Visible Results continues to expand
New Zealand-based loyalty technology specialists, Visible Results, has opened three new offices: in Europe, Central and South America.
Visible Results has signed agreements with partners in Colombia, Chile and Spain. The company already operates in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Japan and the US (where it recently bought the US-based GraphicCard Systems), and now has access to home markets of some ninety million people.
Thermochromic The Visible Results technology uses thermochromic cards, which allow new optically visible information to be written to the card every time it is used: for example, a new promotional message or the latest points total. This makes it possible to employ techniques like stealth marketing; where individual customers are privately given individual offers, depending on their previous behaviour. Even if competitors seed the operator's customer base, they have no way of telling what incentives are being offered over the whole customer base. For further details of how thermochromic cards work, see our earlier news article about them.
Rapp Collins In Colombia, Visible Results has partnered with advertising agency Rapp Collins. The first client, a shopping mall, receives technical support remotely from Visible Results' data centre in Auckland, and Rapp Collins provides local account direction and support.
Entrepreneur Visible Results' chief executive, Michael Whittaker, has recently been elected Ernst and Young's entrepreneur of the year and the Atlantis Group, Visible Results' parent company, has been ranked second in the first Deloitte-Unlimited 'Fast 50' index of the fastest-growing companies in New Zealand. Founded five years ago with a handful of employees, Atlantis has mushroomed into a global, multi-million-dollar database marketing and loyalty card technology company with a revenue growth rate of over 400% over the past three years. And Whittaker expects Atlantis' revenues to increase ten-fold in the next two years.
According to Whittaker, "It is an honour for our organization to be second only to Australia-owned TelstraSaturn where our growth is concerned. However, this is just the beginning."
In late 1996, at the age of 26, Whittaker decided to fill what he and three friends perceived as the need for a top-notch database marketing concern. In its first year, the firm, then called Atlantis Marketing, expanded its staff from four to 30 persons. Less than four years later, it had become a leader in the field of database management and had amassed a client roster that includes such blue-chip New Zealand companies as Clear Communications, Baycorp, and Tower. In 1997, Whittaker founded Visible Results, a separate arm of the company.
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