In a significant move poised to redefine the operational backbone of business-to-business digital advertising, the San Francisco-based marketing technology firm Channel99 has officially launched a new dynamic audiences functionality designed to automate and intelligently orchestrate campaign targeting. Announced on December 11, 2025, this powerful new feature automates the creation, activation, and continuous management of B2B target audiences across a wide array of major digital advertising platforms, including LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and YouTube. The company, founded by account-based marketing (ABM) pioneer Chris Golec, who previously established the category-defining company Demandbase, positions this innovation as a direct solution to the pervasive financial inefficiencies and operational complexities that have long challenged modern B2B marketers. This new capability is powered by a sophisticated, AI-driven decision engine that empowers marketing professionals to construct highly detailed target account lists and deploy them seamlessly to multiple channels through an intuitive single-click activation process, fundamentally shifting the paradigm from manual execution to automated, strategic management.
Solving the Fragmentation Crisis in B2B Marketing
The Manual Workflow Dilemma
The fundamental challenge that Channel99 aims to solve is the deeply fragmented and labor-intensive nature of contemporary B2B campaign management, a reality that has forced marketers into a cycle of inefficiency and strategic compromise. For years, the standard procedure has involved a cumbersome and disjointed manual workflow that drains valuable resources and severely stifles agility. This outdated process begins with building target account lists within a CRM or marketing automation platform, a task that in itself can be complex. From there, marketers must export these lists as static files, typically in a CSV format. The next step involves individually navigating to the separate audience managers of each advertising platform—such as LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads Manager—and manually uploading these files. This repetitive sequence must be performed for every single campaign and for every channel being utilized, creating a significant operational bottleneck that consumes countless hours of marketing operations teams’ time. This method is not only incredibly time-consuming but is also highly susceptible to significant human errors, data formatting issues, and critical synchronization failures, which ultimately lead to inconsistent targeting, audience decay, and wasted advertising spend.
The consequences of this reliance on a manual, static process extend far beyond simple inefficiency, directly impacting campaign performance and the ability to adapt to market dynamics. A critical pain point emerges the moment an account’s status changes within the sales funnel. For instance, when a prospect graduates from a middle-funnel engagement stage to become a late-stage, high-priority opportunity, or when a deal is successfully closed, the targeting strategy for that account must be adjusted immediately. In the traditional workflow, this requires a marketing operations professional to manually identify the change, update the source list, re-export the file, and then re-upload the revised list to every single advertising platform. This lag time means that high-value opportunities might not receive the appropriate bottom-of-funnel messaging in a timely manner, while closed-won customers may continue to see ads intended for prospects, resulting in a poor customer experience and squandered budget. These synchronization failures lead to a persistent state of outdated audience data across platforms, undermining the very foundation of precision targeting and personalization that modern B2B marketing strives to achieve.
The Automation Revolution
Channel99’s dynamic audiences functionality introduces an automation revolution engineered to completely dismantle these antiquated manual workflows. The platform directly addresses the core issues of data fragmentation and audience staleness by establishing a single, dynamic source of truth for all account data. Instead of relying on a patchwork of disconnected static lists, marketers can now build their audiences within the Channel99 interface, which maintains a persistent, real-time connection to both their internal systems, like their CRM, and the APIs of the external advertising platforms. When an audience is created and activated, the system automatically distributes the corresponding account data to all selected channels. More importantly, it continuously monitors the source data for any changes. This means that when an account’s status is updated in the CRM—whether it moves to a new sales stage, increases its intent score, or becomes a customer—Channel99 immediately detects the change and synchronizes the update across every connected ad platform automatically. This process entirely eliminates the need for manual file exports and uploads, freeing marketing teams from the relentless cycle of list management.
