Podcasts about marketing operations

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Kelsie Dube, Director of Marketing Operations and Automation at Unanet.(00:00) - Intro (01:09) - In This Episode (05:31) - Why New Marketing Ops Leaders Should Audit Before They Act (10:09) - How to Run a Marketing Ops Audit When You Join a Company (16:04) - How to Balance a Full Audit Against Your Boss's Priorities (19:00) - How to Spot a Process Problem Disguised as a Tool Problem (23:41) - How to Surface Shadow Processes and Duplicate Tools in an Audit (31:08) - How to Choose a New Martech Tool With a Tiger Team of Power Users (35:30) - How to Turn a Marketing Ops Audit Into a Prioritized Roadmap (41:20) - How to Align Your Team on a Measurement Philosophy (44:22) - What Happens to Junior Marketing Ops When AI Eats the Entry-Level Work (49:26) - How to Turn Marketing Ops From Ticket-Takers Into Business Partners (52:40) - How to Use One Interview Question to Screen for Team Fit (56:57) - How a Marketing Ops Leader Decides What Deserves Her Energy Summary: Kelsie Dube joined Unanet and did the one thing most new ops leaders are too nervous to do: nothing, at least at first. In this episode she breaks down the 30-day audit she runs before changing a single tool, how she sorts 30-plus problems into big rocks, quick wins, and parked FY27 headaches, and why she'd rather build a "digital twin" to argue with than buy another platform. She gets into the tiger-team playbook that makes tool replacements actually stick, the measurement fight every team should have out loud, and what happens to junior marketers when AI eats the entry-level rung. It's a full field guide to walking into a new company and earning trust before you change anything, plus the interview question she uses to know if you'll thrive on her team.Kelsie's Marketing Operations Assessment Framework: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x3IJf9tHku4-fASS9AQE_F6sJ1FLK3PN/view?usp=sharingLiza Adam's Digital Twin: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/smartest-ai-teammate-youll-ever-build-liza-adams-c7rnc/About Kelsie DubeKelsie Dube is the Director of Marketing Operations and Automation at Unanet, where she joined in 2026 to rebuild the company's measurement and reporting foundation. Before that she spent 7 years at Sophos, climbing 5 roles from Marketing Operations Specialist to Director and leading the team through much of that run. She started her career in data entry, scrubbing lead lists and learning the VLOOKUPs she still uses most days, and that ground-floor view shapes how she thinks about the craft.Outside of work she's a mom of 2, an amateur basketball player, and a snowboarder who guards the hours between 5 and 7 for her kids.Why New Marketing Ops Leaders Should Audit Before They ActThe first 90 days at a new company come with a quiet dare. Ship something. Plant a flag. Prove they were right to hire you. Most new marketing ops leaders answer that dare by ripping out a tool they never liked and installing one they used at their last job, all inside the first 2 weeks.Kelsie did the opposite when she joined Unanet. Her first move was to change nothing.The reasoning was twofold. Without a real map of how work gets done, any change you make is a guess, and you'll probably aim it at the wrong target. And Unanet had said in the job description that they wanted someone who'd slow down and understand the business first, which is part of why she took the role. For a marketer who came up through ops and now leads it, that patience is the whole point. You have to understand what's happening well enough to be dangerous, she says, before you can tell anyone what to actually fix.The harder version of this is resisting your own experience. A new CMO walks in and wants a different marketing automation platform because they used one at the last company. Kelsie feels that pull too, since she's learning a few systems here for the first time. Her answer is to make the existing stack work before spending a dollar to replace it. Right now she's rebuilding how campaigns get captured and tagged to campaign members, and she's solving it with a Salesforce workflow or Power Automate instead of a purchase. Replacing the tool would cost more and probably solve less.Then comes the part nobody warns you about, the clock. Listening mode has a shelf life, and everyone, including you, is quietly counting the days until you produce something. Kelsie gave herself a hard deadline of 30 days to finish the audit, then engineered small wins into every week so the learning never looked like stalling. New hires have one thing veterans don't, an empty calendar, and she guarded it. A recurring block every Friday at 2:00 to turn that week's discoveries into something usable. One of those blocks became a 30-minute campaign taxonomy diagram she walked the leadership team through, a quick and visible proof that better structure meant better reporting down the line.The instinct to ship in week one is the most expensive habit in operations, because a fast fix aimed at the wrong problem still has to be undone later. The operators who compound value are the ones who can sit in not-knowing long enough to find the actual bottleneck.Key takeaway: Give yourself a fixed audit window, 30 days is a reasonable default, and block a standing hour each week to turn what you've learned into one small, visible win. Keep a running log of quick wins as you find them so you always have something to ship while the deeper work is still in progress.How to Run a Marketing Ops Audit When You Join a Company"Do an audit" is the most repeated and least defined phrase in marketing ops. Everyone nods along. Almost nobody can tell you what's actually in one, which funnel stages it covers, or where it starts on a Monday morning.Kelsie's version starts before day one. The moment she accepted the Unanet offer, she began mapping ownership lines: what marketing ops owns, what rev ops owns, what IT owns. She wrote out the questions she had and sent them to her leader ahead of her start date, partly out of genuine excitement and partly to get a head start on the RACI.From there it's a series of conversations that snowball. She interviews everyone from her own team to her peers to the level above to her business partners, and she ends every conversation the same way: who else should I talk to? The list never stops growing, but the patterns start to show. Along the way she confirms the systems in her swim lane against the job description, asks what she's missing, and books dedicated working sessions where someone walks her through a live task like a lead import. She records those sessions, then feeds the transcriptions to an LLM to pull out the patterns, a tip she picked up from a mentor that turns hours of shadowing into a usable roadmap.She also runs the work herself.Joining a much smaller team than she was used to, she asked people to hand her a lead import and a campaign creation task so she could run them personally. Part of it was capacity, since a director who can still execute is extra hands when the team is slammed. Part of it was fluency. As she says, a director isn't really a "do-rector," but being right there in the work is how you understand it well enough to change it later.Data privacy rides shotgun through all of this. Coming out of the cybersecurity world, she asks about data retention and opt-in policies early, then files them under "needs struct...

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Kathleen Schaub, Author, Strategist, and Advisor in Marketing Management and Organizations.We cover:(00:00) - Intro (01:19) - In This Episode (04:45) - Why Marketing Behaves More Like Weather Than a Machine (08:49) - The Four Mindsets Marketing Leaders Need for Complex Markets (14:06) - Why ROI Doesn't Work as a Marketing Measurement (18:19) - What Causal AI Can Actually Tell You About Marketing (28:37) - Why Your Marketing Budget Works Like an Investment Portfolio (34:21) - What Marketers Should Actually Be Held Accountable For (38:49) - The Surrogation Trap Behind Single Marketing Metrics (44:09) - Why Marketing Managers Should Create Conditions Instead of Commands (50:00) - How Pace Layering Makes a Marketing Budget Adaptable (57:16) - How Intention Decides What Deserves Your Energy Summary: Marketing has spent a century pretending it's a machine you can feed cash and read like a receipt, and Kathleen Schaub is here to take that apart. She makes the case that markets behave more like weather than vending machines, walks through her 4 mindset shifts for leading in the chaos, and explains why a single north-star metric quietly wrecks your decisions. Along the way there's a butterfly in Brazil, a cucumber garden in Canada, a poker champion, and a COO who begged for the book on a cruise. If you've ever had to defend marketing ROI in a boardroom and felt the ground move under you, this conversation names what's really going on.About Kathleen SchaubKathleen Schaub is an author, strategist, and advisor focused on marketing management and organizations, working through KathleenSchaub.com. She spent 9 years leading IDC's CMO Advisory practice, where she advised hundreds of technology marketing leaders, and she's a longtime contributor to leading martech publications including CMSWire. Her work argues that markets are complex adaptive systems rather than predictable machines, and her book lays out 4 mindset shifts, investor, navigator, statistician, and ecologist, for leading marketing in a volatile world. These days she splits her time between writing, advising, passion projects, and being a grandmother of 2.Why Marketing Behaves More Like Weather Than a MachineEvery marketing leader has sat across from a finance executive who wants one thing. Put a dollar in, know what comes out. Budgets get built on that promise. Forecasts get defended on it. And every year, the results wander off somewhere the model never predicted.Kathleen has spent more than a decade explaining why that keeps happening. Her line is that marketing is not a vending machine. A vending machine is controllable and predictable. You put your money in, you press the button, you get the exact thing you chose. Executives, she says, would give almost anything for marketing to work that cleanly. Marketing never has.The weather comparison is a humbling one. We carry supercomputers in our pockets, we have decades of atmospheric data, and we still can't say for sure whether it'll rain tomorrow. Marketing runs on something messier than the atmosphere, which is people. Buyers, brands, influencers, partners, and the economy, all reacting to each other at once. Kathleen calls the result a complex system, the kind scientists study, where every interaction feeds back into the next and quietly introduces unknowns into every situation.That's the part most measurement frameworks skip over. Marketers, salespeople, and customer experience teams all work at the edge of the company, the seam where the controllable inside meets the uncontrollable outside. Their whole job is to manage, predict, and measure a world that refuses to hold still. No amount of dashboard polish changes the fact that half the inputs live outside the building.Kathleen keeps the parts of the old factory toolkit that still earn their place. The shift she wants is smaller and harder to swallow. Accept that markets are what the military calls VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, then adopt measurement practices built for that reality instead of pretending the reality is something tamer. The methods already exist. Other fields use them every day. Marketing just hasn't bothered to translate them yet.The uncomfortable implication is that a lot of the dashboards marketing teams present with total confidence are measuring a machine that was never really there. The teams that win the next decade will be the ones who stop apologizing for uncertainty and start building for it.Key takeaway: Audit your current reporting for any number you present as a guarantee. Rewrite each one as a range or a probability, and rehearse saying "here's what's likely and here's what could move it" before your next budget review. Present every forecast as a weather report, a set of ranges you can actually defend.The 4 Mindsets Marketing Leaders Need for Complex MarketsYou can buy a new attribution platform, restructure the team, bolt on a dozen dashboards, and still land exactly where you started. Kathleen thinks she knows why. You changed your operations without changing the thing that steers them, which is your mindset. She treats mindset as the director of every action a team takes. Leave it untouched, and every operational upgrade delivers roughly the same results you've always had.Her favorite way to explain this comes from Buddhism. Your mind is the ox, and the cart is everything the ox drags behind it, every outcome your marketing produces.The leverage is quieter than it looks. Change your mindset and the dozens of small decisions you make every day start bending, even slightly, and over enough decisions you end up miles from where the old direction would have taken you. That's why the mindset has to move first. The 4 she recommends all come from worlds that are genuinely volatile and complex, but they're worlds anyone can picture, and each one maps onto something marketing leaders already wrestle with.Investor: stop treating the budget like a cost center you spend down, and start treating it like a portfolio you risk for a better future return., Navigator: change the relationship between your plan and your measurement, adapting like a pilot or a sailor who reads the conditions in front of them instead of clinging to the route., Statistician: give up the hunt for certainty and accept that everything in the human and natural world runs on probability. Kathleen calls this the hardest of the 4 because our brains hate it., Ecologist: manage the conditions people work in, because behavior arises from the intersection of an individual and the context around them, so managing the person by themselves only covers half of it.Read them together and a pattern shows up. Every one asks you to trade the illusion of control for the ability to adapt. That trade is where most transformation efforts quietly die, because swapping tools is easy and swapping beliefs is not.Key takeaway: Before you approve the next platform or reorg, write down the belief driving it in one sentence. If that belief still assumes marketing is predictable and controllable, fix the belief before you spend the money. Pick one of the 4 mindsets and name the single daily decision it would change for you this quarter.Why ROI Doesn't Work as a Marketing MeasurementAsk a room of marketers what keeps them up at night and ROI lands near the top every time. It's the question waiting in every board meeting. What drove revenue last month, and how much will this next bet add? Kathleen has been chasing that question longer than most. Running IDC's CMO advisory practice for 9 years, she kept asking leaders whether they were actually getting ...

