Search and SEO is being disrupted – 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. Plus, he warns marketers putting all their eggs into media mix modelling will likely see scrambled results.

How AI is hitting paid search, content strategies; where prices are headed; why Google is changing its LTV tune; and why trusting media mix modelling may backfire on brands

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&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.

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&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.

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&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. 

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&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.  

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.  

‘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.”

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. 

'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.”

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.  

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&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 & 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.   

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

Katrina Barry is Deloitte Tech's Fast 50 female leadership winner for 2022 and CEO of the globally ambitious Australian restaurant and pubs ordering app me&u, backed by a Hollywood style list of Australian names including Merrivale’s Justin Hemmes, Rockpool's Neil Perry, Uber Australia co-founder Mike Abbott and former Google ANZ and current Domain boss Jason Pellegrino.  She's about a year into the role – me&u already controls about 70 per cent of large format hospitality venues in Australia and is now going global. Barry argues the little round device on bar and food tables is actually about business transformation, customer experience and, for venues, at least 30 per cent more orders if patrons don't have to wait for a negroni or a kale infused pheasant at the counter - or for a host. Hence, many venues are now creating dark bars as one tactic to improve customer experience and sales. Here’s why a little bit of tech in a pub or restaurant is transforming the economics of the hospitality sector - and customer happiness. 

‘Dark bars, A-list investors’: McKinsey, Virgin, Contiki, now me&u – how Australia’s top tech female leader Katrina Barry is chasing $250bn in global consumer spend, crunching bar and pub business models with more tech, less humans and much happier, higher-spending customers

Southern Cross Austereo Chief Sales Officer Brian Gallagher has some contrarian views on the big push from agency groups to have media owners meet ESG and carbon neutral benchmarks as part of their annual ad deal negotiations. He also argues media buyers might be a little lost in the haze of numbers when audio platforms like Spotify bundle overall podcast audience numbers, which include SCA shows that Spotify can't commercialise. Gallagher says there's widespread misconception that they can. On the flip side, SCA Head of Ad Product, Jonathan Mandel are buoyed by the continuing surge of digital audio listening. At a market level, 9.4 million people are tuning in every week into the digital channel – the same number as broadcaster BVOD audiences. Mandel says there are major reach gains to be had for advertisers that take a slice of TV budgets: “If you're investing into a BVOD campaign, the studies we have developed show that if you put 15 per cent of that budget into digital audio, you can increase your reach and the overall reach curve by an additional 40 per cent.” Gallagher says the message is landing: “We've got FMCG advertisers onboard that have never advertised on radio before. I’m talking seven-figure commitments.”

SCA pushes back on media agencies driving carbon agenda, eyes bigger slice of TV budgets for audio as inflation rises, reach tails off – and FMCG advertisers are getting the message

After five years of mergers and acquisitions, Nine’s first Group CMO Liana Dubois has hinted at an incoming major brand offensive as the former boss of the media group’s Powered division says the network will walk the talk on creativity. Seven months into the role, Dubois says Nine has de-siloed its marketing operation and the next surgical intervention is a major review of its disparate tech stack. While Nine’s latest results suggest cost efficiency is the name of the game across the business, Dubois says CEO Mike Sneesby is a "big believer in marketing-led growth". Perhaps her budget is safe for now. Either way, she says Nine has plenty of scale to harness across its vast owned assets, though how Australia’s data-privacy overhaul ultimately crimps those plans remains to be seen. Meanwhile, with former Optus CMO Mel Hopkins now Dubois’ opposite number at Seven, a new competitive tension is brewing as the networks battle shifting audience consumption and buyers holding out to see which way the chips fall. Dubois says it will be good for the category. 

