Audyence Appoints VP of Customer Experience to Lead CX Strategy

What happened

Audyence, a B2B audience-targeting and media platform, has appointed Horst Carreño-Bauer as its new Vice President of Customer Experience. The hire signals a deliberate move by the company to elevate post-sale client engagement as a strategic priority alongside its product and sales functions.

Carreño-Bauer steps into the role as Audyence continues to scale its platform, which connects B2B marketers with targeted professional audiences. The VP appointment places customer experience formally within the senior leadership structure, rather than treating it as a subset of sales or support operations.

Why it matters

For organisations in data-driven or programmatic marketing technology — a sector where switching costs are relatively low and differentiation on product features alone is increasingly difficult — the deliberate elevation of a CX leader to the VP tier sends a clear structural signal. It reflects a broader industry recognition that retention, advocacy and lifetime value are won or lost in the experience layer, not solely at the point of sale.

From a service-design perspective, embedding a dedicated CX executive at the leadership table changes how trade-offs get made. Decisions about onboarding flows, client communication cadences and product roadmap prioritisation are more likely to be evaluated through the lens of the customer's journey when someone with that explicit mandate has a seat in the room.

The Renascence take

Leadership appointments in CX tend to attract polite applause and little scrutiny — but the real question is never the hire itself, it is the organisational authority that comes with the title.

A VP of Customer Experience with a seat at the leadership table is structurally different from a senior manager relabelled for optics. The behavioral economics principle at play is straightforward: the incentives and metrics that a CX leader is held accountable to will determine whether the role reshapes the business or merely reports on it. Customer-obsessed operators should look past the announcement and ask two questions — does this person control budget, and do they have veto power over decisions that create friction? If the answer to both is yes, the appointment is meaningful. If not, it is reputational signalling dressed as structural change.