The Biggest Australian Tech Company You’ve Never Heard Of

At a Glance

• 11 outlets across three news moments, from Forbes and The Wall Street Journal through to MediaPost and CRM magazine
• 89 average domain rating, 94 at the top in Forbes
• 33.9M combined monthly reach across the outlets that covered
• $250M round, GetFeedback acquisition and US headquarters, and the 1-to-1 launch run by Salient directly

The Partnership

Campaign Monitor was founded in Sydney in 2004 and was profitable every quarter for ten straight years without raising a dollar. Insight first called in 2008 and got a polite no. In April 2014 the answer changed, and Insight put in $250 million — close to 10% of its fund at the time. Campaign Monitor later came to Salient PR directly as a client.

The Challenge

The company had 100,000+ paying customers in 170 countries, including Apple, Facebook, and Intel, and effectively no profile in American media. The trouble with bootstrapped success is that it generates no news — ten profitable years is a great business and a terrible press release. And email marketing in 2014 was written off as finished, a solved category owned by MailChimp and Constant Contact.

The Strategy

Make the restraint the story. The interesting thing was never the $250 million. It was the ten years of turning it down. Fortune framed it exactly that way.

Run two hemispheres, two stories. In the US it was arrival: a company at real scale nobody had heard of, opening a San Francisco headquarters. In Australia it was a hometown company going global.

Sell the launch, not the feature. We ran the 1-to-1 Email Marketing launch under embargo and pitched an emerging unicorn with news coming, not a product update.

The Results

The $250M round landed in Fortune and AdExchanger, the GetFeedback acquisition and new US headquarters in TechCrunch. Ben Kepes profiled the hiring push for Forbes under the line “the hottest 10-year-old startup comes to town.” By 2016 the Sydney Morning Herald was running its profile under the headline Campaign Monitor had spent two years arguing.

It landed on embargo day in MediaPost and CRM magazine, carried by a customer’s numbers rather than our own.

A bootstrapped company that never needed press is the hardest to promote and the easiest to believe once someone finally looks. Our job was getting them to look.

Publications: Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, AdExchanger, Business Insider, MediaPost, CRM magazine, Australian Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald