Data-driven media is mostly a lie. The knowledge is already there, unused. Closing that gap should be an everyday reflex.

What drew McLaughlin in was human behaviour, the idea that we can be influenced by anything, and the childhood question of what did and didn't influence him and the people around him. That kept him asking why some things resonate and why others turn us off. His break came early: at a company that today would be called a tech startup, the CEO and chairman had no desk for him, so they shared one, giving McLaughlin a front row seat to running a business day to day. Most of it didn't make sense then, and he says it's still slowly unravelling now.

The holdcos and indies told McLaughlin that less than 3 per cent of the media they buy is informed by any form of first-party data. The industry has called itself data-driven for decades, and he says critically that's a lie. It's broken, and when he asked why, the answer was a deadly cocktail of data privacy, data security, and the faff of getting data to media, the cost and the time.

The data and technology, he argues, is almost always there. He rejects the constant whining about the state of the data, what his co-founder Matt calls a data readiness inferiority complex, given decades of investment in cloud and warehousing. Nobody should be buying more technology. More acutely it's people, attitude and focus, and the fix is commercial: how do you monetise and get value from the data assets you already own.

The gaps in client data are occasionally real but mostly perceived. On identity, McLaughlin points out that any company sending emails to customers already has a beautiful source of first-party identity in its CRM team. On richness, he calls the chase for a 360-degree view a fallacy and worse, creepy. An insurer should own a narrow but rich view into risk, an airline a deep view into travel, and neither should expect to know the rest of a person.

Having a single customer view is one thing, doing something with it is another. McLaughlin calls it a special kind of stupid to have all the information and choose not to use it, and describes the failure plainly: the permission and the knowledge are there, and they go unused. Data and analytics is wonderful and long established, he says, and it's sad the industry has gone decades with all that intelligence and failed to bring it to media.

You have to respect the consumer, legally and even more ethically. Pushing data to third parties they've never heard of is deeply problematic and part of why the figure sits at 3 per cent. So the data must stay with the organisation the consumer entrusted it to, with the advertiser, publisher or data vendor remaining the only owner and processor.

It's also the rampant cost, McLaughlin says. Onboarding and identity offerings have come at gigantic cost, which is sad when the data owners already have permission from the consumer. Why should they be taxed just to get their own data to media. The industry, in his view, always needed to evolve to something better.

McLaughlin says his firm mostly doesn't fix client data, because warehousing from Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery has already delivered better data sets than ever. The move is organisational: when the CTO has funded the warehouse, it's time for the CMO to be a stakeholder of the CTO. Every time the CMO talks about infusing the media plan with first-party data, the CTO's office supports it, and the millions already spent are justified by serving a marquee stakeholder. He points to Saga CMO Hannah Fisher as the model: vision and creativity in marketing, married to a best friend in data and technology.

The Snowflake partnership is also a product launch: AUDIENCES is now an application inside Snowflake, so with a single click any of its thousands of clients can run the capability natively in their warehouse. Because the data already lives in those tables, McLaughlin says the privacy and security concerns are unlocked and the data goes to work without a three, six or nine-month implementation, tortured procurement or new technology to learn. Experian, which he calls the premier owner of identity and consumer signals, has chosen AUDIENCES as, in his words, "their onboarding and activation partner".

Ask a CMO and they'll say they have a first-party data strategy, and they probably had one 10 years ago too. McLaughlin's worry is that it stays strategic when it should be tactical. They should have a first-party data-fuelled media plan being put to work daily, quarterly and annually, because search, social, programmatic, out-of-home, audio, CTV and TV are all better when infused with what they know about the consumer. The risk is it gets dressed up as a project when it should be a reflex.

To McLaughlin, strategy sounds like something slow and expensive, and he prefers fast and valuable. The point of bringing capability to where the data already lives is in-quarter impact: when a CMO is talking about a current plan and acquisition targets, the tool can deliver on them right now.

McLaughlin would never have founded alone. Choosing co-founder Matt Wilkinson from day zero meant he was never completely on his own, though it still felt like us against the world for an idea they knew was right but the industry hadn't taken yet. He is emphatic that the initial hires, exceptional people willing to grow up alongside the company, matter enormously. There's founding lore that none of them is equipped to be a complete individual contributor on a mission this hard, so the answer is always to get round a table. It's a people business, and he says they must never forget it.

AUDIENCES entered at enterprise level from the start, because the concept is best proven where an advertiser has a lot of data and a lot of media spend. That meant the first version had to be full alpha, engineered properly from the start, because you can't put unfinished technology into an enterprise's infrastructure. McLaughlin's earlier company, Loop Horizon, grew to around 6 million and exited via a management buyout, following his most formative years at Sky as head of data across buy and sell side. The big lesson: services can be incredible training wheels for software, because 15 to 20 near-identical client projects show you exactly where to build a product that's faster and more profitable.

McLaughlin is romantic and optimistic about founding, and insists founders aren't a different animal. Setting up the fundamentals of a business takes 15 minutes, and the UK has always been a hotbed of entrepreneurship, with open banking and a limited company you can form in a snap. People lose perspective, he says, that the rest of the world is not that free.

He runs the company despite what he calls government actions against founders and growth companies, while still believing in the NHS and the safety net, which he says need financing. When North American clients pay AUDIENCES, that money enters the UK economy, and people like him should do more of it. At Cannes, bros keep telling him to move to Dubai for zero tax. He's staying, arguing an idea like AUDIENCES could never have come from any other country, a uniquely British perspective built on GDPR in and out of Europe and close ties to North America.

McLaughlin sees more optimism and a willingness to act and build than last year, with North American teams arriving larger and more open, ready to do business. But he notes the industry is no longer talking about sustainability or human rights the way it did, which he puts down to political environments on both sides of the Atlantic. He offers it as an observation. His warning to the industry is against complacency: we slap ourselves on the back when the economy's easy, and we're better than that, because the industry can still grow even when the economies it works within are not.

For someone starting out, McLaughlin offers ingredients. He studied politics, found it hard to purpose, and spent a year as an estate agent learning sales and pipeline, which he loved. He advises going in open-minded and being useful to people building businesses, and he is dismissive of the influencers on Instagram and LinkedIn, pointing to the less glamorous people doing the work.