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Sharon Gai, author, keynote speaker, and educator.We'll cover:(00:00) - Intro (01:21) - In This Episode (05:20) - How AI Moves Marketing Creativity Up the Abstraction Layer (09:08) - Why Taste Is No Longer a Durable Human Skill (15:33) - What Human Work Looks Like After AI Learns Taste (20:41) - How to Codify Taste Into Your AI Systems (27:20) - Why Hands-On Execution Still Builds Judgment AI Can't Copy (36:48) - How to Build a Personal AI Strategy and Learn How to Learn (39:31) - Why Seeing Your Job as Tasks Rather Than a Role Future-Proofs Your Career (48:12) - Why You Should Tinker With AI Before You Cut Back on Meetings (54:13) - How Students Can Adapt to Graduating Into an AI Economy (01:02:13) - How to Decide What Deserves Your Energy Summary: Sharon Gai wrote a book telling everyone that taste and judgment were the durable human skills AI couldn't touch, then went on record to take half of it back. In this episode she walks through why taste is now codifiable, why originality still belongs to humans, and how she pulled a McKinsey-grade deck out of Claude by feeding it her own best work. We get into the lost generation of junior executors, the beekeeper mindset that separates orchestrators from busy bees, and a token-maxing hot pot dinner that made her swear off wasting agents. She even hands over a deathbed test for deciding what deserves your energy. If you've ever wondered which of your skills actually survive the next few years, this one is a map.About Sharon GaiSharon Gai is an author, keynote speaker, and educator who helps professionals future-proof their careers in an AI-driven economy. She teaches on Maven and speaks to audiences around the world about how AI is reshaping creativity, work, and the roles people play inside their companies. Her latest book uses the image of busy bees and beekeepers to argue that the future belongs to the people who orchestrate AI rather than execute every task themselves.Before writing and speaking full time, she spent years in enterprise tech, starting out helping IT directors and CIOs build data centers at the dawn of the cloud era. That hands-on background shows up throughout her work, especially in how she thinks about the difference between doing the work and orchestrating it.How AI Moves Marketing Creativity Up the Abstraction LayerWhen cameras got cheap, painters thought they were finished. Why spend weeks rendering a face in oil when a machine could capture it in a fraction of a second? Plenty of people called photography mechanical, soulless, artless. The threat was real, and the outcome was stranger than anyone expected. Freed from copying the world exactly, painters walked through a door cameras couldn't follow, into Impressionism, Cubism, and everything that made modern art feel alien at first. Sharon sees the same door swinging open for marketers right now, and the word she keeps returning to is abstraction.Walk through any art museum and you can watch this happen on the walls. The 1800s rooms are full of precision: portraits rendered to the eyelash, battle scenes with every horse in place, oceans and landscapes you could almost step into. Then you reach the modern wing, and some people stop and say "I could have done that." The work got harder to read. You have to stand there a moment, wonder who the artist was and why they picked this particular black over a lesser one. The craft survived by climbing a level, from rendering reality to deciding what the piece should mean.Sharon's marketing version is concrete. A few years ago you drew up a Facebook ad yourself, designed the banner, and loaded it into the platform's back end by hand. Now that whole chain can run on its own. So what does the marketer actually do? The real decisions look different now. You choose whether to test one ad or several hundred, each personalized to the person about to see it, whether the creative should be a flat image or a video, and if it's video, what belongs on screen. The manual work shrinks and the number of real decisions explodes. That's the abstracted layer, and it's where the job is heading whether marketers are ready or not.Over the next 2 years, the marketers who struggle will be the ones who still measure their worth by the execution those tools just swallowed.Key takeaway: Write down every part of your last campaign that was pure execution: building the banner, resizing creative, loading it into the platform, pulling the report. Hand those tasks to AI on your next campaign and pour the reclaimed hours into the layer above them. Decide which audiences, how many variants, what format each one takes, and what the creative is actually trying to make someone feel.Why Taste Is No Longer a Durable Human SkillFor about a year, the safe career advice sounded identical everywhere. Let AI do the work, but hold onto taste and judgment, because those are the human skills a machine can't reach. Tech CEOs repeated it on every stage. Sharon believed it too, and wrote it into her book. A few months later she started taking half of it back.Her reasoning is uncomfortable if you've built a career on your eye. What is taste, really? For an expert artist it's roughly 10,000 hours of seeing the bad versions and the good versions until they can tell the difference on sight. That makes the taste expert something close to a mini LLM, a person pummeled with enough examples to develop a reliable read on quality. And if taste is just a very large training set, there's no obvious reason you can't hand those examples to a model.Sharon is careful about where she draws the new line. In AI time, she points out, a single day can feel like a year, so any strong opinion has a short shelf life. She'll grant that judgment might still belong to humans, but taste she no longer counts in that column. Her position in June of 2026 is that taste is codifiable, and that alone knocks it off the list of things only people can do.Where Originality Still Separates Humans From AIShe used to open talks with a slide that read: creativity does not equal originality. The words sound like twins, and they describe 2 different things. AI can be creative. It can paint in an impressionist style and produce something that would look at home in a modern gallery. Originality means something genuinely novel, something that hasn't appeared anywhere before, and everything a model makes was pre-trained on what already exists.The gap shows up most clearly in how humans move between domains. Narrow AI, the kind we mostly use today, is trained on one field. General intelligence takes a principle from physics class and applies it to biology, or borrows something from construction and uses it while cooking. People do this instinctively from childhood. Machines still struggle with the leap, which is why originality, for now, stays on the human side of the ledger even as taste crosses over.If taste is now a training asset, the marketers still selling "good taste" as their moat are pricing a skill the market is about to commoditize.Key takeaway: Stop treating your taste as something locked inside your head. Start capturing it instead. Save the emails, decks, and campaigns you consider excellent right next to the weak ones, label what makes each good or bad, and feed both to your AI tools so the model learns your specific standard rather than a generic one.What Human Work Looks Like After AI Learns TasteEvery few months someone publishes a confident map of what work looks like in 2030. Ask Sharon and she starts by lowering the temperature. Most of it is prediction, and prediction is ch...

How can marketing teams in the life science vertical show up stronger online and drive higher organic visibility for their organizations? Operating in a heavily-regulated industry where market competition is intense, many life science marketing teams stay quite busy, yet their pipelines are quiet, hampering long-term business growth? How can life science leaders bridge this gap and turn things around?That's why we're talking to Lauren Schafer (Founder, Lake House Digital Media), who shares proven ways to build life sciences buyer trust for predictable growth. In this episode, Lauren discussed the high-impact strategies for building deep authority and trust in the life science industry. She highlighted the value of uncovering specific client pain points and tailoring marketing approaches without being too generic. Lauren also stressed the significance of LinkedIn for B2B marketing, noting that decision-makers often conduct independent vendor research on the platform. She advised maintaining an up-to-date profile, using background banners effectively, and how you can be active and responsive on the platform. Lauren also emphasized the value of providing transparent marketing analytics dashboards to demonstrate accountability and ROI, essential for leadership buy-in.

Erin Meyer, Senior Vice President of Marketing Operations; Mary Bennett, Senior Director of Content Marketing; Jason Cassel, Director of Marketing; and Alex Lewandowski, Marketing Coordinator, of EDRM Trusted Partner HaystackID, sit down with EDRM's Mary Mack and Holley Robinson. In this episode, the team returns to the Illumination Zone to share how their AI tools and workflows have evolved. They walk through their three-part design specification for working across Claude, ChatGPT, and other LLMs; how they turn competing models loose on each other to critique and quality-check their work; and where human judgment still has the final word. The conversation also distinguishes prompt writing from framework building, looks at how the team pushes AI-generated design past generic defaults, and covers how quality control now accounts for copyright and AI-assistance disclosures. We ended with each team member naming their ride-or-die LLM.

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Michele Martin, Senior Director of Global Brand and Integrated Marketing at Ticketmaster.Summary: Most career advice still hands you a ladder and tells you to climb. Michele makes the case for a lattice instead, the crisscross path of sideways and diagonal moves that built her range across banking, retail, a startup, and now Ticketmaster. Along the way she breaks down why the call center job she almost refused changed everything, how mentorship and sponsorship are 2 different engines, and why communication beats coding as the skill that survives the AI era. She even walks through what a genuinely good AI session looks like on her marketing team. If you've ever felt boxed in by the straight climb up, this one rewires how you think about your next move.About Michele MartinMichele Martin is the Senior Director of Global Brand and Integrated Marketing at Ticketmaster, where she leads brand strategy and ties together the channels that reach fans across sports, music, and the arts. Her career is a working example of the lattice she advocates: 11 years at TD Bank moving through corporate sponsorships, communications, a contact center, and sales strategy, then brand and customer roles at L.L.Bean and a stretch at a growth-stage startup.A first-generation college graduate, she builds communities everywhere she lands, from the Kind/Red marketing collective to Live Nation Women. She's also an avid traveler, an amateur golfer, and a self-described nonfiction reader who gets her fiction through Netflix and TikTok.What A Lattice Career Means And Why It Beats The LadderMost career advice still runs on a single image: the ladder. You start as a specialist, become a manager, then a senior manager, then a director, then a VP, climbing one predictable rung at a time. It's clean, it's legible on a resume, and it quietly convinces a lot of good marketers that any move which isn't straight up is a step backward. Michele has spent 2 decades proving the opposite, and she has a better picture in mind.Walk into any hardware store and find the fencing section. The lattice is that crisscross panel of wood, the one you'd nail under a porch for a little privacy. That shape is the whole philosophy. A lattice career moves diagonally, sideways, sometimes down for a stretch, and then back up from a completely different position than where you started.The freedom in that reframe is the part people miss. When you stop treating vertical promotion as the only valid direction, you give yourself permission to chase the work you're actually curious about. You might take a role that pays the same and reports to the same level because it teaches you something your current lane never will. A year later that detour is the reason you can do a job nobody on the straight-up track is qualified for. The lattice isn't a slower ladder. It's a wider map of where a career can go.The marketers who'll be hardest to replace over the next decade are the ones who collected range on purpose, because range is the thing no single promotion can hand you.Key takeaway: Stop scoring every potential move by whether the title goes up. Draw your own version of the lattice instead: list the 3 skills or domains you most want to understand, then look for roles that hand you those, even laterally. The diagonal move you resist now is usually the one that makes you uncopyable in 5 years.How To Decide If A Sideways Career Move Is Worth ItEvery marketer has a moment where someone dangles a role that feels wrong. Wrong department, wrong direction, wrong vibe for the brand you're trying to build for yourself. The instinct is to protect the climb and say no. Michele almost did exactly that, and the role she nearly turned down ended up shaping everything that came after.She spent 11 years at TD Bank, a place that treated career growth as a contact sport. The internal logic there was simple: if you want to grow, try a little bit of everything, because that's how you actually learn how the business makes money and how decisions land on customers and employees. So when a contact center role came up, it fit the bank's culture even though it terrified her. She'd never pictured herself there. She didn't know what the work even was beyond the frontline.What tipped her over was a mentor named Matt Chevalier, who passed away young and whose advice she still repeats. He'd watched her get comfortable, and comfort was the thing he refused to let slide. His argument wasn't that her current job was bad. It was that she'd convinced herself the fun she was having couldn't exist anywhere else, and that staying put meant never testing herself in the ways a harder room would. That landed.Inside the contact center she learned phone systems, quality programs, and the guts of customer technology she'd never have seen from a marketing desk. The next jump, onto a sales strategy team, was scarier still, because now she was building an incentive platform alongside genuinely technical people while feeling like she knew nothing. The relief came from a small realization that's stuck with her since. If you can explain a complicated system in plain words, you actually understand it.The roles people resist hardest tend to be the ones carrying the steepest learning curve, which is exactly why avoiding them keeps so many careers thin.Key takeaway: The next time a role feels like a sideways or scary move, separate the fear from the data. Ask what specific skill or exposure it would hand you that your current seat never will. If the honest answer is "a lot," treat the discomfort as a signal you've found a real growth edge, not a reason to pass.Why Integrated Marketing Is A General Contractor RoleMarketing invents job titles faster than anyone can define them, and "brand and integrated marketing" is one of those phrases that means something different at every company. At Ticketmaster, Michele uses a metaphor that finally makes the term concrete. Integrated marketing is the general contractor of a campaign.Think about what a general contractor actually does on a build. They don't pour every foundation or wire every outlet themselves, but they understand each trade well enough to know when something's off, and they're the one person responsible for making all of it connect into a house someone can live in. That's the role. You need real fluency across the components of a campaign, whether that's CRM, paid media, organic, or social, and then you need the rarer skill of wiring those parts together.Here's where the lattice pays off in a way no straight-line career could. Because Michele spent years jumping into unfamiliar functions and learning new technology on the fly, she walks into an integrated role already understanding most of the trades she's coordinating. That changes the quality of the work. Without that range, the job quietly degrades into project management, chasing status updates and herding stakeholders. With it, she comes to the table with a real point of view on every channel because she's actually done the work in them.The integrated marketer who can only schedule the trades gets treated like overhead, while the one who understands the trades gets treated like a leader, and the difference is almost always hands-on range.Integrated Marketing Versus Omnichannel MarketingPeople lump integrated marketing and omnichannel together constantly, and Michele doesn't fight that too hard. Where she sits, the 2 work almost the same way. The job starts with a business challenge for a given category, then asks how marketing can support it, then defines a single concept grounded in data and fan insight. Only after that does the work fan out to the channels.The discipline is in what stays constant ...

   We often treat macroeconomics and B2B marketing as two completely separate ecosystems that function on entirely different levels and scale. However, if you look closer at the underlying factors such as silos, transactional friction, supply chain bottlenecks, and trust gaps, you'll realise how striking the parallels are. Have you ever considered how high-level macroeconomic policies actually mirror the daily execution battles fought within B2B marketing departments? How can B2B leaders extract these macro-level insights to solve operational challenges, streamline campaign execution, build market authority, and generate better results?In this solo episode, Christian Klepp (Host of the B2B Marketers on a Mission Podcast) shared his core strategic takeaways from the Rebuilding Alliances / Reconstruire des alliances event in Toronto. He translated complex macroeconomic frameworks into actionable strategies for B2B marketing teams. Christian talked about the importance of removing internal silos to drive cross-functional collaboration, eliminating buyer friction throughout the sales funnel, and create strategic co-marketing partnerships. He also elaborated on treating data like an organisation's “critical minerals” and how to leverage internal subject matter experts (SMEs) to establish greater industry credibility. Finally, Christian stressed the value of employer branding in talent acquisition, and why building organisational trust while defending the marketing mandate is critical.This episode was sponsored by the Economic Club of Canada. 

