Making Sense of Martech

About Making Sense of Martech

Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.

Publisher

Monarch

Category

business · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

10 Feb 2021

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

138 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Oct 2026

   What the Buck? Marketing Wins Each Season with the Bucks' Justin Price

   Justin Price is the senior manager of multichannel marketing at the Milwaukee Bucks. He built the team's SMS program from scratch inside a legacy Marketo stack. The welcome journey delivers 104x ROI and a 38% conversion rate. Checkout abandonment runs 233x. Subscriber growth hit 455%. The team behind it is five people across five brands. This conversation covers how Attentive connects to Marketo through third-party middleware, why identity resolution is the next frontier, and what actually moved the unsubscribe rate in a 32-50 year. It wasn't the record. It was the trade-rumor cycle. Sports marketing runs on a level of seasonality few marketers manage. A rumor breaks, your list reacts, and you had no hand in the news. Justin explains how that shapes send strategy, why RCS is still on the bench, and why he'd start with an imperfect solution rather than wait for the perfect stack. Timestamps 02:30 — Keep one channel: why Justin picks email over SMS 06:07 — The rumor mill moves the unsubscribe rate 07:52 — Hottest take: AI will not replace human capital as fast as people think 15:20 — Identity resolution is the next frontier 20:47 — Concierge reps and the fans who just want to be heard 22:59 — RCS is still on the bench 29:43 — Eight years in the NBA: stay flexible, let fandom fuel the work 35:49 — Best solution beats perfect solution 37:31 — All-in-one versus best-of-breed 41:48 — Set it and forget it: the in-season automation playbook Sponsor Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom (https://rebrand.ly/msomht). Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok (https://rebrand.ly/msom-tt), LinkedIn (https://rebrand.ly/msom-li), and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube (https://rebrand.ly/msom-yt).

2. 

   30 Sept 2026

   What Client-Side Wishes Agencies Knew with Courtney Tierney

   Courtney Tierney spent years on the agency side telling brands what their CRM strategy should be. Now she's the one whose name is on the result. As director of CRM and customer engagement at Papa John's, she owns how the brand communicates with 42 million loyalty members across email, push notifications, SMS, and in-app channels. The gap between advising and owning is real, and this conversation gets into exactly where it shows. Before Papa John's, Courtney was the senior director of account planning and research at Digital Additive, a Salesforce Marketing Cloud agency, where she worked with brands such as Grammarly and WeWork. She also spent time in-house at IHG. She's crossed the agency-to-client line more than once, which makes her perspective on what each side gets wrong about the other harder to dismiss than most. This episode covers QSR category assumptions that fall apart in a pitch room, why deliverability is insurance, not overhead, how franchise models create competing contact strategies in the same inbox, and why the conventional wisdom to stay in your lane, agency or client side, is worth ignoring entirely. Timestamps 03:55 — Agency energy vs. in-house ownership 05:10 — QSR pizza is not QSR 09:10 — Certifications, genuine expertise or the game 12:53 — Launch before your reporting is ready, and you're guessing 17:50 — Generalist agencies vs. CRM specialists 25:37 — Deliverability jail, a real story 30:17 — Cross-channel frequency and the national versus local fight 38:35 — Geo-targeting competitors at the zip code level 47:24 — Ignore the stay-in-your-lane advice Sponsor Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom (https://rebrand.ly/msomht). Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok (https://rebrand.ly/msom-tt), LinkedIn (https://rebrand.ly/msom-li), and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube (https://rebrand.ly/msom-yt).

3. 

   23 Sept 2026

   Consolidate vs. Best-of-Breed with Mindbody's Vinicius Rodrigues

   "It shouldn't be consolidated or best-of-breed. I think it could be consolidated and best-of-breed." — Vinicius Vinicius Rodrigues has spent his career arguing that fragmentation is a legitimate strategy, not a failure to consolidate. He also cut six figures in martech spend through consolidation. As head of marketing technology and operations at Mindbody, now part of Playlist, he manages the global martech stack across North America, EMEA, and APAC, three regions where almost nothing about how customers respond to automation is the same. Before Mindbody, at Lojas Renner in Brazil, he ran a WhatsApp commerce pilot that generated 30x ROI and identified $20 million in revenue potential, in a market most US martech leaders have never touched. At Mindbody, he built the company's first marketing AI agent from scratch. This episode is a pressure test of his own framework. If best-of-breed is always contextual, at what point does context become a convenient explanation for whatever decision you already made? Timestamps 00:01 — Principled fragmentation or consolidation with better branding 04:00 — Agentic AI, the new overhyped buzzword 05:30 — WhatsApp in the US: hopeful but skeptical 12:00 — Unlimited budget, same philosophy 17:36 — Back-testing AI before trusting it with pipeline 19:45 — AI as safety net, not gatekeeper 24:30 — Localize even your research: G2 vs. Trustpilot 29:00 — The WhatsApp fashion stylist, before "agentic" was a word 37:00 — Platform roadmaps favor the biggest market 44:05 — Bilingual as a dual market lens Sponsor Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom (https://rebrand.ly/msomht). Connect & Subscribe Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@msompodcast), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/making-sense-of-martech), and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@msompodcast).

Who has been a guest on Making Sense of Martech

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Stephanie Griffith
• Elizabeth Martin
• Divya Mulanjur
• Phil Gamache
• Jonathan Harrop

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

8 ratings

Contact Making Sense of Martech

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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