Imagine your advertising agency has just landed a huge campaign for a major corporate client. You create television and radio ads for their new product and arrange for them to be broadcast at various times on stations across the country.

How do you know your radio spot was actually broadcast between 6 p.m. and midnight in Atlanta or Chicago on the day and time the station promised? How do you know your multi-million-dollar-budget TV ad didn’t run immediately before your biggest competitor’s ad for their new product, which your contract says is not allowed?

HMC alumnus Nicholas Seet ‘99 and his company Auditude (pictured in photo above) have a solution. Using a proprietary algorithm to create a digital fingerprint of audio signals, Auditude monitors the ads in real time.

According to Seet, “Advertisers generally tell the agency, ‘it’s your problem,’ and agencies rely on the broadcaster’s invoice, which follows by paper many weeks later. The claims process takes a long time, sometimes a full quarter after the ad was run.”

Advertising is a $60 billion-per-year business, and Seet and his fellow HMC grads who make up Auditude would like to get their hands on a portion of it.

Not that their business is poor, by any means. While he was earning his MBA at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management in 2005, Seet was part of a three-person team that won the $135,450 grand prize in a business plan competition at Rice University. That led to more than $1 million in venture capital to expand and continue operations.

Auditude began as a broadcast music identification business and continues to do that today with an important contract with the nation’s largest radio station owner. “Basically, we can tell every song that’s been played on the radio nationwide,” says Seet. “Knowing what the guy is playing down the street is valuable competitive information.”

While music tracking still has a place in their business model, Seet sees additional opportunities with the technology. “Tracking music on the radio isn’t a big business,” he says, “but advertising is. We found that the error rate—that is, ads played at the wrong time, cut off, played against a competitors ad or played in the wrong rotation—is between five and 15 percent.”

Along with fellow Mudd grads Josh Smallman ‘01 and Steve Wilson ‘01, and team members Jennifer Leavens and Michel Goffin, Seet and company operate out of an office in the Gas Company lofts in downtown Los Angeles. Their co-location facility, which houses additional computers and disk drives, is a few blocks away.

Being a start-up has taught many valuable lessons, Seet says. “There are other companies that do what we do, but our biggest competitor is people not knowing about Auditude. We’re 10 times better than our competitors in every dimension, but the marketing issue is that we are an unknown, so there is a question mark with companies that are risk averse.

“We also compete with the status quo. Change is a big, scary thing. People ask, ‘Why should I change the way I do things now?’ Convincing these people to take a risk on us is a big challenge, but we have tests going with some of the largest advertisers in the U.S.”

Another opportunity that has arisen is the monitoring of copyrighted material on the Internet. Seet and his associates are closely watching the copyright infringement lawsuit that Viacom has brought against YouTube and its parent company Google.

“We purposefully stayed out of the whole copyright infringement and piracy market because we had other things to do,” Smallman says. “But this was before YouTube exploded on the scene. YouTube is actually easier [to monitor] than radio, because we have an isolated piece of content. With radio, you have a continuous stream that has content before and after what you’re monitoring. Like Google, which indexes the web, we index YouTube.”

For copyright owners, the benefits are tremendous. According to Seet, “We can show you when your programs run—on television, on cable or online. We provide a comprehensive interface into where your assets are anywhere in the world—where is your content right now, and what are people doing with it?”

Seet recognizes the need to be nimble in today’s rapidly changing business environment. “We’re really lucky to have people who are very talented and able to shift course quickly,” he says. “It’s very difficult to be doing one thing for several months, then suddenly be doing something completely different, but you have to be able to adapt to those changes. That’s a lot of what makes the Harvey Mudd experience so special—the preparation for that. It’s so intense, and you’re doing five or six different things at the same time.”

Seet also credits the humanities and social sciences requirements at Mudd with his ability to communicate to clients and investors. His experience with the Clinic Program added value, too. In addition to participating as a student, his company sponsored projects at HMC in 2002 and 2003.

“I give a lot of presentations and it’s a lot like giving my final Clinic presentation over and over again,” Seet notes. “Whether it’s a V.C. [venture capital] presentation or a customer presentation, you have to communicate very difficult technical concepts. Even though they are more sophisticated than the average person, they don’t know it as well as you know it. You have to translate it and bridge that knowledge gap. Being able to explain it to anybody is a skill that makes you much more valuable as an employee.”

Auditude is providing services for HMC by monitoring its sponsorship of programming on a local National Public Radio station. As Seet explains, “We’re really happy with what we got from the college and we want to give back. If broadcasters mess with Harvey Mudd, we want to know about it.”