Humans of Martech - 150: Welcoming Darrell Alfonso as a co-host, celebrating baby milestones and the top 2 predictions for martech by 2030

150: Welcoming Darrell Alfonso as a co-host, celebrating baby milestones and the top 2 predictions for martech by 2030

12/17/24 • 34 min

What’s up everyone, today is our last episode of the year and if you paid attention to the intro, I’m excited to officially welcome Darrell Alfonso as the newest co-host of the podcast!

Summary: The Humans of Martech enters an exciting new chapter with Darrell Alfonso joining as co-host, bringing fresh energy and insights to the show. As a long-time listener and new dad, Darrell offers relatable stories of juggling work, family, and community while sharing bold predictions like the shift to warehouse-native architectures in martech, which promise to streamline data operations for enterprises. With AI poised to handle executional tasks, Darrell emphasizes the evolving role of marketers as strategic thinkers guiding AI with emotional intelligence and ethical oversight. As the podcast heads into 2025, it remains committed to delivering actionable insights, thought-provoking predictions, and a fresh perspective for the martech community.

Welcoming a New Co-Host and Celebrating Baby Milestones

Darrell’s journey to becoming a co-host on the podcast came full circle, blending mentorship, passion, and personal milestones. He shared how one of his mentees suggested the idea, sparking an opportunity he immediately embraced. As an early listener of the show, Darrell highlighted his admiration for its unfiltered and geeky deep dives, calling it his favorite podcast—a sentiment that fueled his excitement for the road ahead.

On a personal note, Darrell and his wife recently welcomed their baby boy, just eight weeks ago. Parenthood, he admitted, has been a whirlwind of sleepless nights and steep learning curves. As ambitious and organized as he and his wife are, they’ve quickly discovered that babies don’t operate on predictable timelines. Moments of progress—like better sleep—often take a step back as developmental leaps shake up routines. While the lack of rest is taxing, Darrell’s outlook reflects a blend of exhaustion and gratitude.

Balancing professional life with a newborn is no small feat. Darrell recounted a whirlwind day of delivering a keynote, driving home, and immediately diving into baby duties. He joked about the unpredictability of these moments while acknowledging the personal growth they inspire. Virtual support groups like Maven have also helped him navigate the early stages of parenthood, offering both guidance and camaraderie with other new parents.

For all the challenges that come with parenthood, I always like to emphasize gratitude. Reflecting on the struggles my family faced in our journey to parenthood (and how many other couples have it much harder), we need to emphasize the importance of cherishing even the tough parts. The joy and fulfillment of finally welcoming our child outweigh the sleepless nights and ever-changing routines.

Key takeaway: Parenthood is a mix of exhaustion, growth, and gratitude. Embracing the ups and downs, leaning on community support, and focusing on the meaningful moments can help navigate this transformative stage of life.

Marketing Tools Without Databases

Okay... enough baby talk haha.

Darrell predicts that in 5 years, most marketing tools will no longer rely on databases. At first glance, this concept might seem shocking—after all, marketing automation platforms, CRMs, and CDPs are fundamentally built on relational databases. But Darrell suggests this assumption is rooted in tradition, not necessity, and outlines a shift toward a warehouse-native or zero-copy data architecture that could redefine how tools operate.

To illustrate this point, he draws a simple analogy. Consider apps like Yelp or Google Places. When you share a restaurant with a friend, the app doesn’t create a duplicate of your contacts database; it accesses the data on-demand. Contrast this with the typical marketing stack, where almost every tool replicates contact data, creating endless updates, sync errors, and manual fixes. Darrell estimates that more than 80% of a team’s data work revolves around ensuring consistency across these copied datasets—a cumbersome and inefficient process.

The inefficiency extends beyond wasted effort. Darrell shares examples of bi-directional sync loops that occur when two systems endlessly update each other, introducing a frustrating complexity to even the simplest workflows. These scenarios highlight how deeply ingrained data copying is within current systems and how much time is spent combating its limitations.

Shifting to a zero-copy model, Darrell argues, could eliminate these inefficiencies. A warehouse-native approach would enable tools to work directly from a centralized data warehouse, bypassing the need for constant synchronization. This not only streamlines operations but also reduces the risk of errors. It’s a radical departure from the status quo but one he believes is inevitable as teams demand greater agility and accu...

