12:29) Yeah, this is where I disclaim like this is not financial advice. ⁓ Yeah, let's assume completely insane here. So it's interesting. I actually think, I do think for a number of companies, the SaaS populist valuations have gone too far in the other direction. But for the most part, I actually think it's a very rational movement. And the fact is that, yes, those companies Rio (1:12:33) You do not make your financial advice based on this podcast. Just like, that's a disclaimer, right? Brett House (1:12:34) You Hahaha Scott Brinker (1:12:58) by operating standards are doing phenomenal today. They're growing, their margins are growing, they're providing real value. In fact, actually this whole headless thing of now people figuring out how they use AI on top of that, it's like growing the value and usage. That's all true and legit. The thing is, SaaS had gotten to be a model where the financial industry, I mean the... industry overall, and so I felt like there's a predictability of this. You hit a certain amount, you do this, we can extrapolate this out over the next 10 or 15 years. And this is how we come to the valuations that gave us all these like, you know, crazy multiples on revenue. It wasn't insane. It was like, no, we think this is pretty stable thing. You can, get to this, you keep doing this. We're going to be able to take that to the bank for 10 or 15 years. I think the recognition is like, we do not know what 10 years is going to look like from now. These companies might. Brett House (1:13:51) Yeah, and it creates a lot of investor kind of concern, right? And skittishness. Yeah. Scott Brinker (1:13:55) Well, just uncertainty, you know, and it's not saying that like the Salesforce and the HubSpots and the Adobe's, I mean, they very well might become even larger giants 10 years from now, but it's not an extrapolation from where they are today. And there's this uncertainty and the market is priced that in. Again, I think possibly is over-corrected, you know, in a few cases, but the overall thing of like, hey, we're in an uncertain world for the future of software, I think is actually a very rational assessment. Brett House (1:14:09) Yep. Yeah Yeah, in Feb- Yeah. Rio (1:14:24) That's a really good assessment because people forget stock prices, ⁓ current performance, like combined with future projections and future prospects. You got to factor both in. Brett House (1:14:35) Yeah, yeah, no, and I think it was in February of this year that like 285, almost 300 billion ⁓ in SaaS market value was just erased in 48 hours, right? And it's some of that concern, like, is this predictive capacity that we had to say that, hey, if you keep adding this number of seats and you keep growing your service value by this, you can predict that 10 years is suddenly kind of under threat, right? That's why, Rio, that's why I don't invest in individual company stocks. Scott Brinker (1:14:46) Alright. Brett House (1:15:00) Like you talk about Adobe, I'm like, that's a fool's errand. You're never gonna win that game. You gotta have a portfolio of mixed. You're about as capable of predicting whether a company can grow as a chimpanzee. No, the reason why I say that, the reason why I say that, no, no, they say that your ability to predict the stock market ⁓ is a complete coin flip. Rio (1:15:07) I think if you follow closely, if you follow closely, you can do pretty well. Okay, I will give you an example. Chip Aziz could write a great American novel if he let them hack away long enough, right? Brett House (1:15:29) Yeah, they can, it's literally a complete coin flip. But I think they've done some statistical analysis to show that anybody that thinks they're an expert in a particular category trying to predict stock market movements actually has less chance than complete non-experts, including chimpanzees. I'll pull that data, we'll put it in the notes, but that's, I learned that in my stats class, MBA, and I'm like, I am never investing individually in company stocks. Rio (1:15:54) Well, when the stock market is going up, everyone thinks they're a genius stock trader, right? Brett House (1:15:58) Yeah, and the more you know, sometimes the less likely you'll succeed. And so you gotta have a diversified portfolio. Anyways, ⁓ Scott's like, my gosh, what have I gotten myself into in this podcast? Scott Brinker (1:16:07) Again, I've got no financial advice to offer anyone, so... Rio (1:16:13) Okay. But Scott, do think that to respond to what you said that there's a lot of uncertainty, totally agreed. And I do think too that a lot of these SaaS companies during the boom years, right? Like for them, which was let's say 2019 until, know, ⁓ obviously it's the blip for COVID, then