Tejas Manohar, Co-CEO at Hightouch chats about the platform’s latest self-serve capabilities and the future of marketing in this MarTechSeries Interview:

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Hi Tejas – tell us about yourself and your journey in the SaaS market.

I didn’t grow up in Silicon Valley. I’m from Tennessee. But I was always fascinated by technology and started programming at a young age.

A decade ago, I moved to San Francisco to join Segment as one of their first 10 engineers. Segment was one of the pioneers of the CDP space. While Segment was great at collecting digital and clickstream data, to build a full Customer 360, you had to move and restructure your data into yet another system, which was expensive, time-consuming, and limiting.

At the same time, data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks were taking off. That’s when we had the idea for Hightouch: instead of forcing companies to move their data into a CDP, why not bring CDP capabilities directly to their existing data infrastructure? We called it a Composable CDP.

It worked. Today, many of the biggest brands like Spotify, PetSmart, Weight Watchers, and leading retailers, banks, and media companies use Hightouch. We started with marketing use cases, but we’ve expanded into retail media, digital experiences, and more, while incorporating AI in the “how”.

How has Hightouch evolved in recent times?

Innovation is a core value of ours at Hightouch. I take an “innovate or die” mindset and empathize deeply with Amazon’s philosophy around “it’s always day one”. Even while our core business in Composable CDP is growing very quickly– in fact, we grew over 100% in 2024– we like to stay very close to our customers’ needs and skate towards where the puck is going.

We’ve had two major releases for marketing and retail media teams in the last year.

For marketing, we launched AI Decisioning, a new product that uses AI Agents and reinforcement learning to replace traditional marketing campaign calendars and rigid customer journeys. Instead of relying on predefined flows, AI Decisioning continuously experiments, learns, and optimizes messaging, timing, and channels to deliver the best possible experiences to customers.

In retail media, we introduced a new solution that enables brands to instantly turn their first-party data into a powerful advertising network. By leveraging the data already in their cloud warehouse and a no-code UI, retailers can now create custom audiences, activate them across onsite and offsite media channels, and measure campaign impact—all without moving or duplicating data.

The common theme across everything we’ve built is “composability”. Businesses should be able to run their internal marketing and retail media networks no matter where their data lives or what tools they use. Neither AI Decisioning nor our advertising solutions require brands to use Hightouch as their CDP. While many customers do use Hightouch as their CDP, we’re also serving companies who bought a different CDP like Salesforce Data Cloud, Adobe RTCDP, and others—and that’s fine. While we believe many of them will move to Hightouch over time, we’re composable.

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We’d love to hear the core features of your new self-serve audience management platform and how it can enable end users?

For the last two decades, we’ve seen a trend of marketers wanting to get more targeted and build fine-grained segments. We’ve focused on marketers to create granular segments quickly from day one of our Composable CDP product. With our new AI Decisioning product, we’re even helping marketing teams achieve ‘segments of one’.

Retail media is no different. The industry is booming, but it’s competitive. With hundreds of retail media networks (RMNs) competing for ad dollars, retailers need a way to differentiate themselves and prove their value to advertisers.

Advertisers don’t just want generic “beauty shoppers” or “tech buyers.” They want hyper-targeted segments—like “customers who bought protein powder in the last 30 days and haven’t replenished yet”—to ensure their ad dollars reach the right people at the right time, and no dollar is wasted.

But today, delivering these custom audiences is painfully slow. Most retailers take 4-6 weeks to generate a custom audience for a brand, requiring expensive engineering resources and manual data pulls. By the time the audience is ready, the moment (and the budget) may have passed.

