What does it look like when a start-up grows up. 

Five years is an awkward age for a company. 

You’re in that middle ground where some people still ask “Who’s Anchora? What is it you do?” at industry events, meanwhile your client list includes Tennis Australia, VicRoads, CommSec, Bankwest, Endeavour Group, and Tourism and Events Queensland. 

We started in 2021 with a straightforward thesis: the way enterprise marketing technology was being delivered didn’t work for clients. They were paying for big firm logos and getting graduates. Strategy was separated from execution by layers of subcontractors. And the people making the decisions were never the people doing the work. 

So we built something different. Your strategist is also your architect. Your CTO picks up the phone. The person in the pitch is the person on the project. There’s no handoff to a B-team after the contract is signed, because there is no B-team. 

Five years later, that thesis has held up. But the company around it has changed beyond recognition. 

Here are five chapters from the last twelve months that explain where Anchora is now and where we’re headed. 

1. A partner network built for what’s next. 

If there’s one shift that defines this year, it’s the ecosystem we’ve built around our clients. 

We formalised partnerships with three companies we believe will shape the next decade of enterprise marketing and AI: 

Anthropic 

We joined the Claude Partner Network, bringing one of the most capable, safety focused AI models in the world to Australian and New Zealand organisations. Not as a demo. Not as a proof of concept that stalls at the pilot stage. As production grade, enterprise ready AI, with the delivery capability to actually get it into production and make it stick. 

Databricks 

As a Databricks partner, we’re working with the platform behind CustomerLake, their agentic CDP built natively into the Lakehouse. No data duplication. No lag. No middleware. Customer data now lives where the AI models and governance already sit. For any organisation evaluating their CDP or data strategy, this changes the conversation entirely. 

Microsoft 

We’re now part of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, adding another dimension to how we help clients architect and deploy AI across their stack. 

These sit alongside our established partnerships with Adobe (where we hold Strategic Partner of the Year and multiple APAC awards), Braze, Iterable and Telium. 

Here’s a trend worth watching: the line between your data platform and your marketing platform is disappearing. Databricks building a CDP natively into the Lakehouse is a signal, not an anomaly. Snowflake, Google and AWS are all moving in the same direction. The implication for marketing teams is significant. Within two to three years, the question won’t be “which CDP should we buy?” but “does our data platform already do this?” The organisations that understand this shift now will avoid a very expensive re-platform later. 

We built our partnership ecosystem around that convergence. Every partnership on the list represents a client need we’ve seen repeatedly and a technology we believe in enough to back formally. The combination means we can walk into almost any enterprise environment and work with what’s already there or recommend what should be. 

2. From Niche Player to Real Alternative 

Five years ago, most of the market saw us as a specialist. Today 62% see us as a strong alternative to the big firms. Same team, bigger conversations. Why? The best measure of a consultancy isn’t its pitch deck. It’s what clients say when the project wraps. 

Tennis Australia 

We delivered a full-scale digital transformation of tennis.com.au, reimagining the platform that serves millions of fans, players and participants across the country. The project went well beyond a site rebuild. We designed and implemented a unified elastic search experience that brought together content, events, venues and player information into a single, intelligent discovery layer. It’s the kind of capability that sounds simple from the outside but requires deep architectural work underneath. 

“A big thank you to you and the Anchora team for the huge effort and dedication that went into delivering the new tennis.com.au site.” – Simon Gutman, Director of Digital and Technology at Tennis Australia. 

VicRoads 

We led the migration from Sitecore to Adobe Experience Manager including more than 300 pages, six languages, and enterprise analytics across 10 major customer journeys, all built to serve four million Victorians. 

“A significant milestone, and the result speaks volumes about the hard work and dedication of the entire team. We will definitely look for opportunities to collaborate again… I am confident our roads will come together sooner rather than later.” – Alex Grande, Senior Product Manager at VicRoads 

Endeavour Group engaged us for a 15-week MarTech platform evaluation across their brands. Metricon moved from discovery into an active Adobe engagement. Bankwest progressed from consulting into proof of concept. And we continued delivering for CommSec, La Trobe University, and organisations across financial services, tourism, sport and retail. 

Clients aren’t just asking us to implement platforms. They’re asking us to sit at the table earlier to validate strategy, recommend architecture and help build the business cases that secure board funding. That’s not an implementation partner. That’s a trusted adviser. And it’s a different kind of relationship entirely. 

There’s a reason for the shift, and it’s worth naming. Most MarTech implementations fail not because the technology is wrong, but because the decision was made in isolation. Marketing picks a platform. IT finds out three months later. Data discovers the integration requirements don’t match their architecture. By the time everyone’s aligned, the project is already compromised. The organisations getting it right are the ones who bring strategy, technology and data into the same room before a single vendor is shortlisted. That’s the work we’re increasingly being asked to lead. 

