Touchpoint delivers multi-channel marketing

Wilson Owen

Auckland, Nov 2007

One of New Zealand’s most successful software developers is eyeing the US market as it moves forward with global expansion plans.

Touchpoint’s software-based multi-channel marketing platform has proven a hit with more than 100 Australasian advertising agencies and corportates, using it to plan and manage their marketing strategies.

The company makes no secret of its ambition to become New Zealand’s largest software company in the next three years.

Unlike other offerings in the market, which tend to manage only one channel, Touchpoint’s product manages multiple channels, ranging from email, cellphone and online marketing strategies through to more traditional areas such as print advertising, integrating everything from call centre responses to opt-in email databases to billboards.

Frank van der Velden, the company’s chief executive and co founder, says the old advertising adage – you know half your advertising spend is wasted, you just never know which half – is now obsolete.

Touchpoint is so sophisticated, it can tell which half is working, and which half isn’t.

“The thing that has blown us away is the amount of behavioural information that we gather,” he said, pointing out that organisations such as banks had been able to get much better results out of campaigns because of the “pin-point accuracy in terms of how they use the different media”.

This information enables reduced advertising-dollar wastage, identifying the most effective marketing.

The ability to manage complex campaigns and marketing strategies from one “dashboard” has grown in popularity since Touchpoint was founded seven years ago.  The product has also grown in sophistication, with Version 4 recently released.

The company employs about 70 staff in offices in Auckland and Australia, with plans for a New York office next year.

“We’ve had an ambition to internationalise the business.  So we decided a year ago to go to Australia,” says van der Velden.

The offices in Melbourne and Sydney focus on advertising agencies, mainly because of the difficulties agencies have had “embracing the digital side of things”.

“We learnt over seven years just how to engage the agencies and help them make the creative, and the strategy behind the creative, really work well.”

“We understand their business and the challenges they have,” said van der Velden.  “What we want to see is where we can slot in”.

The company’s unique selling point is its total focus on advertising agencies, and it is trying to determine an “appropriate entry point” to the US.  Van der Velden says Britain is on Touchpoint’s radar, “but we can only do one country at a time”.

He sees a global market for Touchpoint, saying that in the 1980s enterprise software such as Oracle, which managed the finances of big corporate operations, was the big thing.  “Where we are today, the marketing departments of big corporations are the last bastion of non-computerisation in terms of their processes.

“We believe we have now started a cycle which is going to computerise the marketing department, simply because digital has provided marketers and agencies the opportunity to measure media effectiveness,” he says.

“We see over the next 10 years there’s going to be this huge shift in the marketing world, which agencies are at the forefront of, to embrace computerisation”.

He says the response mechanisms in Touchpoint can comfortably manage and measure the performance of diverse campaigns on all media.

The investment so far is “several million dollars”, with a commitment to keep spending about $1.5 million a year on development.

Touchpoint doesn’t hide its ambitions.  Over the next three years it expects to have established itself in five countries, with a turnover of around $50 million.  “I would like this to be the largest software company out of New Zealand,” says van der Velden.  “You only have to get to $50- 60 million to do that.”

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