Hightouch for Offsite Media adopts the same composable approach so that advertisers can deliver highly customized audiences in minutes:

• Composable architecture – By bringing audience creation and activation directly to our customers’ internal data warehouses, we’re able to help launch their media network in weeks rather than months or years. Plus, this architecture gets rid of the data movement, implementation work, and delays that you see with other solutions.
• Visual audience builder – We layer a visual audience builder UI on top of your data warehouse so that sales and media teams can create highly specific audiences in minutes, without engineering help.
• Integrations 50+ media channels – Brands can run campaigns onsite through integrations with your ad server, or offsite through paid social, search, CTV direct, and programmatic.
• AI-enhanced audiences – Retailers can use the native AI tools in Databricks or another warehouse to build things like propensity models (e.g., “high-likelihood repeat purchasers”). They can then surface those models in their audiences and sell them to advertisers, driving better performance and premium ad pricing.
• Data onboarding – Our Match Booster technology increases audience reach by an average of 35%, helping retailers monetize more of their first-party data through CPM fees. We can also translate customer identities into specific household or device IDs for targeting on CTV platforms.

At the end of the day, the retailers that win in offsite media will be the ones that deliver the most relevant audiences the fastest.

When it comes to understanding how end users are engaging with retail advertising and marketing tactics, what do retail marketers today find most challenging?

Retailers have more customer data than ever, but understanding behavior and measuring the real impact of their advertising are still major challenges.

A brand working with a retailer might see that their ad campaign are being attributed to sales, but most don’t know if those sales are truly incremental. Without clear visibility, retailers struggle to prove ROI and drive repeat investment in their media network.

Our team at Hightouch has been deeply focused on solving this problem. Soon we’ll be announcing a solution that will make incrementality testing a standard part of your audience activation workflows.

Retails who can provide these insights will win more ad dollars. Advertisers want proof that their campaigns are truly incremental, and retailers who can show that—while keeping customer data secure—will stand out in an increasingly competitive market.

How will marketing, media, and retail demand generation grow in 2025 and beyond? What trends and tech will come to the forefront?

Marketing, media, and retail demand generation are evolving fast, and 2025 will be defined by data-driven, AI-powered, and privacy-first strategies.

1. Retail media will go beyond traditional retailers. More companies in finance, travel, and telecom are realizing that their first-party data is an asset and are launching media networks to monetize it. We’re seeing a quick rise in these “commerce media networks” and are excited about growth potential for these companies.
2. Privacy-first data collaboration will become more accessible. Retailers and advertisers are embracing data collaboration. But they’re also realizing that they don’t need big upfront SaaS contracts to get what they need. More retailers will adopt clean rooms for campaign planning and measurement using the free products available through their cloud data provider.
3. Incrementality will become the gold standard. Brands are demanding proof from their retailers that their campaigns drive real, incremental sales—not just sales from existing customers who would have bought anyway. Retailers that can offer holdout testing and reporting will command higher ad spend and grow.

Five martech thoughts for 2025 before we wrap up?

1. Agility is everything. Rapid advancements in AI and shifting consumer behavior demand that businesses adapt in weeks, not months, to market changes. Your tech stack plays a crucial role—monolithic, vendor-locked systems will slow you down, while flexible, composable solutions will drive innovation.
2. Composable tech is the new standard. Brands are moving away from black-box CDPs and embracing direct activation of customer data from their cloud warehouse. This shift makes data more accessible, flexible, and actionable. Those who resist risk being left behind.
3. CTV is more effective—and accessible—than ever. TV remains a powerful brand-building channel, but CTV is transforming it into a precision-driven sales tool for brands and retail media networks. Platforms like The Trade Desk make inventory biddable, while Roku and Disney+ are launching self-service ad tools, making premium CTV ads available to all. If you don’t have a CTV strategy, now is the time.
4. AI is moving beyond the hype. Many companies rushed into AI investments only to struggle with ROI. But now, we’re seeing real-world AI applications delivering measurable sales impact. Expect 2025 to bring more AI-powered marketing that actually works.
5. AI is more than LLMs. While LLMs dominate the conversation, the real revenue driver will be AI agents and reinforcement learning—the same tech that transformed paid advertising. This is our big bet with AI Decisioning. Just as AI optimizes bids and budgets in paid media, it will revolutionize lifecycle marketing and digital experiences by dynamically adjusting targeting, timing, and messaging.

At Hightouch, we’re building for this future—helping retailers monetize their audiences and helping brands activate first-party data, power AI-driven personalization, and drive better outcomes.

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