RPA has spent more than 40 years earning something that monolithic holding companies can’t buy: Client relationships built on respect and consistently delivered results.
The largest independent agency in the western United States counts automotive, retail, CPG, travel, and financial services companies among its long-term customers.
Some of those relationships span decades.
Keeping those relationships means showing value continuously, not just at the end of a campaign. “Our standard is to prove ongoing business impact to our clients, beyond simple media KPIs,” says Dr. Amina Asim, Vice President and Director of Audience Intelligence, whose team sits at the intersection of first-party data strategy, media investment guidance, and AI adoption. “That’s not something that’s a one-time deliverable; it’s something we just never stop doing.”
Resonate has played a central role in supporting the Audience Intelligence practice across all RPA brands for more than four years.
Before Resonate, audience profiles were derived from cumbersome annual or biannual surveys that were meant to represent a broad national population.
But Asim and her team knew the limitations of this data. “User behaviors are evolving constantly, and many of our campaigns work on shorter cycles or shift seasonally, so recency matters.”
Resonate was able to address this limitation with a combination of data scale, depth, and refresh velocity that provides:
Being able to enrich actual first-party customer data with so many attributes is a total game changer. To know what personal values drive your customer’s purchase decisions or how they spend their days, that’s very deep insight.
Dr. Amina Asim, Vice President and Director of Audience Intelligence, RPA
The depth of customer intelligence delivered actionable insights for RPA’s clients, but the agency recognized an opportunity to improve the velocity of delivery, as well.
RPA joined the early access program for Resonate Cortex, Resonate’s agentic marketing platform powered by proprietary predictive consumer intelligence. For Campbell Green, Supervisor on the Audience Intelligence team, the primary use case for Cortex was clear: compressing audience definition from days to hours.
A typical audience strategy cycle ran two weeks or more. Much of that time went to audience definition: reconciling third-party research with first-party data, drafting target descriptions, building persona decks, and getting internal alignment before a campaign was even fully planned. Cortex helped Green and the team accelerate the process.
Most hurdles in this process revolved around pulling data multiple times if a new audience was needed. And if a definition needed to be changed later in the process, that meant we were essentially back to square one.
Campbell Green, Audience Insights Supervisor, RPA
– Audience definition compressed to one day
– Multiple audience options generated in seconds from a plain-language brief
– Refinements made interactively in minutes, not days
– Clean handoff to Resonate Ignite for deep insights work — no rebuilding, no reformatting
“Cortex helped us ideate multiple audience targets in a matter of seconds, and allowed us to refine those definitions in minutes,” says Green. “We can also use Cortex to generate variations that we can work with or tweak interactively.” This shift has allowed Green’s team to move away from assembly work and focus on real analysis that clients can actually see.
Resonate gives us the confidence to rely on it for guiding internal teams, driving media strategy and investment, and serving our clients. That confidence is key.
Dr. Amina Asim, Vice President and Director of Audience Intelligence, RPA
RPA will continue to explore practical use cases for Cortex over the next 6–12 months that include:
Dr. Amina Asim sees the connection between insights and activation as the key step. When the audience a team identifies in Cortex flows directly into Ignite for deeper analysis and then into activation, their clients see continuous results faster.