Stack wars – a new hope: Nine’s first Group CMO Liana Dubois says Nine consolidating martech, restructuring marketing in bid for growth, but budget ‘safe’; relishes competitive clash with former Optus turned Seven CMO Mel Hopkins

Two pointy questions everyone is asking: Is the economic crunch going to flip marketing plans and budgets this year? And what impact will budget cuts or a shift to performance marketing have on revenues and the P&L? Hard questions to answer. But Youi CMO Angela Greenwood and PointsBet digital strategy chief Calvin Cain are armed with better data not just to shield budgets from the axe – but to identify which cuts will have least revenue impact. Mutinex CEO Henry Innis says the SaaS platform’s brand equity product – which can quantify “brand equity, preference, salience, consideration metrics and output that to revenue” – goes one step further as rate rises start to bite. Cain says PointsBet is plugging in: “In wagering, marketing is one of the single largest P&L line items”, says Cain, and what can’t be linked to sales is usually first against the wall. Youi’s Greenwood says brand building and predictability of what it will return is “critical” as consumer spending, and price sensitivity, tightens.

‘If you have to cut marketing spend, cut what’s not working’: Youi and PointsBet marketers plug into AI-powered brand equity model to link marketing investment directly to revenue

Here’s an award-winning tale of how Amazon and Whiskas reinvented the ecom giant's cardboard delivery boxes as media – and a play centre for cats – in a bid to woo younger cat owners away from upstart challenger brands nibbling away at market share. They turned every medium and large size Amazon delivery box for two months (“low hundreds of thousands”) into branded cat castles, offices and… rollercoasters. They also wrapped in targeted ads across Amazon’s ad network, plus a branded DTC storefront. It worked, sending sales soaring 70 per cent, with afterburners for the rest of the year while flipping branded search declines into reverse. But there’s more meat in this can: Whiskas will this year launch a major brand overhaul designed to woo the under 45s amid a share war Mars Petcare Portfolio Marketing Director, Camille Shepherd, says has are distinct parallels with craft beer. She’s joined on the mics by EssenceMediacom’s Sophie Price and Michelle O’Brien.

Thinking outside the retailer media box: How Mars Petcare turned Amazon deliveries into a reach play, boosted Whiskas ecom sales 70 per cent, flipped search declines

During a recent high-level pitch to the CEO of a leading but unnamed global consumer packaged goods firm hunting 25 per cent growth in a mature category, “the eyes lit up” at the combined code, creative and culture components being proposed by the “cold, hard analytical” consulting firm Deloitte Digital, as Global CEO Sam Roddick recounts. The pitch involved a top Deloitte Digital team unveiling the blueprint for a new direct-to-consumer (DTC) business unit to deliver on the CEO’s ambitious growth remit. Roddick hopes it’s a benchmark project in-the-making as his firm accelerates to “mimic” Apple-like design and creative capabilities with engineering and systems prowess. The new ‘X’ factor for Deloitte Digital though is the nod to creativity and the business contribution it makes as a “value multiplier” for its industrial-grade customers. Part of Roddick’s global plan to help institutionalise creative thinking in the $16bn firm involves a former BBDO ad agency network CEO in Australia and New Zealand, Nick Garrett. But can the “cold, hard, analytical” firm really pull this one off?    

‘I’ve never made a client cry’: Deloitte Digital Global CEO Sam Roddick’s mission with ex-ad agency boss Nick Garrett to copy Apple’s creativity, design and engineering for digital restructuring programs – and why the ‘majority’ still fail

Hipages Chief Customer Officer Stuart Tucker and VP of Marketing Nick Ellery say growing an online marketplace requires an entirely new suite of marketing and media capabilities to create and match demand and supply between households needing a tradesperson and tradies needing work - and it’s loaded with tension. They’ve got to build a B2C and B2B brand simultaneously and mange short-term demand volumes for two completely different customer sets in real time down to postcode level. That means more sophisticated data feeds to inform fast direct response media channel tactics like paid search when plumbers need work in Melbourne’s Hawthorn next week or household demand for sparkies in Sydney’s Hornsby is surging today. They’re quickly mastering brand and performance levers together and now adding to the “mid-funnel” with content. Here’s what Hipages is doing next after a  three-year “transformational” investment building its brand that has slashed the reliance on paid search for new customers - although it remains a leading tactical strategy for the business. 

