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Matt Aitken has spent 28 years with IVE Group, but he still talks about the business as if it’s only getting started. It’s not because the past is lacking. Quite the opposite actually – the company’s history stretches back to 1921 when Link Printing opened in Balmain, Sydney.
More than a century later, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)-listed marketing services group generates more than US$500 million in annual revenue, employs 2,100 people and operates one of the most diverse marketing services platforms in Australia.
But longevity for Aitken, IVE Group’s Managing Director, is less about nostalgia and more about relevance.
“We’ve been here for 105 years and we’re going to be here for another hundred years, so we need to set that legacy up accordingly,” he tells The CEO Magazine.
The perspective is fitting for a company marking its ‘105ive’ campaign – a celebration of history, evolution and the many ways IVE Group has been woven into Australian life.
Every time Australians go to the polls, the ballots they find have been printed by IVE Group. The business also supported the Marriage Equality vote through print and promotional material.
IVE Group also works with iconic brands, including Country Road, Qantas, Tennis Australia and leading retailers across the country. But Aitken insists 105ive isn’t simply an opportunity to reminisce. To him, in many ways, it is a statement of intent.
“We didn’t get the opportunity to celebrate our centenary in 2021,” Aitken explains, noting that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the company’s 100-year milestone.
“That’s when our marketing team decided 105ive had a bit of a ring to it. It’s looking back at many of the big, iconic moments we, as a company, have been part of over the years.”
Aitken’s own story with IVE Group began practically by accident. Originally from New Zealand, he moved to Sydney in 1998 to open the Australian office of a New Zealand advertising agency. Soon after, Blue Star acquired that agency group, bringing Aitken into the fold of what would eventually become IVE Group.
At the time, Blue Star was a large New Zealand-based print business looking to add creative capability to its model. It had already acquired Link Printing in Australia, a third-generation family business that would become central to IVE Group’s origin story.
“We still have members of that third-generation family on the board today and many continue to be shareholders,” he points out.
“Over time, a number of the businesses we’ve acquired have also been third-generation family enterprises. As a result, there’s a strong family ethos embedded in our culture, even as we operate as a publicly listed company.”
From the outset, this culture has resonated with Aitken, who says he’s always felt at home in the business.
“I love it. I love what I do. I love the people. I love our customers and it’s a really enjoyable, fun industry to work in,” he says.
Even more, he has believed in the business since day one.
“I have always felt like I was working for the best group in the industry in Australia, so I never looked at any other company,” he reveals.
“None were better than us. IVE Group is the best and we will continue to be the best. And I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, I mean it in a very genuine way, considering the people we have, the great customers we have and the tremendous assets we have.”
The company has changed significantly during his tenure and that’s putting it lightly. Aitken explains it’s been owned out of the United States, moved through Chapter 11-related divestments and management ownership, private equity and eventually an ASX listing in December 2015.
It’s grown through more than 40 acquisitions during Aitken’s time with the company and transformed from a print-led organization into a broad marketing services group.
When management bought the business back from Champ Private Equity in 2012, IVE Group had about US$175 million in revenue, 900 staff and US$8.4 million in EBITDA. By the time it listed in 2015, revenue had skyrocketed to roughly US$257 million, staff to 1,300 and EBITDA to US$29.5 million.
“Today, we’ve practically tripled the size of the business,” Aitken confirms. “While we diversified, we continued to grow and remain relevant to our clients as a marketing services provider in a world that’s changed significantly since we started.”
It hasn’t always been easy, but Aitken sees opportunity in the challenge.
“It has helped us build resilience,” he says. “It’s taught us many things along the way. Things that have been fundamental to the business.”
For many businesses, longevity becomes a liability. The systems, products and processes that once drove success can become anchors that prevent change. But IVE Group has taken the opposite approach – as customer needs evolved, so too did the business.
The company expanded beyond print into data-driven marketing, customer experience (CX) platforms, logistics, packaging, retail activation, merchandise, apparel, events and technology services.
Some of these services were unimaginable when Aitken first joined.
“We’re very big around marketing automation platforms, CX and data and technology professional services,” he explains.
The same applies to other areas of the business. IVE Group now designs, sources, stores and distributes uniforms for major organizations, including Reece Plumbing and airport security companies. It delivers large-scale event experiences for organizations such as Tennis Australia and supports customers across increasingly complex marketing ecosystems.
