audience-engagement
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The Company That Taught Radio to Talk Back
Futuri spent a decade helping radio stations listen to their audiences. Then it built a robot that could do the talking - and pointed the same AI at the ad-sales desk.
Tom Clendenin Has Spent a Career Making Complicated Media Feel Clear
From ESPN extensions and retail brands to CNBC’s data-dense screens and the launch of MS NOW, Tom Clendenin has built a career around one practical idea: clarity earns attention.
Maestro
Maestro is a Los Angeles-based interactive video and live streaming platform that lets brands, creators, and rights holders build their own direct-to-consumer streaming destinations. Instead of renting an audience on someone else's platform, Maestro customers own the experience end to end - custom branded sites, interactive overlays (chat, polls, tip jars), and built-in monetization through ticketing, subscriptions, live shopping, and tips, while keeping their data and most of their revenue. Founded in 2015 by Ari Evans, the company powers streams for names like Billie Eilish, the Grammys, Coachella, Fortnite/Epic Games, and Microsoft.
Dan Albritton
Dan Albritton is the CEO and co-founder of Megaphone TV, the company he calls the world's first Participation Entertainment Studio. Trained as a biomedical engineer at Columbia and as an interaction designer at NYU's ITP, he works in the seam between television production and game design - building the live polls, trivia, contests, and interactive on-air graphics that let viewers tap their phones and steer a broadcast in real time. Before Megaphone he co-founded iminlikewithyou, the studio that became OMGPOP and was later acquired by Zynga. Megaphone TV has earned an Emmy Award and multiple nominations, and its software appears in 24 of the top 25 US broadcast markets and on streamers worldwide.
OpenWeb
OpenWeb is a social engagement and monetization platform that helps publishers own the conversation on their own sites instead of renting their audiences to social networks. Founded in Israel in 2015 as Spot.IM and now headquartered in New York, it pairs comment sections, live blogs and polls with AI moderation and in-conversation advertising. The company works with 5,000+ publishers, reaches more than 150 million monthly active users, and reached a $1.5B valuation after a $170M Series F in 2022.
Jim Daily
Jim Daily is the CEO of OpenWeb, the audience-engagement and conversation platform for digital publishers. He took the top job on April 1, 2025, arriving after almost a decade scaling Teads in North America from a standing start to roughly $275 million in annual revenue, and after a detour founding LinksDAO, a golf-community venture he grew to $11 million in ten months. A Boston University hospitality grad turned adtech operator, Daily is the rare media leader who pairs go-to-market discipline with a near-religious belief that healthier online conversation is good business and good for society.
Arena
Arena is a San Francisco-based audience engagement platform that turns publishers' and brands' own websites into social-network-like communities. Through live blogs, group chats, comments, AI-powered content feeds and audience analytics, Arena helps over 20,000 organizations - including Fox Sports - keep readers on-site, collect first-party data and monetize attention they used to give away to social platforms.
Paulo Martins
Paulo Martins is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Arena (arena.im), a San Francisco-based AI-powered community engagement platform that lets brands embed live chat, live blogs, and audience interaction tools directly on their own websites with a single line of code. After stints at NASA, Ubisoft, and Hulu — where he helped grow the streaming company from 100K to 7 million paying subscribers — Martins founded Arena in 2017 with a clear thesis: businesses should own their audience, not rent it from social platforms. By 2022, Arena had grown to 25,000 customers across 150 countries and closed a $13.6M Series A led by CRV, with backing from heavyweights like David Sacks, Des Traynor, and Olivier Pomel.