Paramount went early on both converged trading and a streaming ad tier in the US. Now it’s doing likewise in Australia and Lee Sears, Paramount’s international ad sales chief, thinks both plays will pay off for the media and entertainment conglomerate, its advertisers and crucially – viewers. Unlike some rivals, Paramount didn’t push subscribers automatically onto the streaming ad tier. Sears says it didn’t need to, because “we have a huge audience elsewhere, so don’t have to be reliant on just the SVOD ad tier”. He suggests forcing ads onto subscribers that signed up for an ad free service wouldn’t be right. Either way, the strategy appears to be paying off. Locally, sales chief Rod Prosser won’t divulge numbers, though analysts Telsyte estimate Paramount SVOD subscribers at 1.8m, with sign-ups outstripping its competitive set. Prosser said the reality is much higher than the Telsyte estimate and, confirmed “We are still the fastest growing [SVOD]”. Moreover, Sears suggests Paramount’s subscribers are actually using the service amid some “wild” numbers being touted in market, per OMG investment chief Kristiaan Kroon, “because it's not an add-on to something else, or it's not a byproduct of a bill that you're paying elsewhere within your household”. On converged trading across BVOD, SVOD, AVOD and FAST (linear TV’s set to follow locally in H2 next year), Sears says the approach is now driving a “major” chunk of revenue in the US and other global markets. He anticipates Australia will follow that playbook: “It is now part of everything we do … Converged trading, connecting everything together, is how we lead with our conversation. I think that’s the way everybody will try to lead conversations in the future, unless you only have a one-dimensional play.” Part of the converged approach is a “blended CPM”, i.e. a bundled price that factors in the different channels the ads run across. Prosser said how that pricing works has been the biggest question from agencies in recent weeks, alongside bringing linear TV into the converged mix.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Paramount global and local sales chiefs on converged trading, blended CPMs and why allowing streaming subscribers to opt into ad tiers is optimal

Salesforce reckons it’s the end of the DIY AI era – and global CMO Ariel Kelman is tasked with addressing what his CEO, Marc Benioff said last week is Salesforce's biggest marketing challenge: convincing global markets to think less about Open AI, Microsoft copilots and other generative AI companies that require businesses to custom-bake the tech into their organisations to make it work – and more about the deployment of low code, no code, autonomous AI agents that can be built and tested and live within weeks, if not days. The difference is that Salesforce is pointing these agents directly at existing customer systems and data, rather than brands spending “literally tens of millions of dollars with cloud providers to train these models” from scratch. “There are lots of use cases where you do need to train and fine-tune your models. But absolutely not sales, service, marketing and commerce – the models are smart enough that they can go and grab information,” says Kelman. “It can just scale the work that our customers have already done.” It’s working for the likes of Saks, Gucci and Wiley – and some local firms like Fisher &amp; Paykel and Queensland University of Technology are now likewise plugged into what Benioff reckons is “AI’s third wave”. Kelman says AI agents “blur the lines” between sales, service and marketing functionality – and coming next is a variant for sales lead development, where the agent will develop the leads until they are warm enough for a human to take over.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘Don’t waste millions training LLMs for marketing and commerce, tap autonomous AI agents like Gucci, Saks, Wiley, Fisher & Paykel’ – Salesforce global CMO on AI’s ‘third wave’

Before launching its first-ever brand campaign, Virgin Velocity had to convince finance and commercial teams that investing in brand would drive long-term demand, re-engage its 10m members – and ultimately power growth. So it tapped Beatgrid, the same cross-media measurement platform used by Virgin Australia when relaunching its airline brand.Beatgrid’s audience measurement system uses a passive, single source panel – via an opt-in mobile phone-based app – that uses subtle audio pitch shifts to the ad creative to determine which channel the audience was exposed to. That means it can detect if an ad has been seen and how many times per user across different screens and channels – with total recall because it’s not relying on humans to remember what they saw, when and how accurately. It also enables an accurate read on cross-channel incremental reach.For Velocity’s GM of Member Engagement, Emma King, demonstrating the panel’s robustness via control groups meant she could prove incrementality and unlock the media budget. It’s also given Velocity and their media partner PHD, a sharper insight on which channels deliver the highest growth per campaign and cumulatively across campaigns – and where the best balance of effectiveness and efficiency lies.Beatgrid’s data also threw up some surprises. “In one example, we saw total TV drive a lift of 11 points. And when we tease out the impact of BVOD, we can see it drives an incremental result of three points above TV,” says PHD Head of Research, Lillian Zrim – counter to the narrative of declining audiences and effectiveness.Velocity’s King says Beatgrid’s data also enabled her to justify investing in other brand channels. “We saw television work really well with out-of-home to drive incremental KPI results. If you have a lot of overlap in reach, sometimes you’re thinking - maybe we don’t need to cover both; then you see results like this that say [if someone’s exposed to both channels], they’re going to get a much higher lift.”While King and Zrim acknowledge that nothing happens in a vacuum, “In April, our CEO confirmed that member growth trend was 35 per cent above the growth trend the previous year,” says King. “So that's an example of the kind of commercial impact that these kinds of campaigns can have.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Virgin Velocity measured incrementality across media channels, proved TV+BVOD+OOH deliver more uplift, launched first brand push, saw member growth trend soar 35%

The proposed ban on social media for teens has polarised industry and academia with warnings aplenty it could backfire. Ex-Facebook ANZ MD Liam Walsh argues rather than a ban, dumbing down the algorithms, forcing algorithmic transparency through regulation or removing them altogether – could actually be the solution if fears of the effects of algorithmically-generated dopamine addiction and attention-hogging dark patterns on teenage mental health are the primary problem.“If we took that out, how many problems do we have with social?” he says. Walsh warns society has no structures in place to deal with fallout that could land in nine months’ time when the Albanese government proposes a new age limit on social media use. “If you take away kids’ whole network, how they commune with others, that’s kind of a big deal.” Walsh doubts teens will “suddenly start hanging out in the park and helping old ladies paint the fence.”Erica Thomas, Principal at private girls school Kincoppal in Sydney's Rose Bay, agrees teenagers will “seek other things” to fill the void “and that is one concern” but warns there is no time to wait for a protracted legal battle with tech giants in attempts to curtail or open up the algorithms. She sees daily, first-hand, how badly action is required. Across a 30-year career in education, she says social media is “the most damaging influence I have ever seen”.Concentration levels are plummeting with teachers struggling to find a fix, girls are being conditioned to perfectionism from a young age, boys exposed to increasingly extreme violence, toxic influencers and highly sexualised images and bots of girls and young women – and in the last five years, “it’s got worse”.Brands have long championed ESG and purpose. But they’ve been strangely silent on the proposed ban. Katie Palmer-Rose, a social media marketer who has worked with the likes of L'Oreal, PepsiCo and Aldi and now runs influence agency Kindred, thinks many are waiting to see how it plays out. But she says they face a “moment in time where they tend to think very differently about how they show up in social media, how they build communities and connectedness in a digital world that doesn't live in social media,”Production company Finch’s Rob Galluzzo and Greg Attwells fully expect legal challenges from tech platforms – who they claim have told staff to “stonewall” 36 Months, the campaign they founded with Nova’s Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli to push for a social media ban for under 16s. Dumbing down algorithms won’t cut it, says Attwells. Keeping regulation about health, not tech, and moving fast is key, they suggest – with more backer brands about to be announced. The next phase is designing the massive educational and societal infrastructure required to fill the looming gap.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kincoppal girls’ only high school principal: ‘Social media the most damaging influence I’ve ever seen’, backs 16 age limit but ex-Facebook ANZ boss warns of fallout as brands stay silent

The latest analysis of SVOD growth rates from tech and telco analyst Telsyte proves one thing: fear of streaming services losing subscribers by pivoting to ads is overblown: They’re growing – though some more than others. MD Foad Fadaghi says ads, plus AI personalisation, integration and format innovation, will power the next growth cycle but streaming growth has peaked.   Omnicom investment chief Kristiaan Kroon suggests Stan, Nine’s ad-free SVOD holdout, should heed that lesson because Nine has something globals like Netflix and others do not: “A really sophisticated, at scale, sales infrastructure, which means they could make really good money from an ad tier.” There’s more competition incoming from HBO and Disney. But Kroon reiterates that the best sales wins because unlike the US and UK, Australia’s premium end of town doesn’t operate on fully automated systems and open exchanges. “They are still very much handheld markets.” Who’s winning right now? “Amazon Prime and then Binge and Kayo. Why? They have come to market with scale, both have sales teams, both have sophisticated data infrastructure,” per Kroon. He thinks streamer ad tiers will eclipse his earlier predictions of $75-$100m take in 2024 with Amazon, Kayo and Binge taking most of the pie. Next year, he thinks SVOD ad tiers could beat $200m, but there’s debate about how big ad-streamers like Amazon and Netflix actually are. Fadaghi suggests 80 per cent Telstye’s estimated 4.8m Amazon Prime subscribers could technically receive ads. Kroon puts the active Prime user base around 2-2.5m, broadly on a par with Nine and Seven. There’s also an effectiveness debate, with data from Adgile suggesting streamers can’t yet match TV’s results. Kroon says the MMM-effectiveness-ROI debate has become “very finger pointy in recent months”, but agrees there’s a gap to close. Ultimately, he thinks local content integration could prove decisive in determining winners and losers – and for some of the globals, Australia may prove too small. “I don't see how we can support that many BVOD, SVOD [players] – and we haven't really even talked about YouTube and the amount of ads that are served on CTV now,” says Kroon. “There's only going to be a certain number that can be supported.” Fadaghi predicts the streamers will triple in size to 10m subscribers in the next four years, “with more than a third on ad tiers.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Streaming services have peaked as 2025 ad take set to surge to $200m; Amazon Prime, Kayo, Binge lead local market with ‘sophisticated’ human sales teams but too many streamers to support with ads - Omnicom, Telsyte

For anyone in ecom or performance marketing, this podcast is a must listen. Forget ROI and ROAS, think unit economics, says former investment banker (her last big deal was the Myer float) turned entrepreneur Carla Penn-Kahn. She was early into ecom and left Credit Suisse to launch four of her own –Kitchenware Australia, A Gift Worth Giving, Everten and Buy My Thing. But she sold her last venture last year when she realised it had hit peak profitability. With performance ad prices doubling in four years, and Amazon reaching full speed, the unit economics weren’t going to get any better. Penn-Kahn thinks direct-to-consumer trailblazers have likewise lost their mojo – and their moats – and face the same dilemma, because they can no longer sustainably scale through advertising and VCs are sharpening their bottom line focus as much as the top. Meanwhile, Amazon has just signed an exclusive deal with Australia Post to deliver on weekends. “I can’t see other brands like Myer and DJs getting Aus Post to do the same for them … which 100 per cent gives Amazon an edge in this market over Australian businesses.” Hence she’s cool on the outlook for many, but particularly the likes of The Iconic, Temple and Webster, Adore Beauty and Australian marketplaces like Woolworths-owned Catch, which last week put a $96m dent in Wesfarmers’ balance sheet. Loyalty programs and retail media offers a lifeline for some, per Penn-Kahn, but most DTC brands don’t have the latter option. But Amazon might not have it all it’s own way. She suggests Microsoft might be gearing up to buy Shopify (which in Australia lays claim to controlling 25 per cent of all ecom transactions). If it happens “they will own the space”, suggests Penn-Kahn. “You will be advertising on Bing through the Shopify network as an ecom brand and leveraging Microsoft's AI to build your website, build the content. It could be a full ecosystem roll up if it happens. It's very possible.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Peak ecom? Investment banker turned ecom entrepreneur says social, search ad rates, customer aqcuisition now unviable for ecom pureplay, DTC profits without retail media

The effectiveness “revolution” is colliding with the AI-spawned efficiency uprising and it’s leaping the early consensus AI use cases in marketing around automating personalised content and communications. So much so Mark Ritson choked on his Wellfleet oysters when Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg told him they were leaving top jobs at the LinkedIn-backed thinktank, the B2B Institute. Then they told him why. Ritson promptly joined their venture, along with what Weinberg calls “the advisory board to end all advisory boards”.  Thus the synthetically-enhanced AI marketing outfit Evidenza was born. The founders argue their new piece of “synthetic customer” tech, which starts with creating AI copies of target customers, can create an annual marketing strategy, category entry points, messaging and positioning at a fraction of the cost of traditional market research and in a fraction of the time it takes for a marketing team to do the same. They claim it completes major research projects in minutes – and have proven their digitally synthetic customers match real customer responses it took some of the world’s biggest brands long cycles to gather. “It can imitate essentially anyone by gathering and synthesizing massive amounts of data,” per Weinberg, including almost impossible-to-reach professionals, like airline chiefs, or the bosses of mining companies. Which is exactly what Evidenza did in a head-to-head test with EY Americas CMO Toni Clayton-Hine’s actual survey data – and “reached 95 per cent of the same conclusions,” per Weinberg. EY “has been a fantastic client ever since.” But as well as synthesizing customers, the system also synthesizes marketing strategy and science: Imagine on one side a synthetic combination of Mark Ritson, Professor Byron Sharp teamed with ad effectiveness maestros Peter Field and Les Binet. Then on the other side, hundreds of synthetic CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CIOs, CMOs and each of those functions linked to the nuances of different industries and categories. Put them all into an AI blender, and you get what Lombardo and Weinberg think is an efficiency revolution in marketing fused with the effectiveness revolution from the marketing academics. The upshot for marketers? “A finance-friendly marketing plan that used to take months now takes maybe minutes, but more likely, a day,” per Weinberg. According to Lombardo that’s good news even for traditional market researchers. “Everyone is going to get better. Average is over.” So what’s left for the humans? The synthetic duo say the smart stuff - experience, strategic frameworks and brand and category nuance, for instance - that makes the machines do better. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Synthetic customers meet synthetic CMOs (and CFOs): Evidenza clones Sharp, Ritson, Binet & Field to build annual marketing plans in minutes; Mars, EY sign-up

Marketing mix modelling (MMM) only works if brands grant their agencies access to critical business data – and many don’t in a perplexing and decades-long challenge. But equally, agencies can be guilty of slowing media pricing and audience data into their client MMM models, rounding out the two-way data conundrum. It’s ironic given all the talk of partnerships and outcome-based incentives, per Mutinex APAC CEO, Mat Baxter. Bupa and Atomic 212°, says Baxter, are standout examples of genuine client-agency transparency – and it’s powering not just “marginal gain theory” in which lots of small, incremental components are optimised to drive growth, but hard, 28 per cent ROI gains in specific incidences. Bupa plugged into the platform in 2022 and performance lead Angas Hill says without a free flow of business data to Atomic 212° – sales, revenue, pricing and competitiveness data included - “there's not much point in standing up an MMM model.” Bupa does and now the CFO sees the MMM outputs as “the most trusted source we have in terms of attribution and forecasting”. Bupa uses those monthly ROI insights to shape the quarterly media plan – with Atomic 212° already plugged-in across what’s working and what’s not at a business level. “It’s just speeding up that whole process,” says Hill. “We are seeing long-term growth in our effectiveness for what is essentially flat media budgets.” Plus, he says, on-off testing via MMM, e.g. testing one region and channel against another, “is where we are seeing much more drastic changes.” Atomic 212°’s Tom Sheppard underlines broader benefits from using MMM outputs to inform trading strategy: “If we understand what the ROI is, we can negotiate. If [as a result] we can decrease that cost base of certain channels, all of a sudden we can automatically improve the return that the client is getting,” per Sheppard. “The MMM is fantastic at telling us what's worked in the past and to give us the next best decision,” he adds. Now he says Atomic 212° and Bupa are adding new inputs and channels “to get even better signals – so as a result, everyone wins.” Next step is making automatic media transaction feeds via API the norm, per Baxter. “That is the future of where we are going.”  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

MMM masterclass: Bupa’s open book on business data feeding Atomic 212° a benchmark for agency-client transparency and trust

Part Two: After last week's instalment with S4 Capital's founder and former WPP boss, Sir Martin Sorrell – in which he explained why the market cap of his next generation marketing services firm had plummeted from £5 billion to £300 million in the past three years – he's back for part two. We cover the consolidation of the $700 billion global digital ad market down to a handful of global tech media players. Is that dangerous for brands and the broader marketing supply chain? Maybe, but Sir Martin thinks they're only going to get bigger. Plus, we go deeper into AI and mass personalisation – Netflix style – along with the dodgy, inaccurate, but thriving online user data trade that was revealed a month or so ago by UM's former chief privacy officer, Arielle Garcia (which is now Mi3’s top podcast and story so far this year). For the record, Sorrell agrees with Garcia: “Garbage in, garbage out ... There are some murky parts of the market, but that's our role to expose that, not to be a part of it.” Either way, he thinks the platforms will only get closer to marketers at the expense of intermediaries – and there is little agencies can do to stop it. Plus, he says OpenAI chief Sam Altman, who reckons AI will displace 95 per cent of advertising jobs, is “directionally right”. The timeframe? “Three years,” per Sorrell. “It’s going to be uncomfortable.” Conversely, Sorrell says the big platforms won’t be shrinking any time soon. On a GDP basis, “these are countries, they are not companies anymore.” He thinks that means regulation, unless co-ordinated globally, is ultimately powerless.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sir Martin Sorrell: UM’s ex-privacy boss Arielle Garcia ‘is right’ (partly) on $700bn online data ‘garbage'; Personalisation Netflix-style the future; AI, big tech will crunch intermediaries in three years and why regulators won’t tame them

Most attribution analysis by digital marketing and analytics teams is too narrow to base marketing investment decisions on – and it’s leading to a chronic over-investment in paid search and under-investment in digital video according to Analytic Partners. The firm conducted a major study to unravel the gaps between digital attribution reporting for brands and market mix modelling – and there's a big difference between the two. Analytic Partners MD, Paul Sinkinson said on average, 59 per cent of the data is missing, and it can be “as high as 80 per cent”, yet attribution models mask this, because they pick up “the clicky stuff”, i.e. last click – but miss swathes of what’s happening in between, particularly within-app activity. Privacy changes and iOS-driven signal loss mean the gaps are getting bigger, making it much harder to run even a half-decent attribution model, which “is driving you to allocate activity to the wrong channels, purely because of how much data is missing,” says Sinkinson. “And it's the unequalness of those losses that then made us really concerned.” Social, the study found, is massively under-represented in those attribution models, which try to cram everything into a seven or 30-day window, favouring short-term hits above all else. Per Sinkinson: “Display – 364 per cent overvalued in an attribution model. Search – 336 per cent overvalued in an attribution model. Social – 44 per cent under measured in terms of the ROI and an attribution model. Video – 30 per cent underrepresented from an ROI perspective. So that means that we're starting to put our money into the wrong channels.” The upshot – which applies globally – is that “35 cents is wasted from every dollar invested, because you’re allocating on siloed metrics.” Those findings landed with Meta, which commissioned Analytic Partners to produce a white paper on the key research findings – and the platform’s ANZ marketing science lead, Carl McLean, says there are “very real implications” for marketing spend, especially in a soft market. How big is the problem? “It’s widespread,” per McLean. “A lot of the time it’s because there is a sense that there isn’t a better alternative.” There is – it just requires a bit more work. But the rewards are massive.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last click flaws ‘wasting 35 cents on marketing dollar’, search, display massively overvalued – while social and video an enormous opportunity: Analytic Partners and Meta on how to fix it.

