MarTech Interview with Roland Deal, President and Co-founder of Audyence

Roland, could you please give us an overview of Audyence’s Real-Time Demand (RTD) platform and how it differs from traditional B2B advertising platforms?

Audyence’s RTD is the first programmatic media platform offering B2B advertisers cost-per-lead inventory at scale and workflow automation fueled by AI & machine learning to streamline planning, purchasing, and managing lead generation campaigns across multiple publishers. It eliminates platform fees and ensures validated, quality leads by providing unprecedented control, transparency, and robust analytics.

It differs from traditional B2B advertising platforms by eliminating manually repetitive tasks and improving both speed-to-market and mid-campaign agility. Automating these processes and eliminating the operational overhead for publishers makes leads more affordable for advertisers at over 40% less than the average market price. Not only are B2B lead generation campaigns more efficient to get to market and more affordable through Audyence, but they’re also more performant.

As the President and co-founder of Audyence, can you share the inspiration behind the development of Audyence’RTD platform and how your extensive experience in global agencies influenced its creation?

The solution, Audyence, came out of the realization that virtually every area of B2B advertising was being digitized and automated to bring efficiencies in cost and time, new data intelligence, and ultimately better outcomes to B2B marketers. With the rise of programmatic media, which now accounts for more than 80% of all media purchases, and later programmatic CTV, it became clear that B2B marketers and agencies prefer a digital path to market. Yet, the B2B lead generation industry remained stuck in a primarily analog, slow, unsophisticated workflow mired in inefficiencies and prone to human error. Not only was it too labor-intensive, slow, and expensive, but an industry framework that disincentivized transparency to its customers had to be changed. Karl and I were confident that the market was ready for innovation to address the challenges we experienced over the years managing and implementing lead generation campaigns at scale.

The Audyence RTD platform analyzes more than 17.5 billion firmographic, behavioral, and technographic data points. How does leveraging machine learning on such a vast dataset benefit publishers, advertisers, and agencies in planning, purchasing, and executing demand generation campaigns?

Audyence’s Real-Time Demand Platform leverages machine learning to analyze over 17.5B firmographic, technographic, demographic, and intent data points per second to allow us to build Target Account Lists (TALs) for our Account Based Marketing (ABM) programs. We can also tailor each campaign to one or more personas within a buying committee. We can purchase and activate these campaigns to dozens of publishers at once, only pay when leads are generated, and pass our platform’s strict lead validation process.

The B2B lead-generation industry is described as a $21-billion market growing over 15 percent per year. In what ways does Audyence RTD address the challenges of manual campaign management and lack of transparency in this industry?

Audyence’s platform empowers advertisers to leverage deterministic data for comprehensive planning, purchasing, tracking, and optimizing cost-per-lead campaigns across all publisher partners. Automating repetitive tasks enhances speed-to-market and mid-campaign agility, streamlining processes, and maximizing campaign effectiveness.

Audyence RTD is said to automate the end-to-end process for publishers, reducing agency labor costs significantly. Could you elaborate on how the platform achieves this automation and the impact it has on campaign efficiency?

Audyence RTD streamlines the entire process for publishers by automating tasks related to planning, purchasing, tracking, and optimizing cost-per-lead campaigns across all their publisher partners. This automation significantly reduces agency labor costs while improving campaign efficiency.

The platform allows advertisers to use deterministic data for planning, purchasing, tracking, and optimizing cost-per-lead campaigns. How does this approach differ from the traditional cost-per-impression or cost-per-click models, and what advantages does it offer?

By leveraging deterministic data and real-time tracking capabilities, the platform enables publishers to make data-driven decisions quickly, adapt campaigns in real-time, and achieve higher-quality leads that convert at higher rates than industry averages. Overall, Audyence RTD revolutionizes campaign management for publishers, offering a more efficient and effective approach to lead generation.

Early adopters of Audyence RTD have seen a 47% reduction in costs per lead, and campaigns have reached the market 95% faster. Can you provide examples or insights into how the platform achieves these impressive results?

Our customers benefit greatly with unprecedented price and time efficiencies, mainly due to the platform allowing buyers of leads to deal directly with suppliers of leads and leveraging workflow automation, ease-of-use, and seamless customer experience. By connecting buyers and sellers and using smartly designed SaaS-based solutions to take on the “labor” usually burdening performance media and publisher teams, we enable the publishers to deliver at significantly more efficient rates while simultaneously condensing the time-to-market from campaign brief to activation and lead delivery to just days.

Mike Baker, an early investor, mentioned the credibility of Audyence’s founders and their complementarity of backgrounds. How has the combined experience of Roland Deal and Karl Van Buren uniquely positioned Audyence in the B2B advertising market?

The combined experience of Karl Van Buren and I has uniquely positioned Audyence in the B2B advertising market. I’ve held leadership roles in major marketing agencies such as Grey and Ogilvy (part of WPP), Saatchi (IPG), and gyro/DWA (now part of Dentsu), managing global B2B clients and Karl’s global sales and partnership positions in leading industry suppliers bring over 35 years of combined experience. Our advisory roles with top-tier brands like AT&T, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and BlackRock/iShare showcase our expertise, enabling us to develop and launch a product capable of dominating the industry.

What are Audyence’s ambitions for the RTD platform, and how does the company plan to continue changing the content syndication arena to provide better results, higher returns, and greater velocity for advertisers, agencies, and publishers?

Our ambition is to become the industry’s de facto programmatic platform for the real-time acquisition of CPL inventory, delivering the same benefits and value B2B marketers are getting through their current programmatic platforms buying CPM inventory. By continually improving the processes, increasing the control and transparency of the lead source, and leveraging AI and machine learning further to expedite the workflow, customers and users of Audyence will benefit from an ever-improving platform that puts them at the center of the experience and has their needs and objectives in mind as we, as a company, stay committed and focused on delivering real value and positive business outcomes.