‘Meteoric rise’: How tradie platform Hipages halved paid search and customer acquisition costs after brand investment; next a review of Nine’s The Block, upswing for content marketing, click rate optimisation, tech stack overhaul and…impress investors

A former Wesfarmers CFO, of all people, led the cull of the Kmart Tyre & Auto brand after 50 years in market but took on the challenge to rebuild as mycar's Chief Customer Officer, tasking a creative agency, TBWA, with full service CX, media and brand transformation. It worked: sales are up 23 per cent, at least since 2020. Now under Adele Coswello mycar is positioning for another major transition – electric vehicles – while bidding to steal share from free-spending pure-play rivals such as Bob Jane T-Marts and Ultra Tune. It's dropped a retail, up-sell focus and gone all out for 'people first’ and building pop-up stores next to shopping centres, putting vans on the road to deliver mobile services, while putting tech into its garages that give customers a stream of their cars' vital signs – and what's being done to keep them healthy. Meanwhile TBWA chief Paul Bradbury says moving into CX and media and taking on the consulting giants is the shape of things to come.

From CFO to Chief Customer Officer: How a Wesfarmers exec handbraked finance career to become mycar’s CCO, dumped and relaunched a new brand and end-to-end CX remap – using a reinvented creative agency for CX and media

Attention measurement has captured much of the ad industry’s focus in the past two years just as the out-of-home industry body, OMA, was well into its roadmap to apply a “Neuro Impact Factor” to thousands of individual digital and static screens. Neuro-Insight, the firm behind the measurement system, has among the most robust, academically peer-reviewed advertising science worldwide – initially developed by Professor Richard Silberstein and neuroscientists at Swinburne University’s Brain Sciences Institute to understand brain behaviour among ADD and ADHD children. Despite the science – real advertising science as its proponents argue – media agencies are dragging the chain on take-up, certainly versus emerging and scaled attention metrics. But here’s why the industry needs both and what should happen next according to Avenue C’s Pia Coyle, Neuro-Insight’s Peter Pynta and the OMA’s Grant Guesdon.

Mexican standoff: Out-Of-Home sector hits agency slow lane on take-up for neuro impact versus attention metrics; Avenue C’s Pia Coyle implores buyers and sellers to get over pricing fear paralysis

Three months ago, The Guardian launched its first Australian brand campaign in a bid for double-digit audience increases – and ploughed its entire budget into one media partner. JCDecaux won the brief because it could deliver scale and the tech capability to enable real-time API feeds direct from the Guardian’s editors without any human intervention. But critically, because JCDecaux is also aligned on environmental, social and corporate governance, or ESG. Now both The Guardian and JCDecaux say they are winning significant new business on the back of green credentials, while the campaign is starting to move the needle. Meanwhile, the tech development work to deliver the year-long brand push has set a template for JCDecaux to lift and deploy globally. JCDecaux Chief Marketer, Essie Wake, and The Guardian Director of Growth, Jocelin Abbey, unpack the story behind the headlines on the billboards – and the strong parallels with the shift in strategy from pureplay online retailers to out of home formats.

Re-engineering out of home: How The Guardian’s brand push drove JCDecaux to open its network to editors and set a global standard; where carbon-conscious brands are moving their ad dollars and why online pureplays are switching channels