Part One: It's been three years since Sir Martin Sorrell was last on the Mi3 podcast - he declared then a mea culpa of sorts that he didn't - and couldn't - transform WPP, the giant marketing services holding company he founded in the 1970s, fast enough because it was listed. At the time (2021), Sir Martin’s next generation digital holding company, S4Capital, was firing with a market cap of circa £5 billion (AUD $9.6bn), just three years after a street fight with WPP’s board saw him exit and start the new business. He was bleak on the future of his old British firm at the time along with WPP’s French and US-based global holding company rivals. But since then, S4Capital’s market cap has plunged more than 90 per cent to £300 million (AUD $582m) as the tech sector, representing upwards of 45 per cent of S4’s revenues, slashed their own marketing budgets globally. But there’s more to it – the basics actually, like pricing S4Capital’s business services appropriately to clients. Sir Martin almost acknowledges some rookie errors at S4 in managing the business, which operates as .Monks today globally in-market across technology and content. Aside from his typically robust macro views, Sir Martin also appears to have developed a new and begrudging respect in building S4Capital for businesses that can break down business silos - and lashings of enthusiasm to hire people “who are sharers”, he says. “If ever I was to write a book, which I will never do, about our business, clients and agencies, I would say the biggest impediment is the political structure, or the structure of the companies - they are organised basically into silos,” he told Mi3 last week during a visit to Australia. “Good people tend to put their arms around things. There are exceptional people who are good, who are sharers. Those are the jewels…find good people who are good by definition, but also who share, and we do have them inside our company, but to be frank there are not as many as there should be.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sir Martin Sorrell on the $9bn valuation wipeout of his new-world holdco S4Capital – and why Publicis, Omnicom, Havas are ‘premier league’ players; Dentsu, WPP, IPG in ‘second division’.

Six weeks ago Mel Hopkins was rolled out of Seven amid a clinical round of cuts that added further fuel to the narrative that TV is in trouble as audiences bleed and revenue follows suit. But Hopkins, who as Optus CMO dumped the lion’s share of her media budget into Meta and Google, remains convinced TV is undervalued and undersold, says BVOD metrics and reporting are as good as anything the platforms can provide, and that the global streamers are likewise racing to “manage out cost”. Revenue challenges should therefore not be conflated with audiences, which Hopkins and Nine CMO Liana Dubois insist remain healthy – Dubois said TV reached 24.2m Australians last month. While media buyers last year said 2022 had marked “the biggest audience decline in the history of TV” and correctly forecast a 10 per cent revenue hit for linear TV as a result, Dubois said industry needs to get its terminology straight – literally – because TV delivered over the internet can still be linear TV. However it is delivered and consumed, “television today is reaching the same amount of people that it did 10 years ago,” per Dubois – and those numbers “are holding”. She warns marketers pulling out of TV for digital platforms and their dashboards are “dangerously” risking marketing effectiveness and should instead look beyond the shallow metrics – and narrative – they are being fed.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Market TV perceptions wayward: Ex-Seven CMO Mel Hopkins still backs TV, aligns with Nine CMO Liana Dubois warning marketers of 'dangerous swing' to platforms and dashboards over ROI

$18 trillion’s worth of B2B transactions take place annually. But “40-60 per cent of deals get stalled”, says B2B Institute founder Jann Martin Schwarz, because B2B marketers are focusing on the wrong things and the wrong people. They are missing the “hidden buyers” that don’t show up in individual-focused lead gen and those buyers – procurement, finance, legals, IT security, the c-suite – don’t care about features. They just care about managing risk. They make group decisions (earlier than B2B marketers realise) based on compromise and the “least worst” option. On average, they represent half of decision-making heft, and they get to veto who gets the contract. That’s one of the key insights from a major global study conducted with Bain across 500-plus enterprise B2B buyers. Across the study, “at every stage, familiarity and trust in a brand or vendor's reputation was the casting vote,” says B2B Institute EMEA and LatAm marketing lead Mimi Turner. Which means brand influences hidden buyers disproportionately, because it’s effectively “deal risk insurance”, per Schwarz. The study effectively quantifies why nobody ever got fired for buying IBM and underlines why B2B’s brand and performance teams need to align much more closely to hone brand messaging to hit hidden buyers – and stop focusing on leads and individuals. They argue the findings all but obliterate the model on which B2B marketing is founded – and requires a wholesale rethink of lead gen, measurement and strategy. Changing models means graft and pain, especially for the “rank and file KPI’d on reductionist metrics” acknowledges Schwarz. But if adopted, even moving the needle by 1 per cent will unlock $180bn of annual B2B deal-making upside – and early movers will get the biggest hit. Schwarz is willing to “stake my reputation” on brands that flip their models to reach hidden buyers will see “an immediate spike in activity” and “close deals faster”. A prospect, he says, no CEO or CFO will ever decline.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

B2B marketing fundamentals challenged: Bain-B2B Institute study consigns traditional lead gen, KPIs, metrics to bin as ‘hidden buyers’ missed, trillions lost

Former PepsiCo, Kimberly-Clark, Interbrand and Westfield [now Scentre Group] marketer John Batistich transitioned to company board roles ahead of most – he’s now a non-executive director (NED) and advisor to seven boards, including the listed buy now pay later firm Zip Co, Muffin Break Bakeries and Jamaica Blue Cafes’ parent company FoodCo, Melbourne unicorn Moose Toys and Sydney-founded fashion label Ksubi International. Batistich has a helicopter view of what boards want from marketing functions, where the gaps remain – and crucially, what marketing can do to close them. In short, “become the expert on customer” because marketing is still seen as a cost centre; focus on “brilliant basics”, build better partnerships, and start working on capability models, because marketing’s capability gap is widening and Batistich sees major skills deficiencies – especially around personalisation for lifetime value. The range of his advisory roles also gives Batistich a broader economic worldview than most. He sees a cocktail of uncertainty facing brands over the next months – some of the firms he works with are already re-engineering supply chains in the likely event of a Trump victory and incoming tariffs. But he sees opportunity for some: Cosmetics, pharmacy and beauty are powering and are likely to be those investing harder in FY25. Marketplaces, department stores and fashion are feeling sustained pressure from more efficient, demand-led global platforms like Temu and Shein plus the pullback of financially-crunched younger generations that used to be marketing’s Holy Grail – but now appear less prized than wealthy retirees. Batistich also warns on AI – “both a significant threat to humanity, but also a huge productivity opportunity”. He’s the board member of a firm harnessing conversational design AI for the latter. Either way, it’s another rapidly developing field now crossing deep into marketer-customer remits – and boards are clamouring for intel. Amid all the short-term pressure, Batistich urges marketers to think longer–term. “Unlike the US election, ageism is alive and well in marketing,” he says. “You do need to have a plan, because that reality is going to hit you in the face on an idle Tuesday in your early 50s, when the organisation is seeking a succession plan or change.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From CMO to seven boards: Former Westfield, PepsiCo exec John Batistich's view on marketing from the top, why ageism hits marketers, not finance and talking customer over brand counters marketing’s cost centre perception

A deep, senior marketer study and report by Mi3, The Australian Marketing Institute (AMI), Qualtrics and Tumbleturn finds hard evidence across 105 top marketers responsible for $3bn-plus of budgets of an emergent three-speed marketing economy and upended KPIs and priorities. There are big question marks in key sectors such as retail around the effectiveness of personalisation efforts: Just 15 per cent think their CX is performing, though telcos are confident they’re smashing it. There’s also a major swing to performance media as CMOs seek instant results. The good news is that after decades of being perceived as the colouring-in department, 83 per cent of marketers say that has now shifted, with boards and CEOs perceiving marketing as a critical growth driver – though B2B marketers are far less certain. Problem is, marketer remits are exploding and the FY 25 Marketing &amp; Customer Benchmarks report, polling top marketers across all B2C and B2B sectors, finds the majority feeling ill-equipped to tackle what’s rapidly coming at them. Plus they now have heightened responsibility for customer – with customer lifetime value or CLV eclipsing all other KPIs across the sample as a future indicator – thrust upon them. But CMOs, customer chiefs and marketing directors across the piste are trying to offload duties to free-up bandwidth. Getting lead agencies to manage the partner roster – with an average of 10 agencies per brand across the survey – alongside consolidation is a rising trend, as is hybrid in-housing. Large brands meanwhile forecast project work will eclipse retainer arrangements, with even small brands suggesting it will be at least half of their requirements. Then there’s the question of AI and just how marketers are using it. Content creation and productivity – which comes with positive and negative connotations for headcount – top the pile. AMI’s Bronwyn Heys, Tumbleturn’s Jen Davidson, Qualtrics’ Ivana Sekanic and Akcelo’s Aden Hepburn unpack the findings and implications for marketers, agencies and the broader supply chain heading into FY25 and beyond. Download the report – here – to accompany the nuanced expert view.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mi3 launches FY2025 Marketing & Customer Benchmarks - 105 companies, $3bn in marketing spend: Three-speed marketing emerges; customer KPI’s surge, c-suite cred rises, what next for agencies and AI’s early use cases

RyanCap CEO Simon Ryan says 50 per cent of clients are “shifting a lot more money into search, digital and online video” as they scramble for immediate results and short-term sales going into FY25. Stubbornly high interest rates and crunched consumers mean major brand spending is likely off the cards for the foreseeable. “Any marketer going into a C-suite or a boardroom and pushing a big brand campaign in what is a harder market would be very gutsy,” per Ryan. “Brand is absolutely crucial. However, what is working now is an absolute customer focus.” Problem is, marketers, especially those in ecom, are under pressure to do more with less – but actually are getting less for more, especially in search as Shein, Temu and others drive up ad prices. “You’re seeing bid prices go up,” says Ryan. “When you've got overseas competitors coming into the Australian market, that means that you're either going to be outbid or you've got to outbid them … It's going to be a real challenge for some people”. Meanwhile ecom’s maturity means growth rates are coming down fast, creating a “pressure cooker” for marketers – and they are paring back martech spend as a result, seeking immediate wins over expensive longer-term builds. But RyanCap, after a cash plus equity deal with Paris-headquartered, UK private equity-backed Labelium, does have money to spend – and Ryan’s hunting acquisitions. Content and creative shops could be first off the blocks – maybe. “If you look at the growth channels, and you look at where clients are spending money, that will give you a view as to how we will accelerate our strategy.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pressure cooker: Ecom harder, more expensive, marketers cut martech, brand spend and pile into performance, if not smart strategies in place you could pay more for less in FY25 – Simon Ryan

There’s little contention today that the pro-consumer privacy lobby is winning the war over industry on privacy reform - they’re informed on industry techniques, loaded with compelling consumer research and aligned entirely on the need for a clampdown on the collection and use of an individual’s online data trail. Former NSW Deputy Privacy Commissioner and Salinger Privacy boss Anna Johnston and Choice Consumer Data Advocate, Kate Bower unpack what and why they expect a series of hard, industry-challenging privacy reforms to land in parliament next month - that’s less than six weeks away. Just how deeply the $25bn-plus marketing supply chain and tens of thousands of practitioners will be impacted will become clear as the reforms are tabled in Federal Parliament. Johnston and Bower think the updated Act will go harder than anywhere in the world. Hashed emails will be classified as personal information. Trading of geolocation data will be out. Trading of loyalty scheme data – the stuff that powers retail media and a vast targeting-attribution industry – will require companies to prove they have lawful consent to do so and they won’t be able to deny services to those that say no. But consent, says Johnston, is a very fragile thing – and companies might actually be best off concentrating on one of the legislation’s central tenets: Fair and reasonable use of data. In other words, says Choice’s Bower, does what you are doing with customer’s data pass “the privacy pub test?” If it does, meeting a very high consent threshold doesn’t apply. Right now, most are badly flunking the test. Johnston has a checklist for brands that likely have a 12-month compliance window to get houses in order. But ultimately, she says $50m fines are now in play and that “some product lines and business processes will have to stop … and frankly, that is the point of the reforms.” Cleanrooms, she suggests, may come under intense scrutiny.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The pro-consumer privacy lobby speaks - and why the Federal Government listens on privacy reform clampdowns for cleanrooms, hashed emails, geolocation, loyalty data trading and new definitions of personal information

Just how accurate is the user data being traded by advertisers, agencies and data firms in the $700bn global digital advertising system? The former Chief Privacy Officer of UM in the US, Arielle Garcia, is exasperated - it’s garbage she says and to prove it Garcia recently accessed her profile from an ad tech vendor and found she was in “500 different audience segments across seven different data brokers, and what I saw was just a bunch of contradictory, useless, garbage data.” I.e. she was both a man and a woman, worked in food service, agriculture, a defense contractor, an engineer and was simultaneously below the poverty threshold and classified as high income. “They're selling this garbage data back and forth to one another,” she says, allowing for a host of data “premiums” to be applied by various intermediaries in the process of executing digital advertising campaigns.    “Marketers have been tricked into believing that precision and personalisation equals performance,” she says. "There's so much that's wrong with that, and the inaccuracy of the data is only one piece of that fallacy.” Meanwhile, she says big agency groups have lost their way. “It’s not just principle media models (aka arbitrage) that are problematic, but the fact most of them are incentivised to hit targets by the likes of Google and it distorts the market - “it's literally about their objectivity,” she says.  Agencies are not the only ones. “Google has captured the trade associations … they buy their way into every room.” If trade associations are saying “nothing to see here … of course that’s going to lull marketers into a false sense of security,” she says. Garcia argues Google’s manoeuvres with PMax – it’s AI-powered “just trust us” media placement product for it’s owned media assets like YouTube – “gives Google the ability to opaquely use their black box algorithms to move money wherever they want”, which could prove handy ahead of impending antitrust trials. Meanwhile, AI Overviews in search will “massacre traffic” for publishers. She says publishers must stop forcing people to log in and refocus on quality. For marketers, Garcia urges a “reorientation around people” and “prioritising quality over the illusion of precision.” How? “Demand transparency … there cannot be a market for black box products”, she says. Plus hold agencies accountable. “No one messes with the client that audits.” For everybody else in industry, Garcia has one ask – work out if YouTube is “covertly tracking people.” How? “Let's find out what X-Goog-Visitor-Id is.” Nobody seems to know. But that may change.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ex-UM privacy chief lifts lid:  Google has ‘captured’ trade associations and holdcos, personalisation-precision a ‘fallacy’ based on ‘garbage’ data reaching 'fake people'

Hyundai is the first brand - with some bravery - to have signed on to the 36 Months campaign to lift the minimum age for social media accounts from 13 to 16, launched by Nova Radio’s Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli and Rob Galluzzo, the boss of production company Finch. 36 months is the time a teen will reclaim from social media between 13 and 16 years. Galluzzo is “100 per cent certain” more brands will follow Hyundai to help create and fund the programs that rebuild a physical social network for teens that isn’t manipulated by the anxiety-inducing algorithms that have made young teenagers the product. Which creates the perfect platform for brands to walk all the talk about ‘purpose’ and ‘showing up in the right way’. “A brand can go to its board, and ask ‘how do we want to show up for these kids, these families, the community?’ If they don't have an answer to that, they probably need to have a pretty big discussion about what they stand for as companies,” per Galluzzo. As of last Friday, Wippa and Galluzzo had landed 90,000 signatures, more than enough to have the petition head to Canberra. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already endorsed the campaign, stating “what we want is our youngest Australians spending more time outside, playing sport, engaging with each other in a normal way, and less time online”. State and territory premiers have also backed the move – and Wippa thinks the upcoming election creates an opportunity for legislation sooner rather than later. “There’s some easy votes to be picked up from parents if you made this an election promise,” he says. Now 36 Months is building out three crucial pillars to use the time reclaimed from the platforms to better prepare young Australians for physical and digital life ahead. Here’s Wippa and Galluzzo on where next, and how brands can help repair the fractured civics they have inadvertently funded.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Reclaiming kids from algorithms: Hyundai signs up to '36 Months' campaign, raising legal age to 16 for social media access - Nova’s Wippa and Finch’s Galluzzo urge more brands to walk purpose talk in likely hot election issue

A year ago Ariel Kelman boomeranged back to Salesforce after a decade helming global marketing for the likes of Amazon Web Services and Oracle. As global President and CMO of the $200bn+ customer tech giant, he’s wasted little time shaking things up – and Kelman’s view that Salesforce had “lost our focus on sales pipeline and on marketing really being a vehicle for driving business results” now appears prescient. Last week Salesforce’s stock price crashed circa 20 per cent after missing revenue guidance for the first time in decades. Ironically, most analysts still have a ‘buy rating’ on the stock – citing a “very healthy” pipeline and backing its new AI tools to power renewed growth. Kelman has driven a forensic effort unpacking marketing’s contribution to sales – from a brand investment perspective and more tactical, performance-based campaigns. He’s also reset KPIs and marketing metrics and re-engineered the firm’s attribution model – not for the fainthearted, given “you can provoke very angry religious fights” amongst attribution’s fractured tribes. Either way, Salesforce has ditched last touch for a “deep learning” model that blends and weights sales’ and marketing’s contribution to pipeline growth and revenue.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘Angry religious fights’: Salesforce global President and CMO Ariel Kelman on re-engineering attribution from last touch to ‘deep learning’ model; why B2B market will follow and an AI-powered rebound is coming

A year ago programmatic sales were just 2 per cent of QMS’ business. By the year-end, says Head of Programmatic, Laura Wall, it will be double digits. She says the market is starting to move, and latest SMI data, with pDOOH up 100 per cent in Q1, underlines that trend. Kinesso’s Chief Media Activations Officer, Michael Whiteside, thinks even that rise is “undercooked”. He sees programmatic out of home – or pDOOH – making up 20 per cent of the market within two years. That’s partly because advertisers are seeking increased efficiency and trying to stretch budgets; partly because programmatic buying brings in a new cohort of advertisers that might have been priced out of traditional out of home; and partly because pDOOH delivers both brand and demand. But Whiteside thinks there needs to be a better understanding of the value that programmatic out of home brings. CPMs, he says, are not the only factor – and advertisers with weak attribution models cannot correctly value the flexibility and targeting afforded by pDOOH – especially if they are comparing it to other programmatic media. Understanding out of home’s nuance from a planning and buying perspective remains imperative – and it cannot be lumped in with broader programmatic channels. Hence QMS’ teams selling on a “total out of home basis”. Creating sales silos, says Wall, played out badly in publishing’s early programmatic days. Either way, some of Essencemediacom’s early adopter clients are now pushing 100 per cent of OOH budgets into programmatic, says Group Director Katherine ‘KP’ Pochroj, who suggests “remnant inventory … is simply not a thing any more”.  Entertainment and ecom brands, she says, are making major gains from mapping stores and high value audiences through mobile data – and are able to directly attribute sales increases to their programmatic buys. But better measurement, says Pochroj, is required to keep pDOOH’s momentum moving. Kinesso’s Whiteside thinks the launch of MOVE 2.0 will provide sharper answers – and “highlight the value of each panel”.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Out of home will be ‘20% programmatic within two years’, as ecom, retail, food, entertainment target brand and performance – but buying on CPMs alone misguided

