Rishad Tobaccowala, who spent nearly four decades at Publicis Groupe as its global chief strategist and growth officer, has joined the advisory board of Aussie MMM company Prophet.
He joins to guide Prophet’s expansion into the United States, the world’s largest and most established measurement market.
Tobaccowala remains a senior advisor to Publicis Groupe, and his weekly thought-letter reaches more than 30,000 business leaders. At Prophet, Tobaccowala will advise on how senior decision-makers like CMOs and CFOs judge measurement, and on positioning the company for a US audience.
Prophet’s digital clone is a living model of each client’s business, fed by 100,000+ macroeconomic and behavioural signals, that simulates how media, pricing and market conditions interact, so teams can test a decision against real-world conditions before committing the spend.
In 18 months, the company has grown from a single client to more than 30 of Australia’s largest businesses, across automotive, retail, FMCG, banking and wagering, replacing periodic reporting with on-demand simulation. Those clients include BYD, the global electric-vehicle brand, where Prophet’s modelling uncovered a 20-fold efficiency gap hidden inside a media mix that looked balanced on the surface.
American marketers are under growing pressure to prove what their spending actually produces, as the loss of third-party signals erodes the tracking they relied on and finance teams asking for measurement they can act on before money goes out the door. Tobaccowala has argued that AI now lets companies built without legacy infrastructure move faster than incumbents, and that AI-native challengers are emerging with their own approaches to MMM. That is the position Prophet wants to own.
Prophet Advisory Board member Rishad 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.”
Prophet CEO 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.”
