Australia’s newest intelligence business platform, Prophet, has launched with a line-up of industry heavyweight investors, including View Media Group’s Antony Catalano, Dentsu CEO Cheuk Chiang, and Seek co-founder Matt Rockman.
The company has bold ambitions to solve the $1 trillion pit in marketing and advertising budgets created by Google’s phasing out of cookies, paired with data blind spots.
To begin, Prophet is targeting the Australian market, which it said represents a $23 billion opportunity alone.
Catalano, the lead investor, said: “I’ve seen a number of tech innovations over the past two decades and our operations through our own national media group demonstrates more than ever the importance of media, marketing and organisational accountability and measurement.
“Prophet is on a whole new level. It isn’t just a game changer, it is a whole new game.”
Former Hyperloop global marketing lead Jordan Taylor-Bartels and former Ogilvy and VMLY&R Commerce CEO Sean Taylor helm the Melbourne-based company. Prophet was co-founded by mathematician Patrick Robotham, statistician John Strumila and full-stack developer Clyde So.
Taylor-Bartels said that while every business leader wants to make marketing budgets more efficient, the ability to do so with existing tech will only continue to decline.
“For a long time now, Marketing teams have had to resort to using data that doesn’t provide truly up-to-date information and doesn’t meaningfully assist predictive modelling and extensive scenario planning,” he said.
“We’ve taken sophisticated mathematical processes that represent a very real, long-awaited advantage for marketers, and packaged them in a platform that basically any brand decision-maker can use and understand. Marketing teams that don’t embrace Prophet will soon risk being left behind by competitors.”
Prophet’s launch also signals the first time organisations can run complex mathematical modelling in near-real time, removing the limitation of 60 to 90 data increments the market is currently forced to deal with under pre-existing platforms.
Top image: Sean Taylor, Jordan Taylor-Bartels and Paul Veltman