Episodios

  • 208: Anthony Rotio: Exploring causal context graphs and machine customers, starting in retail media networks

    208: Anthony Rotio: Exploring causal context graphs and machine customers, starting in retail media networks
    Feb 24 2026
    What’s up folks, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Anthony Rotio, Chief Data Strategy Officer at GrowthLoop.(00:00) - Intro (01:10) - In this episode (04:05) - Journeying From Robotics to Modern Marketing Systems (11:05) - Most Marketing Systems Don’t Learn Because They Lack Feedback Loops (16:10) - The Martech Engineering Talent Gap (19:51) - AI Will Amplify Whoever Has the Cleanest Causal Feedback Loop (29:17) - Agent Context Graphs for Drift Detection in Marketing Systems (31:51) - Humans Will Set Hypotheses, AI Will Accelerates Iteration (35:50) - The Evolution of Retail Media Networks (45:07) - How Commerce Networks Redefine Targeting With Governed Data (48:26) - How Agent to Agent Commerce Operates Inside Marketing Funnels (53:04) - Google Universal Commerce Protocol Explained (54:43) - Personal Happiness System (56:30) - Favorite BooksSummary: Anthony traces a path from robotics and computer science to his current role where he approaches marketing as an engineering system. He explains how execution-first marketing stacks weaken feedback loops and fragment data, which slows learning and iteration. He introduces the agent context graph as a causality model that lets AI simulate and predict customer behavior with greater confidence. The conversation also covers retail media networks, first-party data monetization through governed access, and a shift toward zero-to-zero marketing driven by agent-to-agent transactions. He closes by stressing that strong data foundations determine who can compete as marketing becomes more automated and agent-driven.About AnthonyAnthony Rotio is the Chief Data Strategy Officer at GrowthLoop, where he leads partnerships and builds generative AI product features for marketers, including multi-agent systems, AI-driven audience building, and benchmarking and evaluation work. He previously served as GrowthLoop’s Chief Customer Officer, where he built and led teams across data engineering, data science, and solutions architecture while supporting product development and strategic sales efforts.Before GrowthLoop, Anthony spent nearly six years at AB InBev, where he led a $100M owned retail business unit with full P&L responsibility and drove major growth through operational and digital transformation work. He also led U.S. marketing for Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob Ultra, Stella Artois, and other brands across music, food, and related consumer programs. He earned a B.A. in computer science from Harvard, played linebacker on the Harvard football team, founded the consumer product Pizza Shelf, and holds a Google Professional Cloud Architect certification.Journeying From Robotics to Modern Marketing SystemsAnthony’s career started far away from marketing. He trained as a computer scientist and spent his early years working with robotics and reinforcement learning. His first exposure to a learning agent left a lasting impression because the system behaved less like traditional software and more like something adaptive. That experience shaped how he would later think about work, systems, and feedback. He learned early that progress comes from loops that learn, not static instructions.That mindset followed him into an unexpected chapter at AB InBev. Anthony entered a world defined by scale, brands, and operational complexity. He treated his technical background like a carpenter treats tools, useful only when applied to real problems. Running marketing across major beer brands taught him how value is created inside large organizations. It also exposed a recurring issue. Marketing teams had ambition and data, but execution moved slowly because ideas had to travel through layers of translation before anything reached customers.That friction became impossible to ignore. Audience definitions moved through tickets. Campaigns waited on queries. Data teams became bottlenecks through no fault of their own. Anthony felt the pull back toward technology, where systems could shorten the distance between intent and action. That pull led him to GrowthLoop, where he joined early and worked directly with customers. The appeal was immediate. The product connected straight to cloud data and removed several layers of mediation that marketing teams had accepted as normal.As language models improved, Anthony recognized a familiar pattern. Audience building behaved like a translation problem. Marketers described people and intent in natural language, while systems demanded structured logic. Early experiments showed that natural language models could close that gap. Anthony framed the idea clearly.“Audience building is a translation problem. You start with a business idea and you end with a query on top of data.”Momentum followed quickly. Customers like Indeed and Google responded because speed changed behavior. Teams experimented more often and refined audiences based on results instead of assumptions. Conversations with Sam Altman and collaboration with OpenAI reinforced ...
