Image: Fabulate founders Ben Gunn, Nathan Powell, Toby Kennett, and Sachin Singh

Nathan Powell and Ben Gunn watched as 15 professionals spent hours in a boardroom struggling to execute what should have been a simple branded content campaign. In that moment, the two media veterans identified the gap between the growing demand for creator content and the inefficient, manual processes most companies use to produce it.

“I can still remember sitting around the table trying to do a headcount of how many head hours were actually being accrued just by having all of these people in the room,” Nathan recalls. “I remember walking outside with Ben after that meeting, and we both looked at each other and thought there just has to be a way where technology can start to do some of the heavy lifting of the content creation process.”

Founded in 2019, Fabulate emerged from this realization that the creator economy needed proper infrastructure. 

Nathan and Ben, drawing on their backgrounds in traditional publishing and media sales at companies like Nine Entertainment and Fairfax Media, built their platform to serve enterprise brands across 12 markets in the Asia-Pacific region that need to scale their creator marketing while maintaining brand safety efficiently.

Recently named the 10th fastest-growing technology business in Australia by Deloitte in its “Fast 50” program, Fabulate functions as what Nathan describes as “the Salesforce for influencer marketing” — a central repository where all aspects of creator campaigns reside in one place.

“84% of searches for influencers still happen manually and aren’t using discovery engines,” Ben explains. “Couple that with things like payments, which is a real friction point in the industry as well. We know from speaking to our clients that the admin side of payments, when dealing with maybe 20, 30, 50, 100 creators on a campaign, can be a real burden.”

The platform streamlines what was previously a cumbersome, manual process into a systematic workflow. “The main stages of an influencer campaign are first discovering the talent you want to work with, and being able to reach out to them. Once they want to work with you, you need to be able to brief and agree on deliverables and contract them,” Ben explains. “You will then want to be able to go back and forth within a technology platform that can capture all of those changes and that workflow automation so that it can streamline that entire process.”

By integrating discovery, contracting, content management, and analytics in one system, Fabulate eliminates the inefficiencies that have long plagued creator marketing. 

“For every link in that chain you obviously utilize through to the end of your campaign, you’re getting a case where 1 plus 1 equals 10,” Nathan notes, adding that this approach doesn’t just save time—it transforms how brands scale their creator marketing efforts. 

One beauty client reported reducing their campaign turnaround time from 20 business days to just 72 hours—an 84% reduction.

Harnessing AI for Brand Safety and Insights

Fabulate’s suite of AI tools is branded as “SparQ.” The company developed these capabilities to ensure brand safety across thousands of pieces of content.

“We had one government client that basically had a three-page spreadsheet that every creator needed to be checked against,” Nathan shares. “They wanted to go back to the entire life cycle of how their content [developed] from the very beginning.”

Manually reviewing such extensive content histories would be prohibitively time-consuming. Nathan illustrates the scale: “An average influencer campaign where you’re doing 10 influencers, they might have an average of 185 videos, each of which is 1.5 minutes long. That’s effectively anywhere from up to about 46 hours of an actual human reviewing that.”

Fabulate’s AI solution consumes “100 hours of content per human hour,” scanning for brand safety risks with greater accuracy than a human could achieve. The system flags potential issues—from inappropriate language to imagery involving smoking, vaping, or alcohol—for human review, striking a balance between automation and human oversight.

The company continues to expand its AI capabilities. Their upcoming “Lens” tool will apply AI to campaign analytics, allowing users to ask natural language questions about performance. 

“We’ve trained that through the last four or five years’ worth of campaign analytics that we’ve had and all of the questions that we get asked by clients on a daily basis,” Nathan explains. “We’ve trained this agent or agentic AI to be able to think and act like the smartest social strategist that you can think of so that we can democratize that knowledge across anyone that’s doing an influencer campaign.”

Delivering Results for Clients

Instead of measuring success by engagement metrics, Fabulate focuses on metrics directly impacting business outcomes. 

“As a legacy in the creator space, we’ve become obsessed with likes, comments, and shares,” Nathan observes. “I don’t think engagement is the primary metric that people should be measuring the effectiveness of their content against.”

Nathan emphasizes that contemporary savvy marketers should be “optimizing and measuring and tracking their campaigns towards 6-second view-through rates.” He references research supporting this approach: “There’s a great study TikTok did a couple of years back now where they’re saying that 90% of AD recall and 80% of the heavy lifting of awareness is achieved in the first six seconds of a video.”

By leveraging data, Fabulate has delivered desirable results for clients. “We’ve seen results that side by side, apple for apple comparisons as high as 70% reductions in your CPA costs when you’re using creator-led content as opposed to brand ads,” Ben notes, adding that these improvements span metrics including engagement rates, click-through rates, view-through rates, and cost efficiencies across various industry verticals.