What’s up everyone, today is our last episode of the year and if you paid attention to the intro, I’m excited to officially welcome Darrell Alfonso as the newest co-host of the podcast!

Welcoming a New Co-Host and Celebrating Baby Milestones

Marketing Tools Without Databases

Okay... enough baby talk haha.

Previous Episode

149: Kacie Jenkins: Sendoso’s SVP of Marketing on capturing the true impact of marketing and avoiding reductive metrics

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Kacie Jenkins, SVP Marketing at Sendoso.

Summary: Marketing isn’t about cramming creativity into a spreadsheet, and Kacie’s journey proves it. She took on last-touch attribution, broke free from narrow metrics, and built a system that told the whole story, one where sales and marketing actually worked together. It wasn’t flashy; it was months of unsexy foundational work that led to record-breaking results. Kacie’s advice is to stop obsessing over proving your worth with perfect data. Focus on collaboration, long-term strategies, and building something so good it proves itself.

About Kacie

Kacie started her career as a recording artist for 6 years where she recorded and released 2 top 30’s singles on country radio
She transitioned to FANDOM as Marketing Manager where she helped build and scale entertainment and gaming communities
She then shifted to consumer tech and worked at Roku where she helped take their streaming stick to market
She later joined Fastly when they were still a tiny startup and was eventually promoted to VP of Marketing while helping them scale to $200M in ARR and a massive IPO
She moved on to a few other VP of marketing stints at Ace Hotel and then Sourcegraph
Today Kacie is Senior Vice President of Marketing at Sendoso, the top gifting and direct mail platform for revenue teams

Why Marketing Needs to Break Free from Last Touch Attribution

Kacie has strong opinions about last touch attribution and its role in marketing, calling it both misguided and overused. She recounts a memorable example where a company’s finance team mandated that every marketing touchpoint be unique, forbidding multiple efforts for a single account. The result was a fragmented strategy, with marketing forced to isolate efforts rather than integrate them—a scenario she describes as fundamentally broken. This, she says, reflects a wider misunderstanding of marketing’s role in driving success.

In her experience, marketing is often held to an unrealistic standard that no other department faces. “No one questions whether a sales team should exist,” Kacie points out, yet marketers are repeatedly asked to prove their value in isolation. This obsession with single-point attribution—whether first or last touch—reduces complex buyer journeys to simplistic, unrealistic models. She likens it to sports, where success is measured by the contributions of the entire team, not just the final goal or play. In marketing, the same principle applies: campaigns succeed when brand, product, sales, and customer experience work cohesively.

Kacie highlights how marketers often agree to flawed measurement practices under intense job pressure. Many leaders, she notes, demand immediate, trackable results and dismiss longer-term investments like brand building. When these short-sighted strategies fail, the blame lands on the marketing team, perpetuating a destructive cycle. This became especially apparent during the pandemic, when companies slashed budgets for brand and integrated marketing, only to see their performance suffer months later.

At its core, the problem stems from a demand to quantify marketing in ways that are convenient rather than meaningful. Kacie insists that attribution models like last touch can provide insights but have been misused to force marketing into a demand capture role that undervalues its broader impact. Effective marketing, she argues, cannot succeed in a vacuum—it depends on the health and alignment of the entire organization.

Key takeaway: Attribution models like last touch offer insights but become problematic when used in isolation. Marketing thrives on collaboration across teams, long-term investments, and integrated strategies. Simplistic measurement frameworks undermine this by reducing success to isolated metrics, which fail to capture the bigger picture. Focus on fostering collaboration and investing in holistic strategies rather than chasing immediate, trackable wins.

What’s the Best Way to Prove What Drives Revenue in Marketing?

Kacie’s candid take on the challenges of attribution didn’t stop there. She explains that board members and leadership often seek simple answers, asking, “What drove the most revenue?” This, she notes, is rarely a question with a singular answer, and it certainly doesn’t lie solely in the last touchpoint.

