Beyond New Zealand: Tracksuit’s Bid to Make Brand Tracking Universal
Matt Herbert and his team are exporting a model built on clarity and cost control, betting that marketers from London to Los Angeles want simpler ways to prove brand impact.
Born in New Zealand and now scaling quickly overseas, Tracksuit is promising “beautiful, affordable, always-on” brand tracking. Co‑founder Matt Herbert explains why clarity, scale and credibility matter more than ever.
Measurement takes centre stage
At Cannes Lions this year, measurement crept into almost every conversation. Champagne still flowed on the beaches, but the mood was more restrained. Panels and award ceremonies circled back to the same questions: what did the campaign deliver, what was the return, and how long would the idea endure?
The tech platforms Salesforce, TikTok and others were the loudest on the beach, staging dinners and parties designed to show they could convert attention into growth. Traditional media firms, by contrast, were cautious. Many were still adjusting to smaller budgets and fewer staff. Measurement, once tucked away as a side issue, has moved to the centre. Executives now expect proof of impact before approving a single pound of spend.
That shift has changed the feel of Cannes. A decade ago, agencies competed to produce the most dazzling creative stunts. This summer, the best‑attended sessions were on econometrics and brand tracking. Mark Ritson’s workshops on effectiveness were standing‑room only. The applause lines were not about artistry but about evidence. In that environment, companies like Tracksuit whose very purpose is to show whether brand investment is working have found themselves centre stage.
From Auckland to London boardrooms
Tracksuit’s origins are not what one might expect. New Zealand is better known for its film sets and rugby players than for marketing technology.
Yet it was the constraints of a small market small budgets, small populations that pushed Herbert and his co‑founders to design something lean and accessible. If you can make tracking work for a five‑person brand team in Auckland, you can make it work anywhere.
The founding mix was unusual. Herbert’s early experience came at Uber, before moving into start‑ups where he met his now co‑founder, Connor.
A few years later they reconnected and added James Hurman, a figure well known in effectiveness circles, and a small research group. The plan was simple: combine start‑up speed with research discipline, and package it as software rather than consultancy.
New Zealand’s creative sector gave them confidence. Auckland’s agencies regularly win international awards, despite the country’s size. The founders saw how creative talent was already world‑class, but measurement lagged behind. If they could solve that gap locally, scaling abroad would follow. It was a gamble, but one that gave Tracksuit a distinctive edge: rigorous research roots blended with a pragmatic, product‑led mindset.
Matt Herbert, Co-founder of Tracksuit
Simplifying the brand health puzzle
Most marketers already swim in data. What they lack is clarity. Herbert recalls speaking to more than a hundred brand leaders in Australasia before building the product. The complaint was constant: research reports arrived months late, were dense to the point of unusable, and left teams guessing. Tracksuit stripped it back to four things: the size of the market, the health of the funnel, what people think and feel about brands and ultimately how it all compares with rivals.
Tracksuit continuously surveys daily with the dashboard refreshing monthly. A base of 4,000 respondents per category is weighted to be nationally representative. Data is cleaned each day, with spikes smoothed out so a World Cup or Wimbledon won’t distort long‑term trends. The result is something closer to a pulse than a post‑mortem.
A brand manager walking into a Monday board meeting instead of leafing through a consultant’s deck produced three months earlier, they can pull up a live dashboard: awareness is up, consideration flat, preference down slightly against one competitor. That snapshot shapes the conversation, not only in percentages but in real numbers of people. It is less about pretty charts, more about usable truth.
Against the legacy incumbents
The incumbents Kantar, Ipsos, YouGov still dominate the corporate research budget. Their studies have weight and history, but they also come with a price tag and a lag. Reports land quarterly or even less, by which point the board has moved on. Tracksuit takes the opposite approach: subscription pricing, constant updates, and a platform that any brand manager can read without an analyst leaning over their shoulder.
Herbert is not naïve about the competition. “We’re not here to replace all of market research. But we are building the brand tracking platform of choice for modern consumer brands.Tracksuit is often used in conjunction with other research providers, whether that be creative testing with System1, consumer insights through GWI, or supplementary to a large annual global study being run by one of the large incumbents. Market research is vast and everyone has their place. But when it comes to brand tracking and brand measurement, that’s Tracksuit’s lane.” he says.
Some in the industry remain sceptical. Dashboards, critics argue, can create an illusion of control without depth. Herbert’s answer is that the value lies in focus:
“Marketers don’t need another hundred metrics. They need the few that matter, and they need them consistently.”
Who uses it?
Tracksuit was built for brand leaders: CMOs, brand managers, strategists. Yet the user base is wider. Agency planners use it to justify media choices. CFOs like the way percentages are translated into real people “2.5 million now consider us”. Regional brand managers log in for a view of their own patch. Herbert stresses that this openness is deliberate. “We don’t hide the numbers,” he says. “Everyone can see the same truth, whether they sit in London or the other side of the world.”
A typical scenario: a CMO preparing for a quarterly review with the finance director. Instead of arguing from instinct, they show how consideration has risen by 300,000 people since the last campaign. The finance director may not care about the creative, but they understand what another 300,000 potential buyers could mean.
