Francesco D’Orazio, founder of audience intelligence platform Pulsar, joins the latest episode of Marketing B2B Tech to share his journey from studying the internet’s impact on society to founding Pulsar, a company that helps brands understand how people engage online.
He dives into the challenges of navigating the fragmented media landscape and how AI has become a crucial tool for analysing diverse data sources. Francesco also emphasises the importance of understanding narratives and public perception to uncover deeper insights about audience beliefs and behaviours.
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About Pulsar
Pulsar is the world’s leading audience intelligence platform, harnessing rich data sets, AI and human minds, so clients can access nuanced and actionable insights that get straight to what matters most to their customers, their businesses and to society.
Time Stamps
00:00:18 – Guest Introduction: Francesco D’Orazio of Pulsar
00:00:42 – Francesco’s Career Journey
00:01:57 – The Rise and Fall of Virtual Worlds
00:05:40 – Overview of Pulsar
00:06:04 – Understanding Audience and Narrative Intelligence
00:10:11 – B2B vs. B2C Audience Engagement
00:15:06 – AI’s Role in Data Analysis
00:16:22 – Forecasting Trends with Audience Data
00:20:01 – Best Practices for Utilizing Audience Listening Data
00:25:09 – Valuable Marketing Advice Received
00:27:15 – Outro and Contact Information
Quotes
“The thing that most companies get wrong is that they go with the one platform fits all approach in terms of how they communicate on these different channels.” Francesco D’Orazio, founder of Pulsar.
“What AI has done is give us incredibly flexible tools for analysing data in a way that before was quite complex and required a lot of training or specific machine learning models.” Francesco D’Orazio, founder of Pulsar.
“Different communities look at the same topic and brand in very different ways. So, your message should be aligned on how these messages are articulated by the different communities in an audience.” Francesco D’Orazio, founder of Pulsar.
Follow Francesco:
Francesco D’Orazio on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francescodorazio/
Pulsar’s website: https://www.pulsarplatform.com/
Pulsar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pulsar-platform/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Transcript: Interview with Francesco D’Orazio at Pulsar
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Francesco D’Orazio
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Francesco D’Orazio. Francesco founded a company called Pulsar. Welcome to the show, Francesco. Thanks for having me, Mike. It’s great to be here. It’s great to have you on. We always like to start by allowing guests to introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about their career history. So tell us a little bit about what you’ve done and what led you to found Pulsar.
Francesco: Yeah, so I was lucky enough to be at Uni at the time where the web was becoming a thing. I think I started my Uni degree in 1997. And at that time, the internet was starting to blow up and it was starting to emerge as a major force in the media space. And so I started to apply what I was learning to the internet and I got into trying to understand how societies and culture is kind of like what’s developing on the internet. And actually one of the first things that I studied was how rumours spread online through forums and blogs and all of that. And that got me into that space of trying to understand what are the kind of like narratives and the trends that are emerging on the web. But then I got into an academic path. I did my PhD in social science and I did half of that in Italy and half in Canada. and while i was doing that i developed this appetite for building tech solutions related to what i was studying and so i decided to make the leap from academia and i founded the first startup which was a bad marketing company in 2004 so applying that idea of rumours to to the web and turning into an online community where people could connect with brands and organizations and influence the way they shape, the way they design products and campaigns. With that company, I then moved on to a virtual world company. So I created like an online social network for avatars, which got quite a lot of press because you could create profiles for avatars instead of humans. And that was at the time when Second Life was really big and you were just trying to connect. what happens on the web, what happens on inside virtual worlds, which were quite kind of like isolated environments at the time. And then after that, I thought, like, I’m going to take a break and get a job. And so I got a job at an innovation consultancy called Face. And within a year, year and a half in that job, the job was literally trying to understand how we can bring millions of people that are sharing opinions on the web within an innovation funnel and how we can use that insight to build better products. And within a year and a half of doing that, I built a bunch of tools with a team that then became Pulsar. And then Pulsar effectively then swallowed the agency and then it became the company that it is today.
Mike: Wow, so, I mean, there’s a lot there. I think the first thing I’ve got to ask you, and this intrigues me, because when Second Life was big, I thought it was really exciting, it was going to change the world. We’ve not really done this whole avatar meeting, and we’re now looking at basically pictures of people’s faces on Teams all the time. Why do you think that virtual environment never took off?