    Más Menos
    59 m
  • 207: Building a career that doesn't hollow you out (50 Operators share the systems that keep them happy, part 3)

    207: Building a career that doesn't hollow you out (50 Operators share the systems that keep them happy, part 3)
    Feb 17 2026
    "Hey – So what do you do?” Why is it that we always default to work when we get this question. its like many of us have let our jobs become the center of how we see ourselves. This slowly happens to many of us, as work occupies more mental and emotional space.I asked 50 people in martech and operations how they stay happy under sustained pressure. This 3 part series – titled “50 Operators share the systems that keep them happy” explores each of these layers through the lived experience of operators who feel the same pressure you probably feel right now.Today we close out the series with part 3: meaning. We’ll hear from 19 people and we’ll cover:(00:00) - Teaser (01:08) - Intro / In This Episode (04:27) - Rich Waldron: Auditing Whether Work Is Actually Moving (06:49) - Samia Syed: Tracking Personal Growth (08:33) - Jonathan Kazarian: Tracking Growth Across Life Health and Work (10:11) - Kim Hacker: Choosing Roles With Daily Visible Impact (12:21) - Mac Reddin: Checking Work Against 3 Personal Conditions (14:11) - Chris Golec: Choosing Early Stage Building Work (15:19) - Hope Barrett: Feeding curiosity across multiple domains (17:45) - Simon Lejeune: Treating work like a game (19:52) - Ana Mourão: A mental buffer between noticing and doing (21:46) - Tiankai Feng: Anticipation planning (25:30) - István Mészáros: Choosing Who You Are When Work Ends (29:52) - Danielle Balestra: Feeding Interests Unrelated to Work (31:42) - Jeff Lee: Continuing to Build Personal Projects After the Workday Ends (33:23) - John Saunders: Keeping a builder practice outside of work (34:41) - Ashley Faus: Group Creative Rituals Outside of work (37:40) - Anna Aubucho: Maintaining a second self through solo creative practice (39:56) - Ruari Baker: Preserving Identity Through Regular Travel (42:15) - Guta Tolmasquim: Building a personal product roadmap (45:37) - Pam Boiros: Feeding identities that have nothing to do with work (47:52) - OutroAll that and a bunch more stuff after a quick word from 2 of our awesome partners.A lot of the operators I chatted with don’t talk about happiness like it suddenly arrives. They describe it as something you feel when things actually start to move. Our first guest gets there right away by tying happiness directly to progress, the kind that tells you you’re not stuck.Rich Waldron: Auditing Whether Work Is Actually MovingFirst up is Rich Waldron, Co-founder and CEO at Tray.ai. He’s also a dad, and a mediocre golfer.Progress sits at the center of Rich’s definition of career happiness. He treats it as a felt sense rather than a dashboard metric. When work advances in a direction that makes sense to him, his energy steadies. When that movement slows or stalls, frustration surfaces quickly and spreads into everything else. That feeling becomes a cue to examine direction rather than effort.“Happiness is mostly driven by progress.”That framing resonates because it names something many operators struggle to articulate. Long hours can feel sustainable when the work moves forward. Light workloads can feel draining when days repeat without traction. Progress gives work narrative weight. It answers a quiet internal question about whether today connects to something that matters tomorrow.Rich also points to patterns that erode meaning over time.Roles with little challenge dull attention, even when the pay is generous.Constant activity without visible change breeds irritation that lingers after work ends.Both conditions interrupt momentum. The mind keeps searching for movement that never arrives. Rest stops working because unresolved motion occupies every quiet moment.Progress also shapes identity beyond work. When things move in the right direction, attention releases its grip on unfinished problems. Rich links that release to showing up better at home. He describes being more present as a parent because mental energy is no longer trapped in work that feels stuck. Forward motion restores proportion. Work keeps its place as one part of a full life rather than the dominant one.Balance emerges as a byproduct of this orientation. You choose problems that move. You notice when progress fades. You adjust before frustration hardens into burnout. That rhythm preserves meaning over long career arcs and keeps work aligned with the person you want to remain.Key takeaway: Track progress as a signal of meaning. When your work moves in a direction you respect, it stays contained, your identity stays intact, and the rest of your life receives the attention it deserves.Samia Syed: Tracking Personal GrowthThat’s Samia Syed, Director of Growth Marketing at Dropbox. She’s also a mother, outdoor fanatic, and an avid hiker.Progress became the scorecard Samia relies on to keep her career from consuming her sense of self. Early professional years trained her to chase perfection, because perfection looked measurable, respectable, and safe. That mindset quietly tightened the frame around what counted ...
