The global $200 billion black hole in marketing spend and the Aussie tech trying to fix it

Global marketers are wasting $200 billion, or one third of their budgets, because advertising campaigns are poorly briefed and don’t have a strategy, according to the global Better Briefs Study which focussed on the effectiveness of modern marketing.

But this issue is probably part of a much larger challenge: Marketing has fundamentally changed with the emergence of the smartphone. And the advertising industry has not kept up.

Fifteen years ago, when people consumed media via TV, print or billboards, marketing was straightforward because these forms of media only allowed for a one-size-fits-it-all approach meaning that a limited amount of content had to be produced. 

Then the smartphone came along and changed everything. As the average Australian is expected to spend 17 years of their life on their phone, we consume bit-sized pieces of information which are far more targeted at us – otherwise we don’t engage. The complex algorithms that track and analyse online behaviour to maximise engagement have been bred to optimise the content that is presented to us in a way that reflects our greatest desires.

But the very technology that allows companies to target consumers more individually has created a huge challenge for these businesses: They cannot keep up with the sheer scale of the content that needs to be produced to feed this machine. 

A multinational apparel company that launches 100+ new products each month and targets different age groups, gender clusters and geographies has to generate tens of thousands of assets at any one time, potentially driving their costs into the hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Help is at hand – thanks to Aussie tech company TRIBE and their SaaS solution which enables global blue chips to deploy an army of content creators to do the job for them.

Targeted content is being created all the time – not just by advertisers but also by consumers themselves, many of them are fans of the brand, and take pictures or videos that can be perfect assets for targeted advertising.

TRIBE has built a comprehensive, end-to-end platform that is designed to streamline how brands discover these content creators, build, brief and launch a campaign – and measure the results. The scale achieved speaks for itself – with over 70,000 talented and diverse creators that have generated more than 1.2 million pieces of content.

TRIBE works with some of the biggest brands in the world, including Mars, Disney, Lego and Amazon, solving their content creation challenges at scale and a fraction of the cost. With the platform fully built out, the company has clocked over $11 million revenue in FY22 and is now scaling fast, putting it on track to be cash flow positive within a year. Importantly, the business is enjoying the support of some high-profile investors including Exto Partners, a seasoned Australian venture capital fund.

The enduring need to be constantly creating assets in order to target different audiences can easily result in blown out costs that could have been avoided. TRIBE facilitates a far more efficient and effective process of turning a brief into content – with content creators that the targeted consumer can easily relate to.

Reach Markets have been engaged by Tribe and may receive fees for its services.