Francesco: Well, I think it did take off, but it did take off in a different shape than the way we imagined it. I’m saying this because I was there when it happened. So what happened with virtual worlds, the 3D environments were there before social media was there. What happened in 2004, 2005, 2006 is that social media started to get real time. So the benefit that you would get from being in an environment where you could interact with people in real time through chat rooms that ended up having 3D environment, got completely outweighed by being able to be on a web page and seeing someone commenting live in response to what you were just posting. And so that real-time nature of the second wave of social media after Web2, basically, is what cannibalized completely 3D online environments. And we’ve been trying to get back to that immersive dream for the last 50 years, really. And this is what my PhD was about. There’s been this kind of focus on trying to reach his promised land of immersive media that has been going in waves since effectively the 60s and then the 80s when you had cyberspace and Neuromancer and the whole side of kind of like a a science fiction dedicated to cyberpunk and that kind of like envisioning an inhabitable information space effectively. And then you started to get the waves of that going into iMac cinemas, the gaming experiences like the Nintendo gaming experiences, all of those consoles that promise the more immersive world until you get to, you know, the last wave is what happened with Meta really. with the metaverse, which actually was just a reincarnation of a previous wave. The metaverse term was coined in the 90s and was part of that kind of like second wave of the back of cyberspace where you started to see this 3D world. So I think the reason why it hasn’t taken off to answer to kind of like a short point is that it’s not convenient enough. the value of the clunkiness of a 3D environment interaction is just not outweigh the value of what we’re getting from video and what we’re getting from real-time textual communication on the web. So why bother? Convenience trumps anything. And that’s why AI is successful also right now. It’s convenient. Convenient for images, for text, for insights, for anything.
Mike: That’s fascinating. That’s a really simple explanation of what I think was a very complicated phenomenon. Obviously, people are still fighting to get us into the metaverse, not least meta. Anyway, let’s move back to talk about Pulsar because I think that’s what’s really interesting. So, you talked about creating Pulsar in your role and that ultimately swallowing the business and becoming the business. So, what does Pulsar do?
Francesco: So Pulsar is an audience and narrative intelligence company, which means that we try and understand where the audience is at in relation to a brand, a topic, a product or something that is happening in society. And then we help organizations craft messages that matter to those audiences based on what we know about those audiences. It’s a way of baking the audience at the core of anything organizations do and you know this has been a mantra for a long time but what we’ve seen over the last 30-40 years is this kind of like tsunami of audience engagement that has kind of like broken into every space of life that used to be quite confined and quite sanitized You know, crypto is one of the latest evolutions of that where you get like the audience breaking into the world of finance as a force that finance has never seen before in terms of like outsider input. And so the tools that you deal with that have been changing over the last 100 years. You know, you start having like surveys and statistics in the I mean, kind of like in the 30s and 40s and trying to understand what people thought about the war and policies. And you started to optimize the machine in the 50s and in the 60s. But really, it’s when you start getting this real time signal from the audience with the web that the game has really shifted massively, both in positive and in negative terms. And so it was quite interesting for me to be as a Gen Xer at the intersection of that, because I grew up in a world without the Internet. And then I became an adult in a world that was completely engulfed by the internet, so I still find it fascinating. For my kids and for people that are like even just like five, ten years younger than me, that’s like not interesting at all, it is what it is. But I still see the difference and that it’s fascinating how rumours spread, how public opinion shifts and the changes that we’ve seen in the last, even in the last two years is insane.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. It’s really exciting. And a lot of organizations really care about what’s happening and understanding what’s happening with their audiences. Could you give us perhaps some examples of the kind of companies or organizations that make use of Pulsar and how you help them?
Francesco: Yes, there’s a baseline use case, which is social listening and media intelligence, which is effectively understanding what people are saying and what the media is saying about a specific topic. Now, the way you use that can vary differently depending on how advanced the organization is. Let’s say at the bottom of the pyramid there are the companies that are just trying to not be caught off guard and so they just monitoring things and they say something crops up that they should be reacting to if you start moving up the ladder you start seeing people using that for example for customer experience and so they want to improve the way their products are perceived or their products are designed or delivered and they want to know what they should be focusing on. So we provide the best real-time signal for people to understand what they’re doing wrong and what they’re doing right. If you go another level up, you can start seeing companies using this data for planning their strategy. they start looking at where’s the white space, how do we enter this category, what kind of messaging we should be using and how is it working in relation to what competitors are doing. Is there a gap that we should enter? Is there an opportunity that we should take? And then if you start going up, there’s like top levels that are companies that are using these in, in predictive ways. So you’ll be, you want to spot what kind of like narratives or cultural trends are happening in public opinion or in culture and try and pre-empt how your organization should be positioning itself or react to those to be able to capitalize on those trends or just simply being in tune with where the audience is at. Effectively, what we see ourselves as a machine for tuning your organization to what the zeitgeist is in the audience.
