Marketing
Brand of brothers
The Sydney Morning Herald, Weekend Edition May 15-16, 2004, page 19

Innovative software is taking the tedium out of the daily grind of developing campaigns, writes Paul McIntyre.

Two brothers from the bush who left their jobs in 1996 to develop what was then a futuristic internet-based marketing management system are shaking up corporate marketing departments in Australia and overseas.

Its taken nearly seven years, but Brett and Grant Halloran's technology company, Orbis, is winning the support of some of the biggest film studios, banks and consumer goods and telecommunications companies in Australia. It has also won an 11-country contract across the Asia-Pacific for Caltex.

The idea behind Orbis is simple enough: a large amount of time in marketing is spent on the day-to-day grind of communications development processes, tracking costs and juggling a plethora of outside companies that usually work on any one project.

"Not many people appreciate how complex marketing really is," says Grant, the chief executive of Orbis. "There's a whole world of pains in the back office."

The Halloran brothers, however, have found a way to crack the administrative labyrinth for marketers with a software system that automates the lot. Companies such as Cadbury Schweppes, Columbia TriStar, Sony, Vodafone, Telstra, Nokia and American Express are using the Orbis Brand Manager software suite to digitally manage the often thousands of brand images and videos, campaign developments, costings and return-on-investment (ROI) analysis.

It is this last area that could provide Orbis with its next big kick. Developing ROI results from marketing efforts is the subject of enormous debate in the industry and the Orbis founders have some interesting proposition on how it can be done - using their software, of course.

But ROI aside, marketing is as much about mundane project management as it is about developing a new product or brand strategy and the higher-profile communications that go with it.

All the flash TV, radio and print ads, packaging design, in-store merchandising and street promotion and brochures are the results of involvement from a sometimes mind-numbing array of different suppliers and communication partners.

The internal management approval process, which sees communications briefs and strategies bounce from lawyers to the marketing bosses back to line managers and everyone in between has typically created a convoluted paper trail.

And strangely, it has been this process of managing marketing's "back end" that has been one of the last functions inside companies to have any real attention paid to it by the information technology sector.

Business software systems do incorporate marketing modules but marketing professionals say they tend to be based on the prerequisites suiting finance boffins rather than the specifics related to the marketing function.

In its early life, Orbis was simply an online hub for marketers, retailers, media companies and advertising and design companies to access ads, logos, and visuals for communications campaigns, catalogues, brochures, and direct marketing.

ProductBank, as it is known, was Brett Halloran's idea. While working as a creative in the advertising and design sector, he was frustrated by the difficulty in sourcing the visual components for campaigns. The business idea was hatched over a beer with his brother and then developed.

"It was pretty tough trooping around Sydney and Melbourne early on when we were talking about digitising content and putting it online," Grant says. "People just told us we were wasting our time." That was 1996. ProductBank now has 9000 users. The next innovation was Brand Manager, which was also an idea from Brett, hatched from inside knowledge about the frustrations of the marketing community. "Brett had two great ideas in his life," Grant says. "He was talking about it for about three months. No one knew what he was on about until we were away on a company conference. We all just clicked."

Buoyed by their success, they are now pondering a significant offshore expansion into marketing operations of multi-national companies, although the Hallorans are keeping their ambitions under leash for the time being.

"There is no question there is global potential for us," Grant says. "I'm not saying we're going global. There is a graveyard of Australia software companies who've gone overseas, but we are analysing it."

"The main thing is clearly we will be here as market leader. No other company offers the breadth of our marketing solution."

Tuesday, 16 March 2010
Portrait and Orbis Global Partner to Deliver End-to-End Marketing
Monday, 8 March 2010
Orbis Global a “Visionary” in Magic Quadrant for Marketing Resource Management, 2010





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