New look Salmat launches high-profile campaign

Despite touching every house in Australia five times a week through multi-channel communications, Salmat founders don’t feel the company is recognised enough.

Fresh from a bullish annual report announcing record revenues of $812 million, Salmat founders and joint managing directors, Phil Salter and Peter Mattick, are determined to blow their own trumpets with a new branding and reorganisation. They feel the high achieving company does not have the brand recognition it should, especially after a year in which the company almost doubled in size following the takeover of HPA.

Salmat is the giant in the one-to-one communications sector, responsible for more than 60 percent of business to consumer communications utilizing transactional printing as well as call centres and SMS. It is also responsible for 60 percent of initial door-to-door sales for Foxtel.

It is now ramping up its commercial digital printing under the Print Zoo brand, offering national coverage to corporate clients. Under newly appointed chief operational officer, Peter Anson, it intends to develop both transpromotional transactional mail as well as colour digital printing. In this it has benefited from the pioneering work done by HPA, which was widely recognised as a world leader in transpromo development. It has installed a number of iGen3s at centralised locations in the capital cities.

According to Mattick and Salter, the integration of the two erstwhile competitors has gone smoothly and while conceding there will be a number of redundancies they emphasized the complementary nature of much of the offerings. They expect to achieve between $10 and $15 million in savings from integrating both companies.

The takeover sparked a reorganisation of Salmat in four business divisions; Mediaforce, Businessforce, Salesforce and Digitalforce. The new-look company results in the amalgamating of Targeted Media and Dialect to create Mediaforce, while the Salmat BPO business and HPA are put together as Businessforce. Salesforce, the business call centre operator that was acquired in 2006, retains its name but now includes Lasoo.com.au, Australia’s first online retail offer search engine.

“We pioneered the outsourcing of many of the business processing needs of Australian companies, significantly enhanced with our acquisition of HPAL. Our purchase of Salesforce in 2006 meant the country’s leading business call centre operator was now part of Salmat’s business and with VECommerce and Dialect, we are leading in the field of voice interactive and sms communications by companies.

According to Salter,  “2007 was Salmat’s biggest on record and included the integration of HPAL into Salmat and establishing Lasoo.com.au. Almost 30 years ago, Salmat was the first company to recognise then develop the distribution of catalogues into Australian homes on behalf of retailers. This sector now far exceeds the value of any other media used by the retail industry,” said Salter. “Since then, through organic growth and acquisition, Salmat has become Australia’s leading company facilitating direct communications between companies and their customers.

According to Mattick, the other co-founder and joint managing director, the company is now in a position to highlight its competitive advantage in the marketing landscape. “Our clients now require solutions that mean they can communicate with mass audiences one-to-one. Only Salmat can deliver that through its four business divisions and we feel that now is the right time to be talking about it,” he said.

“We are the only company with both the technology and strategic capacity to deliver one-to-one communications on a mass scale. The new branding will give better clarity as to how the business as a whole is seen. Some customers who might have only used Salmat for one part of their marketing needs can better see the bigger picture and the breadth of the services we offer.

“Marketers now want solutions that reach large audiences, but which engage them as individuals. We have recognised that strategic trend and now Salmat reaches 20 million Australians each and every day, a very powerful statistic.”