Marketers today are surrounded by siloed, disconnected, and unusable data and struggle to convert it into smart decisions fast enough. We built MADTECH.AI to bridge that gap and make AI-powered marketing decision intelligence (MDI) usable for all. It is increasingly clear that “Speed to Value” is becoming essential because leadership demands measurable results with a minimum of waste. Our mission is to simplify marketing analytics complexity so marketers can act with confidence and make a positive impact.

Your platform is “purpose-built by organization type and user role.” Can you explain how this approach simplifies complexity for both B2C and B2B marketers?

A retail marketer, a B2B strategist, and a CMO all need vastly different signals. Our platform is designed to deliver tailored insights by role and organization type, so users see only what matters most to them. This eliminates noise and reduces the time spent digging through irrelevant data. The result is faster, more accurate decision-making across the board.

You talk about making insights “accessible to all.” Why is democratizing data and analytics so important for the industry right now?

Data silos and reliance on technical specialists often slow down smart decision-making. By democratizing access to data and insights, we empower everyone so they can use data confidently. This creates a culture of agility and alignment across the organization. In an industry moving at high speed, accessibility is the foundation for innovation and growth.

For emerging brands or agencies with leaner resources, how does the platform help level the playing field?

Smaller teams often lack the budgets or talent pools of larger enterprises. We provide them with pre-built models, automated pipelines, and AI-driven recommendations that are ready to use. This allows lean teams to unlock enterprise-grade marketing decision intelligence without the overhead. In practice, it means they can compete on equal terms with bigger players.

Where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation in MarTech + AdTech over the next five years?

The next leap is AI-based Marketing Decision Intelligence. This is deeply data-connected AI that not only reports activity and performance, but also predicts and recommends actions in real time. We’ll also see stronger convergence of MarTech and AdTech, driving unified cross-channel and cross-platform customer journeys. Privacy-first personalization will shape how brands engage with audiences. Together, these trends will redefine speed, precision, and effectiveness in marketing.

What advice would you give to marketing leaders who want to become more data-driven but feel overwhelmed by complexity?

Start by focusing on one or two areas where data analytics can deliver a visible impact quickly. Small wins delivered quickly build confidence and momentum for broader adoption. Choose platforms that remove complexity and make insights easy to use. Most importantly, foster a culture where sharper, smarter, faster decisions, and not just descriptive dashboards and scorecards, define being “data-driven”.

What is your perspective on the value of a well-crafted press release?

Every company across the technology ecosystem — from vendors to channel and go-to-market partners to end user organizations — needs to make announcements in order to broadcast growth and support their corporate initiatives.

Press releases have traditionally been the main communication vehicle for making formal corporate announcements. However, today there are many other valuable communication channels to also consider.

Press releases should be targeted at not only at journalists, but also at customers, partners, investors, analysts and even employees.

An impactful press release campaign should deliver not only influential news coverage and follow-up interview opportunities, but also create meaningful business development and sales momentum.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, where do press releases fit into a broader communications strategy?

The quick answer is that press releases are an integral part of any corporate communications plan and one of many communication channels that should be utilized.

From our experience, press releases are a good fit for formal corporate announcements, such as the availability of new products and services, the signing of agreements with customers and partners or the completion of other similar company achievements and milestones.

However, not every company announcement requires a press release.

Examples include welcoming new staff, highlighting recent press or analyst coverage, promoting company events and even sharing a holiday greeting.

Each of these examples can be considered a company announcement and the campaigns to support these types of announcements usually revolve around LinkedIn and other social media posts, web site content and email-based outreach.

For these types of announcements, a press release offers no added value and would actually be inappropriate.

What strategic purpose do press releases serve when compared with more immediate channels like social media?

Every company announcement needs to be supported by a carefully planned and executed campaign. This applies to both formal corporate announcements that revolve around the distribution of a press release and casual company updates shared on social media.

At the base of each campaign is a set of marketing assets, including the content, possibly quotes from internal and external sources, and supporting images. Other elements of a successful announcement campaign include effective distribution to and engagement with target audiences.

Press releases, social media posts and direct emails are common examples of distribution channels, while journalist outreach is a typical example of engagement with a target audience.

How much weight do journalists still place on press releases as an information source?

The truth is that journalists are inundated with press releases and pitches from technology vendors on a daily basis. Journalists are more responsive to announcements that are well-written and outreach that is easy to understand. At the same time, journalists are quickly turned off by announcements that overuse marketing superlatives.