It’s not sexy but like AI, it’s going to affect your job – and your company. Another salvo in the fast approaching privacy regime set for tabling in parliament in August was fired last week by the ACCC around how personal information is collected and used by data firms – Experian, Nielsen, Publicis-owned Epsilon and Woolworths-owned Quantium were among those flagged by the competition regulator last week in its eighth interim report as part of the multi year Digital Platforms Inquiry. And to be blunt, any professional working in ecom, marketing, customer experience, digital advertising and data and analytics is going to have a rude shock for what they can do now versus what is likely in a year or perhaps a bit longer. But UNSW Business School’s Professor of Practice, Peter Leonard, says last week’s release by the ACCC of its Data Products and Services interim report makes “every firm in this economy a data firm.” And in the short-term, that’s not good news for most companies because their data readiness and maturity is not matched by the “fundamental change” which will force everyone to “rethink their understanding” of what even defines personal information” according to ADMA’s Director of Legal and Advocacy, Sarla Fernando. Leonard and Fernando are joined by Capital Brief’s Legal and Regulatory Affairs Correspondent, Laurel Henning and Civic Data’s founder, Chris Brinkworth. And for a tantalising teaser, Future Media’s Ricky Sutton lays out the changes Google is making to its search engine which is already seeing organic referral traffic to publishers abroad drop 40 per cent – brands, he says, are facing similar declines.    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A little alarming’: ACCC net widens in latest data products and services report to breaches, fines, enforcement and consumer ‘harm’ beyond privacy reform – ID hashing, location data, clean rooms face more pressure

 News Corp’s first party tech build is now at point where the publisher will match spend from customers using its new platform and run it in parallel with a standard cookie-based approach to prove it delivers much bigger reach and more sales. Via a “privacy compliant” approach using its first party data and data matching via the likes of Google, LiveRamp, Adobe, InfoSum and AdFixus alongside its more commerce-focused websites, News can find buyers who are ready to buy specific products. Hence calling the new stack Intent Connect. Director of Commercial Data, Video &amp; Product, Paul Blackburn, says one “large supermarket” – flip a coin – has increased spend “3,000 per cent” after trialling Intent Connect. GM of Digital Revenue, Mark Brownie, cites tests with “a major insurance company” that used News’ “self-learning, self-optimising segments” to boost acquisition by 199 per cent versus cookies. “We’re not talking about vanity media metrics, we’re talking about hard sales,” per Blackburn. Plus, log-level attribution benchmarking, says National Head of Digital, Jess Gilby, “shows 197 per cent increase in reported reach, which is huge, and 10 per cent higher conversion rates - and we're just getting started”. Those reach gains are because News’ can now measure across browsers that have already killed off cookies – basically the other half of the internet. Meanwhile, offsite targeting is growing rapidly after News launched vertical video products – AKA shorts – basically the same formats as social media, which means buyers can use the same ads across both social and News’ sites to extend reach without having to do everything twice. Buyers are buying in. “Our total video stream number is around the 4 billion mark – and 3 billion of those are happening outside of our owned and operated environments,” says Brownie. Plus, it’s going hyper local – using the log-ins from 100 local mastheads to enable stores to “upload lists of their outlets and automatically generated audiences based on that data,“ says Brownie. “That's really powerful from a pure addressability standpoint, but it also tells a retailer a tonne of stuff about their existing or future customers in those areas, and the nuances between the different locations.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Advertisers Opt for News Corp Australia’s Budget-Matching Test to Demonstrate Outcomes Impact of Intent Connect Over Cookies

In most B2B businesses lead generation, or individual qualified "lead gen” more accurately, is at the core of business marketing - certainly for the tech sector. The merits of focusing on groups of buyers influential in a large corporate purchase over an individual executive is not new, but what is has a veteranB2B marketing analyst warning that almost every sector in B2B is still “focused on completely the wrong thing”. And the required shift that Kerry Cunningham, a former Forrester Principal Analyst now at US-based 6Sense, says is needed from B2B marketers has the backing of the Global VP and Head of Marketing at engineering giant ABB, Jo Woo, who agrees “traditional lead metrics are outdated”. B2B marketers must ditch their “obsession with counting leads”, she says, justas sales teams too must rethink their approach. For Andrew Haussegger, CEO at specialist B2B agency Green Hat, part of the fix is to “free the content”. That is, stop putting content behind a gate in order to capture leads – because brands need to influence a much broader set of people much earlier. Here’s the conversation that puts the hard data on lead generation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

'Focused completely on the wrong thing’: B2B marketing set for a ‘renaissance' if marketers, sales teams decouple from individual lead ‘obsession' to the buyer groups who influence a company purchase

The likes of CommBank, Westpac, Suncorp, McDonald’s and KFC are showing the rest of the market how to do women’s sports beyond just slapping on a logo – and it’s paying off in spades, according to GroupM Chief Investment Officer Mel Hey and Foxtel Media Head of Sport NSW, Caitlin O’Meara. But while existing men’s code sponsors are migrating spend into women’s sport, the broader market remains behind the curve – despite significant growth in both female and male audiences. According to O’Meara, audience numbers for AFL W and NRL W last year climbed 28 per cent and 43 per cent respectively when measured via Kantar versus OzTam’s panel (which “probably wasn’t a true representation,” per O’Meara). The average audience for NRL W is now 55,000 she adds, with the higher audience figure helping women’s codes attract greater sponsor funding as a result. Interestingly, consumption of the women’s codes on Foxtel is more linear than streamed – up to 60 per cent linear versus an average of 25 per cent in men’s sport. “There is still a big opportunity for more brands to get involved,” says O’Meara, especially as the women’s codes are adding more rounds each season. She says it’s still a relatively low-cost entry point for brands increasingly keen to be part of cultural moments that sport provides – and bring those stories to life, from the top teams down to the grass roots, building mutual brand, code and audience growth along the way. For brands now weighing up women’s sport sponsorship, Hey says they could do worse than lift the templates built by the likes of CommBank, Westpac and Suncorp. “They have to make sure they're showing up with authenticity and going beyond just taking a sponsorship and a logo. They should be looking at how they can actually integrate and grow the sport and the players within the sport beyond just the game.” Hey sees a shift now underway as brands aim for new growth opportunities outside more “cluttered” environments – and suggests women’s sport is one of the safer bets amid current market flux. “From a pure numbers perspective, sport actually provides consistency and reach. It's actually the one area, whether you’re talking linear or streaming, that provides a consistent and engaged audience.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

CommBank, Westpac, Suncorp, McDonald’s and KFC show market how to crack women’s sport sponsorship as audiences climb, engagement outpoints men’s

This conversation is about getting marketers, agencies, media and tech to become more like chartered accountants – in a good way. That is, have letters after their name that mark them out to employers, peers and recruiters as the most horizontally skilled and relevant in the business – and be required to continue learning every year to keep them. Which is precisely why Mi3 and the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) have partnered. Log-in and read Mi3’s articles and earn continuous professional development (CPD) points that count towards retaining the AMI’s Certified Practising Marketer (CPM) status. CPMs need 100 points every year to keep their status. So get reading. But first, listen to why chartered status, continuous learning and breadth of skills are critical for marketers and those in the supply chain that want to a) remain relevant and b) progress to the top and beyond. Menulog CMO Simon Cheng is using the AMI framework of 25 competencies to create “horizontal” marketers. “Don’t be afraid to swim in other lanes, and become best mates with the CFO” is his advice to marketers – and amass financial acumen much earlier in your career. For AFL marketing boss, Anthony Voyage, harnessing the framework is all about “marketing fitness” and gaining incremental advantage through it. Chelsea Wymer knows exactly the value of chartered status – because she’s CMO at Chartered Accounts Australia and New Zealand, which accredits 136,000 chartered accountants. Her advice? “Take control of your own learning” – and sign up with the AMI: “It really does tell the organisations we work for that we're more than just ‘the colouring in department’; that we're experts with serious tech and digital skills – and commercial acumen.” AMI CEO Bronwyn Heys says businesses need “bench-ready talent” if they are to promote from within – which requires more horizontal and “more adaptable” talent given accelerating flux. Hence developing the AMI’s 25 competencies with counterparts in the UK, Europe and the US. But she says there is one constant: “If you do not have commercial acumen as a marketer, you are going to fail.” AMI Board Chair Andrew Thornton says recruiters are exasperated at the lack of “broader, non-marketing expertise” in those applying for CMO roles. “It is really hindering where they are going,” he suggests. If recruiters are telling you what’s closing off your job options… it’s probably worth listening.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chartered Accountants, AFL, Menulog, recruiters back Australian Marketing Institute’s push for all marketing industry execs to pursue Certified Practising Marketer status; Mi3 alliance announced, professional development points earned for reading content

‘Virtual professor’ Mark Ritson says advertisers should be allocating circa 11 per cent of media budgets to total audio. Problem is, the market’s not buying Ritson’s line. Audio’s dollar share is sitting just over half of that and static, despite broadcast audiences increasing 6 per cent since Covid and time spent on total audio surging 49 per cent.  SCA thinks media planners may be behind the curve – and aims to change that by hammering home both the audience growth message and the fact it now has the tech firepower and user data to compete with the likes of Meta, Amazon and Google on performance-led conversion. Via audio platform LiSTNR, approaching 2 million logged-in users, SCA is armed with personalisation smarts and first party data matching via data cleanrooms that enable highly efficient and effective audience targeting via dynamic creative messaging. That means it can deliver both sharper behavioural and contextual targeting as well as broadcast reach – and some major QSR and cosmetics brands are piling in for a deeper read on where key audiences are, and what they are consuming. But you need to cover both bases, per National Head of Audio Sales Luke Minto, because SCA uses the tech stack in its own marketing efforts – and watched conversion plummet 30 per cent when broad reach was wound down for targeted performance alone. While advertisers need a deeper understanding of what audio can now deliver, Head of Digital Ad Product and Operations, Kim Loasby, says her key message to advertisers is “you don’t have to be an expert.” SCA will walk buyers though the layers. Loasby says SCA has just done that for a certain mattress brand – where buyers are in market every five years at best. By ingesting the brand’s data, SCA found its high value customers “significantly over-indexed in listening to Abbie Chatfield … So then we could definitively say ‘people who are lookalikes to your highest value customers are likely to be entertained by this piece of content’.” It worked. “They immediately pushed some more data.” Other brands, she says, are using SCA’s new data capabilities and dynamic creative optimisation to re-engage lapsed buyers while suppressing others – making the budget go further. “So we are seeing our ad tech pay dividends for brands already.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

LiSTNR tech stack unlocks smarter behavioural targeting, new lookalikes and re-fires lapsed buyers and its data matching capabilities for brands

The stampede by companies into CX, with massive associated investments into martech, specialists teams and organisational overhauls, is having little impact on customer experience scores – and big banks, telcos, and car brands are at best benchmarked as average, despite investing billions collectively. CSBA Managing Director, Paul van Veenendaal, has seven years of CX performance data from 12,000 annual assessments across 200 Australian firms and it’s a sobering read for those firms heralding their commitment to connecting up and improving the experience across all customer contact points. In short, all that tech investment is simply not hooked up to customer contact centres – and NPS scores, which many leadership teams have linked to performance and bonuses, are “being gamed”, he warns, for better but hollow CX benchmarks. No big brands feature in the top 10 of CSBA’s CX rankings, and only one, a superannuation company, makes the top 20. Chatbots aren’t up to scratch yet, says van Veenendaal, and companies have “pretty much parked” speech analytics. Meanwhile despite heavy investment in digital transformation, call centre volumes have not declined over the last seven years – and those call centres are focused on the wrong outcomes and metrics, he says. Hence underwhelming CX scores across CSBA’s rankings. But some sectors are nailing it: Universities and colleges, utility companies and local authorities – the latter at least partially due to the policies of a one-time adman and former Victorian Premier. Here’s where van Veenendaal thinks it’s all going wrong – and how to fix it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

CX disconnect: Banks, carmakers, telcos failing to join customer dots, ‘gaming’ NPS, measuring wrong outcomes, undermining martech investments – but uni’s nailing it

Tourism NT has always scored its biggest wins targeting the over 50s. Problem is, every other brand has twigged they’re the only one still spending. Cutting through is harder because other tourism bodies are going large on media to carve out their own slice. Plus, it’s already tricky for tourism operators to differentiate. Atomic 212°’s Asier Carazo plays a game of “hide the logo” with Tourism NT’s team every time he visits Darwin, showing other tourism body ads without their branding, and usually catches them out. “I can’t deny that we all get tripped occasionally,” admits Tourism NT marketing boss Tony Quarmby. “Unless you have the Opera House in your shot or Uluru … then it's really only the cityscapes that are going to make any difference. And to most consumers, a city is a city.” Problem is, most of the over 50s have “done” Uluru – so how to convince them that the NT is more than the iconic rock? At the same time, over 50s mindsets have shifted. They are far more safety conscious than even two years ago, says Quarmby, more anxious and more price focused – and that flux is ongoing. So Tourism NT needs to hit consumers with relevant, personalised content that speaks to those shifting mindsets, calms consumer nerves and gets them spending. Meanwhile, for the under 50s market, Quarmby needs to sell the NT as an experience and adventure that rivals overseas travel – without the expense of leaving the country. Hence Tourism NT going through a massive media, martech and process overhaul. At the heart sits a customer data platform, or CDP, to enable deeper understanding of key demo mindsets and more effective “real-time” personalised comms. Plus, it should help media budgets go further – i.e. by supressing ads to less relevant prospects, “and making sure we are seeking new people,” per Atomic’s Ashleigh Carter. Quarmby expects the new stack and approach to “make a big difference” in about six months time. In the meantime, he’s backing Atomic to deliver best bang for buck with smarter tactical campaigns to keep visitors incoming. He cites NT’s hijacking of the Adelaide AFL Gather Round last month, reaching millions with Uluru-themed billboards and then retargeting them with discount vouchers – delivering “370 per cent plus in ROI” – as the kind of approach it needs to take. Atomic’s Carazo thinks brands need to embrace the current chaotic environment and accept having to work harder on media campaigns to move the needle. “More craft, more high-touch media activity is definitely going to pay off,” he says. “Set and forget” won’t cut it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tourism NT rewires media strategy with partner Atomic 212°, overhauls martech in bid to see off rivals piling into still spending, but anxious, over 50s

There’s so much happening on the regulatory front it’s dizzying, so Mi3 called in the experts for an update - and it’s proven rather revealing: Despite intensive lobbying from loyalty scheme operators and beyond, Australia’s sweeping privacy law overhaul remains on course to land this year – with massive implications for just about every business. “It's now clear that we will see a substantial broadening of what is regulated as personal information,” according to Data Synergies Principal, Peter Leonard. “That will include use of online tracking codes and techniques such as fingerprinting, which enable the targeting of individual consumers – and I think we will see that regulation encompassing not only online targeted advertising, but also targeting of content.” Which gives publishers something to ponder – especially those making major martech investments, says Civic Data’s Chris Brinkworth. Across all sectors, Brinkworth warns companies are leaking data on a wholesale basis “in a way that contravenes current Australian Privacy Principles let alone future Australian Privacy Principles”. The broadening of personal information definitions will also govern use of CX data within martech stacks, effectively limiting what banks and retailers, for example, can do with customer data unless they can explain it to “someone of below average intelligence,” per Leonard - and provided it passes a test of ‘fair and reasonable’ use. If not, prepare to fall foul of the Privacy Act, face class action lawsuits and massive fines. The Feds, warns Leonard, are getting firmer on their position, and industry is not being heard “at the same level that privacy advocates and a number of the consumer organisations are being heard in Canberra”. Meanwhile, the ACCC’s probe of data brokers is expected back from Treasury as early as this week, with fallout likely for Australia’s marketing supply chain. “We’re all talking about Meta and Google hoovering up data, but I think the biggest operator in terms of data brokerage in Australia is Woolworths’ Quantium,” per Laurel Henning, Legal and Regulatory Affairs Correspondent at Capital Brief. But across the pond, Google now faces genuinely existential challenges, says Future Media’s Ricky Sutton, as the US Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission “have both said that what they're seeking is a breakup of Google. So there are big changes ahead.” Governments, he says, have decided enough is enough, big tech is about to cop it – and the impacts will market-wide.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Privacy and regulatory update: Banks, retailers, brands, loyalty operators, publishers face ‘substantial’ tightening on CX data, martech, adtech use as consumer groups wedge business lobby in Canberra on privacy review’s 'personal information'

Uber’s ads business is starting to scale and its New York-based boss Michael Akkerman says Australia – one of its best performing markets, with a rapidly growing sales operation – will see the next wave of new formats first. He’s touting retail media meets “mobility media” and a collapsed funnel “brand-formance” model - brand and performance marketing in a single execution. A younger, richer set exposed to an Uber Ride brand ad is driving hard sales via Uber Eats with verified "closed loop” attribution. Akkerman was in Sydney last week wooing “hundreds” of agency execs and rattling off big numbers. Coke’s gamified ads in the ride business got a tonne of new customers and orders via Eats. Absolute Vodka got a 28 per cent sales increase, HSBC likewise a major uplift – and they are coming back for more. Akkerman says the delineation of brand and performance is a false construct. The purpose of brand is ultimately to drive longer-term sales, but put a call to action – a performance element on a brand ad – and a percentage of people will immediately go and buy. People don’t think ‘brand versus demand’, he says, only marketers. But Akkerman reckons that is shifting rapidly in a fast fulfilment world. Just don’t ask Uber for “cheap eyeballs” and rock-bottom rates: “We can seek affordability … but to me it is about return on ad spend.” Whether procurement departments agree remains to be seen. But Akkerman suggests advertisers get what they pay for. He’s claiming Uber ads deliver much higher click through rates, circa 3 per cent versus the “0.000x per cent” brands would be “lucky” to get on other platforms, and is fraud free, because “bots don’t hail cars”. Meanwhile it’s privacy compliant – because everyone has signed up and linked their credit cards. Plus advertisers are connected with “actual humans, not digital representations.” Hence why Uber’s bullish on hitting a billion dollar ad business very soon – if it hasn’t already.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Retail media meets ‘mobility media’: Uber ads global chief says Australia powering as Uber Ride brand ads drive hard sales via Uber Eats app – but funnel collapse pushes ‘brand-formance’ trend to the fore - and 3% CTRs don’t come cheap

