It's not a marketing tool. But it might be the most important piece of infrastructure your marketing stack is missing. Let me start with a question: When a customer abandons their cart on your app, how long does it take your marketing system to know about it? If the answer is anything more than a few seconds — minutes, hours, or worse, the next morning's data sync — you're not running real-time marketing. You're running delayed marketing with a real-time label slapped on it. That gap between...

Most Marketers Are Using AI Backwards. Here's What to Do Instead. Let me say something that might ruffle a few feathers: the way most marketing teams are using AI right now is almost entirely wrong. Not because they're using bad tools. Not because they lack talent. But because they're asking AI to solve the wrong problem. The default move is to fire up ChatGPT or Claude and say, "Write me five LinkedIn posts" or "Generate a campaign brief." And sure, that saves some time. But it's a bit like...

Everyone loves talking about campaigns. The killer ad. The viral hook. The A/B test that bumped conversions by 40% and became its own LinkedIn post. What nobody talks about — especially in fintech — is that campaigns are just the exhaust fumes. The real machine running underneath? That's a very different conversation. When you're the person tasked with building marketing at a fintech from the ground up, you quickly discover that your job title and your actual job are two entirely different...