B&T’s Best of the Best turns its focus on industry entrepreneurs. These are the people who take a risk to start up their own venture and try to shake things up in the industry.
Unlike other lists, B&T is trying to surface different entrepreneurs each year, where possible.
We have considered candidates who have set up stalls in the past decade, while also looking for new talent that has previously gone unnoticed.
Not everyone could make the cut, but this list reflects some of the leading entrepreneurs that have caught our attention in the past 12 months,
10. Troy Townsend & Jack Byrne, co-founders, Zitcha
Zitcha was incubated within the walls of the performance media agency The Pistol. It began as a tool to help the agency’s Meta and Google partners scale supplier funded marketing products. In early 2022, Zitcha became a standalone platform and business, headed up by Troy Townsend, former executive director of The Pistol, and Jack Byrne, former managing director and owner of Hatched Media. The pair has 20 years of media and tech experience, and are shaking up the red hot retail media space. Zitcha is purpose-built to tap into retailer-owned assets to skyrocket revenue. Zitcha is purpose-built to tap into retailer-owned assets to skyrocket revenue. It operates across four continents, including the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, helping retailers including Coles Group, Village Cinemas, MixIn by Endeavour and Tyresales in Australia, and The Warehouse Group in New Zealand, amongst others. It and has established partnerships with Meta, Broadsign and Venvee.
9. Sarah Pelecanos, founder and CEO, TwentyTwo Digital
Pelecanos started out as a marketing intern at George Patterson Y&R and has held a number of marketing roles, often at digital companies before going it alone in 2020. She set up TwentyTwo Digital and has established it to become one of the fastest growing agencies in Brisbane. TwentyTwo Digital is a data-driven boutique full marketing shop whose clients include the likes of Domino’s, Bushranger and Motorama. Testament to Pelecanos’ business acumen was winning a B&T 30 Under 30 Award for entrepreneurs.
8. Jeremy Yang & Mo Moubayed, co-founders, Veridooh
Yang and Moubayed first met each other while travelling around Asia in 2006. The pair hit it off and tried a number of business ventures before launching Veridooh in 2019. It began testing an independent verification tool with PHD and Unilever to create SmartCreative. The aim was simple: boost transparency, automation and intelligence in OOH. Veridooh now tracks more than 400 metrics including location, panel play, share of time to ensure OOH campaigns are delivered as planned and paid for. In an industry that previously had questions about transparency, the Veridooh product provided independent vigour, visibilty and control. Veridooh’s rapid rise is remarkable. It now covers 70 per cent of the Australian market and it has secured verification partnerships with GroupM, IPG Mediabrands, and Omnicom Media Group in Australia, as well as winning awards such as Campaign’s most valuable tech, Deloitte Technology Fast 50 rising Star, among others.
7. Zara Seidler & Sam Koslowski, co-founders, The Daily Aus
The Daily Aus is a rare media success story at a time when newsrooms are being gutted and titles shut down. Seidler and Koslowski started out the idea as a hobby, providing news for family and friends through Instagram posts. They then quit their full time jobs to launch The Daily Aus with a clear remit: to serve news to Gen Z – a demographic that has reportedly thumbed its nose at mainstream media. The Daily Aus claims 85 per cent of its audience is under 35, with 70 per cent of its 365,000 readers citing it as their primary news source. They have commercialised the business through partnerships, and The Daily Aus has found a niche in helping brands connect to those hard to reach 18-35 year olds in a news environment.
6. Emily Taylor & Cam Blackley, co-founders, Bureau of Everything
M&C Saatchi’s former CSO Taylor and CCO Blackley set up Bureau of Everything not as an agency, per se, but as a ‘something new’ that would combine the very best of strategic and creative thinking to create work that is unmissable. They are careful to avoid the “baggage” of being an agency. Their shop builds bespoke teams based on clients needs and has the flexibility of working under various models, including retainers, projects and augmenting in-house teams. Bureau of Everything aims to be senior, leaner and more flexible than its competitive set and is being backed by Goodby, Silverstein + Partners co-founder Jeff Goodby. The pair have won dozens of awards, including slews of Effies, and worked on some of Australia’s iconic campaigns, including the award-winning ‘Come Say G’Day’ for Tourism Australia.