    Más Menos
    50 m
  • 206: The people who keep you standing (50 Operators share the systems that keep them happy, part 2)

    206: The people who keep you standing (50 Operators share the systems that keep them happy, part 2)
    Feb 10 2026
    Pressure at work rarely stays contained within the job. It spills into family life, friendships, and daily relationships. I asked 50 operators how they stay happy while managing responsibility at work and at home. This 3 part series – titled “50 Operators share the systems that keep them happy” explores each of these layers through the lived experience of operators who feel the same pressure you probably feel right now. Today we continue with part 2: connection, the relationships that recharge you and keep you standing when the work would otherwise knock you sideways.We’ll hear from 17 people and we’ll cover:(00:00) - Teaser (02:00) - In This Episode (04:30) - Eric Holland: Limiting Slack and Prioritizing Family Time (05:33) - Meg Gowell: Shared Family Routines (08:31) - David Joosten: Filtering Reactive Work So Time Stays With Family (10:30) - Aboli Gangreddiwar: Designing Work to Enable Family Travel (12:01) - Kevin White: Separating Career Drive From Family Identity (13:42) - Joshua Kanter: Daily Family Rituals (18:07) - Gab Bujold: Daily Check-Ins With a Trusted Work Partner (22:30) - Anna Leary: Treating Workload Stress as a Shared Problem (24:31) - Angela Rueda: Shared Problem Solving Conversations (26:50) - Blair Bendel: Using In Person Conversations to Stay Grounded (29:28) - Matthew Castino: Work Satisfaction Correlates Strongly With Team Relationships (33:17) - Aditi Uppal: Connection as a Feedback Loop (35:48) - Alison Albeck Lindland: One Social System Across Work and Life (37:34) - Rajeev Nair: Human Bonds Absorb Pressure Before Burnout (40:12) - Chris O’Neil: Filtering Work Through People and Problems That Matter (42:24) - Rebecca Corliss: Creativity as a Shared Emotional Outlet (44:24) - Moni Oloyede: Teaching as a Living Relationship (45:50) - OutroConnection starts with who you protect time for. Our first guest begins there, shaping his work around people who refill him and drawing hard lines around anything that steals those moments away.Eric Holland: Limiting Slack and Prioritizing Family TimeFirst up is Eric Holland, a fractional PMM based in Pennsylvania, and the co-host of the We’re not Marketers Podcast. He’s also a dad and runs a retail apparel startup. Eric shapes his happiness around people before tasks. He pares his work down to projects shared with colleagues he enjoys being around, and that choice changes the texture of his days. Conversations feel easier. Meetings end with momentum instead of fatigue. You can hear a quiet confidence in how he describes work that feels relational rather than transactional.Family anchors that perspective in a very physical way. Nearly every weekend, from late November through Christmas, belongs to his ten-month-old son. These are not abstract intentions. They are mornings that smell like coffee and pine needles, afternoons on cold sidewalks, and evenings defined by routine rather than inboxes. Time with his son creates emotional weight that carries into the workweek and keeps priorities visible when deadlines start to blur.Eric also draws a firm boundary around digital proximity. Slack does not live on his phone, and that decision protects the moments where connection needs full attention. The habit most people recognize, checking messages during dinner or while holding a child, never has a chance to form. Presence becomes simpler when tools stay in their place.The system he describes comes together through a few concrete moves that many people quietly avoid:He limits work to collaborators who feel generous with energy.He reserves weekends for repeated family rituals that mark time.He removes communication tools from personal spaces where they dilute focus.Eric captures the point with a line that carries practical weight.“Delete Slack off your phone.”That sentence signals care for the relationships that actually hold you upright. Attention stays where your body is, and connection grows from that consistency.Key takeaway: Strong connections protect long-term happiness at work. Choose collaborators who give energy, protect repeated time with family and friends, and keep work tools out of moments that deserve your full presence.Meg Gowell: Shared Family RoutinesNext up is Meg Gowell, Head of Marketing at Elly and former Director of Growth Marketing at Typeform and Appcues. She’s also a mom of 3.Remote work compresses everything into the same physical space. Meetings happen steps away from the kitchen. Notifications follow you into the evening. Meg treats that compression as something that requires active design. She and her husband both work remotely, so separation never happens by accident. It happens because they decide when work stops and family time starts, and they repeat that decision every day.That discipline shows up in how she leads at Typeform. An international team creates constant overlap and constant absence at the same time. Someone is always offline. Someone is always mid-day. Ideas surface at inconvenient ...
