Sounds simple, right? Well, it’s not. And for those of us in adtech, something I am sure resonates across the board with startup-land, testing and trialling, honing your product needs to be bulletproof before expanding. It's especially vital when media consumption and technologies continue to evolve, and even more so with the changing legal parameters within the industry, applicable to my founder-friends in fintech, insurtech, contech and many more of the techs… Add to this changes in perception, people have changed, we want to interact with companies enforcing trust, honesty, accountability, and transparency, and people want technology that fits their ethos on life.
But there is a place, a market, where products are able to be tested, a faraway land unless you live there - Australia.
Why Australia?
For those of us in Anglo-speaking markets, Australia fits seamlessly into the framework as a testing ground for adtech products and solutions. The country has a robust English-speaking population and a culture that has obvious ties to the UK, (but is also not too different from America too). In essence, it is a Western culture.
As a testing bed, it also has a large 24 million strong population, to vet products, and as a market size, it’s innocuous enough to not eat into your entire budget. It’s also far enough away that you can avoid any mishaps from affecting your solutions in other countries, somehow in a connected digital world, geographical distance adds a buffer to the test cycles, and adtech is flourishing for it.
How can startups benefit from Australia?
As a testing bed for solutions, Australia, and Australians may feel like they are getting the short end of the stick. But, with tech, Australia already has a rich industry and history on its own, and as a “petri-dish” for trialling new products, they are often the first to enjoy the benefits. The melting pot of tech culture is a thing of beauty and positions Australia at the heart of a global transformation, especially so in this 600-billion-dollar industry for us - adtech (Statista).
For a little more context, adtech is at a crossroads. It is stuck between third-party data, walled gardens, and a world without cookies. Adtech companies can benefit from Australia by making use of its strong media ecosystem, its self-contained nature by proxy of its location, and the similarity of cultures.
We see Australia as a prosperous market in itself, as well as a perfect testing ground for all entities looking to test, learn, develop and grow their product offering prior to rolling out around the world. Furthermore, for us it has been at the forefront of adtech and martech for a while, so we really do get to test and learn with the major players in our industry, What's not to love?
Daniel Tjondronegoro is the cofounder of Beatgrid.