Marketing effectiveness is getting worse. Dan Krigstein, Director of think tank The Growth Distillery and Ogilvy Chief Strategy Officer and Innovation Lead, Toby Harrison, have spent the last six months working out why – and building a framework they are now bringing to market in a bid to reverse the effectiveness slump. Their findings literally flip industry-wide assumptions on their head – and expose deep misunderstanding on the power of influence (not influencers) in decision-making. If you take nothing else out of this podcast, it’s that our brains are overloaded, the signals that help us make decisions are missing and “active cynicism” is the baseline. “A world of doubt creates a chasm which influence can fill,” says Harrison. But most brands are missing that trick, mistakenly thinking that consumers trust brands and their message. We don’t. We trust those with whom we have affinity – our influences – much more.  For that reason, as Harrison puts it: “People down the pub are doing a way better job in merchandising brands than any of us have been.” Crucially, say Krigstein and Harrison, the assumption that optimal effectiveness is achieved by hitting people in their restive, least-distracted state is entirely wrong. Hit us when our brains are most stressed, they suggest. “If you can take an affinity-lead message at a time where cognitive load is highest, it's actually most potent,” per Krigstein. But don’t hit people with more information. “The Midas touch in this is to remove the difficulty that already exists and give a simple, easy, definitive processing answer – because we cannot rationalise this stuff anymore,” says Harrison. “There has never been a richer or better opportunity for brands to actually start providing the type of influence that people are seeking to help them make the decisions that they need to. And that is a tremendously exciting opportunity.” Welcome to the world of real influence.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cognitive overload puts marketing effectiveness in free-fall: Influence – not influencers – emerging as marketers’ antidote but industry assumptions require total flip

Five years ago media ecologist Jack Myers made a prediction in the second ever edition of Mi3: By 2025 media would be largely automated and almost totally AI-informed and just a quarter of sales would remain with people and ideas. It happened faster than even he thought. Now Myers predicts that within 12-18 months max, most media planning will be entirely machine-led. By 2030, he reckons “80 per cent or more of all media planning and buying will be done without human intervention or without the necessity of humans”, with major implications for jobs. Meanwhile, AI is already being turned in on itself to spotlight where the money is being wasted amid a “programmatic backlash”. The “machines are actually checking on machines,” says Myers, “increasingly, humans are out of the mix.” He forecasts an incoming wave of consolidation across major media companies and a “collapse of the programmatic marketplace”. For agencies, “the re-emergence of consolidated agencies”, i.e. creative and media back together, “is the big story of 2025-26”. Myers thinks generative AI will force that toothpaste back into the tube. “So I believe in 2024-25, we're going to see massive consolidation, massive contraction, and then in 2025, 26, 27 a rebirth of the advertising business.” But 2025, he warns, will be tough, with a “reasonably massive cutback in spending as marketers work out what is working, and what is not”. Plus Myers – who likewise called out retail media’s impact early – sees a “can of worms” for the sector as journalists and analysts uncover instances of arbitrage of non-retail inventory within some retail media networks. He also has reservations on the surge by media owners into data clean rooms – Disney alone is operating 100-plus – “Who is cleaning the data? Who is validating that it is clean?” Meanwhile, Myers thinks Accenture’s “quiet” ascendance to become a top tier digital media buyer likewise warrants greater scrutiny.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

'Media ecologist' Jack Myers: No humans for 80% of media planning, buying by 2030; creative-media forced back together, brand-publisher clean rooms surge, programmatic and retailer media hit new turbulence before ‘rebirth’ of ad business

IAG Chief Customer &amp; Marketing Officer Michelle Klein returned to Australia last May after more than a decade abroad and embarked on arguably one of the most ambitious – and interesting - corporate customer experience transformation programs in this market for a long time. Such was the complexity and need for top tech and creative talent across every customer touchpoint for NRMA Insurance – think digital channels, apps and websites, retail customers, communities large and small, mass and personalised communications and customer acquisition and retention – that Klein opted for one external partner to work on everything with her team. It’s what Accenture Song’s ANZ boss Mark Green says is a ‘lighthouse project’ globally for the firm – backed up by New York-based Global CEO David Droga and Creative Chairman Nick Law. Droga says his firm has spent the past decade bringing global tech and creative capabilities together and he says NRMA Insurance will be an international proof point on why end-to-end CX programs need more creative thinking and execution, not just an off-the-shelf tech template, particularly as AI continues its march into commerce and society.  “Like all these new technologies, it sets new horizons where everyone gets so excited about what the technology allows us to do that we put aside our creativity for a bit of awe in what that technology allows. Then when we realise that everybody can do exactly the same thing with that technology, everyone's like, ‘oh, we need to innovate with that, where's the tech, where's the creativity?’” Klein agrees the killer combo is tech with creativity and innovation, done differently. Some of the new program will be ready for the Paris Olympics in July when NRMA Insurance will make much of heading into its 100th year. But like her broader mantra on reinventing CX across every touchpoint for NRMA Insurance, the Olympics will do likewise. “It's not just linear TV, this is a fully integrated…program,” she says. “What I love about this partnership with Nine is that it will reach almost the entire population in a way that they've thought through every channel, every touch point.” So here’s how Klein, Droga, Law and Green see the grand plan unfolding and how they’re measuring success.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘Not a paint by numbers solution’: David Droga joins Accenture Song’s global tech-creative posse to build NRMA Insurance’s ambition for a ‘world leading’ customer experience model; one brand team, one global tech-creative firm to run it all

Julie Nestor was one of the earliest Australian marketers to leverage owned media at scale, first at Optus and American Express and now – via Hilton Hotels and eBay – at Mastercard. The APAC marketing chief says owned media helped Optus get beyond mobile and into broader media and communications – and moved the needle for Amex, both in bringing on more merchant partners and driving customer loyalty, retention and spend through personalised offers. Now she says it is “by far” Mastercard’s most efficient channel via the ‘Priceless’ platform, with priceless.com both monetised and serving as the engine room for Mastercard and its main business partners – i.e. the big banks and their customers. Hence the firm continuing to invest heavily in owned media – everything from offsetting paid investment into its Australian Open partnership to building gaming platforms for banks and fintechs in Asia, to helping Ukrainian refugees find homes. But while owned media strategies today are increasingly sophisticated, the fundamentals remain the same as at Optus 20 years ago – which back then leveraged analogue customer bills to cross-sell. “Be where your customers are and where you are going to get most attention,” says Nestor. Likewise, understanding the value of owned channels is key. Nestor worked with specialist owned media consultancy Sonder at Amex and again at Mastercard. Quantifying “real dollar figures” with “measurable numbers” both internally and externally to partners, she says, is critical in maximising leverage and underlining “how marketing supports a business to grow revenue”. Sonder ran an owned media valuation audit for Mastercard across 10 markets, benchmarking metrics such as “click-throughs, time on site, sell-through” against “our $10 billion rate pool, which gives us a single source of truth” for owned asset value, per co-founder Angus Frazer. Having worked with the likes of ANZ, Amex and Mastercard, Sonder’s Jonathan Hopkins thinks the finance sector is about to show the retail media sector just how powerful owned media can be – given its “unparalleled data” and massive footprint. “It’s the tip of the iceberg,” says Hopkins. “They are already way ahead of other companies.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘30-40% more efficient than paid media’: Mastercard’s top APAC marketer on owned media’s revenue power; Sonder predicts banks about to show retail media how it’s done

Marketers and media companies had just about got to grips with audience fragmentation brought about by social media and online video. Now the next big wave is coming fast from global streamers piling into TV’s heartland with ad plays because their subscriber growth has maxed out. They’re targeting the young with localised reality shows, comedy and romantic dramas, and the old with documentaries and crime while taking aim at live TV’s biggest bastion by bidding for sports rights. That hasn’t always worked out for the likes of Amazon, which has pulled back from Premier League rights acquisition in the UK. But it has Disney and Fox Sports worried enough to try to get a combined sports platform off the ground in the US and over regulatory hurdles. Ampere Analysis veteran analyst Guy Bisson thinks similar collaboration from broadcasters locally may be required – and could be good for audiences. Across the piste, Bisson breaks down where audiences are going, how much time they are spending on each channel, and where the money’s headed – with Australia ahead of the global tipping point on streaming versus TV consumption, but not yet in terms of TV-video ad dollar reallocation. For broadcasters, the push by Amazon, Netflix and others into ads kills the old TV versus online video debate and removes the moat around ad-funded quality long form video. “It's no longer about ‘should I do TV, or should I do online?’ It's, ‘I can do everything I can do on TV on streaming’, says Bisson. He thinks broadcasters can compete on reach, targeting and content but need to accelerate streaming-first pivots to regain and retain audiences that definitely want free streamed TV versus the new pay TV – and strategically steal what they can.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Next wave: Everything marketers need to know about the streaming-TV-online video shake-out – audience forecasts, advertising shifts, where next: Ampere Analysis

Meta’s News Media Bargaining Code rug-pull lit up the media sector and has government, regulatory and lobbyist wheels spinning – some would say belatedly, given all the warning signals. Circa $70m in publisher cash - some argue it could be $100m - from Meta will no longer be on the table later this year, leaving Google the only game in town for a newsmedia sector already seriously pressured. Smaller publishers fear Meta pulling news from its feeds in Australia – as it did when Canada attempted to strong-arm the social media giant into paying news publishers – will lead to potentially existential audience and revenue hits. And there could bewidespread carnage if the Federal Treasurer ‘designates’ Meta, as is probable, forcing the tech giant into an independent arbitration process which by law means it will have to pay what thearbitrator rules between one of two fixed bids from Meta and media companies. Many argue Meta’s concerns for Australian designation means it will set international precedent for other countries to hunt billions more for newsmedia and lead to a full-scale exit of Facebook and Instagram in Australia rather than pay and trigger a costly global movement. Here’s everything you need to know on a delicate power game in which a sovereign government can't blink against a global tech giant, leaving Meta few options but to exit Australia entirely if it chooses to break Australian law and not pay. The world’s eyes are back on Australia - for bloodsport and money. And that’s before the podcast panel gets to AI and IP rights and remuneration.         See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Meta v media: Bosses from News Corp, Nine Publishing, Private Media, Capital Brief and ex-Coalition Minister Paul Fletcher unpack what’s next on Meta pulling news feeds - and Facebook and Instagram entirely - from Australia

Domino’s and Asahi are both using Mutinex’s GrowthOS platform to make very different media investment decisions, faster, in a fluid market. Both have buy-in across the business after unlocking the impact of media investment on sales. Both are now taking the platform beyond media and into decisions around seasonality, pricing and planning. “It’s not just a marketing tool, it’s a finance tool, ultimately supporting you how to maximise your investment across the portfolio,” says Jemma Downey, Group GM of Commercial Excellence at Asahi. “We definitely have an intention of looking at how we can ingest the data from our trade promotion and our trade optimisation tools to look at price elasticity.” Asahi has been using the GrowthOS platform for four years. Over that time it has “significantly changed” its channel allocation, per Downey, with the ROI data accelerating its shift from TV to digital video while answering questions around the effectiveness of social channels. “Social delivers the highest ROI on average across the board,” she says. Asahi is now also “far more fluid” with its investment approach. Domino’s Group Digital Strategy Manager, Blake Rand, likewise has executive buy-in with the pizza giant also using the platform beyond media and into pricing decisions. In terms of media channel allocation, GrowthOS has also thrown up some interesting insight – like the power of old-school flyers through letterboxes. Easy to see as “antiquated”, says Rand, “but we're still seeing a really high commercial impact from that investment”. Both Rand and Downey are moving towards predictive media budget and channel allocation. Mutinex CEO Henry Innis thinks that development will further underline the platform’s credentials – because brands can save Mutinex’s forecasts. “Anybody in the business of predictive analytics who doesn’t give you the functionality to save those predictions so you can hold them to account,” per Innis, “is probably lying about how predictive their model is.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Domino’s, Asahi see executive leaders buy-in to better decision-making; now moving Mutinex MMM beyond media’s P&L impact into business planning

People spend “roughly a third of their time, or four hours a day, listening to audio, yet only 6 per cent of ad revenues are coming towards the medium,” says SCA Chief Commercial Officer Seb Rennie. The network is betting on a data-powered push for performance ad dollars to change that with today’s launch of LiSTNR’s AdTech Hub. SCA has made huge gains – slashing cost of acquisition 60 per cent for its LiSTNR app – after embedding a CDP and overhauling its data capability. Now it’s aiming to do the same for advertisers with a new data clean room play that means advertisers can match their own first party data with SCA’s – alongside new dynamic creative optimisation and contextual targeting capability, says Executive Head, LiSTNR commercial, Olly Newton. As a result, SCA can both build brand and drive conversion via tactical performance campaigns – and Rennie thinks a market-wide shift of budgets towards the latter may last beyond the current economic crunch. Either way, says Newton, “we’ve got a total solution.” The key is making it easy for advertisers to use. Hence SCA bucking the Big Tech trend of self-serve and ‘headcount rationalisation’ – instead creating a managed service to help advertisers navigate its new tools. Last month SCA “road-tested” the new data matching capability via Australia’s major ad holding groups. “There’s huge appetite,” says Newton. “And it’s really just the beginning.” Meanwhile, SCA has bullish forecasts for its own business as well as the broader industry. Per latest IAB data, Australia’s digital ad revenue growth was a subdued 3.7 per cent in 2023. Digital audio was up 20.6 per cent – and per 38.4 per cent growth in the December quarter, accelerating hard. “Momentum is building,” says Rennie. Now SCA has some sharper targeting tools to convert it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SCA cuts acquisition costs 60%, targets performance ad dollars by doing the same for advertisers with data matching clean room play

Future of TV Advertising international keynote Jon Evans is Chief Customer Officer at marketing effectiveness data firm System1 – and one of the world’s top marketing podcasters. He's on a mission to help marketers hold the line and sell-in emotional, creative campaign investment to rational, hard-nosed exec teams by better predicting its P&amp;L impacts. While the media industry obsesses on the medium – optimising channel mix, ROI, CPMs, the value equation of the channel – fully half of the business outcome depends on the creative, i.e. the message, per System1’s analysis of 100,000 campaigns. But that message is getting lost says Evans. He wants to help CMOs avoid getting fired by arming them – and the C-suite – with the data to better predict how their ads and massive media investments will perform over the long term. Which just might counteract the accelerating rush to performance channels, with Coke the latest, as marketers seek any kind of validation in the face of exploding remits and intensifying short-term pressure. Plus, he has a toolkit for brand marketers and agencies that unpacks how to build mental availability, cut through and more predictable business results on which to base their media buys.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘Half the impact comes from creative’: System1 customer chief Jon Evans on how to sell-in emotional ad investment to cold, rational CEOs, CFOs – the CMOs nailing it, and why channel mix obsession will waste brands’ biggest investments

Guinness (part of the Lion portfolio), UM, Vistar, Kinesso, and Thinkerbell have just landed Australia's first ever Programmatic Campaign of the Year award after a smart, highly targeted Out-of-Home push delivered 100,000 extra pints sold. The trick? Targeting blokes near pubs stocking the dark elixir when the weather turned cold – with only 2,000 of those pints as QR code freebies. After toasting 18 per cent revenue uplift as a result – and 15 per cent pub footfall boost, a “super happy” Lion is lining up more prDOOH, per UM’s Mark Ryan. But it wasn’t initially convinced. While it wrapped in day-parting, weather and location data, plus dynamic creative via specialist DSP Vistar, IAB chief Gai Le Roy said Guinness won the award because the campaign was “strategy-led”, solving a business problem rather than showboating with “a fancy new toy”. Plus, “it had the magic of doing brand work and performance work” while driving a strong commercial return – not always the case with sampling. JCDecaux launched the award to get brands and buyers up to speed on prDOOH as it plots a massive programmatic growth curve, per National Programmatic Director, Brad Palmer. He’s aiming to hit 10 per cent of DOOH this year, pointing to markets like Germany, targeting 50 per cent of total Out-of-Home revenues by 2032. As to where prDOOH can end up, especially as cookies crumble and privacy laws tighten, “there’s a wild ride ahead for prDOOH” per Palmer. “But we need the market to collaborate a bit further,” not least agencies. Le Roy, Palmer and Vistar’s Winston Stening unpack where prDOOH’s heading next.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

prDOOH power: Lion toasts 18% revenue gains, sells 100,000 more Guinness pints via prDOOH push; JCDecaux maps huge growth, but agencies lagging

When it comes to principal-based media trading, AKA arbitrage, “we can argue about the pros and cons but collectively [marketers] are saying that they kind of accept, if not sometimes prefer, that model,” says Madison and Wall founder and one-time WPP global business intelligence chief Brian Wieser. It’s no coincidence that two of the “most aggressive” proponents of buying ad inventory from media owners and on-selling it to clients with handsome markups saw their respective media businesses notch double-digit growth in 2023. Publicis and Omnicom also have the most bullish growth forecasts for 2024. Yet their broader business strategies and models are almost polar opposites and Wieser sees a structural fault line widening across the major holdcos – unified businesses that sideline individual agency brands like Publicis and Dentsu versus the traditional multi-brand model at WPP, IPG and Omnicom. Both can work, says Wieser, but he thinks those with fewer silos are “more likely to thrive” and suggests very few marketers still care about conflict, one of the original reasons for holdcos running lots of similar agencies. Dentsu is tracking closer to Publicis on agency brand consolidation but the Japanese firm hasn’t executued like the French. One positive for Dentsu, per Wieser, is “it’s hard to imagine it getting any worse”. Regardless of the  model, he sees a single key differentiator in determining holdco winners and losers as IT services firms streak ahead and the big platforms use generative AI to eat further into agency turf: Investment ambition, or lack thereof.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Marketers ‘prefer arbitrage’ as Publicis, Omnicom power ahead of holdco posse; Dentsu ‘shrinking pains’ persist as dividing lines sharpen on agency network brands versus integrated offers, IT services and data M&A: Madison and Wall’s Brian Wieser

Some media companies are feeling the heat on what they describe as a tightening advertising market, particularly linear TV. But there's a very different story coming out of investor briefings in recent weeks at some of the world's biggest brands. Many brands are increasing their advertising and promotion and much bigger overall marketing budgets. Some of these listed CFOs and CEOs apparently agree with marketing’s brand building champions – at least at face value. L'Oreal's overall advertising and promotion budgets, for example, pumped 11 per cent in 2023. Its global CEO told investors the company had seen “spectacular productivity increases of up to 10 to 15 per cent” for L'Oreal brands that have trialled its proprietary AI tool called a BetIQ to measure and improve L'Oreal's advertising and promotion investments. It’s aiming to roll the tool out across 60 per cent of ad investments globally by the year-end. L'Oreal is no outlier. Unilever, Diageo, Kellogg’s, Gucci, Mondelez, Ford and big insurance companies all told investors they're upping advertising and marketing budgets. Ironically, the main sector hacking ad spend is tech, the very platforms hauling in circa 60 per cent of that global budget growth. Unpacking the apparent disconnect is Brian Wieser, a long-time US-based equities analyst who founded Maddison and Wall, on the listed marketing services holdcos such as WPP, Omnicom, Publicis and IPG, and an avid watcher of listed brand owners and what their CEOs and CFOs say about their marketing investments. We’ve made this podcast a two-parter. The first takes on big brands and what’s happening with their ad and marketing budgets. Part two dives into media and the holdcos – where two of the big five are doing better than most for one key reason.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

L’Oreal, Unilever, Diageo, Kellogg’s, Gucci, Mondelez and Ford pump ad budgets; Google, Amazon, Meta cut theirs and grow - Brian Wieser on resurgent performance spend sidestepping  TV

At one point “the performance marketing [team’s] main KPI was actually how much investment they could deploy,” says Uber APAC marketing boss Andy Morley. “The mandate was spend, spend, spend … It was getting crazy.” But then they realised it wasn’t actually working. Then they flipped hard to brand – well above Binet &amp; Field’s 60:40 heuristic – and powered to delivery market leader. Today Morley says both Uber’s rideshare and food business has seen no slowdown despite squeezed wallets. Now it’s driving into grocery and beyond with another brand-powered push: “Pianos delivered in one hour” are the CEO’s mandate. For its rides business, removing 1 million of Australia’s second cars within five years is the target and Morley says growth – and consumer behaviour change – is rapidly underway. Uber’s moves into trains, planes and buses in the UK could signal the shape of things to come. Meanwhile Uber’s ads business is starting to motor. Drinks and entertainment advertisers in particular are tapping people on the way to bars and on their way home. Morley thinks a shift to attention over increasingly challenged reach and frequency metrics will shape both Uber’s own spend – and the media dollars it seeks from advertisers.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Crunch overcooked? APAC marketing chief says no slowdown as Uber plots grocery surge, ads business ramps up with attention, Carshare bids to cull 1m cars by 2029 – and why flipping ‘crazy’ performance for brand pays

It’s not often Suncorp’s CMO Mim Haysom is mentioned in the same conversation as Leonardo da Vinci but the latter’s rare ability to combine creative and analytical thinking is what 50 Australian CMOs working with WPP were briefed on recently as the next frontier for business growth and their own professional cred and advancement. Indeed, Marc de Swaan Arons, a former Unilever marketer who co-founded the non-profit Institute for Real Growth [IRG]  - backed globally by Google, Meta, WPP and Tata Consulting - says there’s a ‘massive opportunity’ for marketers to increase influence and impact with executive leadership colleagues via ‘humanised growth'. How? In this instance, it’s by customer-minded marketing bosses offering their strategy and insights nous to help build out divisional and all-of-company stakeholder-employee management blueprints and programs. It may seem fanciful and foreign to already stretched marketing remits but a new global study by IRG across 450 CEOs, CFOs, CMOs and HR leads suggests the notion would be welcomed by company leaders and seen as a credibility enhancer for marketers - if they don’t turn it into a land grab on colleagues. Suncorp’s Haysom and Piedmont Healthcare’s CMO Douwe Bergsma (US) are already front-running the trend, says de Swaan Arons, who also injects some cool pragmatism into the ESG, DE&amp;I and purpose programs often championed by marketing teams. He cites the raging success and subsequent reality check for marketers working on Dove’s acclaimed Campaign for Real Beauty rollout in 2004 - within two years of that launch, it was in trouble. Purpose had usurped product development. Here’s more from de Swaan Arons and the Institute for Real Growth’s new study.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lessons from Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty: Unilever marketers forgot product in ‘purpose' mission; ESG the new corporate ‘Voldemort’ but employee, stakeholder strategies a ‘massive opportunity’ for marketing influence in c-suite: Institute for Real Growth

The ANA’s latest transparency report looks ugly for agencies, the ad tech supply chain, marketers and their procurement departments. Probably why its findings – just 36 cents on the programmatic dollar stand a chance of being seen by audiences – have been met with deafening silence. None of the big agency holdcos have piped up, while Google, The Trade Desk, Pubmatic and other major adtech players didn’t allow the ANA into their systems. Not even P&amp;G played ball. Nick Manning, who co-authored the ANA’s scoping brief, says even 36 cents in every ad dollar landing with publishers is optimistic – because the investigation used sophisticated advertisers like Mondelez, Shell, Kimberly Clark, Dell and HP for the probe – and because it doesn’t factor-in things like agency commissions. And the ANA calculations are based off feeble viewability metrics. “We are talking about a massive global marketplace and it is out of control,” says Manning. Problem is, “nobody wants to derail the gravy train … Enormous sums of money have been made by the large digital platforms, by the ad tech community, by agencies. They've all been part of this gold rush.” But the report differs from myriad predecessors because it spells out exactly how advertisers can regain control. Marketers, says Manning, have to lock everybody in a room, forget about what has happened in the past, and hold “a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’”. Then they need to sweep their programmatic supply chain, strip out the dud components, including most of publishing’s long tail, and structure contracts accordingly – including with agencies, who “by virtue of tolerating this, are absolutely negligent in terms of their role”, he suggests. “But without that will and intent, you might as well not bother starting.” Here’s what’s going wrong in the $88bn marketplace, and for those with appetite, how to fix it… Before the open web money gets rechanneled from publishers to walled gardens and retail media.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘The whole supply chain is locked into a sense of omerta’: Why marketers, procurement, agencies, ad techs and publishers fear derailing programmatic ‘gravy chain’ – where 36 cents on every ad dollar is ‘optimistic’

It’s taken a couple of years, but the LinkedIn-backed B2B Institute’s mission to flip business-to-business marketing’s focus from performance to brand building – encapsulated by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute penned 95:5 rule – is starting to land, crucially in the boardroom and exec leadership echelons. LinkedIn’s polling of B2B CMOs and CFOs suggests most are planning to spend more on brand this year and are beginning to grasp that rational, product-focused messaging doesn’t cut it. The likes of MYOB, Canva and MailChimp are setting the creative standard, reckons LinkedIn’s Global VP of Customer Science and B2B Institute Global Head, Melissa Furze. But there’s still a long way to go, as Adobe’s APAC and Japan VP of Digital Experience Marketing, Duncan Egan will attest. Adobe, he admits, is challenged with building brand awareness – or more accurately, category awareness - when it comes to being known as a CX company versus its Photoshop legacy. He’s hoping to change that with a full-funnel push – and convince the sales-focused, short-termists that brand both fuels demand and ultimately speeds conversion. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Brand acrobatics: Adobe wrestles with ‘category awareness’ for CX, plots brand-demand offensive; B2B CMOs pump 2024 budgets as CFOs greenlight creative spend – MYOB, Canva, MailChimp nailing it

Marketing remits are expanding faster than most professions but unlike accounting or engineering, it remains splintered and without common professional capabilities, standards and accreditation. Indeed, marketing, agency, media and customer tech professionals across the entire customer and marketing supply chain risk career irrelevance because they're simultaneously losing sight of marketing's fundamentals – like strategy and commercial nous –  and the diverse new capabilities they need to join-up marketing and customer functions to drive business growth. Senior marketers at ANZ, Deloitte and Destination New South Wales are trying to bridge that gap. But even the likes of ANZ’s Kate Young, who launched a major upskilling program for the bank’s 300-plus marketers in 2019, says the pace of change means a refresh is already required and the program – and ANZ’s marketers – must operate in a two-speed environment: Core capabilities for today plus anticipating what’s coming down the track as personalisation shifts to “anticipation”, plus rapid advances in automation and generative AI. Destination NSW Marking GM Kathryn Illy is upskilling her team away from pure ROI-focused performance marketing to better understand what makes people want to visit NSW in the first place. As well as putting skills programs in place she’s hiring from ad agencies – and says the numbers show it’s working. Deloitte CMO Rochelle Tognetti is upskilling her 270 marketing staff around commercial acumen and the collapsing walls between client and employer brand, along with organisational capabilities and governance. All three marketing bosses are backing the Australian Marketing Institute’s re-fuelled drive to future-proof marketing’s skill set across 25 essential competencies. AMI CEO Bronwyn Powell says accreditation, in the same way that accountants and engineers achieve chartered status, gives marketers a far broader appreciation of business fundamentals while mapping a path to the c-suite. Perhaps worryingly for the top end of town, Powell thinks younger marketers are hungrier to upskill than mid and senior-level pros. She’s urging the entire market – agency and media bosses included – to identify skills gaps, personal and team-wide, and join the AMI’s push to plug them along with a revamped path for professional credentials which peak at an AMI Certified Practicing Marketer and AMI Fellow.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Marketing’s capability crunch: ANZ, Deloitte, Destination NSW marketing chiefs back Australian Marketing Institute bid to mirror Chartered Accountants, CPAs for industry-wide professional certification, credibility, status

Owned media in Australia – brands’ own websites, email, apps, instore and social assets – now has $4.3bn in commercial potential. It could reach $5bn in as little as 12 months as brands, eyeing the growth of retail media, start to realise the value of their own media channels. Valuation firm Sonder has just released its annual Owned Media Market Report &amp; Rankings for the '24 financial year and it again contextualises the retail media boom - retailers might be making all the noise around retailer media networks but they represent just one-third of the commercial value that brands across any sector can derive from their own media channels.          Mike Connaghan, MD of News Corp’s Commercial Content division, says his business is booming as the likes of Coles, Bunnings, Officeworks, David Jones and Chemist Warehouse make media revenue from suppliers and use it to fund their own paid marketing efforts as well as turn a healthy margin. Owned media specialist Sonder is seeing the same thing. The likes of ANZ have reorganised operations to put owned channels first – and co-founder Angus Frazer thinks more will follow, especially as pressure on marketing budgets intensifies. Sonder has run the rule over Australia’s owned media sector and drops some well-informed hints at numbers on which brands and businesses might be coming to market next. In retail media, Sonder says the ones to watch are Bunnings, Accent Group, JB-Hi-Fi, Mecca and Kmart. In grocery and liquor it’s First Choice and Vintage Cellars, while in finance its Visa and Mastercard. Sonder co-founder Jonathan Hopkins says the broader market is now “at a tipping point” as brands realise they can better engage, upsell and cross-sell to existing customers, and use the income from selling or trading space with their suppliers to fund acquisition bucket filling.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Owned media v retail media: Commbank, ANZ, Telstra invest in owned channels as sector’s commercial value increases 10% to $4.3bn; Financial services up 19% as non-retail brands eye upside

Jaguar Land Rover spotted an opportunity earlier this year in the lead up to Sydney's Vivid festival, where circa 3 million people show up for 23 days of live shows, music and forums. The carmaker needed to build awareness fast for the new Land Rover Defender and part of the brief included large out-of-home formats. Given the expected surge in people on the streets of Sydney's CBD, Jaguar Land Rover’s just appointed media agency, Resolution Digital, part of Omnicom Media Group (OMG), thought a fast revamp of the brief to include street furniture and screens in the City of Sydney network run by QMS would be a smart move. It proved right and OMG’s head of trading, John Lynch, says the post-campaign audience analysis for Defender saw traffic uplift around CBD sites increase in some cases by more than 200 per cent. Yet the out-of-home industry’s audience currency, MOVE, could not quantify what the opportunity was or how big the upside could be. Which is where QMS’ new audience initiative, using mobility data down to specific sites and screens, came into its own. QMS has broken early from its out-of-home competitors to develop analysis capability for its screen network, which both sets site-level audience benchmarks and then guarantees those audiences will be delivered. Right now, no other out-of-home company delivers that level of reporting or guarantees. But Chief Strategy Officer, Christian Zavecz, says they must if the sector is to improve credibility and maintain high growth rates. In his parlance out-of-home has to move from measuring assets to measuring audiences, with Zavecz arguing that if out-of-home wants to be treated like one of the last big broadcast audience reach channels, it has to behave like one. QMS calls it ‘Performance Plus’ and the single biggest buyer of out-of-home in the country, OMG’s John Lynch, says it’s delivering.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jaguar Land Rover notches 200 per cent audience uplift through new OOH performance reporting: QMS lifts TV playbook with audience guarantees, make-goods; OMG piles in

Arnott’s last month landed the Advertising Council’s Grand Effie after launching a master brand campaign that CMO Jenni Dill says delivered “10 per cent sales growth in dollar terms and three quarters of a share point growth” across the portfolio. It also helped put Arnott’s ahead of the three-year growth plan she’d had to present to the board 13 days after joining from McDonald’s. “Phenomenal” results, says Publicis Groupe CEO Michael Rebelo, given the effort it takes to move FMCG “super brands” like Tim Tams even a quarter of a per cent. And just the kind of hard business results Arnott’s private equity owners KKR need to see from marketing. Dill says KKR is happy to keep investing in growth, hence her signing up for the job, provided she’s not coming to them with soft metrics. So after working on new product sets, including healthier and gluten free ranges, and before approaching the hard, rational board with plans for a big, emotional TV-led push, she doubled down on pre-testing, market mix modelling and media benchmarking to show exactly where the growth opportunities lay. Backing secured, Dill went out with a fully integrated campaign tapping Arnott’s Australian heritage and biscuity ‘moments that matter’ that has since delivered in spades. Despite interest rate hikes hitting consumers hard, she predicts the brand investment will act as a moat and keep delivering well into 2024. Now Dill and Rebelo have their eyes on one, maybe two more Effies for next year, to make up for the one they’re convinced they should have had last year. Here’s how they landed the most coveted annual award for the serious end of town – and their take on how current market sentiment will play out across the piste into 2024.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Master brand plan: Arnott’s CMO Jenni Dill, Publicis Groupe CEO MikeRebelo on how Arnott’s lifted 10% sales growth across entire portfolio via market mix modelling, media benchmarking, creative testing, going large on TV – and won Ad Council’s Grand Effie

Figuring out where potential customers are in the hectic media system and not waste budgets reaching them across disparate channels is driving marketers and media agencies to experiment with some interesting alternatives in cross-media audience measurement. Kmart, its agency UM and IPG tech stablemate Kinesso, think they have landed on a winner – Beatgrid’s automatic content recognition phone-based panel.  Beatgrid counts the likes of Amazon, Google, P&amp;G, Unilever and Virgin as clients. The firm’s tech measures TV, digital video, audio and even out of home audiences, as well as in-store footfall. Plus its panel of paid-up and consented humans is doing away with the guesswork of brand uplift studies. Which is why Kinesso Digital Strategy Director, Charlie Allatt, convinced UM’s Group Director for Kmart, Adam Russell, to trial the tech. By making “inaudible pitch shifts” to creative across different screen types, “the system can unwind whether people are being exposed in a particular channel,” says Allatt. For Kmart, the two launched the trial across linear TV, BVOD and YouTube – which siloed measurement systems can’t do in one hit. Then they ran the numbers against Google’s DV360 DSP for YouTube ads, and against OzTam’s data for linear TV and BVOD. “Both channels tilted very, very closely to the Beatgrid numbers,” says Russell. Plus, using Beatgrid’s location data, they could map the ads served to Kmart’s in-store footfall. “We could see the difference of people who, within a two-week span, had seen an ad and then gone on into a Kmart store versus people who haven't seen an ad,” says Allatt. “We could directly measure that uplift in real time, specifically broken down for each channel.”  Kmart must “demonstrate every day that we are [reaching customers] really efficiently, ensuring every dollar we invest is performing,” says GM of Marketing Rennie Freer. The Beatgrid trial, “was a great opportunity to do that,” she says, “because if we're saving dollars here, if what we're doing is really delivering the efficacy we need, we can reinvest in new channels.” As cookies disappear and privacy laws tighten, Beatgrid’s founder Daniel Tjondronegoro and Australia GM Cameron Curtis think single-source panels are about to have a major renaissance.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Measuring BVOD, TV and YouTube and footfall in one hit: Kmart, Kinesso and UM think Beatgrid may have cracked cross-media measurement

Many predicted The Monkeys would be “roadkill” when Accenture in 2017 paid $63m for Australia’s hottest ad agency, its creative culture steamrollered by the immaculately polished heads of the consulting world. Instead, says creative chief Scott Nowell, who last week departed the agency he co-founded, The Monkeys began a cultural infiltration mission. Six years on, the broader Accenture Song creative-customer model has turned heads in the broader Accenture business – because it’s largely outperforming. That’s not to say there weren’t some awkward early moments. “A request that we lock our beer fridges until 5 p.m. went down very badly,” says Nowell, a diktat that lasted roughly six hours. Ultimately, in a firm with hundreds of thousands of employees and monolithic process rigidity, you have to learn to work the system, he acknowledges. He admits moving from a nimble business to a hierarchical consulting giant can take some getting used to: “You’ve just got to ask a lot of people if you can do something or not.” Either way, after some mutual “bum sniffing” the “more closed” corporate and “more open” advertising packs began to run together – and start building products and solutions that go well beyond advertising. That’s changed the capability The Monkeys now seeks, with “creatives who have that interest in broader business solutions” first order. Whether Nowell climbs back into the saddle, time will tell. But for now he’s smelling the roses after 17 years building a business that won everything going, rejected an offer to reverse takeover Saatchi &amp; Saatchi locally, came close to forming a “pan-Pacific micro network” with Goodby Silverstein and tried – and failed – to revive ice cream brand, Homer Hudson, which it co-owned. His advice to anyone starting their own agency today? “Start smarter … get an accountant … try and balance your life.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last supper: Outgoing creative chief at Accenture Song and The Monkeys Scott Nowell on culturally infiltrating Accenture, failed beer fridge bans, pulling a reverse takeover of Saatchis and why Accenture Song is ‘outperforming’ the consulting growth curve

The problem with Samsung’s previous market mix models was they were too slow, says Carl Bunn, Head of Data and Solutions at Samsung Australia. By the time results came back in, “we’d moved on,” says Bunn. Part of that was on Samsung: Consistency of data is key, says Bunn, and lack of it scuppered much prospect of MMM agility. But having done the “single source of truth” hard yards and plugged into Mutinex’s platform, the marketing teams are now getting more “credibility” within the organisation. They know in near-real time “what’s working and what’s not” in terms of media investment – and that’s getting more departments onside within Samsung. “It’s proven what we thought should be happening is actually happening,” says Bunn. “We can put data and numbers behind what we’ve been saying … and that gives you a lot of credibility in the business to keep pushing.”   Samsung’s agency team at CHEP wasn’t initially convinced. The prospect of yet another data source telling everybody what’s ‘working’ was met with some scepticism, says strategy chief Lilian Sor. Until they all started using it. Samsung and CHEP last month landed gold at the Effies, Australia’s ad effectiveness awards, with its use of media mix modelling to prove results cited prominently by judges. CHEP was also named Australia’s most effective agency overall. So something’s working.   Mutinex boss Henry Innis has only one ask: That everyone steps talking about market mix modelling and instead focuses on ‘market mix decisioning’. “If the industry moves away from the drudgery of legacy MMM models and towards the effectiveness of better market mix decisions, we'll have a more effective and respected industry,” says Innis. “By the time we're done at Mutinex, I would hope that no marketer in the world is seen as a cost centre.”  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘It’s given us a lot of credibility within the business to keep pushing’: Samsung Australia’s Carl Bunn on using MMM to prove what’s working – and win over sceptics

