Joe Zawadzki joins Collective Audience Board of Directors as Chairman
Words cannot express how honored we are to have Joe join us as our Chairman. He is one of the greatest minds who is a visionary, innovator, and connector in the global advertising technology industry. I am so looking forward to our partnership as CEO and Chairman forging the future of the industry and driving our mission to build the next-generation collective ecosystem of media, advertising, data, and AI that builds significant value for our shareholders and industry.
Collective Audience, Inc. (Nasdaq: CAUD), a leading innovator of audience-based performance advertising and media, has appointed industry veteran, Joe Zawadzki, as chairman of its board of directors.
Zawadzki is a highly accomplished entrepreneur, operator, and venture investor with more than 25 years of leadership experience across digital advertising and media, technology, corporate governance, M&A and finance.
“Joe is recognized as a founding father and pioneer across many facets of the digital advertising industry,” stated Collective Audience CEO, Peter Bordes. “He has played a crucial role in shaping the evolution of the industry, inventing the demand-side platform category with MediaMath, and now spearheading the reinvention of the media supply chain ‘financial backbone’ with FxM.”
Zawadzki commented:
“It is an incredible time of opportunity for the advertising industry. With every company a marketer, and increasingly media companies themselves, advertising has become the underlying engine of the global economy. The opportunities of tomorrow are bigger than any single company can tackle on its own. Our belief is that Collective Audience can simplify a complicated ecosystem and scale needed innovation across it.
Through strategic acquisitions and corporate partnerships plus an extended network of talent, the collective can be greater than the sum of the parts. I am excited to be part of this, and excited to bring others to the cause.”
Bordes added: “As a newly traded Nasdaq company, Joe’s appointment as chairman demonstrates our commitment to infusing our senior management and governance teams with the best and brightest leadership the industry has to offer. Joe strengthens the foundation of our board, helping us foster a culture of transparency, accountability, and strategic decision-making for the benefit of our collective stakeholders.”
Since the company’s recently completed merger and rebranding as Collective Audience, it has turned its focus on the rapidly expanding global AdTech market that, according to a report by Allied Market Research, is projected to grow at a CAGR of 14.7% reaching $2.9 trillion by 2031.
Joe Zawadzki Bio
Joe Zawadzki currently serves as general partner at Aperiam, a venture capital and advisory firm focused on the digital transformation of marketing and media. Aperiam’s investment approach spans the full lifecycle, from incubation to growth, with portfolio companies including ID5, TVision Insights, tvScientific, Kevel, Rembrand, and Transmit.live.
He also serves as chairman of FxM, a fintech startup that is revolutionizing how media companies drive financial efficiency through their digital media supply chain, accelerating payment to suppliers, and addressing the hidden estimated 20% “ad financing tax” that drives up costs across the media ecosystem.
Zawadzki other board memberships include serving on the board of directors of MINT, the global leader in Advertising Resource Management (ARM), and on the boards of the MMA and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). He previously served on the board of the Digital & Marketing Association now a part of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
Zawadzki founded and served as chairman and CEO of MediaMath, the first demand-side platform that launched the programmatic/addressable era of digital marketing. Prior to MediaMath, he founded and served as chairman and president of [x+1] / Poindexter Systems, where he helped pioneer its digital marketing technology + data science platform supporting Fortune 2000 brands and agencies.
As an angel investor, Zawadzki has invested in more than 70 companies, including MOAT, IAS, Appnexus, Accordant, Beeswax, Credit Karma, Dataminr and mParticle, with a cumulative exit value of more than $10 billion.
He holds an A.B. in English from Harvard University, and served as a teaching fellow at Harvard in cosmology, set theory and the history of science.
About Collective Audience
Collective Audience provides an innovative audience-based performance advertising and media platform for brands, agencies and publishers.The company has introduced a new open, interconnected, data driven, digital advertising and media ecosystem that will uniquely eliminate many inefficiencies in the digital ad buyer and seller process for brands, agencies and publishers. It will deliver long sought-after visibility, complementary technology, and unique audience data that drives focus on performance, brand reach, traffic and transactions.
For the AdTech providers and media buyers who come onto Collective Audience’s platform, they will be able to leverage audience data as a new asset class, powered by AI as an intelligence layer to guide decision making.
To learn more, visit collectiveaudience.co.