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Amanda Natividad, Chief Evangelist at SparkToro and co-author of Zero Click Marketing.We'll cover:(00:00) - Intro (01:14) - In This Episode (06:37) - Why Attribution Breaks Down in a Zero Click World (16:09) - What the Alligator Graph Means for Ops Teams (22:46) - How to Run a Zero Click Launch Week You Can Actually Measure (32:35) - How Incrementality Testing Works at Enterprise Scale (38:09) - What Audience Listening Adds to the Marketing Ops Stack (42:50) - What Content Leaders Need From Marketing Ops (47:59) - How to Turn Audience Research Into an Operational System (52:00) - How AI Visibility Changes Zero Click Marketing (58:36) - Setting Boundaries to Protect Your Energy and Focus Summary: zero click marketing won the strategy war, and now nobody can prove it's working. Amanda has spent over a decade building marketing that lives where the audience already is, and in this episode she takes apart the measurement crisis that creates. We get into why your attribution dashboard is quietly lying to you, how a viral story about HubSpot losing 80% of its organic traffic actually hid record revenue, and what a 25 million dollar ad blackout taught Dropbox about the gap between credit and cause. She also shows how to turn audience research into an operational system and why winning AI visibility comes down to writing genuinely good stuff. Stick around for the launch-week playbook and the overslept-webinar story that completely reframes how she guards her time.About Amanda NatividadAmanda Natividad is the Chief Evangelist at SparkToro, the audience research startup, and the founder of Zero Click Marketing, a podcast and consultancy built around the framework she co-created with Rand Fishkin in 2022. She spent 4 and a half years as SparkToro's VP of Marketing, where she launched a newsletter that reaches more than 60,000 subscribers at a 35% open rate and built Office Hours, a webinar series that pulls as many as 1,200 registrants a show.She's keynoted at AdWorld, Content Marketing World, and MozCon, and guest lectured at Columbia, Cornell, and Stanford. A Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef and former journalist, she now teaches Content Marketing 201 on Maven.Why Attribution Breaks Down in a Zero Click WorldEvery marketing ops team runs on a dashboard that hands out credit. This lead came from paid search. That demo came from a LinkedIn ad. This signup traces back to the nurture email. The numbers look authoritative, and leadership treats them that way. The trouble is the data underneath has been eroding for years, and most teams still read the output like scripture.Amanda has spent more than a decade building marketing programs that don't depend on the click. Her take on measurement starts from an uncomfortable place. Attribution was never as precise as the industry sold it, and every year it gets less precise.4 separate forces have chipped away at what attribution can actually see, and they stack on top of each other.Third-party cookies barely function. Only about 30% of users accept them, and Safari rejects them by default., Ad blockers hide a huge share of traffic. Somewhere between 20 and 60% of people run one, and among tech-savvy B2B audiences that number climbs toward 60%., The multi-device journey is untrackable pre-login. People average 3.6 devices each, so stitching a single human across all of them is mostly guesswork., Privacy regulation makes persistent tracking impractical. GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD mean what's legal in the US often isn't legal anywhere else, a real burden for any team with a global audience.None of this means you rip attribution out of the stack. In a mature organization it's already there, already wired into the reports leadership reads, so ignoring it would be its own kind of malpractice. The shift Amanda argues for is one of posture. Go in knowing exactly where the model goes blind, then ask the more useful question of what you can measure next to fill the gaps. That's where incrementality, media mix modeling, geo-testing, and holdout tests start to earn their place. The teams that keep their budgets in a down market are the ones who stopped presenting attribution as ground truth and started presenting it as one flawed witness among several. A single confident number is easy to attack. A converging set of imperfect signals is much harder to argue with.Key takeaway: Audit where your attribution model goes blind before your next leadership review. Write down how much of your traffic Safari blocks, how many of your B2B visitors run ad blockers, and how many touchpoints happen before anyone logs in. Bring that context into the room so a drop in tracked conversions reads as a gap in measurement, not a failure in marketing.Why Dark Social Traffic Shows Up as DirectOpen Google Analytics on any given week and a fat slice of your traffic sits in a bucket labeled direct. The polite interpretation is that all those people typed your URL straight into the address bar. Almost none of them did. Most of that direct traffic is dark social, the shares that happen inside messaging apps and closed platforms where the referral information never makes it back to you.SparkToro put real numbers on it. About 2 years ago the team ran an experiment, sending more than 1,100 visits across 11 social networks and then checking what Google Analytics reported. For TikTok, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and Mastodon, every single visit landed in direct.Amanda has a theory about why, and it follows the money. The platforms can see the organic referral string. They keep it invisible, because the moment you pay to join their ad network, that traffic suddenly becomes visible and measurable. Organic reach stays in the dark so paid reach looks like the only reach worth buying. And it goes well past the obvious suspects. Facebook Messenger strips the referral about 75% of the time, Instagram DMs about 30%, and even LinkedIn hides it roughly 14% of the time. A share is a share whether it happens in a feed or a private message, but only some of them ever get counted.The practical lesson for an ops team is to stop treating the direct channel as a junk drawer. When word of mouth and private sharing drive a real share of pipeline, a measurement model that files all of it under direct is quietly erasing your best-performing channel. The brands that figure this out start asking where conversations about them actually happen, instead of waiting for a clean UTM that the platform was never going to hand over.Key takeaway: Run your own dark social test before you trust the direct bucket. Push a known batch of clicks through TikTok, Slack, and a few DM channels, then watch how your analytics file them. Use the gap to set expectations with leadership, and lean on post-purchase survey questions like "where did you first hear about us" to recover the attribution the platforms refuse to share.What the Alligator Graph Means for Ops TeamsThere's a chart making the rounds that content marketers have started calling the alligator graph. Impressions climb while clicks to your website fall, and the 2 lines drift apart until they look like an open set of jaws. For a content team this reads as proof the strategy is working, because more people are seeing the brand. For a marketing ops team staring at the same chart in Google Analytics, it reads as failure, because the dashboard they own is built to count clicks and the clicks are going down. The measurement layer is undercutting the exact thing the content layer is producing.Amanda's first move is to reframe the problem. The j...

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Cara Caruso, CEO and co-founder of Sentinel Insights, and Dustin Taylor, counsel at Troutman Pepper Locke.We'll cover:(00:00) - Cara-audio (00:53) - In This Episode (04:40) - 1 — Why Your Website Is Running More Tracking Tools Than You Know (08:17) - 2 — How a Plaintiff's Firm Turns Your Website Into a Lawsuit (17:55) - 3 — The ECPA Wave and the Privacy Policy That Sues You (20:53) - 4 — What Consent Drift Actually Looks Like (25:16) - 5 — Who Actually Owns Privacy Compliance (30:49) - 6 — The Business Case for Privacy-First Marketing (35:52) - 7 — What Marketing Ops Can Do About Privacy This Week (42:35) - 8 — Why Email Marketing Is the Next Privacy Lawsuit (48:04) - 9 — AI, Consent, and Being Forced to Delete Your Data (51:46) - 10 — Why Small Companies Get Privacy Lawsuits Too (58:42) - 11 — How to Decide What Deserves Your Energy Summary: A privacy-software CEO and a litigation defense attorney walk into a podcast and proceed to scare every marketer in the room, in the most useful way possible. Cara Caruso has scanned over 10,000 websites and found nearly 90% of them non-compliant, while Dustin Taylor has defended more than 100 companies against the exact lawsuits that follow. Together they trace how a forgotten tag from three years ago becomes a seven-figure settlement, why your own privacy policy is the document most likely to sue you, and how one month of a broken cookie banner turns into 10,000 dollars per visitor. Then they flip the whole thing and make the case for why clean, consented data actually performs better. Stick around for the part where your email open rates might be illegal and the FTC makes companies delete four years of data.About Cara Caruso and Dustin TaylorCara Caruso is the CEO and co-founder of Sentinel Insights, where she leads a platform that monitors websites in real time for consent violations and privacy exposure. Before starting the company she spent more than 25 years in data and martech, building and scaling teams across technology and financial services in both B2B and B2C. She pairs strategic planning with hands-on execution, and she's also a certified yoga instructor who has been known to bring a workshop into the office.Dustin Taylor is counsel at Troutman Pepper Locke, where he defends companies at the intersection of privacy law and marketing technology. He's defended more than 100 companies in ad-tech privacy cases involving cookies, pixels, session replay, and website chat, secured dismissals at the pleading stage in federal court, and argued in California, New York, Florida, Texas, and New Jersey. He started out with an advertising degree before law school, which makes him fluent in the martech stack in a way most litigators never are. He also publishes monthly privacy litigation reports and tracks ECPA filings with AI.Why Your Website Is Running More Tracking Tools Than You KnowMost marketing teams believe they have a clean inventory of what runs on their website. There's a tag manager, a cookie banner, a vendor list in a spreadsheet somewhere, and a general sense that someone signed off on all of it. Then someone actually scans the site, and the number comes back two, three, sometimes four times higher than anyone expected.Cara has watched this play out thousands of times. Sentinel Insights has scanned over 10,000 websites in the past year, and the pattern barely changes from one company to the next. Nearly 90% of those sites are not compliant. Every new customer gets the same uncomfortable conversation on day one.The gap between what a team thinks is running and what's actually firing comes from two places. The first is history. Somebody three years ago added a tag for a campaign that ended, then left the company, and nobody ever took it down. The team you have today inherited a stack built by people they never met, and most of those decisions were never written down anywhere. Cara calls it the ghost of marketers past, and it's sitting on almost every site she scans.The second is piggybacking. You buy one tool, drop in one script, and that single tag quietly loads four more. Each of those can load more on top. An agency hard-codes a pixel straight into a landing page because they didn't have access to the tag manager, and now your customer data flows to companies nobody on your team could name. None of it shows up in the tidy spreadsheet. All of it shows up in a scan.This is the part most marketers underestimate. The real exposure comes from the tools nobody chose on purpose, the dozen scripts running quietly in the background, each one sending customer data somewhere you've never audited. They pile up while everyone assumes the banner has it covered. No marketing team actually knows what's on its website until a scan proves otherwise, and "we reviewed it last year" is closer to a guess than a control.Why Not Knowing Is Not a Legal DefenseThe instinct, once you find those orphaned tags, is to assume they don't count against you. You didn't install them. You didn't even know they were there. Dustin spends a lot of his time correcting that assumption. These privacy laws do have a knowledge component, but courts read knowledge very differently than a normal person would. As long as the person who installed the tag three years ago knew they were installing something, the legal requirement is met. The fact that today's marketing team forgot it existed changes nothing.There's a second trap hiding inside the same problem. What marketing knew, what IT knew, and what legal knew are rarely the same thing, and that fragmentation is its own risk. Each group assumes another group is watching the stack. The court doesn't care which department dropped the ball. It only cares that someone, at some point, hit install.Key takeaway: Run a full scan of your live website this month and compare the results against your documented vendor list. Flag every tag you can't immediately explain, especially anything loading third-party scripts you never installed directly. The tools you can't account for are the ones quietly building your legal exposure, and forgetting they exist won't protect you.How a Plaintiff's Firm Turns Your Website Into a LawsuitHere's the mental model most marketing teams carry around: we're compliant until someone complains. You picture a single annoyed customer who takes the time to file something against your little startup, and you quietly decide the odds are low. Who's really going to sue over one text message or one tracking cookie? That assumption is the most expensive thing on your website, because litigation in this space doesn't start with a complaint. It starts with a scan of your site that you never see.Plaintiffs' law firms run continuous automated audits of company websites, and they're looking for far more than a typo in your privacy policy. Dustin walked through exactly what their scanners check:What loads automatically the moment someone lands on the page, before any consent is given, Whether there's a banner at all, and what it actually does, What keeps firing after a visitor opts out, Whether anything is miscategorized, like a marketing cookie quietly labeled "essential" so it can't be turned offOnce a firm finds the exposure, they find a plaintiff. The demand letter arrives, and the dollar amounts climb fast. Cara breaks the pressure into three forces bearing down on marketing teams at once:Trophy-hunting plaintiff attorneys who come after you for small amounts individually, then scale it into a class action, Brand and reputational damage that lingers long after a settlement clears, State enforcement at the atto...

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!AI is becoming part of every Marketing Ops workflow. But what if the most valuable skills in the future aren't technical at all?In this episode of Ops Cast, Michael Hartmann sits down with Debby Mayen, Global Head of Marketing Operations and Analytics at Logitech, for a thoughtful conversation about balancing technology with humanity in the age of AI.Debby has spent her career leading global marketing operations teams through major shifts in technology, but her approach stands out because she intentionally creates space away from screens. Through reading physical books, exercising, creative pursuits, and meaningful human connection, she believes the best leaders strengthen the skills that AI cannot replace.Together, Michael and Debby explore how AI can expand human potential without replacing critical thinking, why creativity and communication are becoming even more valuable, and what today's Marketing Ops professionals should focus on to stay relevant in an AI-enabled workplace.Topics covered include: Why balance is essential in an AI-driven world  Using AI to challenge your thinking instead of replacing it  How AI amplifies both strengths and weaknesses  Why creativity, communication, and human connection are becoming competitive advantages  What hiring managers are seeing as AI becomes mainstream  Helping teams embrace AI without creating fear  Practical advice for early-career Marketing Ops professionals  Why stepping away from technology can make you a better leader Whether you're leading a team, building your career, or simply trying to use AI more intentionally, this episode offers a practical perspective on staying human while embracing the future.Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review Ops Cast, and join the conversation at MarketingOps.com.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations ProfessionalsSupport the show

AI can make you faster. But can it make you memorable? Mark Cibort, Global Head of Marketing Operations at Kenvue, joins the #ShinyNewObjectPodcast to discuss agentic employees, data overload, the AI bubble, and why the real competitive advantage is becoming the most human person in the room. Tune in to learn how to make more space for what matters, while still making the most of the tech revolution. 

