The MQL Industrial Complex

Scott Brinker drew the map the marketing technology industry uses to describe itself - 150 companies on it in 2011, more than 15,000 now. In this episode of Real Seekers After Truth he tells host Nick Mason (CEO, Turtl) two things he didn't expect to be saying. The first is that the number has stopped going up: we may have reached peak martech. The second is that the metaphor everyone organises around - the stack - is falling apart, and what replaces it looks less like layers and more like a canvas, where everything including the software itself is data. Along the way: the 2013 panel where he first had doubts, why code is the thing marketers are least ready for, and how governance quietly became the most exciting word in martech.

Tommy Heffernan thinks the instinct to double down on what used to work is exactly wrong, and he says so in the first two minutes. In this episode of Real Seekers After Truth he takes host Nick Mason (CEO, Turtl) through what's actually scarce when AI can produce content, ads and outreach at close to zero cost - and lands somewhere unexpected. Asked by a man at his local basketball game what his college-age kids should do to get good at AI, Tommy told them to go and study history. Along the way: why most of your website traffic is now bots, why your buyers already know more about your product than your best salesperson, and why the fix isn't to sell them harder.

Oren Greenberg was building production GPT systems in 2020 — not to write anything, but to classify the marketing job market, because doing it by hand in Excel was driving him mad. Six years later he has reconciled 1.89 million marketing profiles against 10.1 million job ads across 126 roles. In this episode of Real Seekers After Truth he takes host Nick Mason (CEO, Turtl) through what the gap between the two sides shows: the skills employers can't find are the ones nobody can claim alone, and the skills marketers over-list are the ones anyone can. Midway through, asked a question his data hadn't answered yet, he runs the query live — and revises a claim he'd made twenty minutes earlier.

Madhav Bhandari joined Storylane at $2M ARR with no funding, a late entry into the category, and competitors holding hundreds of millions. In this episode of Real Seekers After Truth he takes host Nick Mason (CEO, Turtl) through the reframe that made the difference: "how do we go viral" is a question nobody can act on, but "what pattern is our category following, and how do we interrupt it" is a job you can hand a team on Monday morning. He walks through his PIPE framework, why eight of every ten bets are supposed to fail, and why copying Clay's or Lovable's playbook gets the causation exactly backwards.

In this episode we dig into the realities of B2B buying, what Kerry's research actually shows, including preliminary findings from the new Buyer Experience study.  

In this episode we explore one of the most seismic changes on the horizon: AI + the 'Frequency Era'. The next scarce resource isn't knowledge, it's frequency and there are 12 human capacities that AI can't replace. 

In the first episode of our series, we unpack 'hyperabundance' and the implication is has on our marketing efforts. Alex posits the correct response is to not just to rethink our strategies, but to rethink what a strategy consists of. And gives a poignant reminder about the importance of authenticity. 

When I was 17, a photograph changes how I think about almost everything. 29 people. Brussels. 1927. My A level physics teacher held it up on the first day of the school year and told us it was probably the most remarkable group photo ever taken.He was right. I'm going to tell you why. And I'm going to tell you what it has to do with why most B2B marketing is broken.