Foundry (an IDG, Inc. company), the leading B2B media and martech provider, announced today the launch of the company’s proprietary intent data product, Foundry Intent, marking the company’s first major release since it acquired data and martech companies LeadSift, KickFire, Triblio, and Selling Simplified.
Built upon Foundry’s existing Neon ABM data infrastructure and its history of strong IT audience and activation, the contact-level intent capability brings together KickFire and LeadSift data capture technologies and machine learning to enhance and expand the company’s knowledge graph across all technology verticals, and offers a more comprehensive view of intent to tech marketers looking to understand and respond to buyers’ individual needs efficiently and at scale.
Building a digital and analog view of buyer intent from the contact level up
Unique to other intent solutions on the market, Foundry Intent unifies real-time signals from a variety of sources – including Foundry’s owned and operated network of award-winning editorial sites, marketers’ own website data, social platforms and sites across the public web, as well as non-digital signals from Foundry’s 800+ annual events – to deliver a high-fidelity source of B2B buyer intent within a single platform.
“Until now,” said Foundry President Kumaran Ramanathan, “the intent market has offered points of view from a single category of data source, and marketers have been left to aggregate and standardize account-level data in hopes of constructing their own insights. The market has signaled that bid stream data and cookies are too limited both in the scope and detail needed to reach an actionable and accurate view of the buyer journey. Our solution in Foundry Intent is to forgo these types of subjective datapoints and instead create a robust view of the buyer journey built entirely of concrete, multi-channel signals from the contact level up.”
The product aims to support B2B marketers as the technology buyer journey becomes increasingly dispersed, by consolidating and scoring varied signals for a single, actionable view of both account- and buyer-level intent.
“Buying decisions are increasingly complex with more ways to buy, places to look, and stakeholders to involve than ever before,” continued Ramanathan. “By applying artificial intelligence to our consolidated data from places where the majority of buyers are active – pre-form fill – we’re erasing a critical blind spot and enabling efficient marketing by painting a more vigorous and accurate picture of contact- and account-level intent.”
Over the past several months, Foundry has conducted beta sessions with select clients to demo the product’s features and leverage its insights in their own marketing efforts.
“I’m very impressed with the depth of data we can get to, moving past just intent data against particular topics and starting to build up a qualitative and quantitative picture of what is happening within an account,” said Emily Birt, Client Partner at Merkle B2B EMEA.
“I’m very impressed with the depth of data we can get to, moving past just intent data against particular topics and starting to build up a qualitative and quantitative picture of what is happening within an account,” said Emily Birt, Client Partner at Merkle B2B EMEA. “The Foundry Intent platform has also enabled us to solve audience sizing questions for clients based on company profiles vs. firmographic data, which has been invaluable to our strategy team and gives us an edge over standard B2B tools.”
Bringing visibility and orchestration together seamlessly
With the release of Foundry Intent comes a new interface which offers a streamlined and comprehensive view of real-time buyer intent and enables orchestration at both the contact and account level, while adhering strictly to data compliance regulations such as the GDPR and comparable standards around the globe.
Foundry Intent data can be dynamically activated for advertising, outbound, prioritization and personalization in existing marketing and sales processes or via Foundry solutions such as advertising, events, demand, and ABM orchestration for all data and activation in one place. Additionally, with seamless integration into marketers’ CRM and automation tools, Foundry Intent algorithms uncover relevant leads who demonstrate real-time purchase intent to make the outreach and sales follow-up processes more relevant and timely.
Looking ahead to a more integrated model of B2B marketing
Rebranding from IDG Communications to Foundry earlier this year, the company is evolving its longtime status as the world’s largest technology publisher to become a media- and data-enabled leader in the martech space.
“We’re entering an era where marketing and technology communicate consistently and dynamically, establishing the foundation for activation that speaks directly to buyers’ needs,” said Ramanathan. “The introduction of Foundry Intent is the intuitive next step to more actionable intent data to power that activation.”
While Foundry Intent marks the first release following a season of acquisitions, Ramanathan notes that upcoming product releases will fold in Triblio and Selling Simplified features alongside Foundry Intent as part of a martech suite designed for a more holistic and integrated model of B2B marketing. “In bringing together the best of our owned and acquired technologies, we will continue to innovate and help our customers build and execute on their upper pipeline,” said Ramanathan.
Foundry Intent data will be exclusively available through Foundry direct sales and via the Triblio platform.
About Foundry, an IDG, Inc. company
Foundry has played a key role in every major milestone, announcement, and development in modern technology since 1964. Today, Foundry continues to lead in the technology space by helping companies bring their visions to reality through a combination of media, marketing technologies and proprietary data. Our technology platforms of Triblio, Selling Simplified, KickFire and LeadSift are powered by data from an owned and operated ecosystem of global editorial brands, awards, and events, all engineered and integrated to drive marketing campaigns for technology companies. Foundry is dedicated to generating and innovating with data, driving demand for technology marketers with 38 offices in markets around the globe. Foundry is a wholly owned subsidiary of International Data Group, Inc. (IDG), the world’s leading market intelligence and demand generation company focused on the technology industry.