The serial entrepreneur who decided B2B advertising should stop guessing at audiences and start reaching the actual people who sign the deal.
Dmitri Lisitski runs Influ2, a New York company built on a stubborn conviction: in B2B, you are never really selling to a company. You are selling to a handful of specific people inside it - the seven or eight who read the memo, sit in the meeting and eventually put a name to the purchase order.
Influ2 calls the approach person-based marketing, and Lisitski is widely credited with naming the category. Where account-based marketing aims a message at an organization, Influ2 lets a marketer reach named individuals with ads and then watch exactly who engages. The platform has grown from that single idea into what the company now describes as an end-to-end revenue marketing platform, one designed to prove marketing's impact in real revenue numbers rather than soft impressions.
It is a precise answer to a question that, by his own account, nagged him for a decade. Lisitski likes precision. He studied cybernetics before he studied marketing, and both instincts run through the way he talks about advertising - part behavioral data, part media buyer's eye for who is actually paying attention.
We offer something that no one else does and are currently creating a new category - person-based marketing.
Before Influ2, Lisitski helped build an IT services company - the business associated with what grew into GlobalLogic, later acquired by Hitachi for $9.6 billion. By most measures it was a triumph. But it left him uneasy for an unusual reason.
The company, he has said, succeeded almost entirely on the strength of its sales team. Marketing barely moved the needle. For a founder who had spent his early career buying media for consumer giants like Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and McDonald's, that was a puzzle worth chewing on. If marketing could power a soft-drink brand, why was it so weak in B2B?
The answer arrived in 2016 at a Demandbase conference on account-based marketing. Lisitski loved the premise - target the accounts that matter - but felt the technology behind it was far too blunt to deliver on the promise. So he built his own, and pushed the precision down from the account to the person.
Along the way he collected an unusually academic toolkit for an ad-tech founder: a cybernetics background from Kyiv, and Executive MBAs from both Columbia Business School and London Business School. He is candid that formal education only takes a founder so far - business school, he notes, teaches you to run large organizations, while startups make you break most of those rules.
Media buyer in consumer advertising for FMCG brands including P&G, Coca-Cola and McDonald's.
Co-founds BonusTec, an IT services venture tied to the business that became GlobalLogic - later acquired by Hitachi for $9.6B.
Serves as CEO of United Online Ventures.
Leads All.biz as CEO; later works as Global Head of Delivery & Services at Gett.
A Demandbase ABM conference crystallizes years of frustration. Co-founds Influ2 to make targeting precise at the level of the individual.
Raises an $8M Series A, part of $14M+ total funding, to scale person-based marketing.
Grows Influ2 into an end-to-end revenue marketing platform focused on tying advertising to measurable revenue.
Lisitski is openly critical of the industry that made him. He returns often to the old marketing lament - that half the money spent on advertising is wasted - and treats it not as a joke but as a design flaw worth fixing. His argument is that people don't actually hate advertising; they hate irrelevant advertising. Precision, in his telling, is good for everyone: the advertiser gets real return, the buyer sees only messages that matter.
The bet behind Influ2 is bigger than a single product. Lisitski wants person-based marketing to become the standard way B2B companies advertise - replacing anonymous audience targeting with named, measurable engagement of the specific decision-makers who close deals.
That means proving marketing's worth in the language executives respect: revenue. Influ2's stated principles read like a founder's operating creed - hone marketing innovation, measure value in real numbers, move fast on new ideas, and remain precise in everything. The last one is the tell. For a founder who came up through cybernetics and media buying, precision isn't a feature. It's the whole point.
His advice to younger marketers carries the same steadiness he applies to himself: be curious, keep learning, and never forget there's a human on the other side of the ad.
He started out buying advertising for household names like Coca-Cola, P&G and McDonald's before turning fully to B2B.
He holds not one but two Executive MBAs - from Columbia and London Business School.
His academic roots are in cybernetics, studied at Kyiv National University.
He is often credited with coining and popularizing the term person-based marketing.
He was part of the early business that grew into GlobalLogic, later sold to Hitachi for $9.6 billion.
Dmitri Lisitski on the key to successful B2B targeting, in an interview for UME UP.
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