Mike: And I think that’s interesting. And I want to dig in a little bit later into a little bit more about how you help these companies. Most of the audience listening to this podcast is going to be in the B2B sector. And traditionally, it’s been consumer or governments or public sector, or maybe even third sector that have been really switched on about understanding trends and understanding what’s happening with audiences. And arguably, B2B has been a little bit behind. Do you agree with that? And then do you see B2B companies using Pulsar to really understand their audience?
Francesco: Yeah b2b is as crucial for us as the consumer audience and so the types of company use us, it is true that I’ve been historically behind a couple of things happen in the space first of all, the veil has been completely torn in terms of, Who is the audience of B2B? And the assumption is not that the audience of B2B is people, like it is consumers for B2C companies. So you should start treating that audience as you treat the consumers that you’re focusing for B2C campaigns. And you need to think of that audience in terms of cultural affinities, in terms of emotions, in terms of behaviours, in terms of brand. It does not require a completely different playbook because you’re talking to humans. On top of that, yes, you can then deploy specific strategies that are related to B2B. And those strategies range from educating customers to providing actionable insights on their category. So there are many, many ways that you can make yourself useful. But the starting point is that you want to be as focused on humans as you are when you’re working on a B2C campaign. And I think that also helps in the world of AI because that is the major opportunities that all brands are going to have now when most companies are going to implement or are implementing already AI in a way that makes their tone of voice drown in a sea of sameness. And if you maintain your distinctive, authentic tone and you have a clear understanding of who the audience is, you’re just going to do easily much better than the average because everybody else is going to default to the basics.
Mike: That’s really interesting and I think it’s a really good point that B2B needs to actually catch up. I guess one of the things that probably intimidates a lot of people when they start looking at these kind of projects to understand and listen to audiences is just the volume of places you can go and look. Not necessarily always the volume of content, but there’s so many social channels, you know, and you’re obviously within Pulsar monitoring a wide range of different sources. How do you get the balance right? How do you simplify down what the audience is saying from all these different places?
Francesco: Yeah, so first of all, I think we’ve got into a new phase of what the media ecosystem used to look like even just five years ago. You know, when I started this business, the focus was on maybe like four or five platforms and the audience would be congregating in numbers that make those platforms relevant to you in those four or five avenues. And, you know, you wouldn’t have to think about those. And, you know, that would be in terms of like advertising, but in terms of community engagement in terms of strategies. It’s a simpler world in a way, and it’s also a simpler world to generate insights off the back of that. Today, we have this kind of like post platform world where the fragmentation that has been introduced has completely blown up the playbook for most of the social media strategy that was in place even just five years ago. And now you have the ability to see so many different aspects of your audience through all these different platforms. And the thing that most companies get still wrong is that they go with one platform fit or approach in terms of how do they communicate on these different channels. And the game is always and will always be to be where your audience is and to be specific to the value of that specific platform where the audience is engaging in a specific way. and to not make it about yourself really, to make it about the audience and then look at how you exist in the world of the audience and not how the audience exists in your world. In terms of us trying to make sense of those platforms, I mean obviously I feel like we had a gentle ramp in terms of trying to standardize data from hundreds of different data sources and now we’ve got thousands and actually in some cases like millions when you look at like news organizations and you look at more traditional media sources. So that fragmentation that exists today it’s something that we are well trained to cope with. I think that the major changes in this space have been the change of formats that has introduced a lot of complexity in terms of introducing like audio platforms, image platforms, video platforms and different types of formats within those as well so the short form content the fact that you have text overlays on most videos so all of that means that i think if ai didn’t exist today we would be in a very different place in terms of like how we can understand that because what ai has done is given us incredibly flexible tools for analysing data in a way that before was quite complex and required a lot of training or specific machine learning models. But today with AI we can do video transcriptions, we can describe what’s in an image, we can transcribe an audio discussion, and we can extract insights from visuals by doing OCR on an image and understanding if an affiliate marketing code has been shared in a video, for example, and we can use that for attribution. So the use cases are really huge because the formats of the engagement from customers in these different communities are really diverse and if you can actually deploy your techniques for analysing that data in effective ways, the signals are incredible, like incredibly rich. We run a lot of work on integrating traditional data sources like survey data, for example, for reputation management and social media data and news analysis. And what we see is that when you create a framework where you can analyse both data sources, the surveys, for example, on how stakeholders are perceiving your brand and discussions that you see on social and on the news about your brand, the signal we get from social news usually anticipates the signal we get from a survey by about six months. And so you effectively get a warning shot for what’s to come when you see the dip in the brand tracker, for example, from survey data, and you traditionally didn’t know what caused that dip because you didn’t know what question you should have been asking at that point. What we do is that you can go back almost with a time machine and explain that dip with what you can see in the social data. And that adds a whole new level of complexity and opportunity in the strategy.