The tangible benefits of this comprehensive automation extend far beyond saving time, fundamentally elevating the strategic capabilities of the entire marketing organization. By ensuring that audiences are always synchronized and up-to-date across the entire advertising ecosystem, the platform drastically improves the accuracy and relevance of ad targeting. This leads to higher engagement rates, better conversion performance, and a significant reduction in wasted ad spend. With the operational burden of list management lifted, marketing operations professionals can reallocate their focus from tedious, repetitive tasks to more strategic initiatives, such as analyzing campaign performance, optimizing creative content, and refining segmentation strategies. This shift allows teams to become more agile and responsive, capable of launching and modifying complex, multi-channel campaigns with unprecedented speed and precision. The platform’s automation serves not just as a tool for efficiency, but as a catalyst for a more sophisticated and impactful approach to B2B advertising, where technology handles the tactical execution, allowing humans to concentrate on high-level strategy and growth.
The AI-Powered Strategic Engine
Beyond Automation to Intelligence
While the automation of audience management is a significant leap forward, the true innovation at the heart of Channel99’s new functionality is its AI-powered decision engine, which moves the platform beyond simple execution to become a strategic advisor. This intelligent core provides data-backed, prescriptive recommendations designed to optimize both campaign performance and the allocation of marketing budgets. This directly confronts a common dilemma for B2B marketers: determining the most effective channel mix for a specific audience and campaign objective. “Leveraging AI to recommend which channels make the most sense for a particular audience and desired outcome eliminates a lot of the financial inefficiency that exists in B2B today,” stated founder Chris Golec in the announcement. The engine is designed to end the guesswork and assumption-based planning that often dictates channel strategy, replacing it with machine learning-driven insights that guide marketers toward the highest-potential pathways for engagement and conversion.
The system’s intelligence is not a black box; it is fueled by a comprehensive analysis of a rich and varied set of data inputs. The AI engine continuously processes a multitude of signals, including detailed firmographic and technographic attributes of the target accounts, historical performance data from past campaigns across all connected channels, real-time intent signals from third-party providers, and the specific objectives defined for the current campaign. By synthesizing these diverse data points, the AI can predict which platforms are most likely to yield the best results for a given audience segment. For example, it might determine that a top-of-funnel awareness campaign for enterprise tech companies is best suited for LinkedIn, while a mid-funnel consideration campaign targeting small businesses with high intent scores would perform better on Google Search. This level of granular, data-driven recommendation empowers marketers to move from a reactive, trial-and-error approach to a proactive, predictive model of channel strategy, ensuring that their investments are directed with maximum precision and efficacy from the outset.
Data-Driven Channel Optimization
This intelligent guidance provided by the AI engine is particularly crucial in the current digital advertising landscape, where platform effectiveness can vary dramatically depending on the target audience and industry. The platform’s recommendations are not based on abstract theories but are grounded in concrete performance metrics. For example, recent benchmarks from September 2025 cited by the company illustrate this disparity clearly, showing LinkedIn delivering an impressive 113% return on ad spend (ROAS), a figure that significantly outperforms Google Search at 78% and Meta at a mere 29%. Channel99’s AI is engineered to ingest and incorporate these types of performance differentials directly into its activation strategies. When a marketer activates a new audience, the system doesn’t just push the list to all channels equally; it analyzes the audience composition and campaign goals and suggests an optimal distribution. This ensures that high-value accounts—those with the greatest revenue potential or strategic importance—are prioritized on the platforms where they are most likely to engage and ultimately convert, maximizing the impact of every marketing dollar spent.
The broader impact of this AI-driven channel optimization is a fundamental improvement in marketing ROI and overall program efficiency. By systematically directing budget toward the highest-performing channels for each specific audience segment, the platform helps organizations avoid the common pitfall of spreading their resources too thinly across underperforming platforms. This intelligent allocation is dynamic, capable of adapting over time as the AI learns from new campaign performance data and evolving market trends. This creates a powerful feedback loop: the platform recommends a channel mix, executes the campaign, measures the results, and then uses that new performance data to refine its future recommendations. This continuous learning process ensures that a company’s media strategy becomes progressively smarter and more efficient over time. It transforms channel planning from a quarterly or annual strategic exercise into a real-time, data-driven operational function that is constantly aligned with achieving the best possible business outcomes.