“In 1998, I never would have guessed that we’d be doing these things today,” he recalls.
However, the through line of it all has been an intense focus on the customer.
“It’s been about trusting our gut, staying close to our clients and understanding what they’re looking for,” Aitken says.
This mindset has enabled IVE Group to build deeper partnerships while reducing complexity for clients seeking more integrated solutions. Importantly, it’s also futureproofed the business against changes affecting traditional marketing channels.
“We’ve continued to diversify our offering to our customers and we’ve been able to remain really relevant to them as a marketing services provider in a world that’s changed significantly,” he adds.
IVE Group may have started in print, but Aitken is quick to challenge what that means in today’s world. The company still produces hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of retail catalogs that continue to drive measurable results for major brands.
“Our print business is still very significant,” he points out. “By way of example, today, we still produce A$400 million [US$282 billion] worth of retail catalogs and magazines.”
It’s surprising scale for a channel that many in today’s digital world are quick to dismiss. But Aitken insists that retail catalogs remain highly effective in driving foot traffic, increasing basket size and directly influencing sales.
“What we’ve seen in recent times is a print comeback where retailers are increasingly coming back to the channel,” he confirms. “They’re printing catalogs again and putting them back in letterboxes.”
Indeed, physical collateral remains a critical component in an overwhelmingly digital marketing environment.
“It’s the only real thing that is meaningfully tactile from a marketing communication channel perspective,” he says.
“Emails, SMS, web, even out-of-home marketing like billboards – they’re not overly tactile. They might all be effective mediums in their own right, but nothing else is as tactile as printed products.
“Print is one of the few mediums that finds its way inside the home and can sit and exist for quite some time.”
Aitken argues that there is also an entire dimension of print that consumers simply do not register as such. Packaging is a prime example.
“Every muesli bar box, cereal box, laundry powder container – it’s packaging,” he says. “It’s all print, but the consumer isn’t necessarily seeing it that way.”
As sustainability concerns reshape consumer preferences, fiber-based packaging solutions are becoming increasingly important, creating new opportunities for innovation and growth, he adds.
However, print, Aitken stresses, is only one part of IVE Group’s evolving offer.
“It’s not falling off a cliff, but some areas are in decline,” he admits.
Running a business in decline in one area while building growth in others requires strategic clarity. As it stands, the company’s growth divisions – creative and content, data and technology, packaging, merchandise and uniforms, brand activations and events and third-party logistics – are where it is investing to offset print’s decline and drive toward its ambitious goal of achieving a billion-plus in revenue by 2030.
“In today’s crowded marketing landscape, the messaging must be meaningful and relevant,” Aitken says. “It has to connect and the experience across the brand’s ecosystem of channels must be consistent.”
That belief drives IVE Group’s pitch to its clients: a single partner capable of delivering consistently across the full value chain, from creative concept through to physical execution, distribution and analytics.
The company’s diversification over recent years has taken it into some unexpected corners. Its Lasoo platform – the only part of the business that trades directly with consumers under its own brand – is an ecommerce marketplace connecting Australian retailers and brands with shoppers seeking deals and specials.
It grew from a digital catalog website IVE Group inherited via acquisition, which was drawing 250,000 monthly visitors but generating little commercial revenue. The decision to transform it into a full marketplace during the pandemic was taken with the assistance of outside advisors.
It’s one of the few instances the company has looked externally for strategic guidance, according to Aitken.
“We’re not experts in ecommerce marketplaces and we didn’t really know enough about that landscape,” he says, adding that the platform is being managed as a startup and is expected to move toward profitability towards the end of the 2028 financial year.
IVE Group has made more than 40 acquisitions over the course of Aitken’s tenure, and mergers and acquisitions remain a core component of its growth strategy. In fact, three acquisitions were completed in the first half of the current financial year alone.
There is also an emerging opportunity in retail media that Aitken says he is watching closely. It’s not to compete with the in-house retail media arms being built by Woolworths and Bunnings, but to serve the many mid-market retailers who lack the scale or appetite to build their own capability.
“The way we look at it is, can we provide a way for a client to have fewer vendors and more accountability with one partner?” he says.
IVE Group’s scale and reach would not be what it is today without its strategic partnerships.
“When we talk about strategic suppliers at IVE Group, we’re not talking about a long tail of vendors,” Aitken explains.
“We’re talking about a deliberately small group of partners who are fundamental to how we run our business and how we grow.”
