Fabulate aims to redefine creator marketing across APAC

“An influencer in every postcode” was how Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez described the FMCG’s pivot from traditional advertising giant to influencer-first innovator.

Unilever, she said, will invest some 50% of its global ad budget toward creators and influencer campaigns as it seeks to drive sales and engagement with a new generation of consumers.

It’s a sentiment that’s fast becoming reality across APAC, where brands are increasingly shifting spend toward creator-led marketing. But for many, the promise of influencer marketing has been held back by persistent challenges: compliance headaches, poor creator selection, fragmented data and a lack of strategic clarity.

Fabulate, the Sydney-founded influencer marketing platform, believes it has cracked the code.

SEE MORE: Influencer marketing is no longer an experiment - big brands are all in

Today, the company rolls out SparQ 2.0, the next iteration of its AI-powered suite, across 12 APAC markets - a move it said will give marketers smarter, faster and safer ways to run creator campaigns at scale.

“What began as an idea in Sydney is now a business operating in 12 countries,” Nathan Powell, Fabulate’s chief product and strategy officer told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.

“Whether we are in Singapore, London, Indonesia, Thailand … it doesn't matter. Clients all have the same challenge. They want influencer marketing campaigns that are more effective, more efficient and have the data and intelligence to do it better.”

Research by the Influencer Marketing Hub shows that some 53% of brands are still unable to attribute success to their influencer campaigns, and 78% of brands do not have a system in place to interpret the data that comes from running influencer campaigns.

Many of those problem have been around the review process, scanning content against legal standards and brand guidelines before anything goes live. SparQ 2.0 aims to solve this pain point for brands.

“Every brand has had a nightmare story where they’ve selected a creator who’s done something in the past, and it only comes up after the campaign’s gone live,” Powell said. “Manual processes just weren’t strong enough to protect brand safety.”

AI innovation

At the core of the upgrade is a suite of five agentic AI tools designed to automate and optimise every stage of the influencer marketing process - from creator discovery and campaign planning to compliance and performance analysis.

The tools include Lens, an analytics assistant that delivers strategic insights in response to natural-language queries; Compliance Check, which automates content review against regulatory and brand standards; Echo, a trend-tracking engine trained on TikTok; Quality Control, which ensures content meets brand expectations before going live; and Scout, a diagnostic tool that maps a brand’s social presence and competitive positioning.

Powell said the business has leaned hard into AI in the second iteration of SparQ.

“Marketers want to be able to use AI in creative marketing, there’s a real appetite and desire for it,” he said. “The vast majority of brands believe that AI can solve a lot of the issues they are facing.

“Because we are AI led, it allows us to be able to see angles that we hadn't considered before, and it gives us a real complete picture of the entire influencer marketing space.”

In the past year alone, Powell said the platform has already saved brands the equivalent of 16.8 years’ worth of manual checking across 50,000 videos. SparQ 2.0 draws from data on 320 million creative profiles across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, making it one of the richest data sets in the industry.

That volume has helped fuel the development of SparQ 2.0, which Powell describes as “a redefinition of how brands run creator campaigns.”

“What all this data does is it gives us a really strong baseline of performance trends and best practice which has fuelled the development of a lot of the AI tools."

APAC growth story

Fabulate’s rise over the past year has been rapid. With a team of 76 people across the region - almost one third being developers - Powell said revenues grew 94% year-on-year.

“There's not a lot of real bright spark growth stories in the advertising category right now with the challenge of going. So that was a real big achievement for us, especially in the advertising category.”

The company landed tenth on Deloitte’s Tech Fast 50 list last November and is now powering campaigns for major brands across finance, retail, travel and telecommunications.

“We’ve got clients that work with us across APAC saying they want to scale up to running 1,000 videos a month. You can’t sit there checking each individual video. It’s just not possible,” Ben Gunn, Fabulate’s co-founder, said.

With influencer marketing spend rising across APAC, Fabulate’s timing couldn’t be better.

“This isn’t just an upgrade,” CEO Toby Kennett said. “It’s end-to-end intelligence, with AI integrated at every step. We built this to solve real problems - approval bottlenecks, data fragmentation, compliance stress. Now marketers can move fast, stay safe, and scale with confidence.”