Thread launches marketing intelligence platform in ANZ

Thread has launched its marketing intelligence platform in Australia and New Zealand, with customers including DB Breweries, ANZCO Foods, FreshChoice supermarkets, and Metlifecare.

The New Zealand-founded business says the platform gives marketing teams a single place to record and review activity across campaigns, budgets, creative work, results, and internal learnings.

It enters a market where brands often manage campaign information across separate systems, while planning documents and post-campaign reviews remain scattered across email inboxes, shared drives, and presentations. Thread aims to bring those records into a single structured archive that can be searched and compared over time.

The system centres on a feature called Track, which records marketing activity ranging from brand campaigns and product launches to shopper promotions and always-on social media. This creates a history of activity that teams can use to compare work across brands, channels, and markets.

Another feature, Smart Add, is designed to reduce manual data entry by letting marketers upload existing documents such as briefs, media plans, budgets, recommendations, and post-campaign reviews. The tool maps information from those files into Thread's framework for users to review and confirm.

The platform also includes a question-and-answer function called Ask Thread, which lets users query their marketing records in natural language. According to the company, responses are based on the customer's stored campaign context, performance information, and historical activity.

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Troy Fuller said the product was built to address a gap between the volume of information available to marketers and their ability to use it consistently.

"Marketing teams aren't short of information. The challenge is turning all of that information into something they can actually use. Most organisations have years of marketing knowledge sitting across reports, presentations, inboxes, and marketers' heads. Thread gives that activity a home and then puts it to work, allowing teams to understand not only what happened and what was achieved, but, most importantly, why. Those learnings can then be used to make better-informed decisions next time," Fuller said.

Founders' background

Fuller co-founded Thread with Phil Newman. He previously spent more than 20 years in advertising across New Zealand and Australia, including leadership roles within Clemenger Group, before founding independent creative agency Multiplied in 2021.

Newman has worked in advertising production and operations for 15 years, including senior roles at Dentsu. He later moved into automation and artificial intelligence work within the marketing and advertising team at ArchiPro before founding AI and automation studio Chuffed.

Newman said the product is intended to preserve institutional memory in marketing departments as staff move on and records become fragmented.

"Marketing has spent years investing in measurement, but very little in memory. Teams shouldn't have to rebuild the story every time someone asks what worked. Thread's embedded AI capability now makes it possible to structure the messy reality of marketing without creating more manual work. Unlike brand tracking platforms, media dashboards, or attribution tools, Thread captures not only the numbers, but also the reasoning behind them, preserving recommendations, creative decisions, and campaign context alongside the performance data," Newman said.

Early users

Among the early users is ANZCO Foods, which is using the platform for its Angel Bay brand. It says it has used Thread to centralise several years of campaign records.

"Before Thread, half our campaign history lived on our server and the other half in my inbox. Now it's all in one place for the entire team. I've just put $3.5m of activity into Thread dating back to 2022. I'm not writing reports from scratch anymore," said Becky Turnbull, Marketing Manager, ANZCO Foods.

Its analytical foundation was developed with Data Science Lead Hayley Clinning, who has more than a decade of analytics experience. Thread is being offered to marketing teams in Australia and New Zealand through a monthly subscription model.