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Steven Aldrich
Company
Apply Digital
Location
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Bio
I'm the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Ragnarok, a full-service agency. I lead our technical and strategy teams of more 40+ individuals, supporting functions from email development to front-end engineering, ensuring we maintain a high quality product, evaluating our new partnerships and providing a point of view on the Martech space. Since my partner Spencer and I started the business in 2012, we've been at the forefront of promoting the best-in-breed Martech stack, selecting the best partners that fit each of our clients indvidual use cases. We're proud to be key implementors of these partners, including Segment, Braze, Iterable, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Heap and many more. We help our clients leverage these tools to drive personalized outcomes for their customers and significant product improvements.
I'm the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of...
description
APPLY is a global ACx (Agentic Customer Experience) partner — client-obsessed, built for a new era, and convinced that the next generation of customer experiences will be built by people who can connect the dots others don't see. Our 650+ specialists came from iconic retailers, famous brands, and renowned consultancies. Different paths, same conviction: craft mastery and agentic intelligence, applied together, in deliberate service of the customer. Agentic isn't a layer we bolt on. It runs through everything — strategy, experience, delivery. Real capability, not pilots and promises. What we learn from one industry sharpens what we do in the next, and back again. The cross-pollination compounds. Loyalty becomes fandom. Fandom becomes growth. We've helped transform companies like Arc'teryx, Lululemon, Kraft Heinz, the NFL, Moderna, and Atlassian. We apply. So you can move faster without leaving behind what makes the work worth doing.
APPLY is a global ACx (Agentic...
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Actionable Takeaways
The Companion Team Model Is Why AI Deployments Succeed:
AI cannot be handed to a client as a finished product — the only deployments that work are ones where client teams actively want to learn and build alongside the agency; Kraft Heinz succeeded because their team co-built the Tastemaker product over time, not because Apply Digital delivered it as a solution.
Only 5% of AI Deployments Actually Succeed - Here's Why:
The failure rate for AI marketing deployments mirrors the failure rate for new businesses — the deciding factor is change readiness on the client side, not the sophistication of the tool; leaders who have executive mandate, personal curiosity, and appetite for reinvention make the difference.
Agentic Marketing Needs Good-Enough Data, Not Perfect Data:
Braze AI Decision Studio's multi-armed bandit testing works at enterprise scale, but it requires a foundation of conversion data, engagement signals, and historical test results — not perfection, just "good enough" data that gives the system something real to optimize against.
AI-Assisted Auditing Cuts Strategy Timelines in Half:
By automating the collection phase of client audits — using Claude to log into Braze or Salesforce Marketing Cloud and pull all campaign data, then synthesizing it against the agency's internal knowledge base — Apply Digital compressed a 6-8 week process to 3 weeks.
The C-Suite AI Knowledge Gap Is a Real and Growing Problem:
The C-suite has extraordinary access to AI training from Google, YouTube, OpenAI, and Anthropic — while the rest of the organization is falling behind; this accessibility cliff is widening inside organizations, and the gap is becoming visible in real time during meetings.
"It's My Claude" — AI Adoption Succeeds When It Becomes Personal:
The 2026 goal isn't uniformity — it's enabling team members to take the company's AI standards and build their own niche on top of them; a lifecycle marketer who's tuned their Claude setup for retail CPG is more valuable than one who runs the default workflow.
Exiting Into Somewhere You're Still Growing Is Underrated:
Most founders exit and then disengage; Steven and Spencer's experience is the opposite — they're in executive roles at 750 people, still learning Claude, still building AI delivery services, still involved in sales and operations; the quality of exit matters as much as the size.
Conversation Highlights
Steven Aldrich, SVP of Marketing Services at Apply Digital, tells the rare story of an agency acquisition that actually worked — and why. After co-founding a martech advisory firm in 2012 with his childhood best friend Spencer, growing it to ~60 people as one of the first Braze, Iterable, and Segment implementation partners, and being acquired by Apply Digital in March 2025, Steven now operates inside a 750-person AI-first company that gave his team everything it couldn’t build at 60 people: dedicated training paths, enterprise client relationships, and the infrastructure to become what Steven calls “the next generation of marketers.” In this episode, he breaks down Apply Digital’s three-part AI marketing philosophy — agentic decisioning, AI-assisted auditing, and AI co-strategy — and the Kraft Heinz Tastemaker case study that went from briefing engine to full-scale AI content deployment.
Topics Discussed
- Co-founding a martech advisory agency in 2012 with Spencer; evolution from video production to email marketing to martech implementation partner
- Early specialization in Braze, Iterable, Segment, and High Touch — becoming one of the first strong implementation partners in that space
- The March 2025 acquisition by Apply Digital and why cultural fit was the deciding criterion
- The acquisition reality: team grew from ~60 to ~80 people; everyone was retained; equity in the space expanded
- Pre-acquisition enterprise clients: Dropbox, A&E Networks, Rooms To Go
- Post-acquisition clients: Kraft Heinz, Arc’teryx, The Very Group (UK), NBA, NFL
- Client profile: typically $1B+ revenue enterprises, VP of Marketing/MarTech or CTO/CMO with AI mandate
- Three AI approaches: (1) Agentic decisioning — Braze AI Decision Studio (formerly OfferFit); (2) AI-assisted auditing — Claude, Gemini, Notebook LM; (3) AI co-strategist — next best action analysis engine
- Kraft Heinz Tastemaker case study: started as briefing engine → prototyping engine → cultural sensitivity validator → social and email asset deployment; featured at Google Next
- AI-assisted audit: 6-8 week process compressed to 3 weeks using Claude Projects and Notion docs
- Why AI deployments fail — the 5% success rate, change management, and the companion team model
- Apply Digital’s internal structure: 750 people, 10 global offices, formal L&D with customized AI training paths
- Remote-first: New York, Austin, Barcelona team clusters
- The “mastering the craft” culture shift post-acquisition
- 2026 goal: every team member adopting AI delivery tools and carving their own niche; the team becoming the next generation of marketers