    Más Menos
    48 m
  • 205: The daily infrastructure behind sustainable careers (50 Operators share the systems that keep them happy, part 1)

    205: The daily infrastructure behind sustainable careers (50 Operators share the systems that keep them happy, part 1)
    Feb 3 2026
    Careers place a ton of demand on energy and attention way before results start to stabilize. Many operators discover that health and routine determine how long they can operate at a high level.I spoke with 50 people working in martech and operations about how they stay happy under pressure. This 3 part series – titled “50 Operators share the systems that keep them happy” explores each of these layers through the lived experience of operators who feel the same pressure you probably feel right now.Today we start with part 1: stability through routines, boundaries, and systems that protect the body and mind. We’ll hear from 15 people:(00:00) - Teaser (01:05) - Intro (01:30) - In This Episode (04:09) - Austin Hay: Building Non Negotiables (08:06) - Sundar Swaminathan: Systems That Prevent Stress (12:33) - Elena Hassan: Normalizing Stress (14:32) - Sandy Mangat: Managing Energy (16:31) - Constantine Yurevich: Designing Work That Matches Personal Energy (19:05) - Keith Jones: Intentional Work Rhythms (23:58) - Olga Andrienko: Daily Health Routines (26:06) - Sarah Krasnik Bedell: Outdoor Routines (27:21) - Zach Roberts: Physical Reset Rituals Outside Work (28:57) - Jane Menyo: Recovery Cycles (31:56) - Angela Vega: Chosen Challenges and Recovery Cycles (36:09) - Megan Kwon: Presence Built Into the Day (37:50) - Nadia Davis: Calendar Discipline (39:36) - Henk-jan ter Brugge: Planning the Week as a Constraint System (43:15) - Ankur Kothari: Personal Metrics (44:07) - OutroAustin Hay: Building Non NegotiablesOur first guest is Austin Hay, he’s a co-founder, a teacher, a martech advisor, but he’s also a husband, a dog dad, a student, water skiing fanatic, avid runner, a certified financial planner, and a bunch more stuff... Daily infrastructure shows up through repetition, discipline, and choices that protect energy before anything else competes for it. Austin grounds happiness in curiosity, but that curiosity only thrives when supported by sleep, movement, and time that belongs to no employer. Learning stays fun because it is not treated as another performance metric. It remains part of who he is rather than something squeezed into the margins of an already crowded day.Mental and physical health shape his schedule in visible ways. Austin treats them as operating requirements rather than aspirations. His days include a short list of behaviors that carry disproportionate impact:Regular sleep with a consistent bedtime.Exercise that creates physical fatigue and mental quiet.Relationships that exist entirely outside work.Hobbies and games that feel restorative rather than productive.These habits rarely earn praise, which explains why they erode first under pressure. In his twenties, Austin chased work, clients, and money with intensity. He told himself the rest would come later. That promise held eventually, but the gap years carried a cost. He remembers moments of looking in the mirror and feeling uneasy about the life he was assembling, despite checking every external box.Trade-offs now anchor his thinking. Austin frames decisions as equations involving time, energy, and outcomes. Goals demand inputs, and inputs consume limited resources. Avoiding that math leads to exhaustion and resentment. Facing it creates clarity. Many people resist this step because it forces hard choices into daylight. The industry rewards the appearance of doing everything, even when the math never works.“I view a lot of decisions and outcomes in life as trade-offs. At the end of the day, that’s what most things boil down to.”Sleep makes the equation tangible. Austin aims for bed around 9 or 9:30 each night because his mornings require focus, training, and sustained energy. He needs seven and a half hours of sleep to function well. That requirement dictates the rest of the day. Social plans adjust. Work compresses. Goals remain achievable because the system supports them.He defines what he wants to pursue.He calculates the energy required.He locks in non negotiables that keep the math honest.That structure removes constant negotiation with himself. The system holds even when motivation dips or distractions multiply.Key takeaway: Daily infrastructure depends on non negotiables that protect sleep, health, and energy. Clear priorities, visible trade-offs, and repeatable routines create careers that stay durable under pressure.Sundar Swaminathan: Systems That Prevent StressNext up is Sundar Swaminathan, Former Head of Marketing Science at Uber, Author & Host of the experiMENTAL Newsletter & Podcast. He’s also a husband, a father and a well traveled home chef, amateur chess master.Stress prevention sits at the center of Sundar’s daily system for staying happy and effective at work. A concentrated period of personal loss collapsed any illusion that stress deserved patience or tolerance. Three deaths in three weeks compressed time, sharpened perspective, and forced a reassessment of what stress actually costs. Stress drains ...