Personalisation is possibly “the worst idea we have come across in digital marketing,” per B2B Institute’s John Lombardo – even Amazon can’t do it properly. “Find the biggest things that matter to the biggest group of buyers – that's the real commercial opportunity,” per Lombardo. He thinks 1:1 personalisation ultimately leads to a surveillance state. The downturn-induced swing back to performance over brand is another big mistake. “It’s survival, I get it … But you can't just keep on adding up the short-terms and expect some sort of long-term strategy.” Former performance purist, Maria Grivas, now CEO at Mindshare, thinks performance marketers are much maligned – and are targeting longer-term growth as well as immediate gains. The problem is that CFOs demand demonstrable growth metrics. That means marketing to finance, per Lombardo, should be the “most urgent” CMO 2023 agenda item, “otherwise we get our budgets cut”. Elly Bloom, Executive Marketing, Business & Private Banking at NAB, is doing just that, using market mix modelling (MMM) to demonstrate which investments are generating returns in hard business terms – and where to spend next. “It’s been invaluable”, says Bloom. Lombardo doubts econometric models can accurately prove where marketing is moving the needle – but thinks even demonstrating attempted due diligence to CFOs via MMM serves its purpose.

The war on brand, the death of hyper-targeting and why marketers need to market to finance or see budgets slashed – B2B Institute, NAB and Mindshare on key trends for 2023 and beyond

The intense heat and conjecture coming on the subscription models of Netflix, Stan, Paramount+, Disney+ and beyond may, ironically, not cut so deep for battle-weary publishers if they keep moving fast with new bundled products, content, AI and UX. That’s Mark Reinke’s view, who moved from financial services to the media industry in 2019 and admits plunging into a baptism of fire – publishing is tough, News Corp to many even tougher. Under Reinke, News Corp has launched subscription puzzles, mindfulness and wagering sites, its first podcast series - crime - with Apple that is casting for a global subscription audience and a younger version of The Australian – The Oz - which looks more like Instagram and has attracted 500,000 younger readers since launching six months ago. News Corp’s Australian experience is matching – ahead in some areas – what is underway globally among publishers according to Tim Rowell, APAC boss of subscription platform Piano, which counts 3,000 media titles worldwide using its tech. Rowell says editors and journalists have seen many of their assumptions challenged about how audiences consume and behave with content – the old newspaper lifestyle sections are returning as new gold in rebundled digital subscription packs – and there are big lessons for brands, their advertising plans and content marketing investments. Heads-up: move faster, experiment more, repackage content, use AI to find smaller but lucrative emerging audiences and blow up assumptions. New rules are playing out.

‘Tortuous transformation’: From Suncorp to News Corp – how former CMO Mark Reinke reinvented to lead consumer media and crack 1 million subscribers; new growth from ‘throwing out old media rules’ with AI, tech stacks, UX and a paying younger, restless set

QMS has carried out a world first outdoor attention pilot with Amplified Intelligence, aiming to train Artificial Intelligence to recognise audiences – not dogs – viewing assets like street furniture. After a feasibility study with Amplified Intelligence CEO Karen Nelson-Field last year, her team put cameras around assets to track gaze, recognise faces and even “pose estimation” to measure humans as opposed to cars, prams and dogs. “It is literally world first in this space,” says Nelson-Field. Outdoor attention is not necessarily fleeting – think people waiting for a bus. The aim, QMS’s Chief Strategy Officer Christian Zavecz says, is to understand outdoor assets and share that data with the industry. “It’s not about us versus them,” he says. “We've always had a major focus of moving from just eyeballs to influence and understanding what drives better results for our clients. It just made a lot of sense.”

QMS’s ‘world first’ outdoor attention pilot How Amplified Intelligence measures

Australia’s AVOD wars are heating up. Foxtel Media boss Mark Frain reckons “tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars” will move in the next 12-18 months. User experience will win, making ad loads and frequency capping a key battleground. Razorfish boss Jason Tonelli warns that presents a new problem for publishers: As users hop from one service to the other, how will BVOD and AVOD players collectively manage frequency capping? “That will be the next frontier”. Brands are hungry to test the waters, adds Tonelli, with early adopters lenient on measurement. But down the track, measurement will need to be robust. “Is it OzTam or not? That is a debate we have to have.” Foxtel’s Frain says sitting outside of OzTam hasn’t stopped Foxtel writing revenue on Kayo. Ultimately, per Tyler Fitch, head of Advanced TV & Partnerships at Tubi – which has amassed 50m AVOD subscribers – breadth of content, personalisation and UX will determine winners from losers. He thinks the former SVOD purists that once “scoffed” ad ad-funded models have some hard lessons ahead.

