John Riewerts leads product engineering at Acoustic, a marketing engagement company. He joins us on day three of eTail Boston to take apart a phrase every marketer uses and few define, bringing the audience closer to the brand, and to explain why the listening half of marketing is the half that gets underbuilt.

Riewerts frames the discipline as two tools. Marketers send messages, which becomes campaigning. And marketers listen, which means reading behavior, because as he puts it, no consumer ever sends a brand a message saying whether they like it. They answer through their actions instead.

He also walks through Acoustic AI, the company's new layer on top of the platform, and the argument behind it. Generative tools are only as good as the context they are given, so the value is in what the model gets to read. Beyond writing messages and building segments, Acoustic AI pushes unprompted recommendations when it spots repeat buyers slowing down, interest building in an out-of-stock product, unsubscribes spiking on one campaign, or consumer fatigue climbing.

He closes on four pillars, product, campaign, audience and behavioral intelligence, and a critique of the current tooling. Marketing automation is campaign-centric, and nobody lives in a single-campaign world.

Guest: John Riewerts, Lead Product Engineering, Acoustic
Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.
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