What's up folks, welcome to our 4 part series of crawling through the dungeon of martech architecture. You've arrived at our final episode, part 4: The Dispatch Tower.We'll tackle:(00:00) - Intro (00:59) - In This Episode (01:30) - Sponsor: Mammath Growth (02:33) - Sponsor: GrowthLoop (03:58) - FLOOR 4: THE DISPATCH TOWER (04:39) - What Happens When 30 Vendors Turn On AI at the Same Time (21:24) - Boss Battle: The Agent Avalanche (22:53) - Why You Need a Central Referee, With Agent Guardrails (26:48) - Sponsor: Knak (27:55) - Sponsor: MoEngage (28:52) - Privacy Compliance and Data Minimization (38:38) - The Dispatch Layer that Controls Routing Logic (44:00) - The Layer Above the Dispatch is the Interface (47:20) - What Production AI Agents Look Like on a Governed Data Foundation (50:27) - The Deterministic Layer: Why the Interface Can't Run on Guesses (53:09) - System Stewardship: The Role That Emerges When You Clear This Floor (59:33) - FINAL ACHIEVEMENT: The Dungeon Is Cleared ---------------------------------------------------------------------------OPENING---------------------------------------------------------------------------Welcome back to the Dungeon of Martech Architecture.You've arrived at the final floor. Parts 1 through 3 built the foundation, the meaning layer, and the causal memory. Part 4 is the floor most organizations have been living on the whole time, often without knowing it.Episode 1: CRM GravityWe conquered the source of truth and discovered that the data warehouse replaces the CRM with portable audiences.Episode 2: The Eye of ContextWe learned why AI fails without context engineering and built the shared meaning infrastructure that keeps agents from misinterpreting what they read.Episode 3: The Correlation MasqueradeWe escaped the correlation trap and built the causal memory layer that separates agents that optimize correctly from agents that confidently scale the wrong behavior.Episode 4: The Dispatch TowerToday, we tackle the governance chaos of 30 vendors all claiming authority, and confront the interface decision that most organizations already made without realizing it.Let's finish our descent.------------------------------------------------------------------------------FLOOR 4: THE DISPATCH TOWER---------------------------------------------------------------------------Congratulations martech crawler, you've arrived to the final floor of the dungeon. Let's face it, most of your fellow crawlers will never make it this far. They're still lost in political battles debating why the CRM shouldn't hold product activation data or they ended up falling prey to the correlation trap and I forever stuck in the boomerang room. But you've made it. You're proudly wearing the 3 badges of honor on your jacket: data janitor, context king and causal brainiac. This floor is the hardest because it combines collaborative political battles but some serious technical obstacles as well. The layout of this floor is best described as a hot mess of agent spaghetti. Every vendor in your stack has an agent now. Your ESP has one. Your CDP has one. Your MAP has one. Your CRM has one. Your ad platform has one. Each one has separate logic, separate assumptions, separate permissions, and a roadmap slide that says “autonomous.”None of them knows what the others are doing.And nobody volunteered to referee this stuff.At the top of this floor, there is a door most organizations never noticed. Whoever controls that door controls what instructions get through, which systems can act, and which agent gets authority over the customer.What Happens When 30 Vendors Turn On AI at the Same TimeYour inbox is probably already full of emails from every platform in your stack, all saying some version of “Turn on AI today.”Each one promises autonomous intelligence. Each one wants permission to write, recommend, segment, suppress, score, enrich, personalize, or trigger something. Each one is operating from its own model of the customer. None of them can explain what happens when two agents try to update the same record, message the same person, or optimize against conflicting goals.You are now the referee. Congratulations. Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.ai, describes how this feels on the ground:RICH WALDRON, Episode 162"If you're the marketing ops leader and your 30 vendors are telling you to go turn on the AI for their application, you sort of become like an AI referee. You have to figure out, well, do I turn it on for this one and not for this one? And is this one gonna overwrite what occurs here? You feel it already. Your inbox floods with vendors begging you to 'just turn on our AI capability' -- 30 different platforms all promising transformation. Suddenly you're an unwilling AI referee asking impossible questions: which AI systems should I activate first? What happens when one AI's decisions contradict another's? Are all these systems feeding sensitive data into the same models?""Agents backed by an iPaaS give you full governance and control of where execution happens. For teams drowning in vendor AI chaos, the third option -- iPaaS-backed agents that naturally integrate with everything -- provides centralized governance, unified control points, and consistent execution environments."Rich is describing the nightmare version of the final floor: every vendor ships an agent, and marketing ops gets stuck deciding which ones are safe, which ones are redundant, which ones are risky, and which ones quietly conflict with each other.The answer is not to let every team turn on whatever they want. It is also not to create a central AI police force that blocks everything until innovation dies in a committee.The middle path is an operating model: a small central group that sets standards, reviews risk, creates reusable patterns, and lets the business move quickly without turning the stack into a haunted appliance storeFunny enough, I spoke with someone who actually did volunteer for that AI referee job – her title is a bit fancier though. Here's Lindsay Rothlisberger, Director of GTM Innovation at Zapier and also a member of their AI Center of Excellence. At Zapier, she sits at the spoke of a hub-and-spoke AI Center of Excellence, a small central team led by a Chief AI Officer, with Lindsay as the GTM representative responsible for translating governance into go-to-market practice. Her work covers deciding which AI tools get activated, setting the standards for what a shared skill has to pass before it enters the internal library, and keeping track of what people are building before it fragments into 100 unsanctioned experiments.LINDSAY ROTHLISBERGER, Zapier"We have a skill that reviews our skills for data and security compliance. It gives you a red, yellow, green. Red — here's what you definitely need to fix. And in most cases, Claude can just say, 'I can go fix that for you. Would you like me to do it?' And just do it. So it's a pretty simple process. But it is a standard review skill that runs through all of these different things."Every shared skill at Zapier has to have a named owner. If it's used across a team, someone is accountable for maintaining it. Skills covering go-to-market operations are owned by RevOps. New builders who want to ship a skill that runs through a cross-functional workflow pair with a RevOps partner to build it. The governance operates as a co-authorship model, designed to make s...

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!AI is changing Marketing Ops. But the biggest change may have nothing to do with technology.In this episode of Ops Cast, Michael Hartmann is joined by Abby Koble, Vice President of Global Marketing Operations at Cornerstone OnDemand, and Ashley Langford, VP of Marketing Operations & AI Technology at Ashley Langford Marketing, for a timely discussion about how AI is transforming careers, hiring, leadership, and professional development.What began as a LinkedIn connection between Abby and Ashley evolved into a broader conversation about the realities of today's Marketing Ops job market. Ashley shares her data-driven approach to documenting her leadership job search, while Abby offers the perspective of a hiring executive navigating hundreds of applicants and an increasingly AI-influenced recruiting process.Together, they explore where AI helps, where it hurts, and why human skills may become the biggest differentiator for the next generation of Marketing Ops leaders.Topics covered include:• What today's Marketing Ops leadership job market really looks like• Why candidate ghosting happens and where the hiring process breaks down• How AI is changing recruiting, career growth, and professional development• The difference between using AI as a force multiplier versus a crutch• Why foundational experience still matters in an AI-assisted world• The growing importance of communication, confidence, and leadership skills• Whether hybrid and in-person work still play a role in developing future leadersWhether you're hiring, actively searching for your next opportunity, or thinking about how AI will shape the future of Marketing Ops, this episode offers perspectives from both sides of the table.Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review Ops Cast, and join the conversation at MarketingOps.com.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations ProfessionalsSupport the show

Armin Molavi is a seasoned global brand architect, enterprise marketing executive, and the Chief Marketing Officer at Instructure, the edtech giant behind Canvas by Instructure (the world's leading learning management platform).With over 20 years of experience leading massive brand transformations, Armin specializes in taking complex, legacy organizations and modernizing their market narrative. Before stepping into the edtech space at Instructure, he built a powerhouse career on both the agency and corporate brand sides. Notably, he served as the Global Head of Media and Marketing Operations at Hilton, where he managed their international agency ecosystem, drove massive digital efficiency, and helped steer the hospitality giant through an era of aggressive digital transformation.

What's up folks, welcome to our 4 part series of Crawling through the dungeon of martech architecture. You've arrived at Part 3: The Correlation Masquerade.We'll cover:(00:00) - Intro (01:16) - In This Episode (01:36) - Sponsor: Knak (02:44) - Sponsor: MoEngage (04:02) - FLOOR 3: THE CORRELATION MASQUERADE (05:08) - Why Agentic AI Optimizes for the Wrong Thing at Scale (11:30) - The Boomerang Effect on AI that Erodes Revenue (20:40) - Why Marketing Attribution Data Can't Tell AI Agents What Actually Caused the Result (28:28) - Sponsor: Mammoth Growth (29:31) - Sponsor: GrowthLoop (33:56) - How Bad Signals Masquerade as Evidence (42:27) - BOSS BATTLE: The Correlation Boomerang Archer (43:27) - Reducing Exposure While the Foundation Is Built (49:07) - Building a Causal Memory Layer With a Context Graph (01:02:15) - Achievement unlocked: Causal Evidence Layer Established ---------------------------------------------------------------------------OPENING---------------------------------------------------------------------------Welcome back to the Dungeon of Martech Architecture.You've arrived at part 3. If you're just joining, go back to parts 1 and 2, where we demoted the CRM, built the warehouse, engineered the context layer, and built the shared meaning infrastructure that keeps agents from misinterpreting what they read.Episode 1: CRM GravityWe conquered the source of truth and discovered that the data warehouse replaces the CRM with portable audiences.Episode 2: The Eye of ContextWe learned why AI fails without context engineering, built the shared meaning infrastructure, and dug into why the industry built the wrong kind of meaning infrastructure in 2012.Episode 3: The Correlation MasqueradeToday, we escape the correlation trap and build the causal memory layer that separates agents that optimize correctly from agents that confidently scale the wrong behavior.Episode 4: The Dispatch TowerNext, we tackle the governance chaos of 30 vendors all claiming authority, and confront the interface decision that most organizations already made without realizing it.Let's continue our descent.---Okay so we're making our way down to the third floor with blood sweat and tears. But we're feeling good. Our data is clean-ish. You've built a context bundle that we're proud of and we collaborated on it with multiple people and shared definitions. We've got a nice big fancy data warehouse as our source of truth.Our warehouse holds a complete record of what happened. We can query patterns, correlations, historical campaign data, audience behaviors, outcome signals: all of it is available. But the problem we're about to find out is that none of what we've built so far can tell an agent whether the thing it's optimizing for was ever the right thing to optimize for. None of it explains why an intervention worked, or whether it worked for the reason the model assumes it did.Let's step through.---------------------------------------------------------------------------FLOOR 3: THE CORRELATION MASQUERADE---------------------------------------------------------------------------The layout of the correlation masquerade is like a high speed train to nowhere. You've spent two whole floors meticulously cleaning the “atoms” of your historical customer data and building a sturdy warehouse so that you can let AI and agents loose on the data. Maybe you're starting to play with ‘next best action sequences', building propensity models predicting the likelihood that certain cohorts of users will churn, maybe running reinforcement learning loops on historical context and doubling down on your best campaigns. Everything looks like it's working... until the world rumbles and you realize you're still in a trap.The layout of this floor is a room where every single action comes back wrong. And it's not technically AI's fault, they're just optimizing for a finish line that's actually just the end of the first heat of 8 heats. It's a trap.Why Agentic AI Optimizes for the Wrong Thing at ScaleJason Dobbs, the Head of Marketing Ops and GTM Engineering at Kumo describes it like this:JASON DOBBS, Kumo AI"A warehouse is a record of what happened. It's not a rulebook for what an agent should do next. If you let a generic agent optimize directly on historical correlations with unbound authority, you can absolutely scale the wrong behavior. A product that correlates with high LTV does not necessarily cause high LTV. Prediction is not policy. Once you cross into action, you still need guardrails, business rules, approvals, evidence that it's actually driving business outcomes."An AI system that treats prediction as their gold standard will happily optimize for proxies while the actual outcome you care about degrades.The Prediction TrapTobias Konitzer spent years studying this failure as a computational social scientist before bringing that lens to marketing. His argument is that predictive models describe what's already happening, and marketing is about changing what's going to happen. Those are different jobs, and the data warehouse doesn't distinguish between them by default.TOBIAS KONITZER, Episode 212"The nature of predictive models is they represent the status quo. Someone is going to churn, or someone is not going to churn, but that is the status quo. And there is really no point for marketing if everything is just status quo. There is no marketing role here."He describes a CRM head at a billion-dollar outdoor brand who found that high LTV customers had a strong correlation with viewing a specific product, a pair of jeans. The obvious response was to push those jeans into the welcome flow. The correlation ran in the wrong direction, though. Those customers already had high LTV before they saw the jeans. The jeans showed up alongside the relationship, long after it was established.Scaling that logic into the welcome flow pushed irrelevant products onto a broad cohort with nothing in common with the original high-LTV segment. The analysis was reproducible and data-supported; it just never verified whether the jeans caused the high LTV or merely accompanied it. An agent running the same logic would scale the error across every customer who matched the surface pattern, efficiently and invisibly, before anyone stopped to ask.Tobias calls this lazy thinking, and risky thinking: analysis that feels like rigor because it's data-supported and reproducible, but skips the question that would disqualify the conclusion.The Boomerang Effect on AI that Erodes RevenueWhen you let agentic AI loose on the data warehouse it has access to a TON of data. That's amazing. But raw data and then events and actions often leads to predictions that are based on correlation, and not causation.For example, let's say you task an agent with improving the number of free users that convert to paying users. The agent sees in the past that a discount campaign to a certain cohort of active free users on a certain day resulted in a high % of paying user conversions.The agent concludes: this campaign works. Scale it.But what it can't see: those active free users were already the most likely to convert, they were on the edge of paying with or without the discount. The campaign didn't cause the conversions. It just correlated with them. The agent found the easiest pattern in the data and called it a lever.Run that campaign at scale and a few things happen. You hand discounts to users who would have paid ...