Mike: I think that’s really important what you said there, that some of the signals you see on social effectively forecast how attitudes as a whole are going to change. So presumably, you’re maybe seeing a minority of your customers raising issues on social, that can be picked up early, that’s not necessarily seen in a survey. But it’s the start of a trend. Is that basically what you’re saying? Or is it something different?
Francesco: Yeah, it’s that, but it’s also that the ability is on trying to understand how pervasive and prominent the signal is, and trying to have the right algorithms to make an educated bet on how big it’s going to grow. We released recently this new protocol, Narratives AI. The idea is exactly that, is can we spot the early signals in culture to try and understand how an issue, a brand or something is perceived by the media or by the public and identify a direction of travel, but also put a quantitative number on it so that you know how much of the overall perception of that brand is constituted by that specific narrative and how is that narrative evolving over time. And if you spot the trend, where is it going to go next? What you should be doing? And what we’re trying to do is move away from very productive ways of managing reputation and managing brands using indicators like sentiment, for example. If you think about how rudimentary sentiment is, even today that sentiment gets to a 97, 98% accuracy when you use LLMs to run sentiment and apply a lot of context to the analysis of sentiment, which is what we do now. Even with that, what you’re getting is, is this conversation positive or negative and in relation to what? Fine, but what is that telling you? Not telling you anything other than a kind of like a symptom, but you’re not going to get to the root of what is causing that perception and why things are going to go next because of that. So what we’re trying to do is spot the narratives and we like the idea of narratives because those are the stories that we tell ourselves and our peers to make sense of the world. And those narratives reveal the deep-seated beliefs that people have about a topic or a brand or an issue. And when you unveil those beliefs, what you have is effectively a roadmap to behaviour. You go, because people believe this thing, we know that in the next six months, this is going to happen. There’s different ways of deploying that insight. Like if you look at the narratives in the media, you can either assume that if the narratives in the media are not present in the public, you might see those narratives in the media as potentially shaping something that might appear in the public. Or if you see narratives in the media that have some kind of ego in the public, you consider the media is actually leveraging some of that zeitgeist and bringing it into their platforms to generate more audience traction and engagement and reflecting what society is doing. So either way, what you get is a nice dynamic between the audience and the media and how these narratives are born and whether some are becoming forces for culture to be shaped by, or some are just going to die. The battle we’re fighting here is to try and make this data available to as many people as possible and not make it specific to the specialists. We obviously have data people, we have researchers, but this is basically the lifeblood of the community. So if you make this information available to everyone, marketing, politics, everything is going to get so much better, so much faster, so much more effective because it’s going to be showing this connection between the audience and the organizations. And that’s really what we want to do.
Mike: That’s fascinating. I think one of the questions has got to be, you talk about the potential for people to get faster and more effective. What do great companies do to make use of their audience listening data? Are they always constantly changing course? Or are they building big strategies? You know, is there kind of a high level approach that people can use to take this kind of data and really improve their overall organizational performance?