GroupM global boss Christian Juhl says rival holdcos may now regret spending “billions of dollars on cookie-based solutions or personally identifiable information” as privacy moves dead centre in regulatory affairs.. Some, he says, “are going to be sitting on a razor’s edge about whether they are going to be compliant ... it will definitely have ramifications for the industry.” In the meantime, he says a key challenge facing marketers across every facet of their business, and fundamentally “how they justify these massive budgets to their CEOs” comes down to measurement. But building post-privacy metrics and proxies, per Juhl, is probably the most “dynamic” – read challenging – part of his business. GroupM is building its own econometric or “full funnel” models for brands because, says ANZ CEO Aimee Buchanan, market mix models focused on shorter-term campaign metrics no longer cut it. Meanwhile, both Juhl and Buchanan have been pushing hard on carbon-based trading. Culling low performing, high emitting inventory is the easiest first step, says Buchanan, followed by stripping out digital weight from creative assets. But both bosses are less aggressive than previous statements around moving ad dollars based on emissions. Likewise, no hard mandates on getting staff back in the office beyond “probably more than we are right now,” per Juhl with hybrid flex built-in. For now, three days is a rule of thumb. Plus, Juhl is unsure how long brands will “pay more for less” on linear TV – and the world’s biggest media buyer thinks the world’s biggest streaming service, Netflix, has an opportunity to start integrating brands. Netflix’s Microsoft-powered ads launch may have underwhelmed, but Juhl sees “wide open” space ahead.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

GroupM’s global boss Christian Juhl, ANZ CEO Aimee Buchanan on Netflix ads, linear TV’s end game and why measurement sits at the heart of all marketer conundrums

Ecom’s runaway train has hit the buffers. Now brands must sweat massive investments made over Covid much harder, grappling simultaneously with how to drive profitable growth without harming customer experience. Expect a wholesale to push into loyalty and retail media, per Accenture Song MD and ANZ Commerce Lead Peter Davias. Meanwhile, he thinks Amazon may finally present the threat that everyone feared a decade ago, with headwinds for Kogan and Catch potential auguries. Which means more aggressive competition is coming for everyone, just as consumers are tightening their belts, necessitating a laser-like focus on efficiency and de-risking fulfilment supply chains while fuelling a shift to cost-saving ‘headless’ tech stacks. L'Oréal has piled into ecom, launching nine direct-to-consumer sites since 2019. After that surge, the focus is squarely on “sustainable, profitable growth”, per Chief Digital and Marketing Officer, Georgia Hack, while using its new CDP to dive into “personalisation at scale” and push harder into social commerce to plot new growth. News Corp Australia is aiming for a slice of that action by priming consumers with content-driven headless commerce – which allows stores to effectively set up a store within its pages – and affiliate links, per News Corp Australia eCommerce Director, Adam Kron. Meanwhile Accenture Song’s Managing Director and Technology Lead, Josh Lamont, says the convergence of marketing, customer, digital and commerce functions is what’s driving both the rise of the Chief Customer Officer and the push by the big commerce technology platform players to move end-to-end, including into marketing. He thinks consulting firms will need to similarly converge marketing, sales, service, ecom and digital product teams – a step Accenture Song is now taking.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ecom’s boom meets reality check: Focus on CX, efficiency and making money kicks-in hard as Amazon ramps up, puts pure-plays under existential pressure

While Telstra’s massive CX overhaul has powered net promoter scores through the roof – with NPS linked directly to executive bonuses – CMO Brent Smart says that’s only half the job. To grow, Telstra needs to go harder on brand to woo those that don’t even know about its sweeping digital overhaul, including aggrieved former customers. As such Telstra’s 80:20 performance to brand investment ratios won’t stay that way, but Smart says competing with the likes of JB HiFi and Harvey Norman plus rival telcos in the monthly acquisition battle royale “has really sharpened me up as a marketer.” Smart thinks too many firms are failing to properly link brand communications through to CX and performance, using the same off the shelf tools and “luggage matching” instead of truly being fit for platform. Meanwhile, he’s testing performance channels to gauge if they are delivering incremental growth versus sales that would have happened anyway – and similar tests at IAG threw up some interesting results.  Plus, Smart and Telstra are diving deeper into market mix modelling while building out a framework across the marketing function to “systemise and quantify” great creative work “without strangling it”. The latter is lifted from AB InBev’s award winning template. The former an attempt to demonstrate how marketing investment is delivering ROI and contributing to the bottom line. Between the two “I’d be lying if I said we could predict the impact of better creative,” per Smart. But in terms of media planning, he’s going all out for attention. “That definitely does change your channel choices,” says Smart – and there are winners and losers. Smart also fires back crisply at those suggesting Telstra’s new brand ad is lacking in branding.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘It’s sharpened me up as a marketer’: Telstra CMO Brent Smart bids to link CX and rising NPS for non-believers, flip performance and brand investment ratios and systemise marketing team creativity, attention and MMM

News Corp Australia had more than 4 billion short form video views last financial year across its own assets and social feeds and it’s changing the way the Murdoch empire delivers content. Vertical video is the big play as audiences and advertisers pile in. Even boss Michael Miller is getting in on the act. Now News has launched a master plan – dubbed News Shorts – to siphon those social audiences off the likes of TikTok (1.2bn of those streams), back to its owned assets and into its commerce engines.   Director of Commercial Data, Video and Product, Paul Blackburn thinks it can get to 800m on-platform vertical video streams within the next 12 months, feeding its shoppable ad units and packaging a mid-funnel intent play. Per Blackburn: “The trajectory we’re on suggests that’s extremely doable.”   Head of Ad Product and Strategy Ryan Hedditch says the vertical video play, sitting between BVOD and the top of the funnel and social at the bottom, presents “a big opportunity for planners to think differently about how they can capture and convert intent in the mid-funnel and push that through to conversion.”   Travel brands in particular are already taking that approach, with one advertiser notching 75 per cent uplift in sales form response rates using vertical video and News Corp Australia’s data. Crucially, conversion – i.e. shopping – happens on platform, AKA headless commerce. “It essentially means the brand or the retailer can set up a store within our content,” says Blackburn. He thinks brands and buyers are beginning to wake up to what’s been presented to them on a plate.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

4 billion streams and counting: News Corp Australia piles into vertical video, siphons audiences back from social, ties to commerce, bids to own mid-funnel between BVOD and social video

This week’s podcast is a bit different. We’re unpacking two big new plays from Mi3: our first sector specific newsletter edition, CustomerX; and a daily generative AI-powered Fast News edition, where the machines, overseen by Mi3 editors, will crunch and distil the daily PR firehose of people moves, key announcements,  account changes and campaign launches across marketing, tech, media, agencies and consulting. Coles 360 and Capgemini are launch partners on CustomerX; Salesforce and ThinkNewsBrands are backing Fast News.  On CustomerX, Mi3’s Andrew Birmingham outlines the massive CX challenges facing brands. “They believe they can discern the intent of one buyer out of a billion in a millisecond … and they are striving not just to identify customers, but also to really better understand them. But the reality is many are going backwards,” says Birmingham, despite blowing vast sums on martech. CustomerX will dive deep into the weeds of CX, CRM and personalisation to gauge where customer transformation is headed next – and spotlight those successfully navigating rapidly shifting turf. Blackmores, Country Road, Village Roadshow and Compass Group make up issue one.  Meanwhile, generative AI is upending industries. But it also promises massive efficiency. Which is why Mi3 is meeting the inevitable head-on with Fast News: It means editors can remain focused on hard, shoe leather stories while the machines crunch transactional news faster. ThinkNewsBrands GM Vanessa Lyons unpacks why she’s backing the model, while Salesforce’s Leandro Perez outlines the watchouts – and massive gains – generative AI now presents for marketers as the cloud giant goes all-in - the challenges and opportunities spawned by generative AI for Mi3 and B2B publishing more broadly are precisely the same as those facing the core industry sectors Mi3 covers for marketers and marketing’s supply chain. For CustomerX, which launched yesterday, Coles 360 GM Paul Brooks hints at where the retail media player is headed next year – off network and closing the attribution loop; Capgemini marketing chief Tracy Gawthorne on why McDonald’s and Ikea are killing it in CX and loyalty.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mi3 goes all-in on AI-powered Fast News and CustomerX launches; Capgemini, Coles 360, Salesforce, ThinkNewsBrands back initiatives - and unpack the market challenges coming...fast

The Australian market has lagged on electric vehicles. But that’s changing fast says BMW’s top marketer Alex McLean, with EV sales this year making up 10 per cent of the total market after notching 300 per cent YoY growth. Next year BMW will have 14 EV variants in Australia – and the market shake-up means the Ultimate Driving Machine must flip its marketing strategy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

BMW marketing boss flips strategy ahead of ‘overnight’ electric vehicle surge; Atomic 212 plans ‘single-minded big brand job’ to outpace ‘bi-polar’ auto rivals, reel-in Tesla

Lego prides itself on being safe. Nothing wrong with safe, says ANZ Vice President and GM Troy Taylor, a safe-handed 21-year company veteran who’s presided over 16 consecutive years of growth. So he baulked when Initiative came up with a plan to partner with Nitro Circus to put the boosters on its new Lego City Stuntz range. He started to sweat. “My first thought was Mother energy drinks. Women in bikinis. Concerned mums in the stands waiting for kids to fall off motorbikes …. This sounds a bit risqué for a Danish brand … Do we have to do this?” per Taylor. “I was the resistor.” But sometimes, he says, “You just have to let go.” So he did – and Lego’s partnership with Nitro Circus delivered in spades, going global in the process. The upshot? Double-digit sales boost, massive jumps in desire and awareness – and a connection with an audience it hadn’t previously been reaching. Plus, it won the MFA’s 2023 Grand Prix. Lego’s Taylor and Initiative strategy &amp; product chief Chris Colter unpack the process, the “cool currency” challenges in marketing to kids via their parents, why Lego Masters shows no signs of slowing, and the importance of sidestepping ‘care washing’ – even when you care more than most.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘Do we have to do this?’ Lego’s Troy Taylor and Initiative’s Chris Colter on letting go of ‘safe’ brand management  to jump into Nitro Circus – double digit growth and MFA Grand Prix follows

Scentre Group’s Westfield destinations across Australia and New Zealand are seeing an increase of online pure-play retailers moving into retail and pop-up spaces as customer visitation grows. In the first half of this year, customer visitations increased to 314 million, that’s 9.8 per cent more than the same period in 2022.* Just don’t call them shopping centres. They are destinations, where people go to be entertained and Moore sees his competition not only rival retail destinations, but Netflix, theme parks or anywhere people choose to spend their time. Rebel Sport is tapping that rich vein: with a uniquely designed retail presence with direct access to the basketball court housed within Melbourne’s Westfield Knox, and Rebel’s sales are powering. Moore says brands – including e-com pure-players – are heading into Westfield destinations, with 450 new businesses incoming this year alone*. Plus, the 3.5m strong Westfield membership programme and overhauled analytics are delivering sharper intel. Don’t think spots, dots and audiences says Moore, think “need-states mindsets and customers”. And don’t think bricks versus clicks: “it’s just commerce”. Brands need to do both better – especially now: Latest research from insights firm Nature shows swathes of shoppers cutting back in at least one key category over the last 12 months. If they find cheaper brands that are just as good, that risks a cross-category snowball effect. Which means brands must work harder to keep them – but not with discounts, according to Nature’s Lizi Pritchard. As Christmas looms large, Pritchard unpacks three consumer spending megatrends that brands and retailers need to get across, fast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scentre Group, Westfield partners with businesses for growth as brands and retailers tap shopping’s experience boom – plus three spending megatrends with major Christmas implications.

The naysayers scoffed when Tourism Australia made a CGI Kangaroo and 1984’s Say G’Day tagline the main roll of a $125m tax-funded bet to bring the world back to Australia after three years of fire and plague. One year on, those “doofuses” are eating their words, per Mark Ritson, as the kangaroo eliminates misattribution, boosts consideration, delivers travellers in droves, primes high spending tourists to plan trips for next year and beyond, and remains at the very top end of System1’s effectiveness league table. Funnily enough, say Ritson and Tourism Australia CMO, Susan Coghill, following the marketing effectiveness playbook actually works – and the armchair critics were never the intended target. While Tourism Australia is now heading into a statutory review of its creative agency roster, don’t expect much to change platform-wise – which means more budget to keep hammering the message home, building brand and delivering demand. Ritson reckons it could run for 20 years without wearing out. Coghill’s planning for at least four. Here’s how Coghill did her homework, sold it in to stakeholders, went to market and how it’s tracking – and why, per Ritson, 20-30 per cent of marketers will never make the top grade because they cannot get comfortable with imperfect marketing datasets.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Letting the marketing effectiveness rulebook do the talking: Tourism Australia CMO Susan Coghill and Mark Ritson on why Say G’Day’s success has silenced doubters – and will keep rolling for years

Cummins&amp;Partners CEO Michael McConville returned home to Australia last year after five years at the helm of adam&amp;eveDDB, home of effectiveness guru Les Binet – and where he was steeped in econometric modelling with the likes of John Lewis and Volkswagen. One marketer within the Volkswagen Audi Group, Benjamin Braun, nailed econometrics to the point that he could “forecast within 32 units [i.e. cars] what their campaign spend was going to get them in terms of sales”, per McConville. He’s aiming to go one better, probably with clients like Jeep and McCain although he won’t say just yet, after inking an exclusive creative agency deal with Mutinex for econometric modelling in real time. “We'll be looking to beat Audi,” says McConville. “This is a step ahead of what I’d been using in the past by a long way … This is the beginning of an industry repositioning. This is a form of applied marketing science … and agencies won't have excuses anymore to not put this sort of thing forward to clients.” Plus, he’s using it to change Cummins&amp;Partners fee structures: less upfront, more of the client business upside later. “Creativity won't be talked about as a big bet anymore,” reckons McConville. “It's a sure thing.” And that, he says, will make marketing a growth centre once again.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘Binet & Field, Mark Ritson, Byron Sharp applied’: Cummins & Partners chief backs Mutinex deal to beat Audi’s famed econometrics prowess, charge brands less, earn more with new model; prove creative’s business impact

Spreadsheets are not going to save the planet. The threat of jail time might. “The world is facing enormous challenges, the clock is ticking, we are in an emergency,” says Ari Alexander, VP and GM, Salesforce Net Zero Cloud. Yet most businesses are all over the place when it comes to their environmental data. That makes it calculating where they are at nigh impossible, “let alone where they are going.” But regulators in the US and Europe are mobilising to make environmental reporting data as robust as financial data – and new standards will have profound implications for businesses globally. They can no longer hide, says Alexander, and the regulation is moving away from product-based carbon footprinting to enterprise-wide. As a result, marketers are already pulling back from green claims, with CPG giant Unilever being sued in Europe, per Alexander. He thinks it’s just the tip of the iceberg. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘ESG is facing its GDPR moment’: From 1 Jan European regulations will ‘change the game’ on global sustainability reporting – lawsuits, jail time have C-suite ‘freaking out’, marketing reined-in

QMS landed the City of Sydney deal – one of the biggest contracts in Australian advertising history – in June 2020. Then Covid changed commuter patterns seemingly forever. Work from home initially left outdoor media companies sweating, not least QMS’s private equity owners Quadrant, given the scale of outlay required to build an entirely new City of Sydney network. But total audiences are now back to 2019 levels, out of home is powering and major advertisers reckon the shake-up is working in their favour. Stan CMO, Diana Ilinkovski, says the firm is getting a broader leisure-commuter mix within the 2.6m weekly sets of city eyeballs, enabling it to drive subscriber growth despite consumer belt tightening. Plus, the network’s digital flexibility means it can be far more agile in its messaging, targeting and creative optimisation. Bigger, brighter screens, per Ilinkovski, also boost cut-through – and QMS now has the in-day data to prove when, where and who those ads are hitting. Alongside lifestyle and entertainment, QMS Executive General Manager Mark Fairhurst says luxury advertisers are piling in, with the firm opening up a new batch of kiosk assets to further tap that literal rich vein. Plus its 3D screens are expanding – and Fairhurst reckons neither Sydney-siders nor advertisers will be able to miss what QMS calls ‘3DOOH’. Flight Centre is already on board, Maybelline is literally pushing product out of the screen and into the street and Ilinkovski hints Stan Sport may soon be kicking some 3D goals.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Work from home changed out of home audiences… for good: How Stan, luxury and lifestyle advertisers are cleaning up in Sydney as a result – QMS has the data to prove it

After a wild week at Salesforce’s global jamboree in San Francisco, the tech giant’s full flip to generative AI was relentlessly hammered home. Like most, the heat is on APAC marketing boss Leandro Perez and his 100-plus regional marketing team to walk the talk,  applying Salesforce’s new AI-powered capabilities to his own operation. Perez claims it’s working – from freeing up masses of time to iterate social posts on different platforms, to summarising Slack meetings, driving thousands of personalised iterations and interactions on its website, notching up to 80 per cent engagement rates on email campaigns – and potentially turning customer service teams into sales teams - at least partially. But Perez insists all those productivity gains won’t see teams hollowed out. “We never have enough people to do what we need to do anyway, especially if you have big visions from brand to demand.” Creating 15 versions of a social post and scheduling it “isn’t marketing” anyway, he says, “it’s just operations work. So I personally am not getting any pressure to reduce as a team.” Perez says the major B2B firms he’s speaking with all proffer similar lines. If anything, says Perez, generative AI gains mean he can ask for greater resource – because he can prove to leadership that marketing is powering through greater workloads, in turn driving sales growth. And APAC is Salesforce’s fastest growing market globally. Here’s a few insider learnings from a company selling AI to the world. And where B2B marketing is headed next.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

’15 versions of creative for multiple platforms is not marketing…it's just operations’: How Salesforce APAC CMO Leandro Perez’s 100-plus team is selling AI to the world - and applying it to reinvent their marketing roles and remits

The world “hates ads”, reckons Avid Collective boss Luke Spano. But high dwell times and engagement rates suggest they like native content. Marketers know this, but native content has been fragmented and highly manual, akin to insertion orders pre-programmatic. With little standardisation and patchy reporting metrics it couldn’t scale. While the likes of Taboola and Outbrain have hooked major publishers, they have “dirtied” native content’s reputation, per Spano. He suggests they are largely just repurposed ads. Avid Collective is bidding to fix all that. Locally, the firm has landed deals with the likes of Destination Gold Coast and ANZ-owned Cashrewards working with publishers from The Guardian and The Daily Mail through to Urban List and The Betoota Advocate as part of a 140-strong publisher network and platform that Spano claims reaches 18 million Australians, from students to boomers. It’s moving the needle for brands, says Spano, because those publishers along with Avid’s strategists create bespoke content they know will land with their audiences, not filler. Digital Publishers Alliance chair Tim Duggan spent years explaining native to marketers after founding Junkee. Avid’s platform would have cut dead time. But some of the 55 publishers in his alliance are piling in – eyeing major upside from native content over the next decade as marketers seek cost-efficient growth and greater media diversity as part of ESG mandates. Agencies are buying-in, per Spano, driving 70 per cent of spend on the platform. He’s aiming for 80-90 per cent by next year. After that Avid Collective aims to go global.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘Decade of growth ahead for native content’ as brands move beyond ineffective repurposed ads and spreadsheets to reach 18m Australians; Luke Spano and Tim Duggan on standardising, scaling and media diversity mandates

