This week, after almost a year of work, we have launched our new NetWise Audience Platform Version 2.0. This seems like a good time to reflect on how we got here, so here it is, the story of NetWise and our Audience Platform.
How did NetWise get started?
NetWise got started over ten years ago providing B2B Audience Segments into the Programmatic Advertising space. These segments specifically help companies target advertising campaigns based on professional demographics and business firmographics.
The technology we built to enable this was a major innovation at the time and today it has become the most complete and accurate Business-to-Consumer ID-Graph in the market. Because of the power of that graph and the reach and accuracy of our Business Data in general, we quickly found ourselves flooded with sophisticated customers. These (often large) companies have the money and the teams to work with complex terabyte-scale datasets like ours, which most companies cannot. These days, we support many of the most well known brands in the world, and our data helps power many of the most prolific Ad-Tech and Mar-Tech platforms.
A platform by accident... while scaling our business.
Licensing datasets with thousands of fields and billions of rows comes with some sophisticated support. We’ve never officially been a services company and we generally don’t charge for it, but we do end up often offering tremendous technical support to our large customers. Yes, it’s expensive, challenging, and consumes a lot of resources from our teams, but it’s important to us that we enable our customers to be successful with our data products. Plus, we really like solving technical marketing challenges in the modern digital advertising space, so it’s just a fun part of our jobs.
As we soared past 100 enterprise customers, our engineering team started to really feel the weight of all this technical support, as well as the challenge of fulfilling hundreds of complex and customized deliveries to our customers. Even though our customers always had their own engineering teams, data scientists, and analysts, they would still often come back to us with technical challenges that we could help with. This was a huge opportunity, just staring us in the face.
As a skunkworks project, the product and engineering teams started quietly building a web platform that we were going to release to our internal customer success team. Our hope was to enable so them to more easily service our customers, and engineering could focus on technology, rather than customer support, fulfillment, and the creation and execution of custom advertising audiences using our massive business and person dataset.
Big data for marketers without the technical complexity.
Almost overnight after releasing this internal tool for our own team, sales reached out and asked when they could start selling it. It was suddenly so obvious to us that we had built the perfect tool to not only support many of our large customers, but also to empower marketers at ANY company, no matter how large or small, simple or sophisticated, to leverage our B2B Audience Data and our ID-Graph to do true multichannel marketing across every channel and every platform.
An Audience Data Platform purpose built for data-driven marketers.
The product team got to designing and the engineers got to building, and we quickly launched a version of our platform that sales could start testing in the market. Customers started signing up almost immediately, and we knew we had built something special.
Six months later, and here we are, celebrating the full commercial release of an incredibly powerful Audience Data Platform built specifically for sophisticated, data-driven marketers. We couldn’t be happier with the reception by our customers and the power we’ve put in their hands. Now every marketing team can leverage the depth, quality, and performance of NetWise’s Audience Data to target their customers across every channel: digital, programmatic, social, email, telemarketing, direct mail, and DTV, reaching the same person on any platform and any device.
The NetWise B2B Audience Data Platform replaces the need for a complex and costly data lake, and engineers and analysts to run it. Let your marketers get back to work building great campaigns, targeting your ideal customers everywhere you want to reach them.
