Touchpoint plans expansion phase

Noelle Waugh

Auckland, Oct 2007

Nine months after it moved into the Australian market, the New Zealand digital media company Touchpoint is working on plans to expand into Britain, the United States and Asia.

The company, which sells automated marketing technology services, is considering listing in Australia or on London’s AIM market to take advantage of investor demand for new digital marketing businesses.

Touchpoint Principal Frank van der Velden said the company had received takeover approaches from the listed Australian firms Blue Freeway and Q Limited but had decided that selling out would “undermine” its business.

Touchpoint markets technology that helps advertisers manage digital communications strategies through their advertising agencies, which are in competition with groups such as Blue Freeway. Being owned by such a group would create obvious problems.

Touchpoint was set up in New Zealand in 2000 and now works with about 80 per cent of advertising agencies in the market, covering clients such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Nestle. The company opened offices in Sydney and Melbourne earlier this year and now works with ad agencies such as Publicis Mojo, DDB, Rapp Collins, Whybin TBWA and M&C Saatchi.

Mr van der Velden said Touchpoint would use its relationships with ad agencies to open offices in Britain, the US and parts of Asia by early 2008.

He predicted the company would post organic growth of 50 to 60 per cent a year over the next three to five years.  This would push the company’s annual revenue from $10 million to more than $30 million.

Q Limited chief executive Mark Halstead said there was room in the Australian market for “more quality player” such as Touchpoint but questioned the level of demand here for its services.

“It’s more designed for clients with huge databases and there’s only a handful of those really in Australia that need that sort of service in online,” Mr Halstead said.

But Mr van der Velden said the growing pressure on companies to prove the return on their marketing investments was driving an increased use of automated databases and communication reporting services.

“The banks, telcos and loyalty card companies in particular are putting quite significant investment into software to help them manage their communication a lot better with customers,” he said.

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