Mid‑market roots, enterprise appetite
The first customers were the obvious ones: scaling DTC brands with investor pressure to prove their spend. These firms could not swallow six‑figure research fees but needed credibility. Now adoption is moving up the ladder. Large consumer companies, weary of global trackers that do little for local teams, are buying in. Procurement still squeezes, but the software model keeps costs manageable. Unlike consultancy, Tracksuit is not built on day rates, so there is no need to chase loss‑making ‘trophy accounts’.
The balance is shifting. Herbert notes that mid‑market clients are very much the focus and account for much of the growth, but enterprise interest is rising. In some cases, regional brand teams adopt Tracksuit first, then push it upwards into headquarters. What starts as a stop‑gap becomes the preferred tool.
AI inside
Artificial intelligence features heavily in the product, though Herbert avoids the hype. For him the benefit is time. Where consultants once crunched survey data for weeks, Tracksuit’s system can surface insights in minutes. AI helps pick out anomalies, draft summaries, and frame the narrative that matters to non‑marketers in the boardroom. Most of the development is in‑house. Partnerships exist, but the principle is to augment, not replace. “Decimal points don’t sell strategy,” Herbert notes. What matters is the story behind the numbers.
Going beyond brand love
One of Tracksuit’s case studies looked at the role of entertainment in brand growth. Four traits stood out: humour, social content, distinctive characters, and the ability to grab attention. Brands that scored highly grew faster than those that did not. The lesson is not that every brand must be a comedian.
Duolingo’s TikTok antics work for language learning apps; they would be absurd for insurance. What matters is relevance. Consumers must feel a brand is for them. Herbert points out that ‘brand love’, a metric beloved of agencies, showed little link to growth. It sounds warm, but it does not always pay the bills.
The finding has fuelled debate. Some marketers cling to softer emotional metrics; others welcome a harder edge. Tracksuit’s role is not to dictate creative style, but to show what resonates in the market. Relevance, not romance, appears to be the surer path to growth.
Geography over generations
Another study produced a quirkier finding: geography often predicts brand choice more reliably than generation. The “Brand Map of Britain” showed tea loyalties split by county lines, not by age. Herbert recalls a woman in the Peak District refusing a cup because it wasn’t Yorkshire Tea. That loyalty, rooted in place, carried more weight than whether she was 30 or 60.
Tracksuit’s platform lets clients slice the data by region, category or channel habits. A carmaker, for instance, may find that over‑55s in Scotland still favour radio, while London’s under‑25s are heavily skewed to TikTok. With that knowledge, campaigns can be tuned rather than guessed. It is a reminder that demographic clichés are not always the most useful lens. Sometimes postcode trumps age group.
Lessons from American Eagle and Sydney Sweeney
American Eagle’s campaign with actress Sydney Sweeney provides a cautionary tale. Criticised online for objectification, it nonetheless boosted sales. Tracksuit’s data, later cited by Mark Ritson, showed the strongest lift not among teenagers but men in their late twenties and thirties. Was that a failure? Not really. Herbert argues it proves why objective readouts matter. The loudest voices on social media rarely reflect the full market. What counts is whether awareness and preference shift in the right direction. In this case, they did.
The episode also underlines the risk of relying on anecdote. Within marketing teams, the temptation is strong to equate personal reaction with consumer truth.
“Remember, you are not your consumer,” Herbert says. Tools like Tracksuit are designed to puncture that bias with evidence.
Governance and credibility
Tracksuit’s data model sidesteps many of the privacy headaches that dog ad‑tech. No personal identifiers are processed. Respondents are drawn from large panels and weighted to reflect the population. Compliance with GDPR and other regimes is relatively straightforward. The bigger issue is credibility. To counter doubts, Tracksuit guarantees at least 4,000 active respondents per category. That base can be scaled up for global launches or regional depth, but never allowed to slip below statistical significance. This insistence is what underpins Herbert’s claim that they are building one of the world’s largest brand health datasets.
The road ahead
A recent Series B round is fuelling expansion. Europe and Asia are next in line. Tracksuit adapts with a mix of standard dashboards and modular extras.
On the product side, the focus is context. New overlays will show how brand scores move against media spend, PR cycles or influencer peaks. AI will be used to assemble narrative packs for CFOs. But Herbert is wary of bloat. “We’re not building a full analytics suite,” he says. “Our edge is clarity. We’ll stay anchored to brand tracking.”
Growth will depend partly on partnerships. Tracksuit is already working with agencies to embed the platform in planning processes. Embedding with creative testing platforms, MMM providers and CDPs could extend its reach further. The aim is not to own every workflow but to be present wherever brand decisions are made.
Why it matters
Brand tracking was once a back‑office ritual: expensive studies delivered twice a year, then filed away. Today it sits at the heart of marketing. Tight budgets and board‑level scrutiny mean that brand data must be live, credible and easy to grasp. Tracksuit’s model always‑on, affordable, accessible reflects that shift. It is both a sign of the times and a driver of change.
Herbert ends with a reminder. “It’s very hard to sell to someone who hasn’t heard of you or doesn’t consider you.” That blunt truth explains why a start‑up from Auckland now finds itself shaping how brands from London to Los Angeles account for their spend. Brand measurement, long a dusty corner of the industry, is suddenly a frontline concern. And the firms that can provide it quickly, credibly and at scale may yet define the next decade of marketing practice.
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