Amplified Intelligence adds adtech industry veteran Phil Townend to c-suite as it gears up for global growth

Hot on the heels of the successful Q4 launch of its attentionTRACE™ media planner, the Adelaide-based scaleup makes its first senior hire to lead commercial expansion alongside CEO and global attention thought leader, Prof Karen Nelson-Field. A 22-year digital advertising veteran, Townend was most recently regional GM and APAC CRO for Unruly where over a 10-year stint he helped the UK based start-up to global presence in over 18 countries and acquisition by News Corp in 2015. Unruly became well known for their UnrulyEQ video suite which used a market defining emotional testing method to measure and predict user engagement before video ads went live. It was during the early build out of this platform in 2013 that Karen Nelson-Field and Townend became acquainted. Townend joins Amplified as their Chief Growth Officer. “Fundamentally I think we’ve lost sight of a very simple equation which is that if people don’t actually look at your ad, they’re unlikely to become a customer. The market has come a long way in the past 10 years but even viewability is still just an opportunity to see. It’s like asking a friend how she met her partner. You never hear anybody say, ‘Well I almost saw them in a bar then we fell in love and lived happily ever after’.” Attention as a measure is in hyperdrive and Karen and her team punch above their weight in the global stakes. Through her thought leadership and research, she has already established the business at the epicentre of the attention economy. “I see parallels in Amplified and Unruly both in terms of commitment to rigour and commitment to positive change in the advertising ecosystem. It’s exciting to be part of a team that is literally changing the landscape and will be thought of as the company that gave advertisers an objective unbiased view of attention across all platforms and publishers without exception.” – Phil Townend  After the release of attentionTRACE™ Media Planner in late 2020, Amplified Intelligence has received a massive amount of interest from agency holding companies and global brands wanting to improve business outcomes with attention measurement. It is now preparing for hyper-acceleration into the category it has helped to build. attentionTRACE™ Media Planner is Amplified Intelligence’s first scalable SaaS product delivering real human attention data to agencies and brands. In just over 4 months it has had trialists from 111 companies spanning 23 countries. “This technology has come at the perfect moment. The old adage ‘that 50 percent of my budget is wasted, just not sure which’ has never been more pertinent and never been more unacceptable in the wake of Covid19 where client and agency P&L’s are under extreme pressure. Finally, advertisers have a way to identify where the wastage lies. We anticipate a global re-evaluation of the ecosystem once validated attention measurement becomes mainstream and ubiquitous.” – Phil Townend “Amplified’s advanced attention models are paving the way for a new trading model where advertisers pay for quality attention, which will translate into delivery of business goals such as sales, profit and increased market share.” – Karen Nelson-Field “I’m excited to welcome Phil with his vast experience in acceleration and managing scale but also his capacity to welcome and work with rapid change. We are at a critical time right now. Who better to ask for than someone who is old enough to understand legacy measurement, but young enough to have scaled programmatic and insight businesses from start-up to exit. Phil is a perfect fit for us.” – Karen Nelson-Field For media enquiries Research and technical comment: Prof. Karen Nelson-Field Founder and CEO Amplified Intelligence +61 (0) 418104143 karen@amplifiedintelligence.com.au