    Más Menos
    47 m
  • 204: Phyllis Fang: Trust infrastructure and freakish curiosity as career growth levers

    204: Phyllis Fang: Trust infrastructure and freakish curiosity as career growth levers
    Jan 27 2026
    What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Phyllis Fang, Head of Marketing at Transcend.(00:00) - Intro (01:23) - In This Episode (04:13) - Uber Safety Marketing Shaped A Trust First Marketing Playbook (10:12) - How Permissioned Data Systems Power Personalization at Scale (15:22) - How Consent Infrastructure Improves Personalization Performance (19:20) - How to Audit Consent and Compliance in Marketing Data (23:24) - What Consent Management Does Across AI Data Lifecycles (28:29) - How to Build a Marketing Trust Stack (30:49) - Consent Management as a Revenue Lever (35:10) - Designing Marketing Teams for Freakish Curiosity (41:19) - Skills That Define Great Marketing Operations (45:33) - Why System Level Marketing Experience Builds Career Leverage (50:13) - System for HappinessSummary: Phyllis learned how fragile marketing becomes when systems move faster than trust while working between lifecycle execution and product marketing at Uber. Safety work around emergencies, verification, and COVID forced messages to withstand scrutiny from riders, drivers, regulators, and the public. That experience shapes how she approaches consent and personalization today. Permission signals decide what data moves and how confidently teams can act. When those signals stay connected, work holds. When they drift, confidence erodes across systems, teams, and careers.About PhyllisPhyllis Fang leads marketing at Transcend, where enterprise growth depends on clear choices about data, consent, and accountability. Her work shapes how privacy becomes part of how companies operate, communicate, and earn confidence at scale.Earlier in her career, she spent several years at Uber, working on global product marketing for safety during periods of intense public scrutiny. She helped bring new safety features to market at moments when user behavior, policy decisions, and brand credibility were tightly linked. The work required precision, restraint, and an understanding of how people respond when stakes feel personal.Across roles in e-commerce, lifecycle marketing, and platform strategy, a pattern holds. Fang gravitates toward systems that must work under pressure and messages that must hold up in practice. Her career reflects a belief that marketing earns its place when it reduces uncertainty and helps people move forward with confidence.Uber Safety Marketing Shaped A Trust First Marketing PlaybookTrust-focused marketing depends on people who can move between systems work and narrative work without losing credibility in either space. Phyllis built that fluency by operating inside lifecycle programs while also leading product marketing initiatives at Uber. One side of that work lived in tools, triggers, and delivery logic. The other side lived in rooms where progress depended on persuasion, alignment, and patience. That dual exposure trained her to see how fragile big ideas become when they cannot survive real execution.Lifecycle and marketing operations reward control and repeatability. Product marketing inside a global organization rewards influence and restraint. Phyllis describes moments where moving a single initiative forward required negotiation across regions, channels, and internal politics. Every message faced review from people who owned distribution and reputation in their markets. Messaging tightened quickly because weak logic did not survive long. Campaigns became sharper because every assumption had to hold up under pressure.“We were all in the same company, but I still had to convince people to resource things differently or prioritize a message.”Safety marketing pushed that pressure even further. The work focused on features designed for rare, high-stakes moments, including emergency assistance and large-scale verification during COVID. Measurement shifted away from habitual usage and toward confidence and credibility. The audience expanded well beyond active users. Phyllis had to speak clearly to riders, drivers, regulators, and the general public at the same time. Each group carried different fears, incentives, and consequences. Messaging succeeded only when it respected those differences without creating confusion.That mindset carries directly into her work at Transcend. Privacy and consent buyers often sit in legal or compliance roles where personal and professional risk overlap. These buyers read closely and remember details. Phyllis explains that proof needs to operate on two levels at once. It must withstand careful review, and it must connect to human motivation. Career safety, internal credibility, and long-term reputation shape decisions more than feature depth ever will.“You have to understand the human behind the role, because their motivation usually has very little to do with your product.”Many martech teams still lean on urgency and fear to move deals forward. That habit collapses quickly in trust-driven categories. Buyers trained to manage risk respond to clarity, evidence...
