Audiens, a global independent customer data platform and audience management tool, has received an $8M (£6.5 M) cash investment from South Korea’s NHN Corp. This is the first investment in a European technology company for NHN. The investment accelerates Audiens international expansion plans and strengthens the team in key European markets.
In addition to enriching the Audiens CDP product, the investment opens a new channel for NHN data technology to reach global customers beyond South Korea.
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Jonathan Brech, previously Chief Commercial Officer at Audiens, has been appointed CEO to lead the expanded business along with Marko Maras, founder of Audiens, will now head-up product strategy and innovation. Brech was previously the CEO at Cambridge Data, which advised major organizations to develop world-class data-driven capabilities.
NHN has vast quantities of consumer behavior data and is one of the few tech giants outside the western walled gardens of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. Their focus on cloud, data, advertising, fintech and entertainment will enable Audiens to deliver unique competitive audience insight.
With the investment, Audiens plans to augment its plug and play audiences to deliver automatic audience identification and prioritization technologies. They’ll use advanced data processing techniques based on cloud data experience and machine learning techniques from NHN. The company will also embed new standard mathematical models into their CDP and ramp-up data science capabilities to embed better consumer behavior models in the audience management platform.
“Powerful industrial-strength functionality is moving out of the IT and business information domain and directly to the marketing user, to control and evolve, Audiens gives marketers instant visibility on their audience behavior,” said Jonathan Brech, CEO of Audiens. “Our audience management platform also lets marketing collaborate with colleagues on which ‘nudges’ work best to push different audiences to the next most desirable outcome — whether that’s buying media in a smarter way or messaging via email, messenger platform, etc. It’s a much faster way of understanding and responding to the way your consumers are behaving.”
“Audiens has a unique vision to automate audience identification and optimization using data science and machine learning techniques,” said JS Lee, Director of NHN. “By supporting them with our data science, technology and advertising leadership, plus our extensive customer insight data, we can deliver an exciting marketing game-changer.”
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“The continued evolution of CDP’s as a result of the elimination of third-party data shows the strength of the CDP platform to marketers. CDPs are a critical technology to any marketer who needs to turbocharge their first-party data and build and manage audiences for engaging marketing campaigns,” said Brech. “CDP’s are the new must-have model for high-impact marketing and this investment from NHN proves the value of our technology platform.”
“Adding NHN’s technology and data science muscle to the simplicity and easy deployment of Audiens CDP platform, gives our global customers the ability to create marketing campaigns that create value faster for their brand,” added Brech. “The investment accelerates our data science studio capabilities and augments our international sales and marketing program.”
Customers, including ING, Iper and Unieuro, use Audiens to optimize their marketing, grow customer lifetime value by up to threefold and achieve up to 50% savings in advertising cost per acquisition (CPA).
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