Mi3 Audio Edition

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

IAG Chief Customer & 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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&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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 & 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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&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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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&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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 & 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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&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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 & 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 & 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cummins&Partners CEO Michael McConville returned home to Australia last year after five years at the helm of adam&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&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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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&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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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&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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 & 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 & 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.