Today, we’re excited to launch a new interview series, 5 Questions, featuring conversations with both established and emerging leaders in adtech. The series will include interviews with adtech companies as well as key figures at brands and agencies shaping the industry.
Kicking off the series, our first-ever 5 Questions interview is with Paul Kelly—better known as PK—the CEO of AMA, an adtech company specializing in AI-powered dynamic creative automation for digital audio. PK previously served as AMA’s CRO, and just last week, the company announced his promotion to CEO alongside news of 60% year-over-year growth and its highest annual revenue to date.
Digital audio remains, in our view, an oddly undervalued channel, despite its growing importance and potential (see podcasts and the election). We dove into this topic with PK—check out the full interview below.
1. Is AMA’s growth being driven by the company’s tech, the market, or both?
The platform’s versatility and broad interoperability across inventory, measurement solutions, and data have helped position us very well. Equally, our go-to-market strategy, which focuses on category-specific, lower-funnel use cases enabled by creative personalization and optimization, has empowered our publisher partners to successfully compete for performance budgets, unlocking significant new revenue streams.
2. What’s your big focus for 2025 to keep growth going for AMA?
Expansion—both geographically and from a channel point of view. Ad-supported digital audio continues to grow in LATAM and APAC with tremendous opportunity for a localization solution. On the channel side, we unlocked podcasts in 2024, with close to half of our campaigns in the US now serving personalized messaging across streaming and podcast inventory. Next year, we’re hoping to add broadcast radio, which we believe would be a step-change for audio as a whole.
3. What does the industry need to do to sustain growth overall?
First, support the advancement of programmatic tools, including contextual targeting, real-time bidding infrastructure, and cross-channel addressability (as we saw with iHeart adopting UID2). Beyond that, more unified measurement standards across streaming, podcasts, and other audio formats. With sustained efforts around targeting, measurement, and innovation, while making a deliberate effort to align more closely with clients’ omnichannel strategies, I believe 2025 can exceed 2024. The key will be balancing automation and personalization while providing advertisers with measurable, scalable, and ROI-driven solutions for 2025.
4. With the election, the influence of podcasts has been a huge storyline in 2024. Is this influencing how advertisers think about audio?
For anyone that needed convincing, I’d say it proved how powerful a platform it is for opinion-shaping and storytelling. I think it will prompt some categories to view podcasts as an influencer channel alongside social video, with similar benefits and perhaps risks.
5. We hear a lot about brand safety for podcasts, but some of the most popular ones (e.g., Joe Rogan, Call Her Daddy, etc.) don’t fit traditional “safe” definitions. What’s your perspective on applying “legacy” brand safety views to podcasts? Should we be thinking more about suitability here? Will this be a bigger issue as more inventory becomes programmatically available?
I don’t think one is a substitute for the other as they do different things. If you have a predominantly creator-led, high-engagement, high-influence medium and wish to attract large-scale non-endemic advertisers, you should expect to comply with their brand safety requirements. There has been considerable progress in this area, in my view, which suitability—exposing more inventory via brand alignment—can support. Safety will generally remove some inventory from the pool; suitability adds it.
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Thanks to PK for joining us. Stay tuned for more insights from the leaders shaping adtech in our 5 Questions series.
Have a suggestion for who we should feature next? Let us know on X!