everything skyrocketed during COVID when everything went digital. I mean, these companies, they double, triple during COVID, they double or triple their head count, right? They got their revenues skyrocketed, right? And some of this might just be return. Brett House (1:16:35) No Rio (1:16:42) or turned to earth to a certain extent, right? Because, maybe they never needed a hundred thousand people to, you know, maybe they only needed, maybe they over hired, right? So think that's probably still weighing on them as they, as they, I think some right sizing is still going on to be honest. Um, you know, met, you know, meta, example, the 8,000 more today, it's sad, right? But I think there was a lot of over hiring. think we're still seeing some of that and that's, and then as they right size their workforces. But I think also a lot of these, the software got very expensive. Brett House (1:16:44) Market correction. Rio (1:17:09) Right. As they got so big, you know, they cost the licenses went up, cost of cloud went up. mean, it's like the costs for some of these platforms got ridiculously expensive. So maybe this is just like the normal reaction. Right. Scott Brinker (1:17:23) Yeah, it's probably a convergence of a lot of things, mean, there's what's happening with AI. There's, you know, what you just had mentioned about the economics of it. I mean, it could be also just that like software has been pretty unusual ⁓ as an industry, you know, that it had that sort of valuation and economic structure to it. And this kind of goes back to that convergence thing where, you know, like even the lines between what is a software product, what is a service, you know, how do you do it? It could just be like a, what do they call that, reversion to the mean? Like at some point in time, there is not some guaranteed cheat code that like, oh, well, if I start one of these businesses, I'm gonna get like a 50X multiple on things. It might be like, no, it's just really hard to build businesses that get those kinds of multiples. But actually, it turns out building businesses that 2X, 3X, 5X revenue, I mean, the world is largely made up. Brett House (1:18:02) Yeah. Scott Brinker (1:18:16) of businesses like that. People make a lot of money, you know, building these things. People build careers, they have lives. I mean, you know, I think the software industry, yeah, needs to kind of get over itself a little bit here. You know, you aren't a special snowflake. I mean, I guess if you're snowflake, snowflake, but you know, yeah, otherwise you're not a special snowflake. Rio (1:18:18) Like that, Brett House (1:18:21) with modest growth rates, right? ⁓ Rio (1:18:36) Yeah. Brett House (1:18:36) So what do think? We've definitely taken this one as far as this has been a nice long podcast. Should we do quick hits? Rio (1:18:42) Yeah, think we're quick hit, Scott, if you're good. Scott Brinker (1:18:46) Okay, let's do it. Brett House (1:18:47) Yeah, so one MarTech category that looks more vulnerable than others to AI disruption. Scott Brinker (1:18:59) I guess they're all so incredibly vulnerable to AI disruption. All right, this is an easy one. The analytics category. Already disrupted, essentially. Rio (1:19:11) Yeah, we Brett House (1:19:11) Yeah. Rio (1:19:11) had Adam Greco talk about that a few weeks ago. He's the best. Yeah. Yeah, Vibe Analytics. ⁓ Okay. What's one capability or category that you think becomes more valuable as, I'm not going to say your prediction, but your desire for AdTech and MarthTech to converge. Let's say that does happen. Like what becomes more important or valuable? Scott Brinker (1:19:14) I love Adam. Brett House (1:19:15) Yeah, yeah. Scott Brinker (1:19:35) think it's what we're talking about here of context. ⁓ Because to me, that's the thing that's so exciting is the customer has a context in which they're operating before they get to our first party environment, and then at the first party environment, and the degree to which we can start to see that context and carry it along across that. my goodness, I think there's huge value to be unlocked there. Brett House (1:19:59) Yeah, and it doesn't live in one place, and it doesn't live in one category of technology, right? It lives in multiple places, but everything that you can pull together within an organization should be leveraged for that context engine. Scott Brinker (1:20:05) Yeah. Yeah. And then again, it comes to the thing, you can have the specialization in MarTech and AdTech as long as like we start looking at more of the opportunities for alignment and synchronization across things. I get excited about the possibilities. Brett House (1:20:22) Yeah, so one thing, what is one thing that every CMO should