Software
Guest Author: Richard Askam, Founder of Print Island
Every industry needs storytellers, and few tell the story of personalization better than Richard Askam. The visionary behind Print Island and a driving force behind campaigns like “Share a Coke,” Richard has helped shape how brands connect with people in more personal, meaningful ways.
As one of Mediaclip’s personalization ambassador, follow Richard on our blog as he will share his insights, ideas, and inspiration to help bridge creativity, technology, and personalization.
Richard Askam explores the debate between buying a tech solution or building one for your business.
My father always used to say that the most important thing in business is remembering that you have two ears and one mouth. In other words: do more listening than talking, and you’ll learn more. Little did he know I would grow up to become a public speaker!
Recent years have shown that every business must continually evolve its technology to keep pace with the world we now live in. But when it comes to digital transformation, is it better to invest in off-the-shelf solutions, or is building your own technology the wiser path?
To explore this question, I was joined on a recent episode of The MediaClip Podcast by Christian Rondeau, CTO of MediaClip. Over the course of our conversation, Christian shared nearly two decades of hard-won insight into personalization, software development, and where AI may be taking us next.
And when your guest turns up wearing the company shirt, you know it’s going to be a good conversation.
Christian has been with Mediaclip for almost twenty years, joining the business when it was still pressing DVDs and producing photo books. Today, he leads product vision and engineering strategy for a platform that sits at what he describes as “the most complexity per square foot in e-commerce,” the point where users interact deeply with a product before it is ever made.
The secret to surviving two decades of relentless technological change? Building something that never needed to be completely rewritten.
When Flash died, Mediaclip didn’t panic. When mobile technology reshaped user expectations, they adapted. The architecture had been intentionally designed to live inside other companies’ ecosystems, a deliberate choice that made integration more challenging but long-term survival far more likely.
One of the hottest conversations in technology today is the build versus buy debate, a topic Christian has watched evolve dramatically.
“What seems like an obvious answer one year might be a totally different one five years later,” he says.
Technologies that once made buying an obvious choice have since been abandoned by their creators, leaving businesses stranded. Meanwhile, some solutions that once seemed worth building internally have ultimately been solved better elsewhere.
The only constant, Christian argues, is that businesses must keep asking the question.
Today’s consumers want more features and a simpler experience at exactly the same time. Christian was refreshingly candid about how difficult that balance is to achieve and how it only becomes harder as users mature.
Consumer expectations have evolved, and companies like Mediaclip, by helping shape the personalization economy, have in some ways created their own most demanding customers.
Of course, no conversation in 2026 feels complete without discussing AI.
Christian doesn’t shy away from the topic. He sees artificial intelligence accelerating development on one hand while intensifying cybersecurity threats on the other.
“The rate at which vulnerabilities will be used against companies is going to create lots of problems,” he warns, noting that the same tools helping developers build faster will also help bad actors move faster.
Christian’s ten-year-old daughter is already creating AI-generated backgrounds for her WhatsApp chats. For him, that is the clearest signal of all: the next generation is not merely adopting this technology, they are growing up inside it.
Twenty years in, Mediaclip is still building, still adapting, and still asking the right questions.
And in a world where the three-to-five-year outlook has been replaced by a three-to-five-month one, that may be the most valuable skill of all.
Listen to the full episode of The MediaClip Podcast now.
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