Randy Cairns

Why trust matters

Most of Randy's career was spent on the other side of the table from marketers — and what he saw wasn't encouraging. Campaign reviews that started with the conclusion. Reports built to confirm, not to question. Too often, the goal wasn't to learn what happened — it was to justify what was already decided.

When he met Brian at American Enterprise over two decades ago, something was different. Brian was the agency — the party with the most incentive to make the campaign look good — and yet he wasn't trying to prove it worked. He was trying to find out if it did. An agency willing to show bad news was something Randy had never encountered. That commitment to truth over convenience was the foundation of a partnership that would last more than twenty years.

The path here

Randy spent two decades moving from the technology side to the business side of enterprise operations — first at American Enterprise Group, where he managed the technology infrastructure that powered a national insurance operation before taking on broader business responsibilities. That dual fluency gave him something rare: the ability to see both the systems underneath and the business problems on top.

He then went out as an entrepreneur, co-founding and leading businesses including Supplemental Insurance Professionals and WellEx, where he served as CEO. Building companies from scratch sharpened the instincts that no corporate role can teach: when to invest, when to cut, and how to make something work when there's no safety net.

When he and Brian came together to co-found NEXT90, it wasn't a pivot — it was a return. Two decades of conversations about what advertising measurement should be, finally put into practice. Randy's operational discipline and business-building experience is why the Insights & Data Engine doesn't just detect influence — it runs as a business.