    Más Menos
    54 m
  • 203: Jordan Resnick: How to distinguish fake traffic from real machine customers

    203: Jordan Resnick: How to distinguish fake traffic from real machine customers
    Jan 20 2026
    What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Jordan Resnick, Senior Director, Marketing Operations at CHEQ.(00:00) - Intro (01:10) - In This Episode (03:47) - Demystifying Go-to-Market Security (06:14) - The Fake Traffic Surge (08:14) - How the Dead Internet Theory Connects to Bot Traffic Growth (12:31) - How to Detect Bot Traffic Through Behavioral Patterns (16:13) - How Go To Market Teams Reduce Fake Traffic And Lead Pollution (30:03) - Preventing Fake Leads From Reaching Sales (34:17) - How to Calculate Revenue Impact of Fake Traffic (38:09) - How to Report Marketing Performance When Bot Traffic Skews Metrics (43:58) - Trust Erosion From Fake Traffic (49:49) - How Marketing Ops Should Adapt Systems for Machine Customers (53:59) - Funnel Audits With Security Teams to Reduce Bot Traffic (57:47) - Detachment as a Career Survival SkillSummary: Distinguishing fake traffic from real machine customers starts where metrics break down. Jordan shows how AI-driven bots now scroll, click, submit forms, and pass validation while quietly filling dashboards with activity that never turns into revenue. The tell is behavioral texture. Sessions move too fast. Paths skip learning. Engagement appears without intent. Real machine customers behave with rhythm and purpose, returning, evaluating, integrating. Teams that recognize the difference lock down the conversion point, block synthetic demand before it reaches core systems, keep sales calendars clean, and only report once traffic has earned trust.About JordanJordan Resnick is Senior Director of Marketing Operations at CHEQ, where he leads the systems, data, and workflows that support go-to-market security across a global customer base. His work sits at the intersection of marketing operations, revenue operations, attribution, automation, and analytics, with a clear focus on building infrastructure that holds up under scale and scrutiny.Before CHEQ, Jordan led marketing operations at Atlassian, where he supported complex GTM motions across multiple business units and global markets. Earlier roles at Perkuto and MERGE combined hands-on execution with customer-facing leadership, integration design, and process ownership. His career also includes more than a decade as an independent operator, delivering marketing operations, automation, content, and technical solutions across a wide range of organizations. Jordan brings a deeply practical, execution-driven perspective shaped by years of building, fixing, and maintaining real systems in production environments.Demystifying Go-to-Market SecurityGo-to-market security shows up when growth metrics look strong and revenue outcomes feel weak. Marketing operations teams live in that gap every day. Jordan describes GTM security as a business-facing discipline that protects the integrity of acquisition, funnel data, and downstream decisions that depend on clean signals. The work sits inside marketing operations because that is where traffic quality, lead flow, and revenue attribution converge.When asked about how GTM security differs from traditional fraud prevention, Jordan frames the difference through decision-making pressure. Security teams historically focus on defending infrastructure and minimizing exposure. Marketing ops teams focus on maintaining momentum while spending real budget. GTM security evaluates risk in context, with an eye toward revenue impact, forecasting accuracy, and operational trust across teams that rely on shared data.Jordan grounds the concept in specific failure points that operators recognize immediately. GTM security examines where bad inputs quietly enter systems and multiply.Paid traffic that inflates sessions without creating buyers.Analytics skewed by automated interactions that look legitimate.Form submissions that pass validation and still never convert.Sales pipelines filled with activity that drains time and morale.Each issue compounds because systems assume the data is real. Teams keep optimizing against numbers that feel precise and still point in the wrong direction.“You are putting money into driving people to your website, and the first question should be how many of those people are real and able to buy.”Invalid traffic behaves like a contaminant. It flows from acquisition into attribution models, forecasting tools, CRMs, and revenue dashboards. Marketing celebrates growth, sales chases shadows, and finance questions confidence in the entire funnel. The problem rarely announces itself as a security incident. It surfaces as confusion, missed targets, and internal friction.GTM security matters because it gives marketing ops teams a framework to protect the inputs that shape every downstream decision. The work runs alongside traditional security while staying anchored in go-to-market outcomes. That way you can spend with confidence, trust your reporting, and hand sales teams signals grounded in real buying behavior.Key takeaway: Treat go-to-market security as ...