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!Your GTM tech stack is probably costing you more than you think.Not because of software licenses alone, but because of underused tools, overlapping platforms, broken processes, and hidden revenue leakage that quietly compounds over time.In this episode of Ops Cast, Michael Hartmann sits down with Gaurav Palande, founder of Prune and a marketing and sales operations leader with more than 15 years of experience, to explore a different way of evaluating technology investments.The conversation explores how organizations can measure the business value of their GTM technology, identify hidden inefficiencies, uncover revenue leakage, and make smarter decisions about AI investments before difficulty spirals out of control.Topics covered include: • Why tech stack value matters more than tech stack cost • A practical framework for evaluating GTM technology investments • Common sources of waste, duplicate spend, and underutilized platforms • How neglected systems and broken processes contribute to revenue leakage • Where AI creates genuine value and where it simply adds complexity • How to approach the growing "buy vs. build" decision in the age of AIWhether you're managing a handful of platforms or an enterprise-scale ecosystem, this episode offers practical guidance for turning your tech stack from a cost center into a measurable business asset.Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review Ops Cast, and join the conversation at MarketingOps.com.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations ProfessionalsSupport the show

What's up folks, welcome to our 4 part series of Crawling through the dungeon of martech architecture. You've arrived at Part 2: The Eye of Context.We cover:(00:00) - Intro (00:56) - In This Episode (01:28) - Sponsor GrowthLoop (02:32) - Sponsor: GrowthBench (03:32) - Welcome Back (04:09) - FLOOR 2: THE EYE OF CONTEXT (06:15) - Why AI Produces Believable Nonsense (09:00) - BOSS BATTLE: The Hallucination Oracle (10:07) - Data Quality: When Agents Read Your Messy Data (22:33) - Context Engineering: What It Is and Why It's Not the Same as Prompt Engineering (24:28) - Sponsor: MoEngage (25:25) - Sponsor: Knak (26:30) - Context Eng vs Prompt Eng (38:58) - Why the Industry Built the Wrong Semantic Layer in 2012 (46:33) - How Context Rot and Fragmentation Break AI Agent Performance (49:59) - BOSS BATTLE: Rotten Context Mage (50:37) - How to Build a Shared Context Layer for AI Agents (58:17) - Testing Whether Your Context Layer Works (01:01:35) - NEW ACHIEVEMENT: The Meaning Layer Is Live ---------------------------------------------------------------------------OPENING---------------------------------------------------------------------------Welcome back to the Dungeon of Martech Architecture.You've arrived at part 2. If this is your starting point, check out part 1 where we cleared the first floor's boss in 2 forms: The False Truth King in the CRM, and The Export Hydra that spread it everywhere. That said, if you already have a data warehouse, you might be able to start right here.Episode 1: CRM GravityWe conquered the source of truth and discovered that the data warehouse replaces the CRM with portable audiences.Episode 2: The Eye of ContextToday, we learn why AI fails without shared meaning, build the context engineering layer, and dig into why the industry built the wrong kind of meaning infrastructure in 2012.Episode 3: The Correlation MasqueradeNext, we escape the correlation trap and build the causal memory layer that separates agents that optimize correctly from agents that confidently scale the wrong behavior.Episode 4: The Dispatch TowerThen, we tackle the governance chaos of 30 vendors all claiming authority, and confront the interface decision that most organizations already made without realizing it.Let's start our descent.---------------------------------------------------------------------------FLOOR 2: THE EYE OF CONTEXT — AI Hallucinations, Data Quality, and Context Engineering---------------------------------------------------------------------------The layout of the second floor down the dungeon of martech architecture actually looks pretty fancy. It's cozy, it looks modern, the whole palace is lined with mirrors. But it's a bit creepy because once you look a little closer at the reflections, you notice that some of the details are off. The boss on this floor is low key danger that sneaks up on way too many teams – not like the big flashy monsters from the past 2 floors.Let's say you have a new AI system running on your marketing data. You've got it producing stuff like scores, recommendations, campaign ideas. Initially, it actually looks solid.There's no obvious AI sentence structures in the summaries, they read well.The scores next to accounts seem to make sense: higher ones next to well known brands and lower ones are gmail accounts.The campaign ideas are actually pretty fresh, you can tell that it's tailored for your ICP.Every output is delivered with impeccable confidence.So the next step is asking yourself… how would you know if it was wrong?There's a lot of obvious hallucinations that you probably catch when you chat with GPT or Claude, like totally inventing stuff. I'm talking about the details. The kind of wrong that passes the first glance. We've all seen that viral post on r/analytics about a company that found out AI has been making up analytics data for 3 months. Whether this post is from a real story or not, some versions of this are happening inside companies today. But this is happening everywhere right now. Even at some of the top AI companies on the planet. I've talked to technical marketing leaders that have greenlit agentic tools at their startups before the data definitions were settled. One of them called it ‘believable nonsense', and that term kinda stuck with me. It's the most dangerous form of hallucination, it sneaks up on you.This floor is harder than the last because the traps on the previous level were visible, once you knew what to look for: CRM exports nobody trusted, audience logic duplicated across platforms, copies drifting from the original. You felt that, you saw that. This floor's failures are designed to look like success, until you dig into the details and look under the hood.Let's look at the origins of The Hallucination Oracle boss. Why AI Produces Believable NonsenseHumans are wired to trust smooth, confident talkers. It's actually baked into our evolution and how our brains develop from infancy. Studies on babies and brain scans show this is an innate thing that kicks in early.A person who sounds certain usually knows something, right?LLMs and AI systems break this calibration, they produce fluency without necessarily producing correctness. At first glance, the output sounds right for structural reasons, not evidential ones. And once something sounds right, we engage with it differently. We forward it. We build on it. We present it to stakeholders who don't have the context to question it.This is similar to the The False Truth King boss from the first floor in episode 1, but this is at the intelligence layer: output that has been processed, synthesized, and returned with all the structural markers of a trustworthy answer, but the problem is the reasoning underneath it is hollow.That's Jason Dobbs, Head of Marketing & GTM Engineering at Kumo. He greenlit agentic analytics and predictive workflows at his startup before the team had settled on shared data definitions. The system produced outputs that looked reasonable right up until someone started asking follow-up questions:JASON DOBBS, Kumo AI"What made it dangerous wasn't really like the obvious hallucination. What we were seeing looked polished enough to be operational. At first glance the scores looked precise, the summary sounded coherent, the recommendations felt data-backed. But the moment you ask the simple follow-up questions -- why did you choose this account? What data drove this decision? -- the logic started to thin out. The lesson wasn't that the data was bad or the warehouse was bad or the model was bad. What was wrong is we were trying to automate ambiguity. We were asking AI to solve for confusion that we hadn't yet ourselves solved for internally. And once you do that, you enter the danger zone because the failure is essentially believable nonsense."This is some scary stuff right? When this believable nonsense gets trusted long enough to make it into a campaign, a decision, a board slide. Obvious hallucinations are easy to catch. Confident, polished, data-backed nonsense gets through more often than we think.The good news is that we already have a weapon perfect to slay this boss, we shaped it in the last episode: the data warehouse. It houses data. Data is how we defeat believable nonsense… but we need to enhance it.---------------------------------------------------------------------------BOSS BATTLE: The Hallucination Oracle----------------------------------------...

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!What does mid-2026 actually feel like for the people running marketing and revenue ops? And has AI made the work better, or just harder in new ways?Michael Hartmann is back with co-hosts Naomi Liu and Mike Rizzo for one of their rare three-amigos episodes, a wide-open conversation recorded at the halfway point of 2026. No guest, no agenda, just three ops practitioners talking honestly about what's happening in the field, what they're seeing in the community, and where things feel like they're heading.The conversation moves from the present state of AI in marketing ops to the bigger, harder questions underneath it. These questions are about the gap between AI hype and actual operationalisation, what it means to lead teams through expectations that keep changing, and what none of them know how to tell their kids about the world those kids are going to inherit.Topics covered in this episode:Whether AI has made marketing ops and revenue ops easier or harder, and why "harder" might be the more honest answerThe gap between how educated people are on what technology can do and how difficult it still is to actually operationaliseFindings (early) from the MO Pros AI assessment benchmark study, including how bots contaminated the data and what human intuition caught that the AI missedJensen Huang's pushback on CEOs blaming AI for layoffs, and what the ops community thinks about that framingHow the current AI moment is different from previous technology waves: it is changing who does things, not just how they get doneThe post-scarcity economy concept and what it might mean for the future of labour and valueEpisode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations ProfessionalsSupport the show

Many B2B marketing leaders still evaluate website performance by total traffic, engagement, or surface-level conversion metrics. What they should do is view the website as a core revenue engine, where everything from messaging, page layouts, and UX decisions directly accelerate sales-qualified leads, demo booking quality, and pipeline velocity. So, how can B2B SaaS companies design high-converting websites that capture high-intent demand and generate predictable, long-term revenue?That's why we're talking to Sahil Patel (CEO, Spiralyze) to unlock data-backed strategies on how to transform B2B SaaS website traffic into predictable revenue. During our conversation, Sahil reveals why most B2B SaaS website fail as revenue engines based on large-scale conversion rate optimization (CRO) testing data. He discussed why displaying your actual product immediately can drive a 19% lift in conversion rates. Sahil also introduced actionable diagnostic frameworks like the “one-second test” to see if your homepage actually works, and provided tips on how to conduct the competitor homepage test. He provided a tactical roadmap for focusing exclusively on high-intent buyer traffic, deploying friction-free CTAs, and using credible, customer-validated proof points while stripping away overcomplication with too much information.

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!Despite massive investment in AI, many organizations are struggling to generate meaningful business impact. Why? According to Paul Shirer, most companies are treating AI as a tooling problem when it's really a workflow and adoption problem.In this episode, hosts Michael Hartmann sit down with Paul, Founder & CEO of Infinite Ideas AI and Director of AI & GTM Technology at Bridge Partners. Together, they discussed where AI adoption goes wrong, how leaders should think about workflow design and decision-making, and what it actually takes to move beyond experimentation toward measurable value.In this episode:Why AI is a workflow and adoption problem, not a tooling problemWhat's really causing the high failure rate of AI initiativesHow to tell useful AI adoption apart from "agent sprawl"Why Paul moved away from end-to-end automated workflows, and what changed his mindWhat a connected workspace looks like in practiceBalancing flexibility and governance when every team wants a custom solutionWhy the data layer matters even more in an AI-driven environmentWhether you're being asked to justify AI investments or trying to turn experimentation into real results, this is a practical conversation for operators closing the gap between AI hype and AI impact.Learn more about MarketingOps and The MO Pros community at MarketingOps.com.If you enjoyed this episode, do subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone in the ops community who would find it valuable.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations ProfessionalsSupport the show

When leveraged strategically, LinkedIn can be an incredibly powerful platform for B2B companies to build their brands, establish credibility in their vertical, and capture high-intent inbound opportunities. Unfortunately, many company are using tactics that are either too salesy or aggressive, resulting in a massive trust gap and a stagnant pipeline. So, how can B2B companies and their marketing teams close the trust gap, dismantle the friction, establish credibility in their industry, and build a predictable LinkedIn lead generation system without wasting precious advertising dollars?That's why we're talking to Niall Ratcliffe (CEO, noticed) who shares the secrets that top B2B companies use to win on LinkedIn. During our conversation, Niall highlighted how to balance profile positioning, narrative-driven content, and targeted outbound communication. He discussed the critical shift from founder-led content to employee-generated content (EGC) through well-structured internal advocacy programs. Niall mapped out exactly what content formats and structural frameworks are moving the needle right now, providing an actionable blueprint for modern B2B personal branding and organic reach. Stay to the end, where Niall actually revealed some secrets that top B2B companies use behind the scenes that they won't discuss in public. 

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!What if the biggest marketing problem in your organization isn't the marketing team at all?In this episode, Michael Hartmann sits down with Charral Izhiman, Head of Marketing at Bayobab and author of The Marketing Movement, for a conversation about why so many organizations still misunderstand what marketing is supposed to do, and what it takes to fix that from both sides.Charral's perspective is refreshingly different. Her book isn't written to teach marketers how to market. It's written to help non-marketing leaders understand how to actually work with marketing. That framing opens up a rich discussion about the gap between strategy and execution, and why Ops professionals may be the best-positioned people in the business to close it. In this conversation, they discuss:The outdated assumptions organizations still hold about marketing, and how marketers unintentionally reinforce themWhy Ops teams sitting at the intersection of marketing, sales, finance, and leadership are uniquely positioned as translators across the businessThe SHAPE framework, and why "Activation" is the overlooked layer between planning and resultsWhy organizations romanticize strategy and celebrate execution but skip operational readiness in the middleThe Formula 1 metaphor for marketing leadership: everything that has to come together before you can even competeWhether you're in Marketing Ops, RevOps, or marketing leadership, this episode is full of ideas for anyone trying to bridge the gap between strategy, operations, and the rest of the business. The conversation doesn't end here. Explore the full SHAPE framework and more in Charral's book, The Marketing Movement: https://themarketing-movement.com/Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations ProfessionalsSupport the show

