Australia – Sydney-based firm called MagicBrief has received AUD$2m in a pre-seed funding round, aiming to help marketing agencies improve and execute their own creative offerings.
With the AUD$2m investment, the team will improve their offering and continue to develop their flagship product, which now includes MagicAI, a function that analyses adverts from other brands and is presently in beta testing.
George Howes, MagicBrief co-founder and CEO, said, “With more big brands moving away from an agency model and bringing their creative teams in-house, I noticed that they were still adopting outdated creative processes, the same workflows they had learnt from traditional advertising agencies.”
Following a two-year role as creative director at Eucalyptus, Howes identified a chance to elevate marketing endeavours for contemporary marketing teams and joined forces with co-founder Dan Nolan to materialise MagicBrief.
Howes also added, “There’s a growing number of tech products that focus on analytics, tracking and attribution, but the most impactful variable, the creative itself, has largely been forgotten when it comes to marketing technology. Most team leads don’t really want to think about workflows or the creative process: they just need a high output of proven concepts that can generate enough sales so they can afford to take bigger creative swings.”
He also added that startups and established brands alike are responding to economic pressures; tightening their belts. Having a smaller team of creatives in-house is low-hanging fruit, if they can get it right. Platforms like Tiktok are driving an overwhelming push towards short-form interest-based video creative, and requiring a growing number of these assets that many companies are struggling to keep up with.
“The algorithms behind most major social media platforms reward better creative work with more viewers and hence more profit for the brand. MagicBrief takes those learnings and reverse engineers them for the brand’s sake. All creative output costs money. With MagicBrief, you can cut straight through the fat to what is proven to work, and have it live within hours,” he concluded.