Marketing Automation (MA) is a core element of the Martech stack, and it’s been around a long time. Maybe too long, because despite improvements over the years, it hasn’t really changed all that much.
Jon Miller thinks it’s time for a new take on the hardy perennial, one that leverages AI natively, and as such he has built it. It’s called Phave, and it is pitched as replacing hard-coded rules with live AI-generated playlists. Is it the game-changer marketing teams are looking for?
Why Marketing Automation needs re-thinking
Miller describes his career as a pursuit of theOne-to-One future. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers’s book (one I read when it first came out) argues that companies can deliver great Customer Experience by building relationships and treating customers as individuals. The concepts felt fresh when it came out in 1993, but at the time there wasn’t much technology to support them.
His experience spans multiple companies that he either founded or played a key marketing role in, including co-founder and CMO of Marketo, founder and CEO of Engagio, and CMO of Demandbase, and now founder and CEO of Phave, an AI-native Marketing Automation platform.
At Marketo, Miller helped define the standard B2B marketing playbook, which included sending emails, capturing leads, nurturing and scoring them, and passing marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) to Sales. The playbook worked for a long time, until it didn’t.
Why should you need a separate platform for your accounts from your leads and contacts?
After selling Engagio to Demandbase and spending three years there as CMO, Miller felt it was time to start something new, and although he looked outside Martech, there was a strong pull back because he knows the space and the people in it very well:
I had an unfair advantage to do something in Martech.
Talking to other CMOs, it was clear that becoming AI-native was a priority, but no marketing automation technology existed to support that shift. Someone needed to build the AI-native alternative to Marketo, and Miller decided it might as well be him.
Fast forward two years, during which Miller spent a lot of time researching, talking to people, and figuring out what was needed, and you see the launch of Phave, an AI-native marketing automation platform built to replace your existing MA:
I am trying to signal that this is a replacement to the existing tools. I think that marketers and ops people are tired of having to buy more stuff. They already have too much stuff in their stack. And so I want to be super clear. This is not something else you have to buy. This replaces what you have. You’re not spending more budget. You’re just getting something better for the same price. So I am trying to signal that in the category name. The trick, though, is Marketing Automation is old and it’s legacy, and so how do I kind of say, but this is the new thing?”
From fixed rules to individualized playlists
Phave is a completely new take on how marketing automation should work today. It’s a combination of marketing automation and ABM because you manage buying groups and the contacts within them.
Instead of hard-coded rules and journey maps for segments, Phave uses playlists. Rules in MA are hard-coded to tell the system to do things to a contact. If contact A buys product X, add them to a nurture campaign for product Y. If you are a member of segment R, you get emails A and C.
Phave does use rules, but only for things that must always be followed (e.g., if the contact is not a Vice President, don’t invite them to the VIP event). When ambiguity arises, or judgment is needed, Miller says rules break down. In Phave, rules define how the campaign is set up, including who to include, when to send emails, the ideal number of touches, and the campaign type.
After that, reasoning builds a playlist for each contact in the campaign. AI reviews the person, the buying group, and all the data, combines it, and creates a 30-day sequence of activities for that person. He explains:
It’s really this idea of reasoning that we apply to everything in Marketing Automation. What segment you belong to, what score you should have, which buying group you’re part of, which salesperson should we route you to—all these things that are always done as rules in Marketo to individuals. We let you do rules, but you let the AI think and reason where it’s going to be valuable instead.
Playlists are the most visible way Phave is different from traditional MAPs. Miller says it’s key to have the whole journey in mind, not just optimize the next best action at a given moment. That’s how he came up with the playlist idea. Every person has an individual playlist, and you can see why a certain activity was chosen and what else it considered. It’s also continually adapting based on new data.
What changes for Marketing teams
A Marketer can review any individual’s playlist and adjust it as needed. The AI doesn’t write emails; instead, it selects the right offer from an approved library. A calendar view of upcoming touches shows the marketer what is happening at the contact, buying group, or company level. Anyone who wants to dive into the details of buying groups and contacts and playlists can, especially ABM marketers and salespeople.
Miller wants Marketers to focus on strategy and let AI orchestrate it intelligently:
What objective am I trying to achieve? Am I driving engagement or pipeline or win rate or kind of post-sale expansion? So for the marketers trying to manage the whole thing, this lets them kind of operate at a higher level. They’re setting the goals, they’re setting the rules and the constraints, and AI manages the playlist. If they want to dive into the details, they’re there for them, but they don’t have to.
This is a major change from traditional MA, where Marketers spend significant time setting up campaigns, defining journeys and rules, and creating content. Other Marketing Automation platforms are adding AI capabilities, including AI assistants and agents that can create segments and campaigns and answer performance questions, but Phave’s Skills (sets of instructions for AI to follow) and Playlist capabilities are completely new.
The underlying data doesn’t have to be perfect either. Miller says their approach lets AI reason and handle messy data in ways rules can’t.
Why building AI-native technology is different
Building Phave didn’t happen overnight. Miller admits that they threw out the code twice along the way. The design, the research, and the expertise they built stayed, but the code changed. Miller says this is what building looks like in today’s AI era:
I honestly think this is part of the reason why Marketo and the other incumbents are going to have a hard time really competing here, because I basically came to the conclusion that you have to throw out your code and start over to really build in the AI-native world, just because it is moving so fast and is so different.
My take
Marketing Automation certainly does need to change. But Miller is right. Most legacy MAPs have a ton of technical debt they can’t get out from under. Which means the AI they build into their platforms will always be adjacent to the existing technology without extensive replatforming. That leaves the door open to AI-native alternatives like Phave.
Another nice thing about Phave is that it replaces not just your Marketing Automation platform, but potentially your ABM platform, too. B2B Marketing is based on buying groups, so it doesn’t make sense that you can’t see them in your marketing automation platform. Not everyone in a buying group wants the same information; each person often plays a specific role in the buyer journey, so it’s important to see how all members respond to marketing campaigns at both the individual and group levels. Phave lets you go as shallow or as deep as you want.
HubSpot recently came out withsome new AI capabilitiesthat perform some of the functions you will find in Phave, so we can’t say the legacy MAs are completely done. It’s also changing the way its subscriptions and pricing work to support a go-to-market (GTM) strategy that combines marketing and sales (this isn’t fully released yet). But it’s missing the buying groups and the playlists that will appeal to marketers.
You can ask if Phave will re-define Marketing Automation. With Miller’s name and brain behind it, that’s a serious possibility. Or an enterprise vendor could acquire it to integrate Phave’s capabilities into a bigger platform. That’s another possibility with Miller’s history.