What separates a press release that gets traction from one that simply creates background noise?

A meaningful press release allows the reader — whether a journalist, sales channel partner, potential customer or investor — to quickly understand what is being announced and the benefits or strategic importance of the announcement.

 A quote from external sources, such as a customer, analyst and other relevant third party, always adds significant value to a press release.

Our advice is that the structure and content of a press release should be straightforward and easy-to-understand. Alternatively, press releases that contain too many marketing superlatives and lack a logical flow of information will not generate the intended responses.

You mentioned that the audience for press releases has expanded. Are you seeing tech vendors tailor them more toward media, investors or potential partners?

Press releases and other types of announcements are opportunities for companies to facilitate engagements with the important players in their markets and support their corporate initiatives.

An impactful press release — one that is well written and properly distributed — can lead to influential news coverage and attractive follow-up interview opportunities.

We also see that emerging technology vendors also use their press release announcements to facilitate interactions with potential and existing investors.

Similarly, the sales channel partners we work with around the world rely on the press releases and other company announcements of our technology vendor clients. These business partners — many of which are system integration firms, value added resellers and managed service providers — always tell us that they use these announcements to engage with their potential end user customers and move forward the sales opportunities they are pursuing in their local markets.

What role should distribution play in maximizing a press release’s visibility?

Press releases are much more than just the page and a half of text describing a company announcement. Finalizing the content of an announcement is in fact just the middle point of the overall press release campaign.

Good press release distribution can lead to influential news coverage and important follow up interview opportunities. For this to happen, there needs to be an effective outreach to relevant journalists well before the press release is distributed. 

Good press release distribution can also generate valuable business development and sales momentum. In addition to journalists, a company should also send its press releases to its customers — both existing and potential — as well as its sales channel and technology ecosystem partners. This outreach can trigger new business opportunities and move forward sales opportunities that are in process.

Beyond media coverage, what impact can a consistent press release program have on sales and business development initiatives?

A press release is an excellent opportunity for a technology vendor to interact with its network of customers, partners and investors.

Formal briefings or casual conversations can be scheduled with customers, sales channel partners and technology ecosystem partners to introduce the topic of each press release. For example, for a press release announcing a new product or technological capability, demonstrations can be scheduled with customers and partners as part of ongoing account management activities.

This type of ongoing initiative with each press release can generate new business opportunities, move forward sales opportunities in process and even wake up sales processes that have gone dormant.

This area of business development and sales promotion is unfortunately often overlooked by the marketing staff responsible for press releases and is a missed opportunity.

As communications continue to evolve, what does the future hold for press releases?

Press releases will always be relevant, especially for formal company announcements.

There of course will be additional channels to consider that will also add value to the communication and distribution of company announcements.

Companies that invest the right resources to correctly write and distribute press releases can turn these company announcements into powerful campaigns that support not only marketing, but also sales and business development.

1. How do you see organizations leveraging video formats (e.g., behind-the-scenes) to build trust with Gen Z and Millennial audiences?  

Video has evolved beyond a digital marketing tool to become a powerful force for human connection, especially among Gen Z and Millennial audiences. Social video is less about persuasion, as one might see with traditional advertising, and is more about entertaining and informing users: as iStock’s global research platform, VisualGPS, found, about half of Millennials (45%) and Gen Z (50%) say they use video‑first platforms for entertainment. Additionally, the VisualGPS research shows that 31% of people globally seek out videos on social media for inspiration and to learn something new. With these insights in mind, brands and SMBs should focus on video content that adds value to people’s lives to build interest in their brand by teaching viewers something new or sharing a personal story.

A staggering 98% of people say they value authenticity in the visuals they consume, which is one reason that behind-the-scenes content is becoming such a popular (and powerful) format. At a time when audiences are deeply skeptical of content they encounter online, video content that humanizes a business and comes from a place of authenticity is more likely to foster trust. To do so, businesses are adopting popular social video formats that mirror the content users are already looking for.

For example, a local bakery might work with one of their employees to create a “day in my life” video – a common lifestyle video format – to showcase the bakery from a behind-the-scenes perspective while giving audiences a personality to connect with. Meanwhile, a beauty brand might debut a new line of products with a “get ready with me” (GRWM) video–a format that is as much a vehicle for powerful personal storytelling as it is for showing the look and feel of a product. Our research shows that video-led personal journeys inspire empathy and engagement, and these first-person, narrative-focused formats are deeply compelling while fairly simple to produce 

All this to say, many small businesses don’t have the time or resources to produce 100% of their own content. They may also want to include visuals they can’t capture locally, or represent more diverse identities in their videos. To solve this, small businesses are utilizing stock footage to augment their video content. The right pre-shot imagery and footage can evoke a certain mood, heighten the impact of their message, and allow more audience groups to see themselves reflected in a brand’s content.