What if the biggest risk of AI in marketing isn't about job replacement, but about creating more fragmented, siloed work?Agility requires more than just adopting new tools; it demands a fundamental rethinking of how teams collaborate and orchestrate work. When a technology like AI promises to accelerate individual tasks, true agility means ensuring that acceleration translates into collective momentum, not organizational friction.Today, we're going to talk about moving beyond the hype of AI experimentation and into the reality of its operational impact on marketing teams. We'll explore what happens when AI graduates from being a personal productivity tool to becoming an integrated part of a team's workflow, and how that shift changes everything from campaign execution to the very structure of marketing itself.To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Prachi Gore, CMO at Asana. About Prachi Gore Prachi Gore is the Chief Marketing Officer at Asana, where she leads the company's global marketing strategy and brand development. Prachi brings extensive experience scaling product-led B2B organizations, having previously served as SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Checkr, where she built the company's demand engine, elevated its brand, and launched its product-led growth business. Prior to Checkr, Prachi led Marketing at SmartRecruiters, guiding the company's evolution from an SMB-focused product to a leading enterprise talent acquisition suite. This diverse background across consumer, SMB, and enterprise markets gives her deep expertise in demand generation, brand strategy, and AI-enabled go-to-market innovation. Prachi is passionate about creating marketing that combines human creativity with rigorous, data-driven execution, and is committed to helping teams work more effectively and tell clearer stories. Prachi Gore on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prachigore/ ---------- Resources ---------- Asana: asana.com The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/2868abd8085a9703 We're proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save! https://aglbrnd.co/r/7fe458ced0f04658Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit! Learn more: https://advertalize.com/r/491818c79fb1873fDon't miss We Make Future - the International Festival of Innovation in AI, Tech, and Digital Marketing, June 24-26 in Bologna. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/c80991afff416bb2The most influential minds in software, AI, and engineering leadership will be at WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, September 23-25 in San Jose. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/60a7299222a7bcf1 Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://aglbrnd.co/r/faaed112fc9887f3 Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/35ded3ccfb6716ba Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!For years, the hard part of ops work was building the technology. Now the tech is getting easier while the people and process side is getting harder. So why are so many organizations still stuck debating AI instead of activating it?In this episode, host Michael Hartmann sits down with Andrea Tarrell, President of the Tech Services line at Trilliad and CEO of Sercante. Together, they discussed the human side of change in the AI world with speed, trust, risk tolerance, and the trade-offs GTM teams are making right now.In this episode:Why the technology got easier, but the people and process side got harderHow much of AI adoption is really a trust and change management problem, not a tech oneFear of job replacement vs. plain organizational inertiaAI may not replace your job, but someone using it well may outperform someone who refuses to adaptSolving the tension between "move faster with AI" and "watch out for the risks."What companies get wrong about risk management and tolerance for risk in the AI worldWhy old governance frameworks may not fit a world of fast experimentationAnd a lot more...Whether you lead an ops team or sit inside one, this is a timely conversation about innovation, speed, governance, and practical business reality.If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone in the ops community who would find it valuable.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations ProfessionalsSupport the show

Marketing leaders are being asked to drive more growth with less budget, fewer resources, tighter timelines, and more pressure from every direction while AI is being treated like the shortcut to replace entire marketing teams. But AI will not fix bad strategy, weak alignment, poor customer understanding, or broken marketing fundamentals. In part two of this master class conversation with Matt Hummel, CMO of Pipeline360, the focus moves into what it really takes to become the kind of CMO AI cannot replace. Not by chasing every new tool, adding more MarTech, or hiding behind automation, but by understanding the business as a whole, building trust across departments, speaking the language of revenue, and creating alignment between marketing, sales, product, leadership, and the customer. To lead marketing in a volatile market where expectations keep rising and the old playbook is no longer enough, you need to know how to: • Make sales an ally instead of your bitter rival • Build shared pipeline ownership across marketing and sales  • Communicate risk without becoming defensive • Connect marketing decisions to the larger goals of the business • Set clearer expectations with your team and leadership • Understand resource constraints without using them as excuses • Stay close to customers while leading strategy • Create momentum without pretending there is an easy button The best marketing leaders are not just managing campaigns, tools, reports, and dashboards. They are translating complexity into strategy the business can trust. The reminder is clear: AI will not fix bad strategy. More MarTech will not fix bad marketing. The CMO AI cannot replace is the one who understands the business, earns trust, aligns with sales, leads the team, knows the customer, and gets back to real marketing when everyone else is hiding behind tools. (P.S. If you haven't, listen to Ep. 149 for part one of this masterclass episode) Beyond The Episode Gems: Connect With Matt Hummel on LinkedIn Listen To Troy On Matt's Podcast, Pipeline Brew: The Evolving Role of CMOs & Community Building Visit Pipeline360 website to learn more about how they solve B2B marketers' biggest headaches Buy Troy's Book, Strategize Up: The Blueprint To Scale Your Business StrategizeUpBook.com Discover All Podcasts On The HubSpot Podcast Network Get Free HubSpot Marketing Tools To Help You Grow Your Business Grow Your Business Faster Using HubSpot's CRM Platform Support The Podcast & Connect With Troy:  Rate & Review iDigress: iDigress.fm/Reviews Follow Troy's Socials @FindTroy: LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, TikTok Subscribe to Troy's YouTube Channel For Strategy Videos & See Masterclass Episodes Need Growth Strategy, A Keynote Speaker, Or Want To Sponsor The Podcast? Go To FindTroy.com  

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!Today, most teams aren't just struggling to build their AI strategies. The real struggle begins when they try to execute their strategies. In this episode of Ops Cast, host Michael Hartmann sits down with David York, Chief AI and Innovation Officer at Helix CXM, to get practical answers about what it really takes for GTM organizations to move from talking about AI to operationalizing it.David has spent years working at the intersection of marketing operations, RevOps, automation, and AI transformation. Together, he and Michael discovered an uncomfortable truth about how most teams are already overwhelmed by manual work, fragmented processes, shadow systems, and operational debt. Piling "figure out AI" on top of all that creates more chaos. In this conversation, you'll hear:Why the gap between AI strategy and implementation is so hard to closeWhat operational excellence actually looks like in practice, and why it has to come firstWhy mapping how work gets done today is the critical first step before introducing AIThe real difference between automation and "automation plus intelligence"How to identify low-risk, high-value AI use cases (like partially manual lead routing) versus harder onesThe hidden costs teams underestimate: tooling, LLM costs, maintenance, and human monitoringWhere human judgment is still absolutely requiredPractical advice on where to start if you're feeling overwhelmed by AI pressure right nowWhether you lead a scrappy SMB or a specialized team inside a large enterprise, this is a grounded discussion about the reality of AI in modern GTM, beyond the hype and the LinkedIn hot takes.David also published a new book this week, AI-Powered Growth: A 7-Step Adoption and Transformation Framework, which goes deeper into how Marketing Ops leaders can systematically prioritize and operationalize AI initiatives. Grab a copy here: https://www.amazon.com/AI-Powered-Growth-7-Step-Adoption-Transformation/dp/B0H2QCZG5M/Enjoy the episode!Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Marketing leadership has become one of the most volatile seats in business. CMOs and marketing leaders are often expected to create immediate pipeline, prove instant ROI, fix deeper business issues they did not create, defend brand investment, align sales, understand customers, translate strategy across the organization, and still become one of the first functions questioned, blamed, or cut when growth slows. In part one of this master class conversation, Matt Hummel, CMO of Pipeline360, brings a clear reminder back to the table: great marketing starts with trusting the buyer, knowing the customer, and simplifying how you market. In a market obsessed with performance data, attribution, automation, dark social, buyer signals, and immediate results, more complexity does not automatically create better customer understanding. For aspiring CMOs, current CMOs, marketing leaders, founders, and business owners, this conversation is a valuable look at how to lead marketing without getting trapped in the pressure cooker. It challenges you to rethink what it really means to put the customer at the center, not as a tagline, not as another automation workflow, and not as another dashboard filled with signals, but as a deeper responsibility to understand the person, pressure, timing, risk, and decision behind the purchase. The conversation moves through buyer trust, brand versus demand, customer empathy, attribution, sales alignment, CMO pressure, market timing, and the difference between chasing pipeline and building LTV. It is also a reminder to get out of your lane, understand product, spend time with sales, listen to customers, and learn how the whole business works. Because the best CMOs are not just campaign operators. They are translators, mediators, trust builders, and business leaders who know how to connect marketing to revenue, customer experience, and long term growth. Beyond The Episode Gems: Connect With Matt Hummel on LinkedIn Listen To Troy On Matt's Podcast, Pipeline Brew: The Evolving Role of CMOs & Community Building Visit Pipeline360 website to learn more about how they solve B2B marketers' biggest headaches Buy Troy's Book, Strategize Up: The Blueprint To Scale Your Business StrategizeUpBook.com Discover All Podcasts On The HubSpot Podcast Network Get Free HubSpot Marketing Tools To Help You Grow Your Business Grow Your Business Faster Using HubSpot's CRM Platform Support The Podcast & Connect With Troy:  Rate & Review iDigress: iDigress.fm/Reviews Follow Troy's Socials @FindTroy: LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, TikTok Subscribe to Troy's YouTube Channel For Strategy Videos & See Masterclass Episodes Need Growth Strategy, A Keynote Speaker, Or Want To Sponsor The Podcast? Go To FindTroy.com  

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!What separates a marketing team that drives growth from one that just stays busy?Ondar Tarlow came into marketing from the business side rather than the traditional marketing path, and that lens changes how he reads a P&L, how he allocates budget, and how he earns credibility with finance and the executive team.In this episode of Ops Cast, host Michael Hartmann sits down with Ondar, marketing consultant and former CMO, for a practical conversation about thinking commercially. They get into why so many marketers struggle to articulate how their company actually makes money, how to translate strategy into a budget and investment plan, and how to secure buy-in from the people holding the purse strings without getting blindsided in the room.Michael and Ondar discussed:Why coming from the business side reshapes how you approach marketingThe reason so many marketers can't explain how their business makes moneyWhat separates growth-driving teams from teams stuck executing activityHow to turn strategy into a real budget and investment planThe biggest mistakes leaders make when seeking buy-in from finance and the boardBalancing spend across acquisition, retention, partnerships, and brandWhy minimizing surprises is a hallmark of strong operatorsWhere AI is already creating a practical advantage in research and learningHow cheap access to strategic knowledge changes career development, and its risksWhat community building (Fast Lane Drive, Worn & Driven Magazine) teaches about retentionWhat makes a brand partnership strategically valuable versus just promotionalIf you've ever wanted to be the marketer the executive team actually listens to, this conversation is a roadmap for getting there.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Working with family sounds like either a dream or a disaster. This episode is proof it can be the former — but only when the foundation is right. Amber sits down with her oldest daughter, Lilly McCue (Director of Operations and Marketing Operations at Amber McCue), and longtime business partner Joanna Tiger for a candid conversation about what it actually looks like to build a business alongside the people you love. This was recorded at the request of a client who wanted to know: how does it go? And does it really work? Spoiler: it does. But not by accident. In this episode you'll hear: How Lilly got her start — pulling quotes for Twitter at nine years old — and the quiet-quitting moment in 4th grade that set the tone for their whole working relationship Why clear roles and deep trust are the two non-negotiables for making family dynamics work in a business What "assuming positive intent" looks like when it's actually lived — not just written on a values doc The unspoken rules that hold their team together (including who's not allowed to touch the CRM) What Amber would tell any business owner considering hiring a family member — including the conversation to have before you start   If you've ever wondered whether letting your worlds collide could actually work for your business, this one's for you.

SUMMARY What makes a brand sell memories instead of merchandise? Mike Brevik sits down with Mark Jaworski from HOMAGE Apparel to find out. Since 2007, HOMAGE has built a cult following by tapping into the emotional power of sports, pop culture, and the things people grew up loving, from Starter jackets to vintage NBA logos. The conversation covers why nostalgia is picking up speed across generations, how the analog era made retro culture feel rare and real, and how HOMAGE uses storytelling as its primary filter for every product decision. If you have ever felt that gut-punch of seeing an old jersey for the first time in years, this episode is for you. KEY TAKEAWAYS Nostalgia is not a fad. It is a tradition passed down through family, fandom, and shared cultural moments that transcend generations. HOMAGE runs every product idea through a storytelling filter first: does this story matter to people and will they connect with it? Scarcity and limited access in the pre-digital era made retro items feel rare and meaningful, and that emotional weight does not fade. Wearing a vintage logo or old-school colorway is its own form of identity, even a quiet act of rebellion within your own fandom. Navigating controversial figures takes case-by-case judgment, and HOMAGE gravitates toward stories of perseverance over polarization. WHO IS THE GUEST? Mark Jaworski - Director of Marketing Operations, HOMAGE Apparel Mark Jaworski is part of the marketing and storytelling team behind HOMAGE Apparel, one of the most recognizable nostalgia-driven apparel brands in sports and pop culture. Since 2007, HOMAGE has built a loyal following through retro-inspired designs celebrating iconic moments, legendary athletes, classic movies, wrestling, music, and vintage Americana. Mark helps shape the storytelling, brand voice, and emotional resonance behind everything the brand puts out. HOMAGE Apparel HOMAGE Apparel is a retro-inspired apparel brand built around storytelling, nostalgia, and emotional connection. Known for its ultra-soft vintage-style tees and deep-cut sports and pop culture references, HOMAGE celebrates the people, places, teams, and memories that shaped generations. From classic NBA logos and old-school wrestling to cult movies and Americana, HOMAGE has become a leader in modern nostalgia branding. LINKS AND RESOURCES cyberdogzmarketing.com brandretro.com homage.com KEYWORDS nostalgia branding, retro apparel, HOMAGE Apparel, vintage sports, brand storytelling, retro culture, sports nostalgia, pop culture branding, vintage fashion, emotional branding, retro logos, sports fandom, nostalgia marketing, authentic branding, Brand Retro Podcast, Mark Jaworski, vintage Americana, brand identity, memory marketing, retro sports EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS [00:01:49 - 00:02:27] Mike asks at what point HOMAGE realized it was selling memories, not just merchandise. [00:02:28 - 00:04:03] Mark explains how nostalgia was baked into HOMAGE from day one through founder Ryan's vintage collecting roots. [00:04:46 - 00:06:12] Mike and Mark dig into why younger generations are gravitating toward retro culture from 30 and 40 years ago. [00:06:13 - 00:08:33] The conversation turns to vintage as identity and rebellion within fandom, and the battle of the decades. [00:08:34 - 00:10:00] Mike and Mark explore how pre-digital scarcity made retro items feel rare and emotionally powerful. [00:10:01 - 00:11:50] Mark walks through HOMAGE's storytelling filter and the trial-and-error behind figuring out what truly resonates. [00:12:05 - 00:15:56] A candid conversation on navigating controversial athletes and how HOMAGE reviews each situation individually. [00:17:04 - 00:19:29] Mike and Mark bond over living through the Jordan era, the steroid debates, and the 1998 home run chase.  

