MarketCast’s New Guard Bets on AI to Solve Ad Effectiveness

CULVER CITY, CA – December 11, 2025 – In the high-stakes world of advertising, proving what works has long been the industry’s most elusive goal. Marketers are awash in data yet starved for clarity, navigating a fragmented landscape where creative brilliance and media spend exist in separate, often disconnected, universes. This week, advertising effectiveness firm MarketCast signaled its intent to solve that puzzle, not with a minor adjustment, but with a fundamental strategic overhaul, installing a new C-suite and teasing its most ambitious product to date.

The announcement of Lana Busignani as Chief Executive Officer, Paul Shortley as Chief Revenue Officer, and Kerel Cooper as Chief Marketing Officer is far more than a standard leadership refresh. It's a calculated assembly of talent designed to accelerate the company’s pivot from a respected research firm into an AI-powered, predictive intelligence powerhouse. This move, backed by private equity firm Kohlberg & Company, is a direct response to an industry crying out for accountability and a unified view of advertising performance.

A New C-Suite with a Singular Mission

To understand MarketCast's future, one must first analyze the strategic DNA of its new leadership. The appointments are not siloed hires but a cohesive unit, each member bringing a critical piece of the puzzle needed to build and sell the next generation of ad measurement tools.

Lana Busignani, taking the helm as CEO, brings a career steeped in the science of measurement from industry giants like NielsenIQ and IPSOS. Her expertise is in media and marketing effectiveness, the very core of MarketCast's business. Her mandate is clear: to steer the company’s deep-rooted research heritage towards real-time, predictive analytics. "Marketers are facing unprecedented pressure to prove what’s working, and MarketCast is uniquely positioned to answer that," Busignani stated, framing the challenge her team is built to address. Her vision to "accelerate our shift into real-time, predictive analytics" is the central pillar of this new era.

Supporting this vision is Paul Shortley as CRO, a veteran of driving commercial growth at firms like Nielsen, Sensor Tower, and Relo Metrics. His background is not just in sales, but in scaling revenue for technology and analytics platforms, including those powered by AI. Shortley understands the challenge from the client's perspective, noting that the industry is "hungry for solutions that connect creative performance to actual business outcomes." His role will be to translate MarketCast's complex technological ambitions into tangible value for enterprise brands, a crucial link between product innovation and market adoption.

Rounding out the trio is Kerel Cooper as CMO, an award-winning executive from the front lines of ad tech at companies like GumGum and LiveIntent. Cooper’s expertise lies in modernizing marketing and articulating the value of complex technologies to a skeptical market. His task is to craft the narrative for MarketCast’s evolution, moving its brand perception from a legacy research provider to a forward-looking technology leader. "Today’s marketers need clarity, speed, and actionable intelligence," Cooper commented, "and MarketCast is building the products that deliver exactly that."

The Promise of 'Total Effect': A Unified View of Performance

The centerpiece of this strategic overhaul is "Total Effect," an AI-enabled platform slated for a 2026 launch. The company is billing it as a breakthrough solution designed to finally bridge the chasm between creative quality, media exposure, and tangible business results. For decades, marketers have relied on a patchwork of tools: one for testing creative resonance, another for tracking media placement, and yet another for measuring brand lift or sales. The result is a fractured view that makes it nearly impossible to determine how a specific creative element, seen on a particular channel, influenced a consumer's decision to buy.

MarketCast aims to change this by creating a single, predictive framework. "Total Effect" promises to ingest and analyze a vast array of signals—creative quality, audience exposure, attention metrics, behavioral data, and business outcomes—within one AI-powered system. The goal is to provide a unified score that clarifies the full impact of an ad campaign.

This is not a simple undertaking. It relies on leveraging MarketCast’s decades of historical data from testing ad creative and measuring media performance. This proprietary database serves as the training ground for its AI models, which the company claims will allow it to predict performance outcomes with greater accuracy. For clients, the promise is the ability to optimize campaigns not after the fact, but earlier and with more confidence, linking ad exposure directly to brand impact and sales lift in a way that has remained largely theoretical for many brands.

Betting on Integration in a Crowded AI Field

MarketCast is not entering an empty arena. The ad tech landscape is saturated with companies promising AI-powered salvation. Competitors range from platforms that use AI to generate ad creatives to sophisticated analytics tools that optimize media buying in real time. However, many of these solutions focus on a specific slice of the advertising pie. One tool might perfect the creative, while another optimizes its delivery, but the two rarely speak the same language.

MarketCast's strategic wager is that its differentiator lies in unification. By positioning "Total Effect" as a system that "seamlessly integrates creative and media performance with outcomes," it is aiming for a higher ground in the market. The company is betting that exhausted CMOs would rather have one comprehensive dashboard that tells the whole story than five specialized ones that offer only chapters.

The credibility to pull this off comes from its deep roots in both creative and media measurement. Unlike a pure-play tech startup, MarketCast has a long-standing reputation and a vast dataset built on human-centric research. The firm's existing "Audience AI™" methodology, which uses survey data to train AI models on human reactions, underscores its philosophy of using AI to amplify, not replace, human insight. This human-centered approach could be a key advantage in a field often criticized for its "black box" algorithms. As Paul Shortley noted, MarketCast is "one of the few companies with the data, technology, and credibility to do it."

The new leadership, the ambitious product roadmap, and the clear market need set the stage for a significant transformation. The journey to the 2026 launch of "Total Effect" will be a critical period of execution for Busignani, Shortley, and Cooper. Their success will depend on their ability to integrate complex technologies, educate a demanding market, and ultimately deliver on the long-held promise of proving, with clarity and confidence, the total effect of advertising.