A Unified Account-Centric View
Aggregating Disparate Signals
The profound intelligence of the Channel99 platform is fueled by its sophisticated ability to aggregate and unify a wide array of disparate engagement signals into a single, cohesive, account-level view. To achieve this, the platform integrates deeply with a company’s core marketing and sales technology stack. It connects directly to the company’s website to capture first-party engagement data, links with CRM systems like Salesforce to access pipeline and revenue information, and plugs into third-party intent data providers such as G2 to identify accounts actively researching relevant solutions. By pulling together these varied data streams, the system constructs a holistic and multi-dimensional picture of each target account’s activity, interests, and position in the buying journey. This unified view is a critical departure from the siloed data environments that typically characterize B2B marketing, where website analytics, CRM data, and ad platform metrics exist in separate, disconnected worlds.
This unified, account-centric approach represents a crucial distinction from the vast majority of consumer-focused marketing platforms, which are fundamentally designed to track the behavior of individual users or cookies. In the complex world of B2B sales, purchasing decisions are rarely made by a single person. Instead, they are made by buying committees, which, according to research from LinkedIn, can be composed of six to ten or more individuals, each with a different role and level of influence. A platform that only tracks individual leads will fail to see the larger picture of an organization’s collective interest. Channel99’s proprietary account identification technology is specifically designed to overcome this challenge. It intelligently recognizes when multiple people from the same organization are interacting with marketing content across different channels—whether on the website, social media, or through display ads—and clusters all of this activity at the company level. By treating the entire organization as the central entity, the platform provides marketers with a true understanding of an account’s overall engagement, rather than a fragmented view of disconnected individual leads.
Enabling Funnel-Based Segmentation
The power of this consolidated, account-centric view is fully realized through the platform’s ability to enable marketers to create highly sophisticated, funnel-based segmentation rules that are both powerful and dynamic. With a complete picture of each account’s journey, users can easily configure distinct programs tailored to different stages of the sales cycle. For instance, they can build top-of-funnel audiences designed to connect brand investments with early-stage lead generation, targeting a wide net of accounts based on firmographics and low-level intent signals. Further down the funnel, they can create middle-of-funnel lists to accelerate pipeline growth, focusing on accounts where the buying committee has shown significant engagement and is actively being nurtured by the sales team. Finally, they can construct precise bottom-of-funnel segments to target key decision-makers within specific, active sales opportunities, delivering highly personalized messaging to help close deals. This level of strategic segmentation allows for a far more nuanced and effective application of marketing resources than traditional, one-size-fits-all approaches.
A key advantage of this system is that the segmentation remains fluid and automated, adapting in real time to the natural progression of accounts through the buying journey. As an organization moves from an initial stage of awareness to active consideration and finally to a purchase decision, its engagement signals and CRM status will change. Channel99 continuously monitors these changes and ensures that the account’s membership in various audience segments is updated automatically and instantly across the entire advertising channel ecosystem. An account that was part of a top-of-funnel campaign last week could seamlessly be moved into a middle-funnel retargeting audience this week without any manual intervention from the marketing team. This dynamic capability ensures that the advertising messaging and intensity always remain relevant to an account’s current relationship with the company, preventing message fatigue and maximizing the impact of every ad impression. It transforms audience management from a static, periodic task into a continuous, intelligent process that mirrors the true, non-linear B2B customer journey.
A New Infrastructure for B2B Marketing
The launch of this AI-driven functionality represented more than just a new feature; it signaled the emergence of a new foundational infrastructure for B2B digital marketing. The platform’s ambitious expansion roadmap, which included planned integrations for G2, TechTarget, The TradeDesk, and Reddit by the end of 2025, reflected a deep understanding of the broadening and increasingly complex B2B media landscape. This strategic vision, coupled with the backing of prominent investors like Jackson Square Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners, positioned the company to fundamentally redefine how B2B marketing is executed. The technology successfully transformed what had long been a series of manual, disconnected tasks into a fully automated, intelligent, and measurable system. It addressed the core industry challenges of proving ROI and managing operational complexity, providing a unified orchestration layer that bridged the gap between brand investment and pipeline generation. This innovation ultimately provided B2B marketers with the tools they had long needed to operate with the same level of data-driven precision and agility previously seen only in the most advanced consumer marketing organizations.