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!Why is it so hard for teams to say what they actually think?We nod in meetings, then raise concerns in Slack afterward. We approve work, then reopen it at the last minute. We pile up version 20, 30, 40 of a deliverable, wondering why nothing ever feels finished.In this episode of Ops Cast, host Michael Hartmann sits down with Kira Troilo, founder of Art & Soul Consulting, who brings two decades of theater experience into the world of team collaboration. Her insight is that most teams are stuck in "performance mode," being careful and polite, when what they really need is "rehearsal mode," where it's safe to be messy, disagree early, and surface the truth before it gets expensive.Michael and Kira discussed:Why politeness is a hidden source of inefficiency, and what the "silence tax" actually costs organizationsThe real reason approval cycles balloon into endless rounds of revisionsHow theater's "first rehearsal" tradition translates to designing better team kickoffsWhy tools, workflows, and AI don't fix the underlying communication problemPractical tactics teams can adopt this week to give honest feedback earlierWhether AI and automation make these collaboration challenges better or worseHow leaders can shift from managing output to designing how their teams work togetherIf you've ever felt that rework, fire drills, and misalignment are symptoms of something deeper on your team, this conversation will give you a new lens and a starting point.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Most leaders see Marketing Ops as the team that keeps the trains running on time, essentially the plumbers of the marketing department. But what if I told you they're actually positioned to be the architects of your company's most durable competitive advantage?Agility requires moving beyond the transactional nature of campaigns and technology. It demands building a durable, responsive ecosystem around your brand, one that can listen and adapt not just quarterly, but constantly.Today, we're going to talk about how to reframe the marketing operations function from a cost center or tactical execution engine into a strategic driver of growth. And we'll explore a powerful, and perhaps counterintuitive, way to do it: by building a genuine community, not just as a marketing channel, but as the core of your go-to-market strategy.To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Mike Rizzo, CEO at MarketingOps.About Mike Rizzo Mike Rizzo is a career marketing operations professional passionate about using a people-first approach to building scalable and efficient solutions to the challenges faced by marketing, business operations, and client success teams.With his extensive background in marketing Mike helped build, launch, manage and optimize Mavenlink's first user community and Client Advisory Board programs.In 2017 he also founded the growing community of MO Pros - a place where thousands of Marketing Operations Professionals connect, collaborate and help elevate the practice of Marketing Ops. He is also the co-host of the podcast called Ops Cast.As the founder of MarketingOps.com, Mike is taking a community-led approach to building a platform purpose-built to elevate Marketing Operations Professionals. Mike Rizzo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aharze/ Resources MarketingOps: https://www.marketingops.com The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/2868abd8085a9703 Drive your customers to new horizons at the premier retail event of the year for Retail and Brand marketers. Learn more at CRMC 2026, June 1-3. https://aglbrnd.co/r/d15ec37a537c0d74 We're proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save! https://aglbrnd.co/r/7fe458ced0f04658Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit! Learn more: https://advertalize.com/r/491818c79fb1873fEnjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://aglbrnd.co/r/faaed112fc9887f3 Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/35ded3ccfb6716ba Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most leaders see Marketing Ops as the team that keeps the trains running on time, essentially the plumbers of the marketing department. But what if I told you they're actually positioned to be the architects of your company's most durable competitive advantage? Agility requires moving beyond the transactional nature of campaigns and technology. It demands building a durable, responsive ecosystem around your brand, one that can listen and adapt not just quarterly, but constantly.Today, we're going to talk about how to reframe the marketing operations function from a cost center or tactical execution engine into a strategic driver of growth. And we'll explore a powerful, and perhaps counterintuitive, way to do it: by building a genuine community, not just as a marketing channel, but as the core of your go-to-market strategy. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Mike Rizzo, CEO at MarketingOps. About Mike Rizzo Mike Rizzo is a career marketing operations professional passionate about using a people-first approach to building scalable and efficient solutions to the challenges faced by marketing, business operations, and client success teams. With his extensive background in marketing Mike helped build, launch, manage and optimize Mavenlink's first user community and Client Advisory Board programs. In 2017 he also founded the growing community of MO Pros - a place where thousands of Marketing Operations Professionals connect, collaborate and help elevate the practice of Marketing Ops. He is also the co-host of the podcast called Ops Cast.As the founder of MarketingOps.com, Mike is taking a community-led approach to building a platform purpose-built to elevate Marketing Operations Professionals. Mike Rizzo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aharze/ Resources MarketingOps: https://www.marketingops.com The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/2868abd8085a9703 Drive your customers to new horizons at the premier retail event of the year for Retail and Brand marketers. Learn more at CRMC 2026, June 1-3. https://aglbrnd.co/r/d15ec37a537c0d74 We're proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save! https://aglbrnd.co/r/7fe458ced0f04658 Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit! Learn more: https://advertalize.com/r/491818c79fb1873f Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://aglbrnd.co/r/faaed112fc9887f3 Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom Don't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/35ded3ccfb6716ba Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show! Most RevOps advice assumes your organization is already halfway in your success journey. But what happens when you're starting from zero, with no clear blueprint, inconsistent data, and a team that can't agree on how revenue actually works? In this episode, host Michael Hartmann sits down with Chelsea Gill, CMO at Resultant, who recently expanded her role to include RevOps and Customer Experience. What started as a need for better data and process quickly revealed a full-scale management change challenge across the entire organization.Chelsea and Michael discussed:What Chelsea expected when stepping into RevOps and what she actually foundWhy most RevOps frameworks assume more maturity than most teams haveWhat a "beta" version of RevOps actually looks like in practiceHow to change behavior across sales, marketing, and leadership (not just process)The role of empathy and storytelling in building organizational trust around dataWhether marketing has contributed to its own credibility problem inside the businessIf you're going through the messy middle between marketing, sales, and operations, or trying to build RevOps without a roadmap, this episode is a must watch for you.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Colleen Meenan is an Executive Vice President at Publicis Media, where she focuses on leading media strategy, client partnerships, and integrated marketing solutions for major brands. She is recognized for her leadership in modern, data-driven media planning and helping clients navigate the evolving digital and advertising landscape. Brad Feinberg is Vice President of Media & Marketing Operations at Molson Coors Beverage Company. He oversees media strategy, digital marketing, eCommerce, analytics, and consumer engagement across the company's portfolio of brands. Feinberg is known for leading innovative campaigns, expanding first-party data capabilities, and helping modernize Molson Coors' media and marketing operations.

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!In today's episode of Ops Cast by MarketingOps.com, we're going beyond systems, processes, and technology to talk about how Pros are actually doing and executing the work.  Marketing has grown into a measurable revenue engine, but that transformation has come at a cost, and the pressure on operators is now constant, unrelenting, and in many cases, unsustainable.Our guest is Debbie Qaqish, one of the original pioneers of Revenue Marketing and Marketing Operations, and the founder of her new venture, The Growth Factor. Debbie has spent years helping organizations turn marketing into a measurable driver of business growth, and now she's tackling the human side of that shift, focusing on resilience, leadership, and how marketers can perform at a high level without burning out.Key Topics Include:The evolution of Revenue Marketing and where most companies get stuck todayWhat comes next after accountability and measurement defined the last eraHow AI is rebuilding the role of marketing ops and the expectations placed on teamsWhy does the pressure on marketers feel different now than even a few years agoWhat resilience actually looks like in practice for marketing ops and RevOps rolesHow "caveman brain" shows up in high-stress work environments and affects decision-makingSimple resets operators can use when stuck in fight-or-flight modeWhat effective leadership looks like when pace and pressure are this highHow operators can move from surviving to performing at a high levelIf you've been feeling the weight of constant pressure, changing expectations, and the demand to do more with less, this episode will give you a different lens on what's happening and what to do about it.If you're ready to think about performance, leadership, and resilience in a way that actually fits the reality of modern marketing ops, tune in!For leaders looking for a reset, here is the 10-Minute Leadership Reset™ Ops Cast (https://www.growthfactor.us/opscast)Be sure to like, share, and subscribe to join the conversation at MarketingOps.comEpisode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

On this debut episode of Beyond the Wrench, Chris Lollini speaks with Cody Damp, owner and president of American Home Pros, a Tulsa-based HVAC and plumbing company with 17 trucks on the road. Damp breaks down the company's approach to marketing, including a major push to dedicate 40% of marketing spend to brand recognition.

