Tejas Manohar, co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch, joins Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi to discuss composable CDPs, replacing LiveRamp, enterprise AI workflows, and why marketers still need SaaS in the age of vibe coding. They also cover Meta’s new apps, OpenAI ads, AppLovin’s social ambitions, X’s ad business, and the rise of clipping in political campaigns. Takeaways: - Hightouch is emerging as a strong alternative to LiveRamp for identity onboarding and data activation. - Tejas Manohar explains why composable CDPs and enterprise AI workflows are gaining momentum. - The team discusses agentic AI, OpenAI ads, Meta’s new apps, and the future of marketing automation. - X, AppLovin, and Meta are all evolving their platforms around AI, data, and advertising scale. - Political campaigns are increasingly using clipping and influencer distribution over traditional media. Chapters: 00:00 Intro &amp; Marketecture Live Chicago announcement 01:28 IAB Tech Summit and industry association discussion 02:43 Introducing Hightouch co-founder Tejas Manohar 04:20 What Hightouch actually does 05:22 Composable CDPs explained 07:32 SaaS apocalypse vs enterprise software reality 11:08 Can Hightouch replace LiveRamp? 13:58 Hightouch’s vision for agentic AI marketing 17:09 Why CDPs matter for AI workflows 20:48 Tejas Manohar’s background and Segment experience 23:32 Running Hightouch as co-CEOs 24:37 AppLovin launches social app “Gist” 28:11 Meta launches Reddit-style Forums app 30:41 Meta’s AI consulting and enterprise ambitions 34:42 X ad revenue, xAI, and social graph advantages 37:14 OpenAI ads and “conversational intent” 40:51 The rise of clipping in politics and media 44:28 FTC settlement over “active listening” claims 46:52 All Eyes On raises funding in the CTV space 48:57 Closing thoughts and outro Guests: Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi, Tejas Manohar Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 175: Tejas Manohar, co-CEO of Hightouch, on the Company's Giant Fundraise, Agentic Ads, and LiveRamp

Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.

## Participants

- **Ari Paparo** (None)
- **Eric Franchi** (None)
- **Tejas Manohar** (Hightouch)

## Transcript

This is At Tech God, and I command you to listen to this house ad. So if you're listening to this show, just know that you've really stumbled upon a giant network of content across advertising, marketing, media, publishing, and of course, the people that work in this great advertising industry. So go to MarketectureMedia.com, check out all of our brands. We have a multitude of shows from the Brand Forum, the Advertising Forum, the Monopoly Report, the At Tech God Pod, the Marketecture Pod, and the Marketecture Pod.

We are bringing more podcasts to our network. We are consistently and constantly bringing on new shows. So check it out, MarketectureMedia.com, or search for any of those brands in the app that you use to listen to this podcast. Enjoy the show and see you all soon.

Welcome to the Marketecture Podcast. This is Ari Paparo. I'm here with Eric Franchi. Eric, you're in Chicago? Yes, I'm in Chicago. Guess what else is in Chicago? All right. It is Marketecture Live is coming in Chicago. You know it. Marketecture Live in September. And what happened this week about Marketecture Live Chicago? We opened up tickets for early bird purchases. That's right. So discounted tickets at Chicago.MarkitectureLive.com. And tickets are starting to sell.

Xander, formerly from Beeswax, now at Adquifer, was our first ticket sale, which was pretty exciting. Oh, nice. Shout out Xander. People just jumped on it. So we wanted to give him some flowers for buying a ticket. So recommend that you buy a ticket. It should be a really great event where we'll be announcing speakers in the next couple of weeks. And it's, you know, one day, really high quality content and hope to see you there. What are you doing in Chicago? I'm here on meetings, but I haven't been to Chicago in a long time.

I lucked out with the weather. The weather has been awesome. There's nothing like Chicago, like when it gets nice. And I'm reminded of like what a good market this is between brands and agencies. And so many companies have kind of like set up their sales offices here. It's a great market. And I think it's an awesome one to have a market texture. So I'm super excited. Yeah, it should be great. There's so many companies there, ad tech and brands and publishers, etc.

I'm spending the day at the IAB tech summit. We're recording on Thursday. So I've got my badge. I ran home to record this. Tony Marlow gave an impassioned speech this morning about, you know, AI and agentic and how, you know, you can't just trust it to new, unproven standards. You have to build on the IAB standards to do agentic the right way, which was kind of an interesting point of view. And I'll probably get more.

Continually kind of poking at some of these other groups that are coming up. I was talking to a civilian yesterday, someone who di...

Episode 175: Tejas Manohar, co-CEO of Hightouch, on the Company's Giant Fundraise, Agentic Ads, and LiveRamp

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Episode 175: Tejas Manohar, co-CEO of Hightouch, on the Company's Giant Fundraise, Agentic Ads, and LiveRamp

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.