Making Sense of Martech

In this episode of MSoM I had an in-depth conversation with Aarron Spinley on one of his recent articles discussing how the digital industry defines the concept of "experience" which was in the top three clicked of TMW #026. Aarron is a leading growth futurist, doing important work in experience anthropology, customer experience and economics. Aarron has worked at SAP, and most recently works as the SVP of Thunderhead APAC, a cloud based customer engagement platform that was named as a leader in journey orchestration platforms by Forrester in 2020. Aarron lives and breathes understanding the experiences of customers and is currently working on a series called "I beg to differ" a series of articles for marketers, leaders and thinkers. We talk about how ill-defined concepts like customer experience can be a shortcut for confusing an entire industry, the way other industries approach standardizing the definitions of important concepts, how the word experience has become so central to how marketers and digital professionals explain their work, the difference between the service and experience layers in digital strategy, the importance of our emotional state and experiences with a brand and transitioning some of the languages in the industry from experience to engagement. Subscribe to The Martech Weekly Newsletter here: www.themartechweekly.com

In this episode of MSoM I had the pleasure of interviewing Charles Burdett, the founder of Product Club and Workshop Tactics. Charles is a world-class expert in design and UX and his products are trusted by companies like IDEO, Facebook, Lyft and Stanford University. I covered Charle's first product workshop tactics in TMW #007 and since then it's evolved into a thriving community of product and design thinkers from all around the world. We talk about how design-led organizations create better products, why Charles built a company around design culture, how companies and the designers in them are changing how they work, and storytelling in business. We also talk about making the perfect omelet 🍳.

In this episode of MSoM, I'm joined by Ben May the Founder and MD of The Code Company. We talk about the downstream impact of the news media bargaining code and how it changes how publishers do business. Ben has over a decade of experience working with news publishers and media businesses in Australia, particularly from an infrastructure front, building the digital solutions that make news publishers run on the internet. We talk about how media companies should approach Google's News Showcase from an audience, discoverability and data front, the idea of a walled garden approach to hosting news, the real value of Facebook audiences for publishers, and how media companies are already investing in deleveraging the influence and risk associated with big tech.

Making sense of Martech is an irregular set of interviews with some of the most interesting people working in marketing and technology. This podcast is an extension of The Martech Weekly newsletter by going deeper into the most popular topics covered there. You can subscribe at themartechweekly.com In this first-ever episode, I'm joined by Dr. Augustine Fou a marketer of 25 years and a world class expert in advertising fraud. He's taught marketing at NYU and Rutgers University and has worked at companies like American Express, Intel, Omnicom and McKinsey and Company. We discuss the place of academic marketing theory, like the 4 Ps (Product, Price, Promotion and Place) in a world where technology has changed the game for what marketers focus on day to day. We talk about the relevancy of the 4P's during technological disruption and some alternative frameworks. This conversation also sits in the context of Dr. Augustine Fou's defense of a young marketer online and we converse about how marketers should approach public discourse. We also talk about the state of digital, programmatic advertising, its future, and risks on the horizon for advertisers and brands.