    Más Menos
    1 h y 2 m
  • 202: Aleyda Solís: AI search crawlability and why your site’s technical foundations decide your visibility

    202: Aleyda Solís: AI search crawlability and why your site’s technical foundations decide your visibility
    Jan 13 2026
    What’s up everyone, today we have the honor of sitting down with Aleyda Solís, SEO and AI search consultant. (00:00) - Intro (01:17) - In This Episode (04:55) - Crawlability Requirements for AI Search Engines (12:21) - LLMs As A New Search Channel In A Multi Platform Discovery System (18:42) - AI Search Visibility Analysis for SEO Teams (29:17) - Creating Brand Led Informational Content for AI Search (35:51) - Choosing SEO Topics That Drive Brand-Aligned Demand (45:50) - How Topic Level Analysis Shapes AI Search Strategy (50:01) - LLM Search Console Reporting Expectations (52:09) - Why LLM Search Rewards Brands With Real Community Signals (55:12) - Prioritizing Work That Matches Personal PurposeSummary: AI search is rewriting how people find information, and Aleyda explains the shift with clear, practical detail. She has seen AI crawlers blocked without anyone noticing, JavaScript hiding full sections of sites, and brands interpreting results that were never based on complete data. She shows how users now move freely between Google, TikTok, Instagram, and LLMs, which pushes teams to treat discovery as a multi-platform system. She encourages you to verify your AI visibility, publish content rooted in real customer language, and use topic clusters to anchor strategy when prompts scatter. Her closing point is simple. Community chatter now shapes authority, and AI models pay close attention to it.About AleydaAleyda Solís is an international SEO and AI search optimization consultant, speaker, and author who leads Orainti, the boutique consultancy known for solving complex, multi-market SEO challenges. She’s worked with brands across ecommerce, SaaS, and global marketplaces, helping teams rebuild search foundations and scale sustainable organic growth.She also runs three of the industry’s most trusted newsletters; SEOFOMO, MarketingFOMO, and AI Marketers, where she filters the noise into the updates that genuinely matter. Her free roadmaps, LearningSEO.io and LearningAIsearch.com, give marketers a clear, reliable path to building real skills in both SEO and AI search.Crawlability Requirements for AI Search EnginesCrawlability shapes everything that follows in AI search. Aleyda talks about it with the tone of someone who has seen far too many sites fail the basics. AI crawlers behave differently from traditional search engines, and they hit roadblocks that most teams never think about. Hosting rules, CDN settings, and robots files often permit Googlebot but quietly block newer user agents. You can hear the frustration in her voice when she describes audit after audit where AI crawlers never reach critical sections of a site."You need to allow AI crawlers to access your content. The rules you set might need to be different depending on your context."AI crawlers also refuse to process JavaScript. They ingest raw markup and move on. Sites that lean heavily on client-side rendering lose entire menus, product details, pricing tables, and conversion paths. Aleyda describes this as a structural issue that forces marketers to confront their technical debt. Many teams have spent years building front-ends with layers of JavaScript because Google eventually figured out how to handle it. AI crawlers skip that entire pipeline. Simpler pages load faster, reveal hierarchy immediately, and give AI models a complete picture without extra processing.Search behavior adds new pressure. Aleyda points to OpenAI’s published research showing a rise in task-oriented queries. Users ask models to complete goals directly and skip the page-by-page exploration we grew up optimizing for. You need clarity about which tasks intersect with your offerings. You need to build content that satisfies those tasks without guessing blindly. Aleyda urges teams to validate this with real user understanding because generic keyword tools cannot describe these new behaviors accurately.Authority signals shift too. Mentions across credible communities carry weight inside AI summaries. Aleyda explains it as a natural extension of digital PR. Forums, newsletters, podcasts, social communities, and industry roundups form a reputation map that AI crawlers use as context. Backlinks still matter, but mentions create presence in a wider set of conversations. Strong SEO programs already invest in this work, but many teams still chase link volume while ignoring the broader network of references that shape brand perception.Measurement evolves alongside all of this. Aleyda encourages operators to treat AI search as both a performance channel and a visibility channel. You track presence inside responses. You track sentiment and frequency. You monitor competitors that appear beside you or ahead of you. You map how often your brand appears in summaries that influence purchase decisions. Rankings and click curves do not capture the full picture. A broader measurement model captures what these new systems actually distribute.Key takeaway: Build crawlability for AI...