ask their team about the kind future of the stack? I how should CMOs be thinking about it? Scott Brinker (1:20:31) Start with the data layer. Do we actually have that in any semi-coherent form at this point? Brett House (1:20:35) Yeah. Yeah. And it seems like there's plenty of solutions out there that facilitate speed to value in terms of that type of work, right? It used to be a much slower integration and normalization process. Is that arguable? Scott Brinker (1:20:52) I mean, I don't know. I still feel like the reason why data is so hard is it's ultimately very little of a technical problem and very much, like, like you talk about the semantic layer. The hard part is not, I have a technology that can manage, you know, the semantic definitions for it? Actually, that's pretty easy. It's like, can I get people in my company to actually agree what the semantic definition for this thing is? That's really frigging hard. And so, but it's where we need to work. Brett House (1:21:13) Yeah. Rio (1:21:14) Right? Even within a company, yeah. as well. Well, it's like five years now. I think I know what you're going to say, but five years to now, like looking at the, let's say the MarTech stack, like in the framework you put out, more solutions, fewer solutions. Scott Brinker (1:21:42) I two things are... I have high confidence in two things and a question mark about a third. The things I have high confidence in is I do think this commercial infrastructure that powers this stuff is absolutely still going to be thriving. I think it'll be pretty consolidated. ⁓ It's not going to be 15,000 infrastructure solutions. The second thing I'm very confident in is there's going to be an absolute... It's going be dwarfed. Brett House (1:21:59) Yeah. Scott Brinker (1:22:08) by the amount of custom things that people are just running inside there. That's going to be wild. Where I have a question mark is in between those two extremes, will there be a market for smaller packages of whatever they are, agents, apps, skills? And will there be marketplaces that facilitate those things? None of those are going to be like multi-billion dollar businesses. But is there an aggregate? Brett House (1:22:12) The HyperTail. Scott Brinker (1:22:35) something really interesting that could happen there, that I don't know. ⁓ That's the one I'm most curious about. Like, maybe, maybe not. Brett House (1:22:43) Yeah, yeah. Well, hey, thank you. That's a great answer. And thanks, Scott, for joining us and entertaining our crazy meandering conversation. We kept it thematically tight, I think. We kept coming back to this. Rio (1:22:45) That's a answer. I like that. This is cool. Yeah, we were looking forward to this, Scott. You did not disappoint. Scott Brinker (1:22:50) No, thanks so much for having me. Okay, I just want you to know as I start getting all the incredible hate mail that's gonna be coming my way and hate LinkedIn posts, I'm tagging all of you on this stuff here. And I just wanna say. Brett House (1:23:01) Hahaha Yes. Rio (1:23:06) Tag away, Brett House (1:23:07) Hey, bad press is good press. Any way you look at it, right? And one thing I think, yeah, one thing I love about you, is that your influence sort of goes beyond the world that Rio and I most often see, and even beyond MarTech. And my brother works for a company called Elastic Path, which is a composable commerce company. Rio (1:23:11) There's no such thing as bad press, right? Yeah. That's funny. Brett House (1:23:28) subscribes to your feeds, like read your reports. And so it's a much broader view of the tech ecosystem. Cause I think, yeah. Rio (1:23:35) you were on with Shivan Miles like a couple of weeks ago, right? I saw that too. They're great. Good. Good friends of ours. Yeah. Brett House (1:23:41) It's all interconnected. All of this tech and data is all interconnected. And we sort of have to break down the silos of the bar tech, the app tech, the data tech, the AI, the B2B SaaS of varying types. To me, it's all decisioning on underlying data that's pretty common to all of our organizations that we service. Amen. Well, for everybody that made it this far, this is one of our Joe Rogan episodes. We told you in advance that this was going to be a good long one. Scott Brinker (1:24:00) Amen. Rio (1:24:06) Who warned you? Brett House (1:24:08) And visit us at www.signalnoise.ai, YouTube, Spotify, as well as Apple Podcasts. We've got a ton of content, both editorial and editorial desks from our executive contributors, as well as video and audio content available. And we're publishing a ton more. Thanks, Scott, and we will see you all next time. Scott Brinker (1:24:30) Thank you.
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