Prophet appoints Rishad Tobaccowala for US expansion

Prophet has appointed former Publicis Groupe Global Chief Strategist and Growth Officer Rishad Tobaccowala to its advisory board, where he will advise the Australian marketing mix modelling company on its expansion into the US.

Tobaccowala spent nearly four decades at Publicis Groupe and remains a Senior Advisor to the advertising group. His appointment gives Prophet a senior industry figure as it moves into what it describes as the world's largest measurement market.

Melbourne-based Prophet sells marketing mix modelling tools to brands and builds a digital model of each client's business so marketing and finance teams can test decisions before committing budgets. Those models draw on more than 100,000 macroeconomic and behavioural signals to simulate the effects of media, pricing and market conditions.

The business has expanded quickly in its home market. In 18 months, it has grown from one client to more than 30 large Australian brands across sectors including automotive, retail, fast-moving consumer goods, banking and wagering.

Among those clients is electric vehicle brand BYD. Prophet said its modelling work for BYD identified a 20-fold efficiency gap within a media mix that had appeared balanced.

US push

The advisory board appointment comes as marketers face growing scrutiny over how they measure returns on advertising and other spending. Across the sector, companies have been reassessing measurement tools as the loss of third-party data weakens some of the tracking methods widely used in digital advertising.

Tobaccowala will advise on how senior decision-makers, including Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Financial Officers, assess measurement, and on how Prophet should present its offer to a US audience. The focus reflects a broader shift as finance teams demand tools that can inform spending decisions before money is allocated rather than simply explain outcomes after the fact.

Tobaccowala has also argued that companies built around artificial intelligence can move faster than established incumbents relying on older systems. Prophet is positioning itself among newer entrants seeking to challenge more established marketing measurement providers.

In remarks on the appointment, Tobaccowala said: "Too often, the ways companies try to understand their markets give them answers to the wrong questions, or answers that arrive too late. Prophet lets a marketer run scenarios against real-world conditions to reach decisions faster, and more accurately, on the questions that actually matter to the business."

Growth stage

Prophet was founded in Melbourne in 2024 and remains at an early stage of expansion. Its pitch centres on replacing periodic reporting with continuous simulation, an approach aimed at linking marketing decisions more directly to commercial outcomes.

The company argues this matters because many marketing teams still make allocation decisions using backward-looking data. In that context, it is seeking to appeal not only to marketers but also to finance executives who want more certainty before approving expenditure.

Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Jordan Taylor-Bartels said: "Marketers everywhere are making big investment calls on numbers that only tell them what already happened. A digital clone changes the question - it lets a team ask what happens if they move the money here, before a dollar is committed, and get to that decision faster and with more confidence. Rishad has spent his career helping marketers make exactly that call, and his guidance will be instrumental as we take on the US."

The appointment is effective immediately.