    Más Menos
    1 h
  • 201: Scott Brinker: If he reset his career today, where would he focus?

    201: Scott Brinker: If he reset his career today, where would he focus?
    Jan 6 2026
    What’s up everyone, today we have the honor of sitting down with the legendary Scott Brinker, a rare repeat guest, the Martech Landscape creator, the Author of Hacking Marketing, The Godfather of Martech himself.(00:00) - Intro (01:12) - In This Episode (05:09) - Scott Brinker’s Guidance For Marketers Rethinking Their Career Path (11:27) - If You Started Over in Martech, What Would You Learn First (16:47) - People Side (21:13) - Life Long Learning (26:20) - Habits to Stay Ahead (32:14) - Why Deep Specialization Protects Marketers From AI Confusion (37:27) - Why Technical Skills Decide the Future of Your Marketing Career (41:00) - Why Change Leadership Matters More Than Technical AI Skills (47:11) - How MCP Gives Marketers a Path Out of Integration Hell (52:49) - Why Heterogeneous Stacks are the Default for Modern Marketing Teams (54:51) - How To Build A Martech Messaging BS Detector (59:37) - Why Your Energy Grows Faster When You Invest in Other PeopleSummary: Scott Brinker shares exactly where he would focus if he reset his career today, and his answer cuts through the noise. He’d build one deep specialty to judge AI’s confident mistakes, grow cross-functional range to bridge marketing and engineering, and lean into technical skills like SQL and APIs to turn ideas into working systems. He’d treat curiosity as a steady rhythm instead of a rigid routine, learn how influence actually moves inside companies, and guide teams through change with simple, human clarity. His take on composability, MCP, and vendor noise rounds out a clear roadmap for any marketer trying to stay sharp in a chaotic industry.About ScottScott has spent his career merging the world of marketing and technology and somehow making it look effortless. He co-founded ion interactive back when “interactive content” felt like a daring experiment, then opened the Chief Marketing Technologist blog in 2008 to spark a conversation the industry didn’t know it needed. He sketched the very first Martech Landscape when the ecosystem fit on a single page with about 150 vendors, and later brought the MarTech conference to life in 2014, where he still shapes the program. Most recently, he guided HubSpot’s platform ecosystem, helping the company stay connected to a martech universe that’s grown to more than 15,000 tools. Today, Scott continues to helm chiefmartec.com, the well the entire industry keeps returning to for clarity, curiosity, and direction.Scott Brinker’s Guidance For Marketers Rethinking Their Career PathMid career marketers keep asking themselves whether they should stick with the field or throw everything out and start fresh. Scott relates to that feeling, and he talks about it with a kind of grounded humor. He describes his own wandering thoughts about running a vineyard, feeling the soil under his shoes and imagining the quiet. Then he remembers the old saying about wineries, which is that the only guaranteed outcome is a smaller bank account. His story captures the emotional drift that comes with burnout. People are not always craving a new field. They are often craving a new relationship with their work.Scott moves quickly to the part that matters. He directs his attention to AI because it is reshaping the field faster than many teams can absorb. He explains that someone could spend every hour of the week experimenting and still only catch a fraction of what is happening. He sees that chaos as a signal. Overload creates opportunity, and the people who step toward it gain an advantage. He urges mid career operators to lean into the friction and build new muscle. He even calls out how many people will resist change and cling to familiar workflows. He views that resistance as a gift for the ones willing to explore.“People who lean into the change really have the opportunity to differentiate themselves and discover things.”Scott brings back a story from a napkin sketch. He drew two curves, one for the explosive pace of technological advancement and one for the slower rhythm of organizational change. The curves explain the tension everyone feels. Teams operate on slower timelines. Tools operate on faster ones. The gap between those curves is wide, and professionals who learn to navigate that space turn themselves into catalysts inside their companies. He sees mid career marketers as prime candidates for this role because they have enough lived experience to understand where teams stall and enough hunger to explore new territory.Scott encourages people to channel their curiosity into specific work. He suggests treating AI exploration like a practice and not like a trend. A steady rhythm of experiments helps someone grow their internal influence. Better experiments produce useful artifacts. These artifacts often become internal proof points that accelerate change. He believes the next wave of opportunity belongs to people who document what they try, translate what they learn, and help their companies adapt at a ...
    Más Menos
    1 h y 4 m