Page 71 - Adnews Magazine November-December 2021

Feature
Why Publicis
bought this
Australian startup
Reported to be a $200 million deal, Publicis Groupe snapped up Brisbane-based company CitrusAd.
WORDS BY
CHRIS PASH
Brad Moran’s first startup, software com- pany NoQ (No Queue) and later called eGrowcery, didn’t go the way he wanted. “I got forced out towards the end,” he told AdNews. “So it wasn’t a happy ending but I learned a lot of good les- sons along the way.”
His second, Australian-based software as a service platform CitrusAd, has just been bought by Publicis Groupe for an undisclosed sum.
Although the former AFL player for the Adelaide Crows met his co-founder Nick Paech in Adelaide, they decided to base CitrusAd, a white-label, self-serve, ecommerce ad-serving platform that ena- bles retailers to monetise their online shelf-space, in Brisbane.
“At the end of my last startup, I said I would never do it again,” Moran says. “I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy, but somehow we managed to get dragged back in.”
He couldn’t find a job. “I went through about 50 job interviews in Brisbane and I was either too startupy or I was too strong minded to fit in a corporate,” he says.
His previous industry was e-commerce so he knew a bit about retail.
“We understood the pain points of retail- ers and brands,” he says. “We knew the technology side of the business really well and that gave us the footing to start Citrus.
“We built the technology to spec basi- cally, anticipating all of the pushback or all of the things that retailers and brands might like or might not like. Then we took all of our learnings from our first business and applied them to the new one, which is why we were able to grow so quickly.”
Along the way he raised $6.5 million via the Moelis Australia’s venture capital team for his advertising technology start-up.
The pandemic accelerated the process of retailers going digital, pushing demand higher for CitrusAd’s services.
And CitrusAd has more than half its activity in the US. Globally, it services more than 70 major retailers with 4,000 plus brands using its self-serve platform.
“We saw the natural progression from the physical shelf space into the digital,” he says.
“Having built an e-comm platform in the past, we knew there were deep flaws in the way that e-commerce systems work and how they present products. They used to present them alphabeti- cally for a long time.
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