Overall, a combination of stock footage, smartphone video, and user-generated content will help brands and businesses to strike that coveted balance between authenticity and polish. 

2. Which platforms are brands prioritizing in their video distribution strategy (e.g. Instagram, YouTube), and how do they adapt content formats to meet each platform's expectations? 

Brands are going where their audiences are going. Which social platforms they target will vary depending on which audiences that brands want to engage, where their brand social accounts already have a strong presence, and where they hope to grow. From there, brands are creating video content in line with the expectations of users on a certain platform. For example, TikTok content might play to a trending format or make use of a viral audio file to increase discoverability, while YouTube videos could be tailored for more intentional, appointment-style viewing.

A major trend of note is long-form content, which is gaining widespread popularity across platforms. It’s a shift that defies the reality of our shrinking attention spans and speaks to consumers’ appetite for valuable, authentic content. This is not to say that every brand should be churning out hours of video entertainment. Rather, the growth of long-form video gives brands more time and freedom to tell their stories.

3. How effectively does video content reflect a brand’s personality—whether fun, premium, or purpose-driven?

If every piece of content is an opportunity to create a personal connection with a potential customer, then it’s best to portray your brand honestly and authentically. In engaging today’s consumers, personality and credibility go hand-in-hand. Video content that effectively showcases a brand’s personality is content that focuses on who the brand is, not just what it sells or how it operates.

Brands should also account for industry-specific nuances when creating content that expresses their personality. For example, health and wellness brands might consider showing how their products and services improve the lives of everyday people, rather than leveraging paid influencers, as 81% of people prefer to see real individuals actively improving their well‑being over aspirational imagery. Even sleeker, more “premium” brands can humanize their content by showing the passion and care that goes into the work. It’s all about leaning into personality in a way that compels audiences, but also feels truthful.

4. Are SMBs using video to demonstrate products (e.g., unboxings, tutorials, testimonials) in ways that reduce buyer friction and increase conversions?

According to VisualGPS, 72% of consumers prefer video for product demonstrations, making them a crucial way for SMBs to help audiences understand their product and make informed purchasing decisions. Video allows for a 360-degree view that static online shopping doesn’t offer, as well as the injection of customer testimony or expert commentary from the seller. The more questions a business can answer about how their products look, feel, and function, the more likely they are to convert.

Fortunately for small businesses, these kinds of videos are not excessively expensive to produce, and audiences will value the authentic, realistic look at the product. These videos also offer another chance for SMBs to show off their personality, building further trust and amplifying the chance of conversion. 

5. How do you quantify the impact of video storytelling on long-term customer loyalty and brand trust?

Our ongoing VisualGPS research looks at consumer sentiment over time, and our latest video insights reveal that approachable content told through diverse, creative formats are what resonate most with consumers, building loyalty and trust.

As for quantifying the impact of an individual campaign, each brand has its own specific metrics that matter most, but video content has been expressly linked to higher conversion rates, social engagement rates and improved SEO. SMBs and brands can also use UTMs to see if videos are driving web traffic and monitor for an uptick in product reviews, location check-ins, and social mentions.

And it’s not just quantity that matters: when posting visuals on social media, comments and direct messages from audiences can be valuable sources of qualitative feedback to help SMBs determine whether their video campaigns are resonating.

6. How are you preparing your teams to scale video storytelling as part of a broader digital engagement strategy in a “video-first” environment?

Video content has been a core part of our offering at iStock, and we work with our content creators to produce compelling clips and footage that can be used for just about any project, whether it's for social media, paid ads, websites or digital banners. Creating and scaling original content, especially high-quality video content, can be cost-prohibitive for SMBs; stock footage enables businesses to create varied, personalized and more creative videos to engage a wider variety of audiences. With the variety of dynamic video options available to today’s businesses, it’s easy for them to find something that feels like a true fit for their brand and the story they’re trying to tell.

Scrolling and watching videos online is how so many people fill the downtime in their days, so brands and businesses want to enter these spaces without being invasive and overly advertorial. Video content that models what users are already seeking, while coming from a place of honesty and authenticity, is the ideal way in.