5. Jordan Taylor-Bartels & Sean Taylor, co-founders, Prophet
Prophet was formed in 2020 by digital marketing specialists Taylor-Bartels and Taylor to help businesses adapt to the looming cookiepocalyse. Prophet combines advanced maths with predictive intelligence to to help organisations quantify the historical return on investment of their online and offline marketing, while also predict future outcomes. The company’s mission is to solve the $1 trillion black hole in marketing and advertising budgets that will be created by Google’s phasing out of cookies, as well as data blind spots that cause businesses to lose money on ineffective ad spend. Although Google has kicked the proverbial third-party cookies can down the road, again, Prophet has begun trials with clients and raised $5 million in seed funding, as well as drawing the backing of media industry heavyweights Antony Catalano (ACM) and Matt Rockman (Seek).
4. Louise Wilson & Lauren Thornborough, co-founders, The Village
Not all innovations are about shiny new tools. In fact some of the best help the industry overcome perennial challenges. The Village does just that, helping the industry juggle parenting with work. It was set up by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions head of new and emerging business, Louise Wilson and UM client partner Lauren Thornborough. The Village provides support and a community for working parents in the industry at a time when soaring childcare costs and limited places are taking a toll on working families. The problem is so pervasive that 80 per cent of parents in media have cited an “overbearing mental load as a barrier to peak performance”. The Village is being supported by industry luminaries including Angeline Lee, Venessa Hunt, Jacquie Alley, Scott Laird, Kim Portrate, Ricky Chanana and Anathea Ruys.
3. Matt Herbert & Connor Archbold, founders and co-CEOs, Tracksuit
B&T 30 Under 30 winner Herbert and business partner Archbold topped this list last year and feature highly once again for the impact that Tracksuit is having on the market. Tracksuit helps more than 5,000 brands globally keep track of their equity with more than 450 customers. It claims it can slash the tracking costs of the big players by up to 80 per cent to allow marketers from business of all sizes, including start-ups, to better value brand, justify investments and predict future demand. The start-up has caught the eye of VC Blackbird, Mark Ritson and Ascential. It has also inked a deal with Mutinex and plans to take on established brand trackers including Ipsos, Kantar, Nielsen and Qualtric. The New Zealand founded company is on a mission to show why brand equity is so important to a company’s bottom line and is growing its vision abroad.
2. Dr Karen-Nelson Field, founder and CEO, Amplified Intelligence
Nelson-Field is one of the global authorities on media research and the role of attention in advertising effectiveness. The Adelaide native, a regular on the conference speaking circuit, set up Amplified Intelligence to revolutionise the media industry through attention measurement and the role it can play in media planning and marketing more broadly. The business has a team of crack data scientists, analysts, software engineers and machine learning experts that have developed marketing leading planning tools for platforms including TV, cinema, web social and more. It is shaping the way the global industry thinks about attention. Few are better placed to help the industry come to grips with the role attention plays in effectiveness, and Amplified Intelligence is one of the more influential organisations Australia has produced in this sector.
1. Henry Innis & Matt Farrugia, co-founders, Mutinex
Arguably the hottest marketing analytics start-up in Australia – if not the world – Innis and Farrugia set up the SAAS business Mutiny (now Mutinex) to disrupt how marketers and media agencies were assessing the effectiveness of their media investments and deciding where to allocate spend. Using AI tech Mutinex’s GrowthOS platform allows marketers to optimise their media investments in real-time, effectively doing away with reactive decision-making and drawing into question the value of upfront media deals. In the past two years, Mutinex’s valuation has soared from $10 million to more than $120 million. The business has expanded overseas across Asia and the US, attracting blue chip clients and colleagues to wave the flag. Recently Mutinex hired Mat Baxter to lead APAC, and a slew of other senior recruits. Innis was on the Cannes in Cairns entrepreneurs panel and is at the helm of one of the fastest growing SAAS firms out there.