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!In today's episode of Ops Cast by MarketingOps.com, we're breaking the misconception that digital accessibility is just a compliance issue. Instead, we're exploring why accessibility should be viewed as a strategic advantage, a lever for better customer experience, stronger performance, and sustained growth.Our guest is Mike Barton, the leader of Corporate Communications and Content Marketing at AudioEye. He shares how accessibility isn't just about ticking boxes or worrying about lawsuits; it's about enhancing the experience for all customers, creating more inclusive content, and ultimately driving business success.Key Topics Include: • The real definition of digital accessibility and why it's often misunderstood • How accessibility impacts revenue and growth opportunities when ignored • Why designing for accessibility improves the overall customer experience for everyone • Where Marketing and Revenue Ops teams should focus on accessibility through email programs, websites, campaigns, and more • Best practices for ensuring accessibility across different channels • Quick wins for Ops teams to implement accessibility changes without getting overwhelmedIf you haven't thought about accessibility in your workflows, this episode will show you exactly where to start and how to implement changes that will have a lasting impact.If you're ready to take actionable steps to make your marketing, web operations, and campaigns more accessible, tune in!Be sure to like, share, and subscribe to join the conversation at MarketingOps.com.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!What happens when you throw out a nearly finished $500K rebrand… and rebuild it in two months for $22K?In this episode of Ops Cast, Michael Hartmann sits down with Michael Yehoshua, CMO at WiseStamp, to discuss a decision that most marketing leaders would never make and why it worked.Michael walked into an 18-month rebrand that looked polished on the surface but was fundamentally disconnected from real customer insight. Instead of finishing it, he scrapped the entire effort and rebuilt the brand using AI in a completely different way.What followed was not just a faster rebrand, but a change in how decisions get made. From analyzing customer conversations for emotional signals to rethinking how content is structured for LLM-driven discovery. This conversation challenges many of the assumptions behind traditional marketing, SEO, and brand strategy.This is not a tools discussion. It is about how marketing and operations teams need to rethink data, signals, and decision-making in an AI-shaped environment.Topics covered include:• Why a nearly complete $500K rebrand was scrapped• How AI was used to listen to customers instead of just generating content• What analyzing tone, intent, and “aha moments” reveals beyond transcripts• How Marketing Ops teams should think about capturing new types of signals• Why optimizing for LLMs is different from optimizing for traditional search• The shift in content, backlinks, and site structure for AI-driven discovery• Why traffic can drop while conversions improve• What metrics matter when traditional SEO signals become less reliable• Why brand may become more important, not less, in an AI-first worldIf you are in Marketing Ops, RevOps, or growth, this episode forces a hard rethink. Not about tools, but about how decisions should be made going forward.Be sure to like, share, and subscribe to Ops Cast, and join the conversation at MarketingOps.com.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!Welcome to another episode of Ops Cast by MarketingOps.com, powered by The MO Pros. Host Michael Hartmann is joined by co-hosts Mike Rizzo and Naomi Liu for a candid, no-guest conversation about one of the biggest questions in operations right now, which is what are we actually getting from AI?With massive funding announcements, rapid product releases, and constant noise around AI, it is easy to assume everyone is seeing results. But when you look closer, most teams are still struggling to measure real impact beyond surface-level efficiency gains.In this episode, we discussed the gap between hype and reality, exploring why ROI is so difficult to quantify, where AI is genuinely useful today, and the expectations that users have for what the technology can actually deliver.In this episode, you will learn:1. What OpenAI's massive funding signals for the future of AI and operations2. Why most teams cannot clearly measure ROI from AI initiatives3. The difference between time savings and real revenue impact4. Hidden costs of AI tools that make ROI harder to track5. Why AI adoption often fails without proper change management6. The belief gap, skill gap, and expectation gap are slowing teams down7. How fear and uncertainty are shaping AI adoption inside organizations8. Why the “AI gold rush” does not guarantee real business value9. What AI agents can and cannot do without human oversight10. Why strong operators become more valuable in an AI-driven worldThis episode challenges the assumption that AI automatically drives value and offers a more grounded perspective on how operators should think about adoption, measurement, and long-term impact.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!Conflict is part of every operation's role, but most people avoid it. However, the best operators learn how to use it to their advantage.In this episode of Ops Cast, Michael Hartmann sits down with Anna Lecat, CEO and Founder of Bridging Global and author of the upcoming book Loving Conflict, to explore why conflict is not something to eliminate, but something to understand and navigate.If you work in Marketing Ops, RevOps, or any cross-functional role, you are constantly operating between teams with different priorities, incentives, and perspectives. The question from this conversation is whether you avoid it or learn how to work through it effectively.Anna brings more than 25 years of experience leading multicultural teams and working across global organizations. She shares practical ways to reframe conflict, build trust, and turn difficult conversations into productive outcomes.Topics covered include• Why conflict naturally shows up in operations roles• The concept of “loving conflict” and what it actually means in practice• How different teams operate with different “languages” and priorities• Why people feel stuck in the middle and how to shift that mindset• How to prepare for difficult conversations with stakeholders or leadership• Common mistakes that escalate conflict instead of resolving it• How strong operators and leaders handle tension differentlyThis episode is not about frameworks or tools. It is one of the most overlooked skills in operations, the ability to solve conflict in a way that builds alignment rather than breaks it.Loving Conflict by Anna Lecat If this conversation feels relatable, Anna's book goes deeper into the ideas discussed in this episode. This offers a practical framework for turning tension into trust, alignment, and stronger relationships across teams. Here's the link to buy the Loving Conflict: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1966629974Be sure to like, share, and subscribe to Ops Cast, and join the conversation at MarketingOps.com.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!What happens when an Ops leader thinks like a marketer?In this episode of Ops Cast, Michael Hartmann sits down with Julie Hamada, Chief Operating Officer at Monarch Dentistry, to explore the connection between marketing, operations, and customer experience.Julie's path from marketing into operations shapes how she leads today. She views marketing as promise-making and operations as promise-keeping, and she focuses heavily on retention, customer psychology, and the full journey from first touch to long-term loyalty.This conversation challenges the way many organizations think about growth. It looks at why retention is often overlooked, how operational design directly impacts customer experience, and why some of the most valuable insights come from conversations rather than dashboards.Topics covered include:• The transition from marketing into operations and executive leadership• Why the gap between marketing promises and operational delivery matters• Retention vs acquisition and why most companies get the balance wrong• Designing operations around the full customer or patient journey• How understanding human behavior improves internal leadership• The limits of dashboards and why conversation-driven leadership matters• Practical ways to break down silos between marketing, ops, and frontline teamsIf you're leading or working in Marketing Ops, RevOps, or business operations, this episode offers a different lens on growth. One that starts with the customer experience and works backward into systems and execution.Be sure to like, share, and subscribe to Ops Cast, and join the conversation at MarketingOps.com.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!Why do marketing teams keep adding approvals, processes, and controls… yet still struggle to move faster or perform better?In this episode of Ops Cast, Michael Hartmann sits down with Joe Bockerstette, Partner at Business Enterprise Mapping, to discuss what is really happening inside modern marketing organizations.Joe brings over 30 years of experience helping companies redesign how their business systems function. A former PwC partner and CPG leader, he focuses on mapping entire operational systems to reveal why teams produce the results they do and where friction actually lives.This conversation goes beyond surface-level process optimization. It explores how hidden system design drives delays, why adding more controls often makes problems worse, and how marketing teams can diagnose the root causes behind slow execution and inconsistent outcomes.Topics covered include:• What a “business system” actually means in a marketing context• Why organizations are structured to produce their current results• How approval layers and control mechanisms create bottlenecks• The difference between documenting processes and mapping systems• “Red Clouds” and how they expose operational friction and missed opportunities• Key differences between in-house teams and agency operating models• Practical ways smaller teams can start improving their systems without external helpIf your team feels stuck in cycles of rework, delays, or constant firefighting, this episode offers a clear framework to understand why and what to do about it.Be sure to like, share, and subscribe to Ops Cast, and join the conversation at MarketingOps.com.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!Social media is changing fast. Platforms are becoming search engines, video continues to dominate, and AI tools are rebuilding how people discover brands and information online.In this episode of Ops Cast, Michael Hartmann speaks with Stephanie Gardner, a freelance social media and marketing strategist who works across B2B, B2C, nonprofits, and small businesses. Stephanie focuses on helping organizations build purposeful social strategies that align with real business outcomes rather than vanity metrics.The conversation explores how social platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn are evolving into discovery engines, why brands need to think in terms of searchable intent instead of hashtags and trends, and how the lines between search, social, and AI-driven discovery are rapidly disappearing.Stephanie also explains why follower counts and engagement can be misleading indicators of success, shares real examples of how smaller but more targeted audiences can drive better results, and discusses why executive visibility and employee amplification are becoming essential trust signals in B2B environments.Topics covered include: • The shift from social media feeds to search-based discovery • How Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube are evolving into search engines • Why intent-based visibility matters more than hashtags or trends • The difference between vanity metrics and real business impact • How smaller, targeted audiences can outperform large follower counts • The growing role of executive visibility on LinkedIn • How Marketing Ops teams should think about social, search, and AI togetherIf you work in Marketing Ops, RevOps, or digital marketing strategy, this episode offers a practical look at how discovery behavior is changing and what organizations should start preparing for now.Be sure to like, share, and subscribe to Ops Cast, and join the conversation at MarketingOps.com.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!Many Marketing Ops professionals eventually hit a ceiling. The work is important, the systems are running, but the influence over the broader go-to-market strategy remains limited.In this episode of Ops Cast, Michael Hartmann speaks with Jackson Fisher about what it takes to move beyond execution and step into a more strategic role inside the business. Jackson recently completed ten years at the American Hospital Association, where he began in Marketing Operations and later moved into Product Development. As an early member of the MarketingOps.com community and part of the Founding 100, Jackson shares how his operations background helped him transition into a role focused on pipeline structure, revenue performance, and product strategy.The conversation explores how operators can translate their skills into business impact by connecting marketing activity to pipeline, pricing, and financial outcomes. Jackson also explains what it looks like to introduce pipeline discipline in organizations that lack a clear revenue structure and how Marketing Ops professionals can learn to communicate in the language of finance and revenue leadership.Topics covered include: • Recognizing when you have hit the Marketing Ops ceiling • Translating Marketing Ops skills into broader business impact • Building pipeline discipline in organizations without clear revenue structures • Connecting marketing activity to pricing, Salesforce data, and revenue outcomes • Creating strategic impact with a lean tech stack • Moving from order-taker to trusted GTM partner • Preparing for leadership roles in Revenue Operations and GTM strategyIf you are a Marketing Ops professional thinking about the next phase of your career, this episode offers practical insight into how operators can expand their influence beyond campaign execution.Be sure to subscribe, like, and share Ops Cast, and join the conversation at MarketingOps.com.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

In this honest and strategic conversation, Nick and I pull back the curtain on what's really happening behind most online businesses.   We talk about why marketing is not just social media, why operations matter more than you think, and how entrepreneurs unintentionally light money on fire by skipping foundational steps.   Nick shares what he's learned from 15+ years behind the scenes of major brands, events, and digital products. We break down the simple but powerful marketing flow most businesses are missing, and why driving traffic without capturing it is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make.   We also explore the emotional side of entrepreneurship. The loneliness. The ego. The pride that says “I can do it alone.” And why the most successful entrepreneurs rise together, not in isolation.   This episode is an invitation to stop guessing, stop reacting, and start building with strategy.     In this episode, we explore: • Why 90 to 98% of website visitors never come back • The biggest mistake entrepreneurs make with social media • What a lead magnet actually needs to do to convert • Why long, overwhelming freebies hurt your credibility • The psychology behind quick wins and buyer trust • The difference between brand marketing and operational marketing • Why driving traffic to your homepage is usually a mistake • The purpose of a low-ticket offer and how it builds momentum • How to increase lifetime customer value through ascension and add-ons • Why most entrepreneurs feel alone and how to fix it • The common trait Nick sees in top-performing founders • How mentorship shortens the learning curve and prevents costly mistakes • Why transparency and integrity win in the long game Catch up with me on socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melissadlugolecki/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/melissa.dlugoleckiLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-dlugolecki-b24988141/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@melissadlugoleckiYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MelissaDlugolecki

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!The traditional B2B marketing playbook is becoming irrelevant. At the same time, AI is fundamentally transforming how buyers research, evaluate, and purchase.In this episode of Ops Cast, Michael Hartmann is joined by Naomi Liu and Mike Rizzo for a wide-ranging conversation with Jon Miller. Jon co-founded Marketo, helped define modern Marketing Operations, later co-founded Engagio, and is now the Co-Founder and CEO of a stealth AI startup focused on the future of buying behavior and revenue systems.This conversation challenges long-held assumptions about campaigns, MQLs, attribution, and the systems Marketing Ops teams have relied on for over a decade. Jon explains why rules-based automation is not sufficient now, how AI changes what marketing platforms must do, and what it means to move from campaigns to AI-orchestrated experiences.The panel also explores buying groups, lifecycle orchestration across anonymous and known buyers, and how Marketing Ops can operationalize trust, brand, and customer experience in a world where AI filters much of what buyers see.The topics that we covered include: • Why the traditional B2B playbook is no longer working • How AI shifts marketing from campaigns to orchestration • What it really takes to operationalize buying groups • Why MQLs and last-touch attribution are losing relevance • How Marketing Ops can build infrastructure for modern buying behavior • The evolving role of Marketing Ops in 2026 and beyond • Where AI is genuinely useful today versus oversoldIf you work in Marketing Ops, RevOps, or revenue leadership, this episode will push you to rethink the systems you are building and how artificial intelligence can transform them.Be sure to like, share, and subscribe to Ops Cast, and join the conversation at MarketingOps.com.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals We're an official media partner of B2BMX 2026 — the B2B Marketing Exchange — happening March 9-11 at the Omni La Costa Resort in Carlsbad, CA. It's practitioner-focused with 50+ breakout sessions, keynotes, and hands-on workshops covering AI in B2B, GTM strategy, and advanced ABM. Real networking, real takeaways. And because we're a media partner, you get 20% off an All-Access Pass with code B2BMAOP at checkout. Head to b2bmarketing.exchange to grab your spot. MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!In this episode of Ops Cast, we explore a side of operations leadership that rarely appears in roadmaps or system diagrams but determines whether teams thrive or burn out.Kimi Corrigan, Vice President of Marketing Operations at Huntress, joins Michael Hartmann on our latest Ops Cast episode. Kimi shares her perspective on servant leadership, psychological safety, and the emotional intelligence required to lead effectively inside fast-growing, complex organizations.The conversation goes beyond tools and processes to focus on the human side of operations. Kimi discusses how to lead with empathy without lowering standards, how to navigate difficult conversations with honesty and accountability, and how to create sustainable team rhythms in environments that often default to constant firefighting.They also examine how ops leaders can enter new organizations thoughtfully, read culture before pushing change, and decide where to invest their energy early. Kimi shares where AI can genuinely support leadership development, not as a replacement for judgment, but as a tool for reflection, communication, and clarity.What you will learn: • How to balance servant leadership with high performance expectations • Why psychological safety is essential in ops teams • How to lead through growth and organizational transition • Ways to build sustainable team trust outside of crisis moments • The non-technical skills that prepare operators for leadership roles • Where AI can strengthen communication and self-awarenessIf you are leading a Marketing Ops team or aspiring to step into leadership, this episode highlights the interpersonal skills that often matter more than technical mastery.Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review Ops Cast, and join the conversation at MarketingOps.com.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals We're an official media partner of B2BMX 2026 — the B2B Marketing Exchange — happening March 9-11 at the Omni La Costa Resort in Carlsbad, CA. It's practitioner-focused with 50+ breakout sessions, keynotes, and hands-on workshops covering AI in B2B, GTM strategy, and advanced ABM. Real networking, real takeaways. And because we're a media partner, you get 20% off an All-Access Pass with code B2BMAOP at checkout. Head to b2bmarketing.exchange to grab your spot. MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

Got a story idea for Bloodworks 101? Send us a text message February marks the 100th anniversary of Black History Month, a time to reflect on the achievements and contributions made by Blacks in this nation. But as Bloodworks 101 producer John Yeager found out, it's also a time to look at some "pretty sobering numbers" when it comes to Black Americans and blood donation. For today's editon of Bloodworks 101, John spoke to Harry Thomas, Bloodworks Northwest's Vice President of Marketing Operations and Planning about those numbers and a new study of Black donors.Support the show

The marketing teams winning with AI today are not the ones chasing every new model release. They are the ones who found the boring, repetitive tasks their teams hate and automated those first.Nir Pochter, Co-Founder and CMO at Lightricks, joins Stephanie Postles on Marketing Trends to break down what AI actually means for creative workflows and why most teams are still using it wrong.You'll learn:- The "algebra problem" of AI adoption- How to save your design team 80% of their time- Why the gap between marketers who use AI well and those who don't is widening fast.- How to use an LLM scoring system to pre-review documents for you- The dangerous trend of "AI Marketer" job titles- What's really in store for the future of video+AI Key Moments:00:00 — Why AI Hasn't Improved Creative Output Yet02:06 — The Algebra Problem: Tools vs. Knowing How to Use Them07:27 — Nir's Background: AI PhD to Lightricks and FaceTune09:46 — What Used to Take Weeks Now Takes Minutes13:35 — Why Automating Everything Failed Miserably16:38 — Start with What People Hate Doing20:08 — The LLM Scoring System: Nothing Gets Reviewed Without an 8521:43 — Train Your LLM to Be Mean, Not Nice23:32 — Building Custom GPTs with Company Guidelines26:30 — The Pitfall: Using AI to Please Leadership28:47 — From Toys to Tools: Why Text-to-Video Isn't Enough31:05 — Coca-Cola's 70,000 Prompts (Was It Worth It?)34:41 — AI Won't Replace Creatives, But This Will37:04 — The Two Critical Skills: Prompting and Curation37:55 — How AI Multiplies the Skills Gap (7 vs 10 Example)42:47 — What CMOs Should Be Asking Their Teams46:20 — Why "AI Marketer" Is LinkedIn Fluff This episode is brought to you by Lightricks. LTX is the all-in-one creative suite for AI-driven video production; built by Lightricks to take you from idea to final 4K render in one streamlined workspace.Powered by LTX-2, our next-generation creative engine, LTX lets you move faster, collaborate seamlessly, and deliver studio-quality results without compromise. Try it today at ltx.studio Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.