The secret to scaling storytelling is to mobilize your teams as storytellers. It’s important to look at the metrics and understand which content attracts which audiences, but the human element is what truly unlocks scalability without requiring a massive budget. Audiences have a keen sensibility for what’s real and what isn’t, and the best way to keep them engaged is through storytelling that feels honest.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

When it comes to combating subscriber churn, nurturing long-term relationships is the key. Today, we sat down with Gilles Domartini, CEO and Founder of Cleeng, a subscriber retention management (SRM®) company to discuss strategies that can strengthen the subscriber engagement lifecycle and activate personalized, real-time approaches that can convert passive users into loyal subscribers.

1. You’ve described Cleeng as a “Subscriber Retention Management” company. How does that differ from traditional subscription platforms?

A Subscriber Retention Management (SRM®) system takes a more strategic approach to keeping subscribers engaged, reducing churn, and maximizing lifetime value. Our SRM® suite helps traditional subscription services optimize retention by leveraging data-driven insights, ensuring payment reliability, and providing robust customer support.

For example, our customers include traditional subscription platforms such as Univision, Volleyball World and Newsmax. By leveraging Cleeng, Newsmax gained over 150,000 paying subscribers within the first month and retained over 85% of those subscribers as part of the launch of Newsmax+, their OTT service that provides access to Newsmax for those without traditional cable subscriptions.

2. Can you share an example of how a small change in personalization led to a big impact on engagement or retention?

One example that comes to mind is our most recent work with Skyship Entertainment and how a simple change of streamlining their billing process to meet the demand for multi-channel offerings, led to impactful subscriber growth.

Skyship Entertainment is the company behind Super Simple Songs, one of the world’s most trusted educational brands for preschoolers, with 47 million Youtube subscribers. With an audience spanning millions of families worldwide, they wanted to scale their reach even further and offer a more premium, ad-free experience that children could use independently, with content parents could trust.

Specifically, parents wanted the ease and freedom to subscribe once and access the service across multiple devices, whether on iOS, Android, or Amazon tablets. By leveraging our multichannel billing solution, they were able to create a unified multi-channel experience, without making the experience complex for subscribers.

Over the past year alone, the platform’s subscriber base has grown by more than 140%, driven organically, by improving the onboarding flow, having seamless cross-device access, and increasing awareness through YouTube.

3. What’s one underrated metric companies should track more closely when it comes to churn prevention?

One underrated metric that companies should pay closer attention to is Time-to-Convert: the duration between when a user signs up and when they actually start a paid subscription.

While it happens at the very beginning of the customer journey, it can be a strong indicator of future churn risk. A long time-to-convert often signals friction in the onboarding process, a lack of perceived value early on, or hesitancy to commit. These are factors that can lead to weaker engagement and, ultimately, higher churn. Tracking this metric can help teams identify and address conversion bottlenecks before they turn into retention problems.

Yet, there are many more KPIs to succeed, like winback rate, cancellation rate, upgrade/downgrade, LTV. That’s the benefit of having a platform like Cleeng that helps you easily monitor those.

4. What are some UX mistakes you see platforms make that unintentionally drive users to churn?

One of the most common UX mistakes I see is not being transparent enough about trial periods and billing. When users aren’t sure when they’ll be charged or how to cancel, it creates mistrust and often leads to churn right after a free trial ends. A 65%+ conversion from free to paid is typically a good benchmark.

Another issue is making it difficult for subscribers to access their content across devices. If logging in or switching between devices isn’t seamless, users get frustrated and may give up on the service altogether. Nowadays, the web only accounts for 40% of connections (may vary substantially), and the vast majority of people connect on multiple devices.

But perhaps the most overlooked mistake is failing to support users when a payment fails. It represents between 30% to 50% of all churn. Many people churn involuntarily because their payment didn’t go through, not because they wanted to leave. If the platform doesn’t make it easy to resolve payment issues, you lose customers who actually intended to stay. Focusing on transparency, smooth access, and proactive payment support can make a real difference in keeping subscribers engaged.

5. How do you identify the “right moment” to deliver a specific message to a subscriber?

With D2C subscription models, brands are able to collect a significant amount of data from its subscribers, however the challenge that many of them face is efficiently extracting insights from the data and leveraging them to make impactful decisions. These data-driven decisions are crucial to identify that “right moment” to deliver messages to subscribers in order to stay competitive, maximize customer lifetime value.