The criteria for such a relationship hinges on financial strength, the ability to scale, operational bandwidth, genuine innovation capability and critically, cultural alignment.
“The best results come when the teams on both sides are genuinely connected and collaborative,” he adds.
IVE Group’s property partnership with Frasers Property Industrial illustrates the model to a T. Over more than a decade, what started as a single lease has grown to six facilities and over 80,000 square meters of space in Victoria, including the state-of-the-art Rubix Connect logistics hub.
Working alongside the Frasers team and logistics specialist Dexion Logistics Australia, IVE Group has been able to design bespoke facilities, which have lifted its third-party logistics footprint by approximately 60 percent in Victoria and 30 percent nationally.
“You don’t achieve that kind of step change unless there’s a deep level of trust and connection between the people involved,” Aitken says.
On the technology side, partners Enablis and Sekuro have helped to build the secure, resilient network and cyber environment that underpins IVE Group’s production platforms and connected marketing solutions.
“They’re not just service providers – they’re in the room early, helping us think through how we scale, how we protect data and how we keep the operation running reliably as we grow,” Aitken says.
Suppliers are central to the company’s paper and raw material supply chain, while equipment partners underpin the high-quality print output that keeps major retailers, publishers and brand owners returning.
Long-term manufacturing partners Durst Oceania and Koenig & Bauer anchor the production side. Meanwhile, major raw materials suppliers – Ball & Dogget, Sappi Trading Australia and Spicers Australia – are treated as genuine strategic collaborators rather than volume vendors.
“We’re not just buying volume; we’re codesigning solutions, sharing insights and building long-standing relationships where their teams understand our strategy, our clients and our culture,” Aitken insists.
Together, this ecosystem across property, logistics, security, networks, manufacturing and supply chain is, he believes, a core reason IVE Group can innovate and scale in a highly competitive market.
IVE Group is roughly 12 months into its AI adoption journey and is preparing for what Aitken describes as the next phase. Currently, the company is using AI to help with everything from generating content in its agency business to writing code in its data division.
It’s also using AI-powered fraud detection in the Lasoo platform and AI-driven lead generation in sales, which Aitken says has already made a considerable difference, turning what would have been four days of research into minutes.
AI agents, he notes, are handling outbound calling to recruit walkers to join the existing network of roughly 10,000 contractors who distribute IVE Group’s catalogs into mailboxes each week.
“What I love about where we’ve gotten with AI across our staff is the entrepreneurial spirit that they’ve had around adopting it in the workplace, getting to know it and using it,” he says.
However, one firm boundary remains in place – no customer data or sensitive company information is fed into external AI engines.
Aitken acknowledges candidly that any AI strategy set out 12 months ago is already outdated.
“The same thing will happen again in six months,” he predicts.
As it relates to current fears of AI replacing entire teams, he’s quick to note that at IVE Group personal connection is irreplaceable.
“You still need the human experience,” he says.
With 105 years of institutional power to draw on, Aitken has gleaned a particular vantage point on what separates companies that last from those that don’t.
“The brands that endure are the ones that stay relentlessly relevant – not just to people but also to the AI systems that increasingly mediate our choices,” he says.
“They’ll be very clear on who they are and then use AI to deliver that in more personal, more useful and more human ways at scale.”
But even in an AI‑driven world, Aitken acknowledges that people still want to do business with people. He believes the brands that succeed will be the ones which place human relationships, judgment and accountability at the center.
“Crucially, they’ll compete for both hearts and algorithms – building brands people would miss if they disappeared and brands that AI can clearly identify, trust and recommend,” he explains.
“The brands that vanish will be the ones that treat AI as either a gimmick or a shortcut – pumping out generic, automated content, losing distinctiveness and letting both culture and technology move on without them.”
For IVE Group, the strategy is to be neither. After more than a century, three ownership structures, a global financial crisis, a pandemic, an IPO and more than 40 acquisitions, the company has learned that relevance is not a destination.
And the future will belong to brands and businesses that can combine innovation with consistency, relevance with resilience and technology with trust.
“What excites me about where we’re going is the opportunity to bring our strategy to life – building a diverse business that employs thousands of Australians, is very passionate about manufacturing, puts clients at the center of everything we do and delivers a broad range of marketing services,” Aitken says.
“That’s what will keep us relevant and successful well into the future.”
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