Francesco: I think there’s an element for flexibility and as a case for consistency. To start from consistency, because that’s who you are and what you believe. And people like to know where people stand. As humans, we do not trust people that we don’t know where they stand. We don’t trust people that change stance on things too often. So consistency is key and that’s why I think this is the golden age of brand. Like we have come out of a world where performance marketing was eating budgets and actually even the separation between performance marketing and brand marketing was completely fictitious. What you see today is because of the nature of the media ecosystem that we’re involved in, brand really is where the game is at, and so consistency and staying true to yourself is key to make it. As a byproduct of that, authenticity is obviously the currency that everybody’s looking for when trying to engage with an organization or leadership or anything that has a public profile. And this is also connected to the way we see the advertising and the engagement funnels evolving. Like a lot of people have been starting to talk about a zero-click world. A zero-click world being a world where we’re kind of like moving away from an economy of attention based on getting you to click onto something and go to a specific page. And we’re actually going into a world where the answers are available to you through systems that give you what you’re looking for instead of pointing you to a page, which obviously changes completely the way marketing is done. So the other dynamic alongside this is that the platforms that we used to lean on for generating those clicks and generating that traffic are actually holding that traffic now and trying to keep you in the platform. And this is true for the social media platform but it’s also true for search engines trying to provide you with answers thanks to AI instead of sending you to some links. And it’s also better for us because we want the information we don’t want to be sent to a specific page. So when that whole thing changes What you left with is a reliance on optimizing for impressions and reach and focusing people’s attention on who you are and then leaving it to them to come to you when they’re ready, rather than trying to funnel them into a specific route for traffic that delivers a specific conversion. And so, I’m excited because this golden age of brand means that we are going to be in a much more creative space where the people that don’t take shortcuts using, for example, slop AI messaging and things like that, they’re going to be easily standing out and do interesting things. And we’re entering a world where execution is becoming trivial, but that doesn’t mean that creativity is trivial. That simply means that Executing something becomes a lot easier than it was before and a lot cheaper than it was before, but that means that direction is going to become crucial. And so what do you shape that execution as? The idea behind it is going to become the differentiating value, not the budget that you have to produce something, which I think is also very exciting and it aligns really well with this brand shift.
Mike: I think that’s a super positive message to leave it on. The fact that whilst execution may become easier, the creativity and the direction is potentially going to become harder. And that’s where we as humans add value. Francesca, I really appreciate your time. Before I let you go, there’s a couple of questions we always like to ask our guests. So the first one is, what’s the best piece of marketing advice you’ve ever been given?
Francesco: Well I think for me it’s always been about focusing on the audience first and everything else flows from that. And the thing that has become a mantra for me has been something that we learned from Netflix actually 10 years ago. We were going to them to show them how we could analyse the discussions about a TV show and how we could look at the audience of that specific TV show. And the response to them was like, this is interesting, but we don’t really care about your audience of a TV show. Within each TV show, there are multiple audiences and each TV show thinks about the same TV show in very different ways. And that kind of like made me think about what we do. And it became the mantra of actually what Pulsar does, which is that different communities look at the same topic and brand in very different ways. So your message should be aligned to how these messages articulated by the different communities in an audience rather than trying to reach them with a single message. And so using the audience as a prism. is the best marketing advice that I’ve been given by Netflix, which set us on course to become an interesting company doing interesting stuff. This was like back in 2016.
Mike: Wow, that’s great. That’s fascinating. The other thing we like to ask people is if you’re talking to someone who’s maybe just graduated from university looking to start their career in marketing, what advice would you give them about achieving a great career in marketing?
Francesco: Be curious, be curious in terms of audiences, because that’s where everything starts. So I got into this because I was into music and music is a great school for understanding audiences because each artist has his own audience and his own community. So understanding that allows you to decide who you should be booking for an event. And that’s a superpower. So be curious about audiences, be curious about technology and be curious about creativity. And these are the three kind of like assets that you need in this game and if you are good at understanding audiences, understanding creativity and understanding technology, I think it’s going to be a smashing success.
Mike: Fantastic. Francesco, it’s been amazing. We’ve talked, it feels like, about quite a lot, but it seems like there’s so much more we could cover. If people want to find out more or perhaps learn more about Pulsar, what’s the best way to do that?
Francesco: They can check out the website, pulsarplatform.com, P-U-L-S-A-R platform.com, or they can just email me, name.lastname at pulsarplatform.com.
Mike: And I think you also have a podcast as well talking about some of these issues too.
Francesco: We do have a podcast, thanks for reminding me. Podcast is called Audiences and it’s a podcast where I ask three simple questions for every episode. So every episode is an audience and it’s focused on one audience and we invite a guest and we get the guest to tell us who’s the audience of Wrestling, who’s the audience of Tesla, who’s the audience of AI tell us how their audience has been evolving over the last five to 10 years and tell us where is their audience evolving next. We wanted to create like a podcast to spotlight the opposite of what normally gets spotlight. Most podcasts focus on the content, the thing that is being produced. We wanted to focus on the people that are consuming that content, that are consuming those products.
Mike: That sounds fascinating. Definitely a podcast to add to my listen list. Francesco, thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Francesco: Thanks for having me.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favourite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