Advanced AI tools can be beneficial to help streamline this process. With our ChurnIQ AI-ssistant, we help brands get precise answers from their data without the need for deep analytic expertise, which can be both costly and time consuming. Brands can leverage AI-ssistant by asking simple prompts, which will then quickly generate data visualizations, and uncover hidden trends and patterns from their subscriber dataset. These insights can then be used to send those specific messages, uplevel retention strategies, adapt to evolving customer needs and enhance user experiences.

6. If you could give one piece of advice to D2C leaders trying to improve retention, what would it be?

If I could offer one piece of advice to D2C leaders focused on improving retention, it would be to treat retention as a core discipline, not just a byproduct of great content. Retention success requires more than reactive strategies; it depends on having the right infrastructure to support seamless subscriber experiences across billing, offers, payments, customer care, and data analytics.

Too often, platforms rely on fragmented tools or internal builds that are hard to scale or adapt to changing needs. Instead, it's worth investing in solutions that are purpose-built for subscriber businesses. These should offer automation, actionable insights, and the flexibility to support multiple models such as subscriptions, pay-per-view, or seasonal passes.

What sets the most resilient platforms apart is their ability to respond quickly to churn signals, optimize the right levers, and experiment without being held back by complex systems or limited resources. In a competitive and fast-moving landscape, adaptability and operational precision are essential for long-term retention and growth.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

1. What does your approach to real-time personalization different from other CDPs or journey orchestration platforms?

Most CDPs and journey orchestration platforms limit how much data can be used for real-time personalization, often restricting brands to a narrow set of behavior signals and limited customer history. Hightouch removes those limits. Our approach is built around full data access and flexibility, enabling marketers to combine real-time behavioral signals with the complete depth of customer history from the data warehouse. With our new take on same-session personalization, we made it possible, for the first time, to react to in-session activity using the entire customer profile. Whether you're delivering an experience in under a second or orchestrating it over minutes, our real-time product suite is designed to meet the full range of real-time needs with no trade-offs between speed and data richness.

2. Same-Session Personalization is a bold claim. What was the core challenge in marketing that this feature is solving?

The core challenge is relevance in the moment. Without understanding current customer behavior, personalization efforts can create a disconnect between user intent and brand response. Same-session personalization solves this by allowing marketers to react to in-session signals, like product views, cart behavior, or site search, in less than a second. That means offers, messaging, and experiences can adapt as the customer is browsing, not after they've bounced. Our approach to same-session personalization goes one step further, and makes it possible to combine behavior signals with complete customer history in under a second. Brands can interact with their customers as a person, not just a set of digital behaviors.

3. Many CDPs force marketers to choose between speed or historical depth. How do you remove that trade-off?

Hightouch is uniquely positioned as a Composable CDP, which means we use the data warehouse as the source of truth for rich customer profiles, while also integrating real-time event streams. This approach means marketers don’t have to sacrifice depth for speed. You get the historical context of warehouse data and the in-the-moment context of behavioral events. It’s not about choosing between the past or the present. With Hightouch, you get both.

4. How do you handle identity resolution in same-session scenarios where the user might not yet be logged in?

We can use anonymous identifiers to stitch session activity to a profile. Whenever an anonymous user authenticates or provides identifying information, we can retroactively connect their session data to their historical profile in the warehouse, and be ready to address that user’s anonymous identifiers in the future as well. This enables persistent, privacy-safe personalization that respects user consent, while still delivering highly relevant experiences in the moment.

5. What’s your take on how AI and decisioning engines are collapsing the gap between insight and action?

AI is transforming marketing from reactive to predictive. With tools like Hightouch’s AI Decisioning, we’re enabling marketers to operationalize insights the moment they emerge. Rather than waiting for analysts to surface trends or build segments, AI models can evaluate user behavior and context in real-time. AI Decisioning constantly experiments and continuously improves delivery based on the results of each experiment. The result is personalization that’s not just fast, but smart—driven by data, governed by logic, and scaled through automation. Even with this rapid iteration, it’s also really important to surface key insights back to marketers, so they can improve their overall strategies and create more effective content and campaigns.

6. How do you envision yourself evolving to support marketers as zero-party and consent-driven data become the new norm?

Hightouch is built on privacy-first principles. As the industry shifts toward zero-party and consented data, our composable architecture gives brands full control over what data is collected, how it’s used, and where it’s activated. We’re also investing in features that help marketers surface and act on self-reported preferences in real time, whether that’s through consent banners, preference centers, or in-product feedback. The purpose of personalization is to create connections with people, and that starts with trust. With Hightouch, security, privacy, and trust are not an afterthought; they are core components of our architecture and company culture.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.