Databricks entering the CDP market with agents raises a question most marketing leaders have never had to answer: if customer data does not live in marketing, does marketing still own the customer? Jeff Pedowitz and Dr. Debbie Qaqish break down why marketing has always been a second-class citizen for data access, why the data lake created new silos instead of removing them, and what happens when IT controls a consumption-based contract for the data marketing needs to do its job. They also name the gap nobody has solved: no martech system on the market accurately captures what happens across a B2B buying committee, and most of what matters there was never digital in the first place.

95% of B2B marketers are using AI but fewer than four in ten say it's actually working, and that gap is not a tools problem. Teams are throwing AI against the wall with no strategy, no training, and no defined metric, the same way they approached ABM and marketing automation before it. Meanwhile the buying committee has grown to 11.2 people and 68% of searches end without a click, so the marketers winning right now are the intentional ones: pick one use case, baseline it, measure the delta, and build a culture where it's safe to fail forward.

https://vimeo.com/1213650471?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci

Jeff returns from Fanatics Fest in New York with lessons B2B marketers can steal from the world's largest sports merchandise retailer. Fans paid to enter, paid again to engage, and left more loyal than ever. Jeff and Debbie break down what made it work: immersive fan-first experiences, multi-floor booth design that rethinks the same footprint, client Joe Hollywood's 15-hour live broadcast and instinctive read of his audience, and an omni-channel flywheel where content was created, broadcast, and consumed in real time. The Monday morning challenge for every CMO: stop thinking customers, start building raving fans.