We’re excited to announce our latest early-stage investment in Cartelux!
Cartelux is on a mission to shape the future of digital retail marketing. Cartelux simplifies digital advertising for global brands to drive bottom-line results via a centralised and automated marketing platform. By using the Cartelux platform, brands can run hyper-localised digital advertising campaigns in the most time efficient, cost effective and brand compliant way possible - cutting the usual ~4+ week convoluted process down to minutes.
Cartelux was founded by Josh Williams, initially as an end-to-end digital content marketing and video agency. Looking to leverage the early successes of his agency model, Josh set out to transform his offering into a more scalable, global platform; one that automated the entire digital marketing and ad campaign process for brands and their local retail networks.
Josh is a seasoned founder, with extensive experience in global advertising and technology. Before moving to Australia, Josh worked in film and advertising in the US across global retail brands, such as Quicksilver.
Josh leads a highly capable team with extensive industry experience, technical expertise, and global networks spanning auto, retail marketing, and media sectors. This dynamic team embodies the qualities we seek in our investments: ambition, hunger, deep domain expertise, and the vision to tackle significant global challenges at scale. Recognizing Cartelux as a high-conviction opportunity, we are excited to have led their Series A round, with our friends at QIC as co-investors.
Problem:
Cartelux’s target market includes global brands, with geographically spread retail networks or franchisees, that require localised marketing campaigns to reach their customers.
Global digital advertising spend is in the hundreds of billions of dollars and is forecast to be worth US$646bn in 2024.
Given these market dynamics, global brands are always seeking simple ways to create regionally targeted, engaging digital advertising campaigns on a large scale. However, there are persistent challenges and numerous pain points in the global retail digital marketing process that hinder this.
The marketing landscape is constantly evolving, with an increasing number of media channels available for advertising. This rapid change is transforming the industry and its operations. As the sector continues to shift and influence consumer behaviour, advertisers have been forced to shift from traditional marketing methods that rely on user tracking to using broader demographic data in order to reach their target audiences. However, research shows that personalised ads have the greatest impact on driving engagement and achieving successful marketing outcomes.
Consequently, these changes have made it more challenging for advertisers to comprehend audience behaviour and create highly personalised, targeted ad campaigns. This has resulted in an inefficient allocation of ad spend across media channels and missed marketing opportunities, ultimately affecting the bottom line.
Creating and managing digital marketing for global brands can be a time-consuming and costly process. Setting up, personalising, localising, and launching a digital ad campaign for retail networks at a large scale requires significant resources and is complex. With numerous tasks to complete, the process of creating and launching a digital ad campaign typically takes around 4 weeks. This can hinder the ability of a brand and its local retail networks to act swiftly and with agility.
Solution:
Cartelux solves these challenges. A key driver of Cartelux’s success to date is the material value the platform generates for global brands and their local retail networks.
The Cartelux platform allows global brands to efficiently deliver cohesive, integrated digital ad campaigns that are cost-effective and compliant with the brand's standards. It achieves this by automating and tailoring the ad creation, approval, and media buying processes to local, national, and international retail networks.
Cartelux is highly customizable to accommodate the unique characteristics of each retail network, regardless of a company's retail model, technical sophistication, or agency landscape. The platform seamlessly integrates with stakeholders and operational systems within an organization, making it easy to advertise on major media channels like Google and Facebook.
With the Cartelux platform, teams can quickly create professional, brand-compliant, and hyper-local digital marketing campaigns in just 60 seconds after onboarding.
Having begun focusing on the Auto indusry, Cartelux has been driving incredible results for the brands using the platform, cementing the company’s position as the leading platform for centralised digital marketing in the sector. For one customer, using the platform enabled the brand to increase organic searches by 300% during the campaign time but also decreased audience searches for its competitors by 8% - this means Cartelux can give its customers a real competitive advantage.
While the company started in the auto industry, Cartelux’s platform can simplify and centralise digital advertising no matter what industry.
Why We Invested:
- Exceptionally strong team with deep industry experience and international networks: The executive team holds decades of experience across industry, technology, and business, with an intimate knowledge of the auto and media sectors. The company is also proving it can attract and retain strong talent, critical for success during this next phase of growth.
- Material early traction: Since launching the latest version in 2020, Cartelux has achieved impressive traction in the market with some of the largest brands in automotive using the platform. Spread across 10 countries, the company’s current customers include leading global brands such as Aston Martin, Ford, Mini, Nissan, Toyota, Renault, Honda, and MG.
- Platform stickiness and rapid adoption: Cartelux is a scalable technology platform that easily integrates into a brand's marketing infrastructure. It is deeply embedded in the brand's advertising and marketing processes, allowing for rapid deployment across the brand's entire retail network. This enables a one-to-many sales model, where adoption by one brand leads to potentially automatic country-wide adoption across their retail network.
- Industry agnostic solution enabling global scalability: Designed to service any global brand, irrespective of industry, with geographically spread retail networks requiring localised marketing campaigns to reach their customers, the technology powered automation of the platform delivers global scalability efficiently and easily. Already demonstrating early success with traction in the auto industry, the company is now gaining interest from other industries such as real estate, retail, and telco.
- Global partnership with Google: Cartelux helps drive more advertising spend with Google. As such Google has become a solid sales partner helping them develop global sales opportunities for their platform and embedding them into Google’s suite of marketing solutions for automotive brands at a global level.
Optimising operations and ultimately saving time and money, particularly in today’s uncertain global climate, is something most companies are looking for. This is making Cartelux an increasing necessity for innovative brands looking to drive efficiencies. Having already established itself as a leading player in its market, Cartelux is well-positioned to expand its presence in what is a rapidly growing market opportunity. We are delighted to have the opportunity to invest in, and partner with, Josh and the team.
Safe Travels!
The TEN13 Team