Anthony Kennada

Who is Anthony Kennada?

Anthony Kennada is the co-founder and CEO of AudiencePlus, a company built around the conviction that owned media is the most durable go-to-market strategy available to modern B2B companies. A marketer by trade who became an operator, Kennada has spent his career arguing that the discipline of building a direct relationship with an audience — rather than renting attention through paid channels and third-party platforms — is what separates the companies that compound from those that stall. At SaaStock USA 2023 he framed this not as a tactic but as a thesis, telling the room he wanted to convince them that owned media was "the number one strategy for navigating the next several seasons of our market."

Kennada is best known to the SaaS community for his earlier work helping define and popularize the Customer Success category, an experience that shaped his instinct for category creation and narrative-driven marketing. That background informs everything he now builds at AudiencePlus: the belief that great marketing is less about chasing leads and more about earning a standing audience that trusts you enough to keep coming back. His SaaStock talk, "How to Build, Engage and Monetize an Owned Audience," walks through that full arc — from making the business case for owned media to the practical mechanics of turning attention into revenue.

This page collects Anthony Kennada's recorded SaaStock talk along with its transcript, so founders and marketing leaders can study his owned-media playbook in his own words.

About AudiencePlus

AudiencePlus is an owned-media platform built for B2B marketers who want to own their audience rather than rent it. The company exists to operationalize the very thesis Kennada presents on stage: that the channels most marketers have been trained to optimize — paid acquisition, social platforms, search algorithms they don't control — are increasingly expensive and unreliable, while a direct, owned relationship with an audience compounds in value over time.

In his SaaStock USA 2023 talk, Kennada positions owned media as the textbook concept that has been underused in practice, and AudiencePlus as the infrastructure to finally do it well. Rather than treating content as a one-off campaign or a blog nobody maintains, the platform is designed to help companies build a persistent destination, engage an audience over multiple "seasons" of the market, and ultimately monetize that attention.

The themes Kennada surfaces — building, engaging, and monetizing an owned audience — map directly to the problems AudiencePlus is built to solve. His pitch is that owned media is no longer a nice-to-have content play but a core go-to-market strategy, and that the companies who internalize this now will be the ones still growing when paid channels tighten.

Key lessons from Anthony Kennada's talks

Owned media is a strategy, not a side project. Kennada's central argument at SaaStock is that owned media has been treated as a textbook idea rather than a primary go-to-market motion. He urges marketers to elevate it to the number one strategy for the years ahead, reframing content and audience-building from a supporting tactic into the foundation of how a company reaches its market.

Make the business case before the creative case. Rather than opening with content ideas, Kennada deliberately starts with why owned media is relevant in 2023 — the economics and market conditions that make renting attention riskier. The lesson for operators is to justify owned media on business terms first, so it earns budget and executive buy-in instead of being dismissed as a brand luxury.

Build, engage, and monetize in sequence. The structure of Kennada's talk — and his framework — is a deliberate progression: first build an owned audience, then engage it consistently, then monetize it. Skipping straight to monetization fails because there is no trust or attention to convert. The discipline is in doing the unglamorous building and engaging work that makes monetization possible.

Lean on category-creation instincts. Drawing on his roots popularizing Customer Success, Kennada treats owned media as a narrative to be championed, not just a channel to be filled. The takeaway is that marketers should approach their audience the way a category creator approaches a market: with a clear point of view that people want to follow.