3. We Backed AI Before Clients Asked for It  

Two years ago, we made a deliberate decision to reinvest heavily into AI, not because it was trending, but because we saw where the industry was heading and believed we had a responsibility to meet our clients there rather than chase them. 

This year, that bet started paying off. 

Our AI practice now spans autonomous agent deployment, AI-powered content supply chains, intelligent reporting and AI-first website architecture. Combined with our Anthropic partnership for frontier AI models, our Databricks partnership for data infrastructure, and our early adoption of Adobe Edge Delivery Services, where we’ve compressed what used to be six-month site migrations into three-week sprints, we’ve built an AI capability grounded in delivery, not slide decks. 

One observation that keeps proving true: the organisations getting the most out of AI are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most advanced technology. They’re the ones that fixed their data foundations first. Clean, connected, governed data is the unsexy prerequisite that determines whether AI creates value or creates chaos. 

Anchora’s Director of Marketing and Strategy, Phil Koolen, wrote in a recent op-ed on lifecycle marketing: adopt an agentic AI tool without a lifecycle foundation in place and it won’t transform your business. It will simply scale whatever you’re already doing, including your inefficiencies. 

That’s the approach we take with every client. Build the foundation first. Get the data connected. Get the lifecycle programs running. Then let the AI do what it’s designed to do: scale something that already works. 

4. The Recognition 

In a market where trust is everything, independent recognition matters. 

This year we were nominated for the 2026 AMI Marketing Excellence Awards – Agency of the Year, a milestone that puts Anchora alongside some of the most established names in the industry. For a five year old consultancy it’s a validation of what’s possible when you back quality of delivery over speed of growth. 

Alongside that: 

• Adobe Strategic Partner of the Year 

• Adobe APAC Emerging Partner of the Year – finalist 

• Adobe ANZ Partner of the Year 

• Mumbrella Emerging Agency of the Year – finalist 

• Mariko Aoki, Bankwest – finalist for Digital Transformation Leader, a recognition that reflects the calibre of transformation being delivered alongside her team 

Beyond the awards, this year we hosted roundtables, presented on stage at the MarTech World Forum, and continued publishing thought leadership on AI, data and customer experience. Not as a marketing exercise but because in our experience, the best business development is sharing what you actually know. When your CEO is writing about agentic AI architecture and your Director of Marketing and Strategy is publishing on lifecycle strategy, clients can evaluate your thinking before they ever pick up the phone. That’s intentional. 

With a client retention rate of 98% and a Net Promoter Score of 73, the numbers tell the same story. In consulting, repeat business is the only honest metric. Everything else is marketing. 

5. From humble beginnings to global expansion 

Five years ago, Anchora was a Melbourne consultancy. Today we operate across four Australian cities including Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide, as well as an offshore delivery team headquartered in India and international operations spanning New Zealand, Malaysia and now the UK.

This year, we landed our first European client. Fidelity engaged us to lead end to end delivery of a large scale MarTech migration to Braze, spanning architecture, design and implementation of data and engagement capabilities across their global business. A milestone that opens an entirely new market and validates something we’ve believed for a while. The way we work travels! Senior led, hands on, no bloat. That model isn’t geography dependent.
 
We now have active engagements across the Asia Pacific and into Europe. Not through acquisitions or franchise agreements, but organically. One relationship, one referral, one piece of work at a time. The same way we’ve built everything else. 
 
There’s something worth noting about how other services firms typically expand internationally. Most do it by acquiring a local presence first and then finding work to justify the cost. We did it the other way around. We built a strategy to expand and then had the agility to let the demand lead us. It means every market we’re in exists because a client needed us there, not because a growth plan said we should be. Sounds a little like lifecycle marketing, right? Be where the customer needs you, not where your strategy tells you. 

What’s Next 

Five years in, the question isn’t whether Anchora can deliver. It’s what’s possible when a company with this team, these partnerships and this momentum decides to push further. 

We’re scaling our AI practice through Anthropic, Databricks and Microsoft. We’re deepening our data capability. We’re expanding our strategic advisory work across new industries and new regions. And we’re continuing to invest in the people behind every result on this page because none of this happens without a team that chose to be here and a culture that gives them a reason to stay. 

One of the things we’re most proud of, and it rarely makes the highlight reel, is how we work with clients’ internal teams. We don’t parachute in, deliver a strategy document and disappear. We sit alongside your people, build their capability as we go, and leave the organisation in a position to own what we’ve built together. The best outcome for us is when a client doesn’t need us for the same thing twice. That’s how you earn the call for the next challenge. 

Anchora started as a different way to do consulting. Five years later, it’s become a different way to think about what marketing technology, data and AI can actually do for an organisation when they’re done properly. 

If you’re rethinking your MarTech stack, building an AI strategy, working out what to do with your data, or just trying to figure out where to start, we’d genuinely like to hear from you. 

Not because we need the work. Because this is the work we were built for.  

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