P&G’s programmatic buying platform AudienceScience has a new CEO.
Company Chairman Bill Gossman will assume the role, effective immediately, and former head Mike Peralta will become chief strategy officer.
AudienceScience also made two other executive hires: David De Simone, who will serve as COO, and Patrick Reilly, its VP of enterprise sales.
“We’ve gotten to pretty great scale serving hundreds of brands in 45 countries, processing more than 120 billion transactions per day,” Gossman said.
“We also have the largest buy-side header tag solution in the industry with about 200 publishers,” he claimed. “We’re seeing less than 2% nonhuman traffic, so we think we’re in a good position to grow as the industry demands more transparency.”
So why now for a CEO swap? Gossman, who is also a venture partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, which contributed to several rounds of AudienceScience funding, said the company wanted to focus on boosting global supply access and expand its product focus.
AudienceScience is most commonly known for its DMP/DSP hybrid called Helios. In a not-too-distant past, AudienceScience was called RevenueScience and operated as an ad network. It shut that down in 2012 in a push toward marketer-focused tools.
“We’re creating a very integrated suite for planning, activation and analytics around media,” Gossman said. “That will evolve into an advertising system of record, similar to how SAP provides a system of record for enterprise resource planning.”
AudienceScience says it wants to connect known customer records and CRM data with anonymous audience acquisition, which Gossman views as a logical extension of marketing automation.
“How do I find, within the haystacks of all the traffic in the world, a consumer that will be most interesting to a client or campaign?” he said. “Then, once you find those anonymous users, you can bring them through a more traditional marketing funnel of known users on the B2B side or a customer management system like B2C would have.”
Meanwhile Peralta, as CSO, will be charged with forming partnerships with agencies, media sources and other tech providers to create a network effect or partner ecosystem similar to the ones provided by marketing clouds like Salesforce or IBM.
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Another big focus for Peralta is maintaining AudienceScience’s buying power as inventory sources become increasingly walled (read: Facebook and Google). But the company acknowledges there is giant addressable opportunity beyond the walled gardens, too.
“If you’re a big global brand like P&G, you’re looking at inventory through a wide, global lens,” Peralta said. “Yes, Google and Facebook are big, but they’re not in China and we’re probably the biggest buyer of video in China today. While the US may be P&G’s biggest market today, not too far off it’ll be China.”
AudienceScience has raised a total of $56 million.
