Make Martech Cool Again: A Conversation with Jason Lyman, Customer.io's CMO
Making Sense of Martech
Intro
Jacqueline introduces the show and guest Jason Lyman, outlining his background and episode focus.
"Marketing to marketers is the dream job, but it makes everything that much more high stakes." – Jacqueline
In this Hot Seat episode, Jacqueline sits down with Jason, CMO at Customer.io, to ask a simple question: what would it actually take to make martech cool again? Drawing on stints at Dropbox, BetterCloud, and Microsoft, he unpacks how brand storytelling, design, and experience can turn forgettable software into something people genuinely want to be around — and why so many teams lost that plot after the early cloud-era glory days.
From Bob Ross livestreams to "Raiders of the Lost Lifecycle," this is a playbook for injecting swagger back into marketing without sacrificing pipeline, rigor, or credibility.
Sponsor
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Timestamps
00:25 – First Martech tools, Mixpanel obsession, and Jason's weekly grilled cheese ritual
06:30 – Shaping brand storytelling: experience at Dropbox, BetterCloud, Microsoft
11:43 – What made early Salesforce so magnetic and why Martech lost its spark
16:40 – Making Martech cool again: inside Customer.io's Bob Ross, Hot Ones, and Raiders of the Lost Lifecycle concepts and playful brand identity
20:00 – What modern marketers actually want from live experiences
25:55 – Can mascots, memes, and influencers bring consumer fandom dynamics to Martech?
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Production Credit: Edited and produced by @the32collective_ / https://www.the32collective.co/
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