After two decades at GroupM, Dave Gaines quit to launch Media by Mother, an offshoot of creative London hotshop Mother that he reckons may ultimately be subsumed by its progeny. A major frustration with the WPP-owned business, per Gaines, was the inability for swathes of its people to think laterally, critically and stay curious. He hired a shrink to try and fix the problem, and then tried to take a creative-agency led approach to media within WPP. Ultimately, neither worked. Now Media by Mother staff – many liberal arts grads – are KPI’d to read, listen and learn outside of their current remits to better understand the bigger picture. If they do, they get up to 15 per cent more salary. If they don’t, “there are plenty of other places they can work.” The agency doesn’t make any money from trading media, “the money flows through their pipes, not ours”, and Gaines says media buying is a misnomer: “it’s just data entry”. Meanwhile, he reckons those arguing over Recma billings rankings are bald men fighting over a comb: “If you think scale is important, you don't know how an auction works.” After hitting its five-year growth targets in two years, Media by Mother is now planning an Apac office, and a Naked 2.0 model – except with execution, which Gaines reckons was Naked’s downfall. Its precise Apac location will be determined by finding curious, T-shaped contextual operators. He reckons Australians are better at that than US peers… but it’s a low bar.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Even a shrink couldn’t fix media agencies’ narrow mindset: Why Dave Gaines ditched GroupM to build Media by Mother, takes no mark-ups on media buying – “just data entry” – KPIs staff on learning, planning Apac launch

Media buyers this week applauded Nine’s retailer media launch – but wanted more detail. They always do. Sales chief Michael Stephenson and CMO Liana Dubois unpack it here, alongside Nine’s bid to take the fight to Meta, Google and TikTok with a self-serve AI-powered ad platform aimed squarely at Australia’s 2.5 million small businesses currently spending $1.5bn a year on “less efficient” social video. For big advertisers, Nine is bringing all its data, reach and assets to bear as it fires the starter pistol on a decade-long Olympics run, with new ‘9Tribes’ or segments being created from 20 million signed in users and new ways to match. Dubois is backing the games to drive major audience growth – and help convert light and lapsed viewers to heavy long-term users. Either way, she says Australia’s population will be at 30m by 2032, which means TV, and every other media channel, has 3.5m more eyeballs to aim for – and user experience will determine winners. Media buyers at Nine’s Upfront also warned the network is making a “big mistake” by not following the likes of Netflix and Foxtel into SVOD advertising. Stephenson insists they are wrong.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Taking retailer media up the funnel, how $305m for Olympics rights may prove cheap, why media buyers are wrong about Stan ads, and TV’s 10 per cent audience boost

Since leaving Telstra to take on a wide-ranging c-suite role at Tabcorp – spanning product, data and data science, customer experience and personalisation, brand, marketing and sponsorship with revenue responsibility – Chief Customer Officer Jenni Barnett has hit the turf running. The betting firm was haemorrhaging customers to digitally-savvier, free-spending rivals like Sportsbet and Ladbrokes. One year in, she’s stemmed the flow after launching a new app and migrating nearly a million customers within months to make the Spring Racing Carnival, driving ten updates since and KPI-ing the whole firm on digital revenue share. Customer experience is the key battleground per Barnett – and she’s front-running regulation and pulling Tabcorp out of daytime TV. To reel-in rivals she’s undertaken a sweeping overhaul of the marketing, digital, data and product teams and their capabilities – and pushed talent to develop quickly. Game on.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tabcorp customer chief Jenni Barnett stems digital haemorrhage to snappier rivals; bins bad media deals, restructures teams, now gunning for 10x conversion via ‘personalisation to context’

David Jones’ new retail media business wants brand budgets – both from the suppliers it already works with as well as wooing marketers across travel, automotive and lifestyle. CMO James Holloman is backing shopper data from 5.4 million premium David Jones customers – and the ability to hyper-target them across DJs stores and digital assets as well as across the open web – in a plan to woo marketers to spend with its new Amplify media unit. Years in the making, Holloman needed to convince powerful merchandising teams to cede control of how they strike deals with suppliers while building a tech stack from scratch and centralising control of its sprawling assets. Now the marketing-run Amplify has its own P&amp;L and great management expectations. Jonathan Hopkins, whose firm Sonder helped value DJ’s assets and develop the media business, says the average department store retailer in Australia could make $34m annually from media. But that’s the average, and DJs is top-end, with 55m annual store visits and 110m hits to its website. It’s loyalty data-powered offsite media revenue could be significant but Holloman’s not putting a figure out there, and shies away from any suggestion it’s a ‘Cartology for premium shoppers’. “It’s early days,” he says. “But we’ve got ambitious targets.” Here’s how Australia’s oldest retailer got into the newest, fastest-growing media game in town – and where it’s headed next.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Retail media goes upmarket: David Jones CMO targets auto, travel, lifestyle brands in premium tilt, touts 5.4m high-end shoppers across stores, online and open web as crunch-resistant customers keep spending

The experts at Hoyts and Val Morgan didn’t see it coming quite as it did. Hoyts CEO Damian Keogh says he was “laughed out of the room” for suggesting Barbie would take $35m at the Australian box office. It will do double that – meaning Margot Robbie’s not the only one in the pink. Kia, AAMi, Chemist Warehouse, Modibodi and Nintendo aside, marketers are kicking themselves for being equally blind to the opportunity. Now Val Morgan’s phone is ringing hot with advertisers “asking what are our next ten Barbies”, per MD Guy Burbidge. He and Keogh have a good idea what they are. They think the lesson for brands is to think earlier and smarter about IP marketing. Meanwhile, Barbenheimer has brought lapsed cinema audiences back to screens – 15 per cent hadn’t been for a year, per Hoyts 2.5 million member loyalty data – auguring well for a year in which the box office is powering back to the billion dollar mark. Plus, says Burbidge, cinema’s investment in attention data is having a “significant” revenue impact as marketers seek mass cultural alternatives to sport. Here’s the next big screen bets they think marketers should be laying over the next 12 months.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lessons from billion dollar Barbenheimer: Brands to rethink IP marketing, merch as Hoyts, Val Morgan bosses say marketers scrambling for ‘next ten Barbies’ - Kia, AAMI, Chemist Warehouse win big

Just about every B2C business is trying to build superglue stickiness into their user platforms. Nimble start-ups, at least prior to the big VC squeeze, were the poster children, leaving big legacy firms foundering in their wake. But SCA’s pivot to uber app Listnr is a standout exception, reinventing its digital audience business and building a new brand from scratch – pretty much all in-house. Launched mid-Covid in a bid to see off local incursion from the likes of Apple, Spotify and iHeart, Listnr has already powered past 1.5m signed-up users. Now SCA is using the logged-in data – alongside a new martech stack and digitally upskilled marketing department – to move the needle across acquisition, retention and engagement, while giving advertisers sharper incentive to spend. CMO Nikki Clarkson said the pivot required the entire business to suspend traditional thinking – from finance, sales, marketing, content, distribution, research and tech – without dropping the ball on its day-to-day game. Then the business had to go through a major systems overhaul while learning the language of tech and customer experience. But she says the pay-off and ROI is already landing, with marketing alone making “monumental gains” by aligning sharper digital tools with brand-building assets. Her takeout for those planning mass audience transformations? Go broad or go home.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘Monumental gains’: SCA chief marketer Nikki Clarkson on how broadcaster bet the farm building new customer platform from zip to 1.5m users, collapsed exec silos and forced new marketing skills beyond brand comms

Tectonic movement is reshaping blue chip marketing with remits expanding by the day. Coles and IAG replaced the CMO role with Chief Customer officers. ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra was last month promoted to Managing Director of ANZ’s Everyday Banking business. But Lion’s latest move tops the lot for adventure. Anubha Sahasrabuddhe in February became Chief Growth Officer at the $3bn drinks firm. The former Mars global marketing chief has responsibility for marketing, M&amp;A plus enterprise-wide transformational innovation beyond new product development. Just to make things more interesting she’s also been handed responsibility for IT and technology. Which means the CMO is now effectively CTO, CIO and CDO to boot. Lion CEO Sam Fischer, former APAC chief at Diageo, is backing Sahasrabuddhe to deliver. She’s given herself and her team 500 days to move the needle and reengineer the company’s culture, including IT, entirely around the customer. “If we can't demonstrate sufficient progress, then we can't justify our existence,” says Sahasrabuddhe. “The days are ticking.” This podcast is as wide-ranging as the remit. Tuck in.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lion’s ex-CMO, now Chief Growth Officer trailblazes with company-wide IT budgets and strategy, M&A, marketing and innovation agenda; Anubha Sahasrabuddhe sets 500-day target to flip IT culture to customers

Uber launched at South by Southwest, as did Twitter, Pinterest and Foursquare. Billie Eilish was discovered as an unsigned 14-year old. Mumford and Sons first made their name at the creative-tech-culture jamboree in Austin, Texas. In three months time the world will learn whether the powerhouse event can replicate itself outside of the Lone Star State. SXSW Sydney MD, Colin Daniels, is backing Sin City to deliver – with the likes of futurist Amy Webb, Coachella co-founder Paul Tollet and Slack co-founder Cal Henderson joining “titans of every industry” across tech and innovation, music, games and screens. He says every one of its 70 featured speakers would likely be the keynote at any other event. No wonder circa 500 brands are keen to get involved – which is one of the reasons Seven West Media is going large, partnering with SXSW Sydney and planning to spring a very different kind of upfront during the week-long festival. Chief Revenue Officer, Kurt Burnette, said getting the investment over the line was a “difficult conversation”, but he’s backing the play to position the network at the heart of the creative-tech nexus and change perceptions. CMO Mel Hopkins will have a big hand in shaping what that looks like. No pressure then. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

'We’re going all in’: SXSW’s biggest tribes are brands, marketing, tech as Sydney gig aims for Southern hemisphere creative, innovation super event; Seven plots biggest overhaul of Upfronts format in decades with full-week SxSW program

 Tightening privacy regimes around the world are forcing Google to change the way it tracks and measures web traffic across the majority of the globe’s estimated 100m sites on the open web. That’s forced Google’s Universal Analytics to be swapped out with an entirely new product knowns as GA4. The problem is it’s a mess for most. And it's a likely marker for what’s to come in Australia - companies in Europe, and even the US, are pulling out of Google'snear-ubiquitous [and once free] analytics platform as marketers fumble with new tools, unable to quickly pull key reports, historical comparisons and insights. Many are raging against the big Google data-swiping machine as European regulators enforcing stricter rules on how people’s data is used, stored and transferred and dishing out big fines over GDPR breaches. Some of the big questions hovering over Google’s new analytics products include whether they’re fully privacy compliant, particularly if Google is feeding its vast global advertising business via sample data carved out from website owner data, most of whom are only now discovering they don’t own or often see all their real audience behaviour. In France, about 80 per cent have reviewed their analytics, per Piano’s global analytics chief Marie Fenner, and “about 60 per cent” have switched". That scenario may soon repeat in Australia as data privacy rules are beefed-up. Scentre Group performance marketing lead Jason Elk thinks the shake-up threatens Google’s analytics dominance and by proxy its broader business. Matomo CRO Dion Blair, agrees. “Right now, unlike any time in the past 15 years, we're seeing the choice [businesses are making for analytics] is potentially not the big behemoth.” With Google shutting off Universal Analytics a few weeks ago, here’s what marketers locally and globally are likely to face.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cookies again? Google’s global hegemony measuring 100m-plus websites faltering amid corporate governance concerns in privacy, data ownership; Brands, tech, advisors weigh-in on measurement meltdown

NAB CMO Suzana Ristevski is a touch emphatic after just completing a three-year, $45m grinding overhaul of the bank's marketing technology systems that has seen 95 per cent of the tools used by the marketing team switched out - a Pega decisioning engine and Tealium's customer data platform are among the new line-up. Now NAB is ready for the AI stuff.  Ristevski acknowledges “inflicting a lot of pain” on the bank’s marketing team in the tech transformation and there’s more to come but "more exciting" as NAB works to embed machine learning and generative AI to deliver personalisation at scale that isn’t just “sending out rubbish”. She’s already sent out 10x more comms, now circling at 500m. But the bank is acutely aware of the risks posed by AI – and the strategy goes all the way up to the top. Tabcorp is onto its third in-house generative AI program and the creation of a centralised unit, Next Labs, to experiment - the problem with the other two was that they lied, or suffered “hallucinations”, per Chief Data &amp; Analytics Officer Amy Shi-Nash. But Tabcorp can’t risk plugging into things like ChatGPT. The Monkeys and Accenture Song ANZ boss Mark Green, meanwhile, is back from Cannes where the AI banter was redlining on a "moral crisis" crisis for creativity, not dissimilar to the previous metaverse hype cycle. Green’s not worried. He reckons he’s slipped Accenture Song Global Creative Chair Nick Law an idea “that’s as good as any we’ve ever created” with generative AI at its core - and he says the client briefs are coming in from all angles. New York-based Law thinks there are new AI risks which will undermine the fascination and effectiveness of personalisation - namely, tonnes of mediocre messaging that will be created under the guise of 'right person, right time', unleashing a sea of sameness. NAB's Ristevski agrees.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘No hallucinations’: NAB, Tabcorp, Accenture Song on 'applied AI’ - less ‘possible', more ‘pragmatic’ use cases first; NAB flags AI creative surge for 500m personalised messages but brands warned on mindless messaging, CX usurping media for brand building

When Elsa Beaumont was tapped last year by Treasury Wines Estate – home of the mighty Penfolds – the former exec at global hot shops like Mother and Big Spaceship, and her colleague Ben Oliver, who’s running Treasury’s internal media unit at Splash, were worried. Could they beat all the warnings that come from agencies when brands try to go in-house with capabilities all previously outsourced: talent is hard to attract and keep stimulated, burnout is a high risk and any cost benefits would be shortlived. Burnout risk turned out to be true but the talent, quality and volume of work is rocking, they say  – and now Splash is preparing for a global rollout across Treasury Wines’ international markets. The upside is faster turnarounds, tighter links with marketing teams and better output than what was possible by just using agencies. And in the case of media, Oliver is chasing down transparent digital media buys and practices that he never quite got in life before Splash.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Penfolds-Treasury Wines lauds creative, media together for its in-house agency Splash, now going global: one year old, 20 people, 400 projects, same marketing budget but doing more, better, faster – mostly

After ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra commissioned owned media specialists Sonder to conduct a valuation and audit of the media assets the bank owned and managed, her big discovery was that circa 85 million impacts a month, mostly from ANZ customers, were under leveraged by the business. Now ANZ’s marketing team think first about their owned channels before developing paid media briefs. New content hubs coupled with ANZ’s two year investment overhauling its tech and personalisation capabilities, for example, has seen “up to a tripling of conversion rates”, says Mehra. Sonder Co-Founder Jonathan Hopkins says ANZ also has a big upside in acquiring new customers from its owned media assets, not just better cross-selling of products to existing customers."ANZ have screens outward facing in most branches around the country - in some cases they can also do customer acquisition."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra: ‘There’s only so far you can go with paid media’ – why ANZ is investing heavily in its owned media assets; 85 million impacts a month across ANZ channels triggered a ‘mindset shift’ for marketing team

Coles and IAG have joined the march to install Chief Customer Officers into roles that were either previously at least partly the domain of CMOs or now have marketing as a reporting line. But what does a CCO do? Is it job title semantics or is the mission sweep broader? And where does this new executive species come from? Three Chief Customer Officers from Inghams Group, Hipages and MyCar, the overhauled Kmart Tyre &amp; Auto, breakdown their agenda and why their firms opted for the role – and in Inghams case, why everything starts with “balancing the bird”.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Return of the Chief Customer Officer – the CMO’s new boss: Coles, IAG latest blue chips on board with broader remits and revenues; Inghams, MyCar, Hipages log their progress

The Media Federation of Australia unveiled a hot shortlist of the brands and agencies delivering the best work and business impact in media for 2023, with Lego, NRMA, Campari’s Aperol, Netflix and Suncorp among those leading the finalists tally. About 30 advertisers and 20 agencies made the cut of finalists with three marketers among the judging line-up for the 2023 MFA Awards joining Mi3 to unpack why some entries got their likes - and laments. Arnott’s CMO, Jenni Dill, Unilever’s Director of Digital Marketing, Media and Commerce, Sarah Sorrenson and Deakin Business School’s Adjunct Professor and former CMO at Coles and Tourism Australia, Lisa Ronson, reveal their collective observations and scorecards (well some of them) on the standard of work in the past year. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Standout brand, agency media work unveiled in MFA Awards: Lego, NRMA, Defence Force, Mars, Suncorp, Dell, Netflix, Campari lead shortlist; Initiative, EssenceMediacom, OMD top agency haul

Gen Z makes up 20 per cent of Australia’s population. There are more than five million of them – and they want very different things from brands. Purpose won’t cut it. They want action, locally and globally – and they are sick of nobody listening to them, per Chris Sanderson and Martin Raymond, founders of The Future Laboratory. They are also – aged between 11 and 26 – already wary of digital burnout. They’ve been bombarded with digital content their whole lives. Which means many are blind to the ads they’ve not already blocked. But not Out-of-Home: Out-of-Home is “so important for them [and to reach them] because Gen Z don’t see it as an intrusion,” per Sanderson. “They see it as a logical, seamless connection with their world of brand.” They are also making their purchase decisions in very different ways to previous generations – the pyramid and related funnel are now “circular”, reckons Raymond, with profound impacts for brands. Plus they say its time to stop “sneering” at the notion of crowd-sourcing aspects of ad campaigns – or at least getting far broader inputs, particularly when marketing on billboards, because Gen Z is all about community, collaboration, and commitment: “It guarantees the sharing of the campaign,” says Raymond. Off the back of a deep dive commissioned by JCDecaux, the two unpack what brands need to know about marketing to Gen Z.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Digital burnout, ad blindness and sick of brands talking purpose: The 5 million Australians marketers risk alienating – and how to make them share your Out-of-Home campaigns

Mattresses selling for circa $3,000 are not typically a signal for how consumer spending is bending historical patterns but Tony Pearson, CEO at mattress maker AH Beard, is seeing two distinct consumer groups going in opposite directions. Sales of his premium lines in the $2-3,000 tier are holding strong just as his cheaper lines - from $600 - fell off a cliff in April. Meanwhile, mattress sales to hotels are soaring as even the cash-strapped masses keep spending on holidays and experiences – first hand evidence of the consumer spending divide mapped by Commbank-Quantium analysis of 7 million bank accounts playing out. But Pearson saw it all coming, because that’s exactly what Roy Morgan’s segmental database of NEOs, or ‘new economic order’ consumers, said would happen. Ross Honeywill helped pioneer the typology – the quarter of the population that earns more, and critically spends more. He says the NEOs are currently keeping Australia out of recession and with latest rate rises yet to hit home, Honeywill says brands must have a premiumisation strategy that targets NEOs, or risk pain. CommbankIQ innovation and analytics chief Wade Tubman agrees: Marketers without “stratified” or multi-layered brand strategies “might be starting to feel the walls are closing in.” Following clothing and household goods, Tubman says insurance extras and telco are next as pinched consumers wring out every last dollar to spend on experiences, which he suggests are becoming “the new essentials”. The good thing for marketers is that comms to NEOs deliver double duty, per Honeywill, tapping the aspirational but squeezed masses as well as those with money still to burn. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Strange days: Two speed consumer economy messing with markets, marketers - value lines surge as does ‘premiumisation’ – Commbank iQ, Roy Morgan, AH Beard CEO Tony Pearson unpack what next and safest marketer bets

