Jeremy Barnett, RAD Intel Co-Founder & CEO: “By introducing AI-driven feedback earlier in marketing and operational workflows, RAD Intel helps teams refine messaging, improve execution, and measure with more discipline before production is finalized or dollars are spent.”

Marketing has never moved faster. Campaigns launch in minutes, creator partnerships scale overnight, and media budgets can shift with a few clicks. Yet the decisions behind those campaigns often move far slower. Teams still rely on lagging reports, scattered tools, and instinct to determine what message will resonate, which audience matters most, and where a campaign should actually live. That gap between speed and certainty is exactly what led RAD Intel to take shape.

Co-founded by Jeremy Barnett and Bradley Silver, the company emerged from a simple observation that marketing execution had become incredibly fast, but marketing decision-making had not kept pace. Brands could spin up ads, influencer collaborations, and content strategies almost instantly. What remained difficult was knowing what to say, who it would resonate with, and how to distribute it in a way that produced consistent results rather than occasional wins.

Barnett and Silver saw organizations making high-stakes marketing decisions using fragmented data and surface-level metrics. Engagement numbers looked good on dashboards, but they rarely explained why something worked or how to repeat it. The founders believed the real opportunity was not another reporting tool or media platform. It was rebuilding the decision layer that sits underneath modern marketing.

RAD Intel was designed as that layer. The AI-driven platform connects real audience behavior with creative strategy and distribution planning, helping teams understand which ideas are most likely to resonate before campaigns go live. Over time, those insights compound. As brands run more campaigns through the system, the intelligence grows stronger, turning past performance into guidance for future decisions.

The company’s origin reflects that same mindset. RAD Intel took shape during the global disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Barnett and Silver merged RAD Intel with the content intelligence company Atomic Reach without ever meeting face-to-face. No conference rooms, no handshakes—just Zoom calls and a shared conviction about where marketing was heading.

From the beginning, the founders built RAD Intel around a single idea: if marketing decisions could become faster, more accountable, and consistently repeatable, brands would gain a lasting advantage in an unpredictable market.

Today, RAD Intel operates as an AI marketing holding company and the intelligence platform behind a growing portfolio of operating businesses. It defines the long-term roadmap, establishes governance standards, and ensures the predictive technology powering its ecosystem evolves consistently as the portfolio expands.

In conversation with Jeremy Barnett, Co-Founder & CEO of RAD Intel

Your core offering is the proprietary RAD Score, which powers your Audience Insights, Influencer Discovery, and Content Optimization tools. What makes this AI-driven score more predictive of real-world consumer action than traditional marketing metrics?

Content production has scaled dramatically, but confidence in what will resonate has not.

Brands can launch quickly across paid and creator channels, but determining what will resonate and where it will land remains inconsistent. Many teams still rely on historical engagement reports to guide forward-looking investment.

The RAD Score introduces structure to that gap. It connects audience behavior, creator alignment, and content performance into a measurable framework that informs decisions before campaigns scale.

In a fragmented digital environment, alignment drives efficiency. The RAD Score gives teams a system for improving performance through better decisions, not simply larger budgets.

Your Influencer Discovery Tool analyzes over 24.9 million influencers across factors like tone, sentiment, and audience demographics. How does removing human bias from influencer selection lead to more authentic partnerships and demonstrably better ROI for your clients?

Influencer selection has historically been driven by what’s familiar. The names you’ve seen before. The creators with the biggest follower counts. The trends that are already obvious. That’s where bias creeps in, and where “good on paper” partnerships quietly underperform.

RAD Intel replaces that guesswork with structured intelligence.

Our platform integrates proprietary datasets, platform signals, and brand-specific inputs across structured and unstructured data. A typical campaign can incorporate hundreds of data sources and billions of behavioral signals to evaluate creator fit.

We’re asking so much more than who looks right. We’re quantifying everything, and ultimately, alignment.

The models evaluate subject-matter depth, tone, sentiment patterns, audience demographics, engagement behavior, and historical content performance to identify creators who naturally belong inside the communities a brand is trying to earn.

When selection is driven by alignment instead of perception, the work reads as native. Audience trust increases. Media efficiency improves. Performance becomes more repeatable.

The Content Optimizer, powered by Adobe, evaluates factors like emotion, memorability, and virality. How does giving creators this level of granular, AI-driven feedback change the creative process and increase content certainty?

Creative teams have traditionally relied on instinct and post-launch data to evaluate performance. That often results in longer revision cycles and internal debate.

By introducing predictive feedback during development, RAD Intel enables teams to validate ideas earlier. Messaging, tone, structure, and emphasis can be adjusted before production is finalized or budgets are deployed.

This shifts risk upstream. Decisions become clearer. Creative discussions become more focused. The path from concept to launch becomes more efficient.

The result is disciplined creativity, supported by measurable audience insight.

Beyond software, you offer end-to-end managed services with a team of specialists. How does RAD Intel's "hands-on-keyboard" philosophy and AI advantage allow you to build custom service models that avoid the "bloated teams" of traditional agencies?

RAD Intel was built to keep intelligence and execution in the same room.

In a traditional agency model, research, strategy, analytics, and activation often sit in separate layers. Work moves through handoffs. Timelines stretch. Teams grow to manage the complexity, not to improve outcomes.

Our “hands-on-keyboard” model works differently. The intelligence layer handles much of the analysis and signal processing, so specialists spend their time making decisions and deploying work in-market rather than assembling reports or presentations.

Instead of staffing large teams by default, we assemble small specialist groups aligned to specific objectives and iterate from live audience insight as performance data emerges.

The result is a lean execution model designed for clarity and accountability. Structure supports performance. Headcount does not drive the model.

What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

RAD Intel is an AI marketing holding company focused on scaling its intelligence platform through specialized operating businesses.

RAD Amplify serves enterprise brands and agencies through managed execution and strategy, while Lickly brings the same intelligence layer to mid-market teams through a self-serve platform designed for faster deployment. Both operate under dedicated leadership while sharing a common technology foundation and governance model.

Looking ahead, RAD Intel stays centered on disciplined growth: strengthen the intelligence layer, expand only where the shared system gets better, and keep tight accountability as scale increases. RAD Intel is intentionally building a holding company where every operating business both contributes to and benefits from a shared AI-driven decision layer, so that as that core gets smarter, every company in the portfolio becomes stronger.

Jeremy Barnett, Co-Founder & CEO

“In a fragmented digital environment, alignment drives efficiency. The RAD Score gives teams a system for improving performance through better decisions, not simply larger budgets.”