What an incredible year 2022 has been! 🚀 WOW, so much has happened and I could not be more grateful to all of the people who have helped shape Audiense - our customers, our partners, and our team - over the last decade. A huge THANK YOU for your continued trust and support, we couldn’t do it without you.
In this year’s CEO letter, I wanted to talk about some of the things that have kept us up at night, both the good and the bad. Let’s start with…
We need to talk about Elon
… the elephant in the room. It’s been an interesting few months for Twitter with Elon Musk at the helm. Rather than repeating what everyone else has been saying about the acquisition, I wanted to talk about what these changes mean for Audiense.
Elon plans to keep data licensing in Twitter’s roadmap, we were aware of this before the acquisition and we don’t see it changing. Especially because their emphasis on subscriptions is aligned with this. Our Enterprise access to Twitter’s data is just another subscription.
While we were inspired by the culture of Twitter 1.0, we believe that the product enhancements of Twitter 2.0 will help it thrive in the future. We love Twitter, we think it’s unique and beneficial to society. Instead of telling people to adopt other social networks, we believe we need to provide feedback on all of Twitter’s new policies and functionalities so whatever Twitter has planned for the next ten years is shaped and guided by our collective feedback.
Audiense: the past, the present & the future
Last year, we decided to double down on our partnership strategy and announced our partnership with Semrush, which improved the understanding of audience affinities by combining social and web signals.
With a keen focus on partners this year we announced two more partnerships, Kantar and Sponsor Seeker.
Kantar is the world’s leading marketing data and analytics company, as one of the first partners for iLab. As you may know, iLab brings together consumer brands, academia and start-up partners to address tomorrow’s consumer needs today, by experimenting, creating and testing innovative solutions and products.
Having worked with Alex Huot, CEO of Share of Voice for over 10 years we decided to also partner with Sponsor Seeker to empower the sporting community.
We will continue working on collaborative initiatives throughout 2023 and even have a few more partnerships in the works to release next year.
Alongside our partner work we will also continue to invest in our own platform exploring features such as:
- Merging and splitting segments
- Time comparison reporting
- Better data export capabilities
- Only profiling reports
- Improving the content Tab
If you’re keen to be the first to discover what’s coming next, check out our new product portal and make sure you’ve signed up to our beta program!
These features align with the foundation of our product strategy which continues to centre around three key pillars:
- Interoperability: How can we connect systems of insights?
- Actionability: How can we connect with systems of engagement
- Transparency: How do we do all of this, transparently and compliantly, so there are no black boxes in the middle?
Product aside, our organization and our team continue to thrive! We have over 50 talented people working at Audiense and we remain profitable, with revenue growing 60% year-on-year.
Back in October, we had the opportunity to share a few days together as a company to celebrate our #10YearAudienseMeetup! It is the hope that we are able to continue building this amazing culture for many years to come that keeps us all going 💪
Like peanut butter & jelly - Welcome SOPRISM!
For us the highlight of the year has to be our first acquisition: SOPRISM
If you haven’t read the release yet, I encourage you to do so. SOPRISM’s founders Jonathan and Angelo are amazing individuals that have created a tool that is immensely valuable. This milestone is a fundamental step in our vision of democratizing audience insights and I couldn’t be happier that they decided to join our cause.
Using Audiense and SOPRISM together, you’ll be able to:
- Access new inputs for definition of audiences:
- Improve Ads targeting by analyzing lookalike of aggregated and anonymized 1st party data including:
- Email lists
- Mobile numbers
- Web activity
- Mobile activity
- And any segment you have for these ones
- Understanding META volumes for interests
- New understanding of demographics and interests based on META
- Segmentation based on META insights
- And all compliant
An interesting fact we uncovered after the acquisition was that Córdoba, Spain (where Audiense began) and La Louvière Belgium (where SOPRISM was founded) are actually sister cities. It seems as though this acquisition was written in the stars!
With this acquisition, we believe we have cemented our position as audience intelligence leaders. Now, we can focus our attention in 2023 on becoming a leader in consumer research technology.
But, as you probably know, collaboration is in our DNA. We want to achieve this by working with all our partners, new and old. Our goal is to continue pushing the boundaries of innovation in consumer research.
Thank you once again for your trust and support over the last ten years - let’s make 2023 the best one yet! Wishing you happy holidays and all good things in the year ahead.
Peace and love x