“We’ve tested this with B2B clients, we’ve tested it with B2C clients, and we’ve tested it with e-commerce clients. And we see phenomenal improvements in performance,” Ben adds. “The smart clients now are starting to go, ‘right, how do we do this at scale? And how can technology help us do this at scale?'”

Insights Into Media

As veterans of traditional media who witnessed the digital transformation firsthand, Nathan and Ben have unique perspectives on how creator content is disrupting established marketing channels.

“The marketers will follow the audiences, and the audiences are on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram,” Ben observes. “When TikTok’s most watched, they’re now watched in prime time, 7:30 at night, people are choosing to get onto TikTok rather than turning on free-to-air television. And for me, I think that’s a real sort of changing of the guards.”

Nathan adds that this impact extends beyond marketing. “We just had an election here in Australia, and the people who won the election leaned heavily into TikTok and social media as a platform because this was the first time that the voting bloc here in Australia was the 18-to-35-year-old age group, which was the largest voting bloc.”

This shift in audience attention is driving how brands approach content creation. Rather than producing a few polished brand assets, leading marketers are now focusing on generating multiple content variations quickly to allow platform algorithms to identify top performers—what Nathan calls “Creative Darwinism.”

The Future of Fabulate

Having earned industry recognition, such as back-to-back wins at the Australian Influencer Marketing Council (AiMCO) Awards for “Best Influencer Marketing Technology,” Fabulate will continue to expand across the APAC region while developing more AI-powered features. 

“Our biggest competitors are based in the U.S. and are not terribly focused on the APAC market,” Ben explains. “That’s something that we’re really passionate about.”

Their long-term vision remains consistent: “We just want to make content easier to build, easier to find the right creator, and easier to prove that it works for brands,” Nathan states. “Our platform will become increasingly AI-enabled and AI-powered as we move on.”

For brands looking to succeed in creator marketing, Ben’s advice is clear: “This is such an evolving space that you need to lean in to take advantage of it. There are solutions out there for all of those things,” referring to common concerns like brand safety and scalability.

To creators, Ben recommends approaching their work professionally: “This is an opportunity that is just so rich. I’d encourage everyone to treat it like a business and become a professional creator. Because what’s going to happen as the market evolves and develops is that there’s going to be a gap created. And that gap is going to be who are the professional creators who can work with brands, who can respond quickly, who can understand a brief, and who can adapt. They will be the creators that win in this space.”

Nathan Powell and Ben Gunn watched as 15 professionals spent hours in a boardroom struggling to execute what should have been a simple branded content campaign. In that moment, the two media veterans identified the gap between the growing demand for creator content and the inefficient, manual processes most companies use to produce it.

“I can still remember sitting around the table trying to do a headcount of how many head hours were actually being accrued just by having all of these people in the room,” Nathan recalls. “I remember walking outside with Ben after that meeting, and we both looked at each other and thought there just has to be a way where technology can start to do some of the heavy lifting of the content creation process.”

Founded in 2019, Fabulate emerged from this realization that the creator economy needed proper infrastructure. 

Nathan and Ben, drawing on their backgrounds in traditional publishing and media sales at companies like Nine Entertainment and Fairfax Media, built their platform to serve enterprise brands across 12 markets in the Asia-Pacific region that need to scale their creator marketing while maintaining brand safety efficiently.

Recently named the 10th fastest-growing technology business in Australia by Deloitte in its “Fast 50” program, Fabulate functions as what Nathan describes as “the Salesforce for influencer marketing” — a central repository where all aspects of creator campaigns reside in one place.

“84% of searches for influencers still happen manually and aren’t using discovery engines,” Ben explains. “Couple that with things like payments, which is a real friction point in the industry as well. We know from speaking to our clients that the admin side of payments, when dealing with maybe 20, 30, 50, 100 creators on a campaign, can be a real burden.”

The platform streamlines what was previously a cumbersome, manual process into a systematic workflow. “The main stages of an influencer campaign are first discovering the talent you want to work with, and being able to reach out to them. Once they want to work with you, you need to be able to brief and agree on deliverables and contract them,” Ben explains. “You will then want to be able to go back and forth within a technology platform that can capture all of those changes and that workflow automation so that it can streamline that entire process.”

By integrating discovery, contracting, content management, and analytics in one system, Fabulate eliminates the inefficiencies that have long plagued creator marketing. 

“For every link in that chain you obviously utilize through to the end of your campaign, you’re getting a case where 1 plus 1 equals 10,” Nathan notes, adding that this approach doesn’t just save time—it transforms how brands scale their creator marketing efforts. 

One beauty client reported reducing their campaign turnaround time from 20 business days to just 72 hours—an 84% reduction.