If Nine’s former publishing boss Chris Janz and The Guardian’s Managing Director Dan Stinton are right, there’s a storm brewing for the media establishment as frustration rises among the business, tech and innovation elite – and even the broader public – over what and how mastheads and journalists produce content. Chris Janz did the “deal of a career” when brokering the 2017 ‘unholy’ alliance with Google to sell Fairfax’s premium ads and audiences programmatically, reportedly for guaranteed annual revenues north of $40m. Now Janz has flipped entirely with VC-backed media challenger Scire: He says Scire won’t collect any personal data at all and thinks those relying on Facebook and Google for traffic, while trying to compete on data and tracking – areas in which News Corp, Nine and others have invested heavily – “are playing someone else’s game” and have already lost. The future of mastheads, he says, is all about trust and serving smaller, smarter segments with content they will, in some way, pay for. Either way, privacy regime changes will soon disrupt tracking-based ad-funded business models – and Scire isn’t going to do traditional advertising at all, per Janz. Outgoing Guardian Australia MD, Dan Stinton agrees on trust, contextual targeting and the push away from open exchange “direct response” advertising. The Guardian has slashed its reliance on open ad exchanges from half to a tenth of its ad business in five years under Stinton – reader contributions now make up more than half of revenues but ads are still growing at a fast clip. Stinton and Janz unleash on the new challenges facing the media establishment and the full force of AI scrape and lifts that are about to hit.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘No personal data’: Chasing audience scale, ad exchanges, big tech targeting is publisher folly as media trust plummets, says Scire’s Chris Janz, Guardian’s Dan Stinton; No-tracking, contextual ads next growth wave

With Voz in market and the TV networks seemingly moving forward with a BVOD marketplace, agencies and broadcasters have renewed impetus to converge TV trading and buying and flick legacy systems. But ditching decades of behaviour is never easy. Perhaps the best example is what has been dubbed the Unilever trial, where the FMCG giant, agency PHD and Seven West Media used early Voz data to boost reach by 20 per cent while cutting audience duplication to four per cent by combining linear and BVOD. Alex Tansley, Head of Converged Audience Trading at Seven and PHD investment chief Joanna Barnes were key architects of that trial. They unpack what converged TV trading will look like in the next 12 months – and what that means for marketers, media agencies, TV networks and perhaps ultimately the pure-play streaming platforms now entering the advertising game.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The future of total TV: Voz, the cross-network ‘BVOD Project’, Unilever’s 20 per cent reach gains and converged trading implications for marketers, agencies and TV networks

During Covid, the big Hollywood studios played hardball with cinemas – rushing to take-on Netflix and Prime, feeding their own direct streaming plays, shortening releases windows, or cutting them out altogether. Sony was the streaming holdout. ‘We’re either going to look like the smartest person in the room, or the dumbest,” Sony Pictures local boss Stephen Basil-Jones told Hoyts CEO Damian Keogh. But facing spiralling losses on their streaming businesses, stars and directors in revolt and booming box offices, Basil-Jones says the studios have universally changed their tune. “They’re saying ‘We’re back, baby! We need you!’ Sony Pictures has avoided the dunce cap and Basil-Jones forecasts a “shake-out” and consolidation ahead for the streamers. Keogh thinks the studios will go back to making episodic series for their platforms – while channelling investment into A-grade films for cinema and increasing flexibility on release windows to maximise returns. It's a tale of content economics and consumer behaviour that runs almost diametrically to the ecom boom – and Keogh and Basil-Jones see another leg to come.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From streaming boom to busted economics: Sony Pictures’ Stephen Basil-Jones and Hoyts’ Damian Keogh on the Hollywood studio streaming shakeout that has them all running back to cinema

NRMA’s data crunching suggested the brand would get more bang for buck by putting some of its sports marketing budget into entertainment. So it pulled out of The Broncos, unwound its Collingwood sponsorship and, flipping from a local club to national strategy, “made the biggest bet we’ve ever made on Cricket Australia,” per IAG Acting CMO, Zara Curtis. She recycled the remainder into cinema, last year “owning the top ten films” via Val Morgan category exclusivity, and using cinema first on the plan to launch longer-form versions of its ads, before pushing out shorter cuts to TV. Wise move, says Matt Sandwell at research firm The Owl Insights, because in a fragmented media landscape, “water cooler moments” are rare beasts. Per the firm’s research, sport is still the number one cultural connector and memory encoder. But it’s expensive and crowded. Cinema is number two – and can deliver better bang for buck. Esports, he says, are another cost-effective bet, along with live theatre, but don’t deliver at scale. Curtis says NRMA’s tracking proved the theory: “We saw 50 per cent more efficiency in driving a brand uplift across recognition and brand cut through recognition tracking at 55 per cent, branding at 84 per cent, and cut through at 46 per cent.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

IAG’s Zara Curtis on why NRMA flicked footy and rugby sponsorship, put the money into cricket and cinema – and drove massive brand gains

Debate on whether brand campaigns can drive short term sales performance and vice versa – aka ‘double duty’ – is running as hot as the budget knives pressed to the CFO’s whetstone. News Corp’s Pippa Leary says market-wide short-termism is fuelling demand for performance ads to drive immediate results but double duty works – results for Moet has LVMH marketers popping their corks. Brand strategist James Hurman says brand campaigns can drive short-term sales, but that trying to make one ad to do both is “way harder” than just making two ads, so why try? Either way, using the same metrics for brand building and short-term sales “is like judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree,” per Hurman, “it’s always going to be a shit fish”. Rob Brittain says marketers only have themselves to blame: Few can articulate the difference between the two – nor why long and short need to work together – to CFOs under pressure for short-term sales. Meanwhile, he says marketers are getting the basics of ESOV wrong, ending up closer to double jeopardy than “difficult” to achieve double duty by wasting money on low attention channels. But partially reformed growth hacker turned growth advisor to companies up to $100m in revenues, John James, thinks ESOV is a flawed concept based on touting the benefits of being “the loudest person in the room” by those who “want to sell more advertising media to clients”. He also throws a jab or two at Ehrenberg-Bass ‘how brands grow’ thinking. Brittain can’t let either go unanswered. This one gets politely punchy. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Double duty dilemma: Can a search or social ad build brand and drive sales now? Media execs, reformed growth hackers and ad effectiveness maestros duke it out – as ESOV critics have their say

Search and SEO is facing major disruption – with implications for brands across both performance media and mid-to-upper funnel content marketing. Google is countering the threat from Bing and ChatGPT with Magi, set to soft launch later this month. Billed as a “hyper-personalisation engine”, it will change how search works and the way content on websites needs to be written and structured, per Stephen Downward, Head of SEO at Atomic 212°. That’s on top of Google algorithm changes that call time on the days of 500 word blogs and average content. The key to ranking and traffic is now all about EAT: Expertise, Authority, and Trust – plus Google has added another E: Experience, which is why News Corp, alongside Atomic, created a vast trove of articles via masthead financial journalists to feed its new comparison site and take on Finder, says Downward.  Within paid search, prices will continue to climb, per Atomic Head of Performance Media Sascha Bonomally, which is why Google’s new rhetoric is around amortising the cost of its upfront click to lifetime value. Either way, Bonomally thinks advertisers now optimising clicks to products with best margin are making a mistake.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How AI is hitting paid search, content strategies; where prices are headed; why Google is changing its LTV tune; and why interpreting media mix modelling requires human intelligence

Three years ago Jenni Dill put a multiyear strategy plan to Arnott’s to management and board. The former McDonald’s CMO had been in the CMO gig at Arnott’s for 13 days. But Dill had just completed The Marketing Academy’s Fellowship course, which she says provided the clarity and confidence to speak business, not marketing – and to deliver a growth agenda at pace. It’s paying off. Despite the biggest spending squeeze in a generation, Arnott’s brands are powering. Tim Tams, Shapes and Vita-Weats sales are up double digits as Australians cut out restaurants but keep buying branded snacks and staples, resisting the siren call of supermarket’s own brands. Dill puts it down to brand re-investment after a decade of underspend, enabling her to link marketing spend directly to the P&amp;L. She was also one of the first Australians to complete The Marketing Academy Fellowship program run by McKinsey that is launching in APAC this year for 20 elite CMOs - 10 Australian marketers could land in that group who want to be the next CFO, CEO or board member. Dill, along with Lisa Gilbert, CMO of the $20bn IBM managed services spinout Kyndryl, unpack what’s required and what the best of the best – today’s ‘super CMOs’ – will get in return.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Arnott’s sees double digit growth after private equity ownership and marketing overhaul; CMO Jenni Dill on bucking downturn, linking brand to P&L and landing a ‘Fellowship' spot with elite Marketing Academy-McKinsey CMO program

Mel Hopkins says she hasn’t gone to Seven “to put lipstick on a pig”. The former Optus CMO says CEO James Warburton wants “total transformation” – and not just across ratings – so she’s hatched a four-point plan. Hopkins has also committed to linking Seven’s marketing activity and investment directly to earnings and the P&amp;L “in real time”. Anything less, she says, “and I am failing to do my job”. That means growing both the brand and its equity as well the number of eyeballs tuning in as a destination – fast. Hopkins thinks Seven, particularly Seven Plus, can outpoint the streamers and reckons their ad-funded tiers may fizzle out as Covid-driven growth wanes. But just as Hopkins is finding media an entirely different world to telco – it’s way more complex than she realised – she says Seven’s media-focused marketing team must also “sharpen up” when it comes to “strategic marketing and advanced digital marketing”. Plus, Hopkins opens up on the Optus data hack, not sleeping for five weeks, but why living through the experience, in all probability, will pay off.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Why Mel Hopkins left Optus for Seven CMO gig: Not putting 'lipstick on a pig’; Big transformation plan looms – sharpening marketing, hitching it to the P&L – and her take on the Optus cyber attack

Here’s how two firms in different parts of the supply chain are upending legacy marketing practices. Tracksuit, a two year-old New Zealand-based brand tracking platform has slashed the cost, turnaround time, cred, and the role of brand – historically considered fluffy by the business community. The rapidly growing start-up has caught the eye of VC Blackbird, with Mark Ritson and Ascential, the firm behind Warc and Cannes Lions, also investors. Now it’s bidding to carve out a major slice of a market dominated by big global research firms like Ipsos, Kantar and Nielsen – and has just inked a partnership with fellow SaaS disruptor Mutinex. The two aim to align the in-market perceptions of a brand directly to the P&amp;L while doubling the $4bn addressable brand tracking market. Crucially, the hardcore VC types are piling in not just as investors, but for their early stage startup investments to actually harness the tech to grow faster and more sustainably as growth hacking bites the dust and startups flip to brand investment that, amid far more sober money markets, must be quantified in hard financial terms. Tracksuit co-founder Connor Archbold and Mutinex CEO Henry Innis join Paul McIntyre on the mics. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Brand equity blow-up: Ritson-backed Tracksuit eyes $8bn brand tracking market, Ipsos, Kantar, Nielsen disruption by linking brand equity directly to P&L; inks Mutinex deal

It’s not often Australian and New Zealanders can teach the giant US market a thing or two but hear this one out: If you're one of those hard-nosed types who think all this marketing science and advertising effectiveness stuff is too rubbery – ESOV, mental availability, investing in brand to drive long-term demand over short-term sales – here’s some contrarian proof that might just change your mind. It’s a textbook case from a CMO who took a giant leap and deployed a whole suite of marketing's new and established thinking in one strategic gulp, rolling it out across a $7bn US healthcare brand and sweeping away pretty much everything that had gone before. It worked, massively. All growth KPIs for Douwe Bergsma, CMO of Georgia-based healthcare firm Piedmont, are busting upwards and the CEO handed him the biggest marketing budget in the company’s history to do it. Here’s how Bergsma, a former P&amp;G marketer and current ANA board member, along with NZ-based brand and start-up strategist James Hurman, hatched a plan to do everything by the marketing science and effectiveness handbooks, sold it into the leadership team, brought every single one of its agencies into 20 marketing effectiveness briefings – and literally ended up with a runaway best seller. It’s the story of a Dutchman and a Kiwi taking Australian and UK marketing science to the US, and winning big.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How an ex-P&G US marketer ditched cohorts, personas and restrictive segmentation, blended Ehrenberg-Bass, Binet & Field textbooks word for word, landed biggest marketing budget in $7bn company’s history – and all KPIs are powering

Volvo Car Australia boss Stephen Connor has hit the accelerator on the carmaker’s plan to ditch combustion engines. He’s going all-in on electric vehicles (EVs) by 2026 – faster than any of its global markets. Volvo has deep sustainability commitments, pledging to become climate neutral across its supply chain by 2040. But Connor’s gone for first mover advantage for profit just as much as purpose, because by 2030 “every manufacturer in Australia will be standing on the mountain beating their chests about EVs”. By then, the market will be awash with technologically advanced electric cars. Hence Connor thinks brand will become the key differentiator – and he’s backing Marketing Director Julie Hutchinson to ensure Volvo builds a greater share of mind. "The race is already on," she says, with EV ad spend tripling last year.  But the sprint to all-electric cars means major change ahead for dealers and retail operations (Volvo is about to launch a direct-to-consumer play) while a rapid rollout of new electric models requires new business models – including subscriptions – to scoop a new cohort of younger buyers. Here’s the plan.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘The race is on’: Volvo boss Stephen Connor on why going all electric by 2026 will double sales, protect revenue – but poses tricky challenge for marketing, even with a bigger budget

There’s been just a little happening inside the $8 billion Yahoo business globally - and in Australia. The digital content and advertising business announced last month it would reduce its total workforce by 20 per cent but global CEO Jim Lanzone told Axios recently the layoffs were not about financial challenges. Rather it was an important strategic change. No longer is Yahoo pushing a “unified tech stack” to compete with Google or Meta. “We really had to take a hard look at the business and make the big decision to refocus and prioritise where we really succeed the most,” says John McNerney, Yahoo’s new Managing Director for Australia and Southeast Asia. “It was nothing to do with financial challenges or troubles in the advertising market but really instead about a strategic restructuring and refocus globally for long term success. We were trying to be the masters of everything, building a unified tech platform with DSPs and SSPs to compete against Google and Meta but we realised change was needed.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Yahoo’s new team, new mission: Yahoo Australia execs unpack the global restructure and the “why and what” of a new, simplified game plan

Ask any marketer with CX and martech in their remit to prove the return on those investments and it can get a little awkward. But CFOs are increasingly asking the same question. Here’s a full and frank download from a marketer doing exactly that: assessing ROI on its customer experience strategy - on and offline - after going all in on Salesforce, just before the pandemic hit. Rob Lopez, GM of CX, Brand and Innovation at Norths Collective – which operates eight venues and clubs and two fitness centres across Sydney – has embarked on "Project ROI" to quantify its contribution to profit. Lopez already knows the transformation is working: engagement rates are through the roof thanks to what he calls “ethical personalisation” and the firm is able to attribute comms output to member action, digitally at least. Now it is digitising memberships to better understand offline – or in-venue – activity. The kind of insights it is delivering to the likes of Lion has the drinks giant smacking its lips to get inside the new app. Meanwhile, smarter data and analytics capability means Norths is de-risking its next phase of growth – because it knows the dollar value existing members can bring to new venues “before we even open the door”. Lopez has five tips for marketers embarking – or rethinking – their digital transformation strategies. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

'Ethical personalisation’: How a leading CX, martech convert at Norths Collective is (finally) proving ROI on tech stack investment, not just campaigns; engagement rates rocketing over global norms; Lion hungry to tap its member app and loyalty program

Australia will escape a recession this year but not a downturn, per Sky News Business editor, Ross Greenwood. But the impact of rate rises means the average mortgage payer is now $20k out of pocket. If fewer people move home, fewer white goods and consumer electronics get bought – creating a negative cycle and something of a two-speed economy as the squeezed middle and lower income households cut back. But the third of Australians with no mortgage cash in the bank are still spending, and luxury is booming as a result. Meanwhile, Western Australia is as ever forging its own path and younger consumers still spending, creating a three-speed national economy. But Buy Now Pay Later buttons “are taking a hammering” in WA, warns The West Australian's Business Editor Sarah Jane Tasker. “That raises some concerns about when the pay later kicks in”. Across the economy, the Federal Treasurer is talking up ‘values-based capitalism’, which will chime with brands putting purpose at their core. AFR economics editor John Kehoe thinks that trend is here to stay – though may be scuppered in the short-term should economic headwinds strengthen and cost hikes outweigh good intent. “But for the now, in the foreseeable future, people want governments and businesses involved in these sort of social and ESG causes.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Three speed economy and ESG pressure: Top business editors on what rate rises and a $20k mortgage hit mean for consumer spending, retail and brand purpose

The killer combination of Covid and voluntary administration decimated Virgin Australia’s marketing team to a handful but under its new private equity owners, Bain Capital, Virgin’s head of paid media, Ben Will, finally got to deploy a massively scaled and personalised programmatic ad campaign that he had been dreaming about for years – but it nearly cracked the Virgin team and its media and dynamic creative partners at PHD and Adylic in the process. It took months after launch to fine tune but they survived, ultimately lifted revenues 30% and won the MFA’s top award for real-time marketing for their efforts. But Will is worried new privacy laws will hand much of the control he currently has to "test and learn" to the walled gardens like Google and Meta, where their unknown tools and AI do all the optimisation without any visibility for advertisers.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dream flight: How Virgin’s decimated marketing team launched an automated creative campaign with 80,000 'full funnel' ad variants, lifted revenues 30% but...brands will cede more control to Google, Meta under new privacy regime

There’s an easy way to cut carbon emissions from digital advertising. Stop buying “crap” ads that “no human sees”, ditch “gamed” viewability metrics and instead buy on attention, never buy another outstream video ad, and cull the bloated programmatic supply chain, per Brian O’Kelley. The CEO of Scope 3, a global emissions measurement firm focusing on decarbonising digital media and advertising, knows how much waste lurks within that supply chain – the sprawling Lumascape – because he was in deep and early, founding AppNexus, which ultimately sold to ATT&amp;T for $1.7bn. Even “turning off five to seven per cent of inventory gets you a 29 or 30 per cent reduction in carbon,” says O’Kelley. Publishers feeling the heat to decarbonise – GroupM and Mediabrands are talking about money moving next year – needn’t fear. He reckons they will see more cents in the ad dollar as the bad actors get punted. Marketers will also stop wasting billions of ad dollars while saving millions of tonnes of carbon. But marketers have to lead, because everyone else will follow the money. Suncorp CMO Mim Haysom, NAB Head of Marketing Planning &amp; Performance, Tom Dobson, and Australian Marketing Institute CEO, Bronwyn Powell join Mi3 on the mics to ask the pointy questions on where next – and how fast.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Halve digital ad emissions in 12 months by culling adtech, binning outstream ads, swapping viewability for attention metrics and flicking junk ad inventory, says Scope 3’s Brian O’Kelley: Suncorp, NAB and AMI ask the curly questions

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