Her approach combines every available data point, UTMs, self-reported attribution, and multi-touch models, to create a comprehensive picture. This isn’t about assigning credit to one channel or tactic but understanding the collective influence of all touchpoints. For instance, at Sendoso, Kacie leveraged this holistic perspective to reinvigorate outbound sales. By investing in trust-building, strong branding, and ...

Next Episode

151: Austin Hay: An operator’s guide to AI agents, composability, building in concert and self-designing APIs

What’s up everyone, welcome to our first episode of 2025 – today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Austin Hay, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Clarify and Martech Teacher at Reforge.

Summary: Something extraordinary is brewing in the world of martech. In the near future, Austin thinks AI agents will turn into an omniscient digital butler, anticipating your needs with uncanny precision while vanishing into the background of your workday. But the real revolution unfolds in the seemingly mundane machinery of marketing operations, where innovative companies are transforming their spaghetti mess of data pipes and platforms into something approaching digital poetry. The fundamental building blocks of our systems aren't disappearing, they're gaining superpowers. Hear it from one of our industry's most thoughtful builders.

About Austin

Austin started his career at Accenture but he left the Fortune 500 world to join a startup called Branch where he became the 4th employee
Austin then created his own boutique mobile growth engineering consultancy. He grew the practice to 1.5M with big names like Walmart, Jet, Airbnb, Foursquare and more.
His consulting practice was aqui-hired by mParticle – a leading CDP solution where he would eventually become VP of Growth
He later joined Runway as VP of Business Operations
He also started building The Marketing Technology Academy – an online learning center for martech which he would eventually sell to Reforge and become the Instructor for the new Martech course
He was also Head of Martech at Ramp, a fintech startup
Last year, Austin strapped on his jetpack and became a product founder at Clarify conquering SF and Hubspot and building the first flexible, intelligent CRM that people actually enjoy using.

AI Agents and the Hidden Promise of Ambient Computing

Let's face it, manually feeding context to AI feels a bit like teaching a fish to ride a bicycle. Current AI systems, brilliant as they may be at crunching numbers and crafting responses, still stumble around our digital workspaces like a tourist without a map. Sure, they can write a decent blog post or solve complex equations, but they're essentially working with one hand tied behind their virtual back.

Now, imagine your AI assistant as more of a digital detective, quietly observing and understanding everything happening on your screen. No more copying and pasting chunks of text or explaining what's in your Notion workspace for the hundredth time. Picture having a conversation with your computer while it maintains an almost supernatural awareness of your digital environment, from those buried Slack threads to that spreadsheet you've been avoiding. Recent demonstrations, like Kieran Flanagan's adventure with Gemini's screen reader, hint at this future, even if current versions move with all the grace of a sleepy sloth.

The real magic kicks in when we start thinking about operating system-level integration. Platform-specific AI agents are like horses wearing blinders; they can only see what's directly in front of them. But desktop applications from companies like GPT and Anthropic are pushing toward something far more interesting: AI that can understand your entire digital world, not just a tiny slice of it. It's the difference between having a personal assistant who can only help you in the kitchen versus one who can manage your entire house.

Here's where things get particularly juicy: this isn't some far-off sci-fi fantasy. We're looking at a five-year horizon where the clunky, permission-asking AI of today evolves into something far more sophisticated. The transformation won't happen overnight (sorry, instant gratification seekers), but when it does, we're talking about a 10x boost in productivity that makes current productivity hacks look like using a butter knife to cut down a forest.

Key takeaway: While today's AI assistants feel like overeager interns requiring constant supervision, the next five years will usher in truly ambient AI that seamlessly integrates with our operating systems. The future isn't about teaching AI to understand us; it's about AI that already knows what we need, when we need it, across our entire digital landscape.

The Limitations of AI Agent Marketplaces

The AI marketplace concept raises important questions about automation's role in our daily work. While downloading specialized AI agents for every task might sound appealing, reality suggests a different path forward. Current marketplace models mirror the Chrome extension ecosystem, where tools often remain peripheral rather than becoming essential to core workflows.

Austin frames the central debate in venture capital circles clearly: will we depend on AI agents that require explicit commands, or will we embrace ambient intelligence that wor...