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Wayne Reuvers is a seasoned entrepreneur and innovator with deep expertise in developing and launching software solutions for the creative and marketing industries. As Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of LiveTechnology Holdings, he has positioned the company as a leader in marketing automation, versioning, and customization, particularly through the LiveRetail platform. Wayne serves on the advisory boards of African Angels Network, Health at Work, Solomomo, ENG8, and Gearbrain, and holds board positions at five companies. He has founded seven companies, invested in nine, and raised over $35 million in capital. Wayne has successfully exited six subsidiaries, having created over $110 million in wealth for the investors. A South African-born, Irish-Dutch American, Wayne is an accomplished engineer, software inventor, and investor. At age 14, he developed and sold his first software, Graph-It, a technical analysis tool for the stock market. He pioneered derivative modeling software, created a high-speed fingerprint matching algorithm, and launched groundbreaking technologies, including the first web-pixel tracking system (LiveStat), a web programming language (LSML), and a high-transaction object-oriented database (LiveOODB). Currently, he is driving innovation in AI-driven marketing automation (LiveRetail) and personal cloud solutions (LiveStuff).

Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of LiveTechnology Holdings, Wayne Reuvers, was interviewed by Donovan Neale-May, Founder and Executive Director of the CMO Council, on the evolution of LiveTechnology. LiveRetail is a SaaS platform that automates the creation and management of hyper-targeted, on-brand localized ads for multi-location brands, franchises, and retailers. Its CreativeMatrix technology generates personalized, localized digital assets at scale, ensuring brand compliance while driving engagement, traffic, and sales. LiveRetail simplifies local marketing with pre-built, customizable content, integrated social media posting, and advanced targeting tools, helping businesses achieve up to 3X sales growth without increasing budgets.

CMO COUNCIL: How did LiveTechnology evolve from digital search and customer aftermarket experience to hyper-localized digital ad creation, campaign/content management, social media audience targeting, and high-performance demand generation?

REUVERS: After years of experience in automating the ad production for industries like Banking, Automotive, Real Estate, Insurance, Hospitality and more, we sold LivePlatform to Microsoft. Contractual obligations required us to step back from the industry for a few years, giving us time to observe market trends. We realized that while we had solved a major challenge—rendering localized creative at scale—no one had integrated the full process of ad creation, media buying, targeting, and measurement. When COVID-19 forced us to close our corporate park, I retreated to my island in the Bahamas with time to reinvent what the market needed. This led to LiveRetail, an end-to-end platform that seamlessly connects content and data to create ads, purchase media, target audiences, and aggregate results. Today, LiveRetail is the only platform that streamlines all five critical steps to build, deploy, and measure localized, on-brand advertising.

CMO COUNCIL: In what way is LiveRetail’s end-to-end, digital advertising platform massively scaling and transforming the automated creation and delivery of localized, hyper-targeted advertising through all media and digital channels?

REUVERS: Many large companies with retail locations focus digital and social media advertising on driving e-commerce sales, overlooking that only 17.7% of retail sales occur online; the rest are in-store. We discovered that localizing ads to physical stores boosts ad performance by 2–3x, leveraging the power of proximity (location, location, location). This approach also redirects a brand’s shopper marketing and trade funds—often spent on platforms like Amazon—back to in-store promotions. The challenge is creating ads for hundreds of brands and thousands of stores, a task that would take humans 350,000 hours. LiveRetail’s automated platform accomplishes this in just three hours, streamlining production and delivery across all channels.

CMO COUNCIL: Where and how are retailers and supplier brands moving from costly print and mail promotion to lower cost, intent and interest-based digital ad/deal delivery for in-the-moment marketing?

REUVERS: LiveRetail enables brands to create localized marketing assets that are on-brand, relevant, and personalized for each location. Holding companies and brands using the platform include Unilever (Axe), Keybank, Century21, Nissan, Jeep, Kia Motors, Five Guys (Quick Service Restaurant), JD Sports, Inscape, Take Five Hard Seltzer, Fishaways, Cicis Pizza, and Ancient Nutrition (and hundreds more). As a channel-agnostic platform, LiveRetail localizes, targets, and optimizes ads across multiple channels—social media, addressable TV, direct mail, digital display, and more. This flexibility allows brands to shift spending from one channel to a higher performing one in minutes, maximizing efficiency and impact

CMO COUNCIL: What are the high-velocity, adaptive marketing and ROI benefits underlying LiveRetail’s end-to-end digital advertising platform for multi-location, hyper-targeted promotional marketing?

REUVERS: Shopper marketing, marketing development funds (MDF), trade funds, and co-op advertising represent the largest portion of ad spend. Localizing these to specific retailers and stores delivers over twice the performance of national advertising and is fully measurable down to the stock keeping unit (SKU) sale in a store. LiveRetail transforms retailers’ reactive weekly ads into proactive, dynamic campaigns that drive traffic and unlock a lost revenue stream. Brands see significant value in reaching customers in their local markets through trusted retailers, a game-changing approach that works across industries. For example, auto dealerships target vehicle shoppers based on their inventory and incentives, banks promote services through local branches, and industries like real estate, quick-service/dine-in restaurants, insurance, and other multi-location retail and consumer services benefit from hyper-targeted campaigns.

CMO COUNCIL: How is this enabling better use and accountability of marketing development funds (MDF), as well as brand integrity, compliance and cooperation with field, franchise and dealer networks?

REUVERS: Brands traditionally allocated MDF and shopper marketing budgets to weekly ad inserts, but as these shifted to website links, they became reactive, diverting funds to platforms like Amazon. Recognizing that 82.3% of retail sales still occur in physical stores, LiveRetail empowers retailers to launch a Local Social Retail Media Network in just four days, recapturing these funds and driving in-store traffic. In the auto industry, for instance, fewer than 10% of dealerships utilized available co-op funds due to high costs and complex processes, often spending more on agency fees than the funds provided. LiveRetail reverses this with ready-to-run, co-op-compliant campaigns where co-op funds partially cover media costs. By eliminating ad production costs, campaigns can be optimized by channel, item, audience, and messaging—unachievable with traditional agency models. Franchisees benefit from ready-to-run campaigns activated in two clicks, simply by selecting a media budget.

CMO COUNCIL: How are you incorporating GenAI technology to remove human intervention from the process of digital asset selection and production of creative advertising media outputs, libraries and portfolios for all localized media needs, formats and requirements?

REUVERS: LiveRetail integrates with multiple AI platforms, including OpenAI, Gemini, Grok 3, ElevenLabs, Hume.ai, and others, onboarding new engines in under four working days. Our AI-agnostic approach allows brands and retailers to select the best tools for tasks like voice-overs in over-the-top (OTT) ads, offer overlays in digital displays, audience targeting optimizations, and results analysis. By operating at scale, we transform AI—which can be complex and time-consuming—into a streamlined, scalable solution tailored to specific needs. Brands no longer face the challenge of choosing and integrating providers; they simply activate LiveRetail and achieve immediate ROI.

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