A Frank Exchange

10 Jul 2007


Just as the digital market evolution reaches the tipping point within mainstream marketing in New Zealand, trailblazer Frank van der Velden retakes the helm of Touchpoint.

Marketing Magazine, November 2007
By Graham Medcalf

Thirteen and a half years ago, a business development executive at the Hamilton City Council went to a meeting with the chief technical officer at Waikato University and had an epiphany. The business development guy was Frank van der Velden and the revelation the university’s CTO introduced him to with a “take a look at this Frank”, while pointing towards a computer screen, was the internet.

It was March 1994, Waikato University was New Zealand’s gateway to the internet and this country had a mere 200 local websites. It was a “road to Damascus” type experience for van der Velden, who went home that night and told his wife, “I know where our next business is, it’s going to be in the internet.”

Last month, van der Velden took up the reins as chief executive officer of Touchpoint, one of the companies he co-founded with long-time partner Steve Shearman. Touchpoint was established in 2001 but it was in 1995 that the two pioneered New Zealand’s digital marketing industry, forming web services company WebMasters.
Shearman, has been appointed chief technology officer.

The change in focus follows the company’s quadrupled investment in product development for offshore markets and Touchpoint’s leap across the Tasman, with the opening of offices in Sydney and Melbourne – a move to spearhead business expansion in Pacific Rim markets.
“Our goal from day one was to be an exporter,” says van der Velden. “Our platform has matured and the company has grown to a size where we can hit the ground running in larger and faster-growing markets.”

Touchpoint is widely used by New Zealand’s advertising agencies, in an industry that is undergoing fundamental change in the face of new digital technologies and client demands for transparency and measurement of advertising effectiveness. Touchpoint technology is behind many of New Zealand’s highest profile digital campaigns, and for the second year running provided the multichannel campaign management engine to the New Zealand Direct & Interactive Marketing Awards’RSVP Grand Prix award winner.
Earlier this year Touchpoint topped the National Business Review’s monthly Exciting
Companies Survey, ahead of Saatchi & Saatchi, TimeZoneOne and Proximity iD.

Van der Velden says technology is now the engine room driving marketing communications and the disciplines around regulatory compliance, citing a category transformation similar to the rapid adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems used to automate corporate accounting in the 1980s and ’90s.
“Just as ERP revolutionised the way corporates manage their businesses, MRP [marketing resource planning] is the answer for marketers seeking to streamline their campaigns in this new era, technology-dependent marketing,” he says. “Partnering with advertising agencies as our preferred distribution channel is not dissimilar to the working relationship between ERP vendors and the consulting arms of big CA [chartered accounting] firms, which managed the lion’s share of client ERP implementations of that period. However, our software as a service delivery is much simpler and faster, leaving no technology imprint on users.”

Touchpoint recently completed a $1.5 million upgrade of its technology platform, which van der Velden says provides customers with bite-sized simplicity and the scope for building heavily customised marketing programmes and campaigns.

Under van der Velden’s guiding hand, Touchpoint is blazing one of the brightest trails in technology-driven marketing, providing integrated technology modules which can be clicked into place, offering marketers ready-built functionality for multiple channels, including email, SMS, web and DM, to develop profitable customer relationships.
“Businesses don’t have to implement everything at once; like building with Lego bricks, technology adoption can progress as campaigns demand it,” he says.

Van der Velden correctly identifies that corporate marketing budgets are being filtered through advertising agencies in some form or fashion. “Agencies have a big influence on how companies spend their marketing dollars,” he says. “Therefore, in the metamorphosis that the market is going through in embracing digital, agencies have the influence on what technology their clients choose to buy.”

A few years ago, when email marketing began, clients didn’t know what technology was behind the agency reporting. Today marketers want to know where their data is housed and are focused on return on investment. Consequently the demand for technology and the best software is increasing.

According to van der Velden, mixing agencies with IT is quite hard to do. “In the early
2000s we managed to develop the best support mechanisms behind the agency offering to make their creative [work] sing,” he says of the marriage between Touchpoint and the advertising fraternity, and the technology that adds value to the creative ideas.

Over the years, agencies (or at least the better ones) have built up their knowledge of, and services around, the technology, and are achieving better results. As the agencies become more adept, Touchpoint will end up as a provider of software with the customization and professional services that will be demanded by marketers.
What is interesting, is that there are only a handful of providers worldwide that are at that level of sophistication. It is this that makes Shearman’s and van der Velden’s global expansion plans so exciting. Entering the Australian market has been interesting.
“There’s not a huge amount that we’ve seen that New Zealanders could learn from Australia,” he says.
But globally, as well as in New Zealand, van der Velden sees digital marketing (internet channels, mobile marketing and the search phenomenon) at the ‘tipping point’.
“Marketers are becoming more demanding,” he says. “They want to see everything about their interactions with their customers. And they want to measure that, to make better decisions for their marketing spend.
“The best result for marketers is where the agency comes up with brilliant ideas that blow everyone away; mixed in with the experience and mechanics that technology can provide (that was previously impossible).
Get those two things together,” he says, “and you get some of the most amazing campaigns in the world.”
Van der Velden points to the examples of Tequila’s work on the award-winning online portal adiRun.co.nz (a toolbox for runners); Tribal/DDB’s Nickolai campaign for Smirnoff; and Publicis’ New Zealand Herald Rugby World Cup promotion, as recent examples of this collaboration.
All rely on Touchpoint’s interactive marketing platform to provide marketers and brand owners with advanced digital campaign technologies.
For van der Velden it is a 13-year-old vision that is finally coming to fruition.