Harnessing AI for Brand Safety and Insights

Fabulate’s suite of AI tools is branded as “SparQ.” The company developed these capabilities to ensure brand safety across thousands of pieces of content.

“We had one government client that basically had a three-page spreadsheet that every creator needed to be checked against,” Nathan shares. “They wanted to go back to the entire life cycle of how their content [developed] from the very beginning.”

Manually reviewing such extensive content histories would be prohibitively time-consuming. Nathan illustrates the scale: “An average influencer campaign where you’re doing 10 influencers, they might have an average of 185 videos, each of which is 1.5 minutes long. That’s effectively anywhere from up to about 46 hours of an actual human reviewing that.”

Fabulate’s AI solution consumes “100 hours of content per human hour,” scanning for brand safety risks with greater accuracy than a human could achieve. The system flags potential issues—from inappropriate language to imagery involving smoking, vaping, or alcohol—for human review, striking a balance between automation and human oversight.

The company continues to expand its AI capabilities. Their upcoming “Lens” tool will apply AI to campaign analytics, allowing users to ask natural language questions about performance. 

“We’ve trained that through the last four or five years’ worth of campaign analytics that we’ve had and all of the questions that we get asked by clients on a daily basis,” Nathan explains. “We’ve trained this agent or agentic AI to be able to think and act like the smartest social strategist that you can think of so that we can democratize that knowledge across anyone that’s doing an influencer campaign.”

Delivering Results for Clients

Instead of measuring success by engagement metrics, Fabulate focuses on metrics directly impacting business outcomes. 

“As a legacy in the creator space, we’ve become obsessed with likes, comments, and shares,” Nathan observes. “I don’t think engagement is the primary metric that people should be measuring the effectiveness of their content against.”

Nathan emphasizes that contemporary savvy marketers should be “optimizing and measuring and tracking their campaigns towards 6-second view-through rates.” He references research supporting this approach: “There’s a great study TikTok did a couple of years back now where they’re saying that 90% of AD recall and 80% of the heavy lifting of awareness is achieved in the first six seconds of a video.”

By leveraging data, Fabulate has delivered desirable results for clients. “We’ve seen results that side by side, apple for apple comparisons as high as 70% reductions in your CPA costs when you’re using creator-led content as opposed to brand ads,” Ben notes, adding that these improvements span metrics including engagement rates, click-through rates, view-through rates, and cost efficiencies across various industry verticals.

“We’ve tested this with B2B clients, we’ve tested it with B2C clients, and we’ve tested it with e-commerce clients. And we see phenomenal improvements in performance,” Ben adds. “The smart clients now are starting to go, ‘right, how do we do this at scale? And how can technology help us do this at scale?'”

Insights Into Media

As veterans of traditional media who witnessed the digital transformation firsthand, Nathan and Ben have unique perspectives on how creator content is disrupting established marketing channels.

“The marketers will follow the audiences, and the audiences are on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram,” Ben observes. “When TikTok’s most watched, they’re now watched in prime time, 7:30 at night, people are choosing to get onto TikTok rather than turning on free-to-air television. And for me, I think that’s a real sort of changing of the guards.”

Nathan adds that this impact extends beyond marketing. “We just had an election here in Australia, and the people who won the election leaned heavily into TikTok and social media as a platform because this was the first time that the voting bloc here in Australia was the 18-to-35-year-old age group, which was the largest voting bloc.”

This shift in audience attention is driving how brands approach content creation. Rather than producing a few polished brand assets, leading marketers are now focusing on generating multiple content variations quickly to allow platform algorithms to identify top performers—what Nathan calls “Creative Darwinism.”

The Future of Fabulate

Having earned industry recognition, such as back-to-back wins at the Australian Influencer Marketing Council (AiMCO) Awards for “Best Influencer Marketing Technology,” Fabulate will continue to expand across the APAC region while developing more AI-powered features. 

“Our biggest competitors are based in the U.S. and are not terribly focused on the APAC market,” Ben explains. “That’s something that we’re really passionate about.”

Their long-term vision remains consistent: “We just want to make content easier to build, easier to find the right creator, and easier to prove that it works for brands,” Nathan states. “Our platform will become increasingly AI-enabled and AI-powered as we move on.”

For brands looking to succeed in creator marketing, Ben’s advice is clear: “This is such an evolving space that you need to lean in to take advantage of it. There are solutions out there for all of those things,” referring to common concerns like brand safety and scalability.

To creators, Ben recommends approaching their work professionally: “This is an opportunity that is just so rich. I’d encourage everyone to treat it like a business and become a professional creator. Because what’s going to happen as the market evolves and develops is that there’s going to be a gap created. And that gap is going to be who are the professional creators who can work with brands, who can respond quickly, who can understand a brief, and who can adapt. They will be the creators that win in this space.”