‘Hundreds of millions of dollars will move quickly’: Foxtel Media’s Frain, Razorfish’s Tonelli and Tubi’s Fitch on AVOD’s next battlegrounds of frequency capping, measurement and personalisation

At the height of anti-vaxxer revolt, with protest boiling out on the streets, NAB decided to nail its colours to the flag and launch a pro-vaccine campaign – changing its name to JAB seven days after signing off the brief. A bold move for a risk-averse ASX-listed bank and NAB was bracing for blowback from “keyboard warriors”. Within hours, it arrived in spades. But the bank “held the line”, per NAB Head of Group Brand Faycal Ben Abdellaziz – and the stream of vitriol actually helped propel NAB JAB to go viral. What’s more, anti-vaxxers vowing to close accounts were largely all talk. Instead, NAB gained thousands of customers, while engagement rates and brand reputation metrics shot to multiyear highs, and played a role in Australia reopening weeks ahead of schedule. With a downturn likely, Ben Abdellaziz suggests JAB’s legacy is bravery and that the bank won’t let “an extremely vocal minority” water down its approach to bold work. NAB, he says, won’t be pulling back on brand spend either, whatever the economy throws up next.

Moving the needle:  NAB brand chief on how the bank ‘held the line’ in the face of anti-vaxxer ‘keyboard warriors’, turned their rage into brand and business growth – as JAB helped drive Australia out of lockdown

Richard Facioni, chair of retail groups Alquemie and Mosaic Brands – with upwards of 1,000 stores and brands including Surf Stitch, General Pants, Lego Stores, Ginger & Smart, Noni B and Rivers – thinks ecom pure players may be in trouble. Shoppers have swung back to physical stores just as digital customer acquisition costs “are going through the roof”. If marketers turn off the taps, sales evaporate, which could spell danger for the likes of The Iconic and Adore Beauty. Versus last year, “we’re definitely seeing a pullback in online,” he says, with some brands back as much as 30 per cent. Meanwhile, retailers that stocked up to head off crunched supply chains may find themselves scrambling to offload in January as a “definite slowdown” bites. Facioni hates the word ‘omnichannel’, but says it’s the future of profitable retail – hence lining up a physical presence for $50m acquisition Surf Stich, currently an online pure-player. Fresh back from Dreamforce, Facioni’s helping steer both group’s commerce and ERP stacks, with a customer data platform likely to follow. He also predicts social commerce will be the next revenue frontier.

‘We’re definitely seeing a pullback’: Pure-play online retailers squeezed as Covid bubble pops, digital ad costs ‘go through roof’, shoppers head back to stores; Alquemie-Mosaic chair plans physical stores for Surf Stich, tech stack overhaul to cross-sell General Pants, Lego, Noni B

News Corp’s new shoppable video format, which lets audiences buy without leaving the content, has been “flying off the shelves” across alcohol, beauty and consumer electronics, News’ data, video and product director Paul Blackburn says – and the trial with Moet & Chandon hasn’t even finished. “We have 14 other clients in flight, post-Moet,” he said, “and there’s a huge pipeline of other clients looking.” The format is part of News’ reengineering effort to unlock what McKinsey describes as ‘commerce media’ or ‘content media’ – a $50bn incremental goldmine buried within media companies. “We’ve always been really good at upper funnel, we’re really good – we’ve always been an amazing billboard,” News’ MD for Client Product Pippa Leary says. “Now we’re going to become a billboard and a shopfront.” The trial with Moet, with Kantar testing, has found a 10 per cent plus rise in purchase intent and a 38 per cent unaided brand awareness uplift.

Shoppable video ‘flying off the shelves’: Early results from News Corp-Moet & Chandon test campaign – 10%+ purchase intent, 38%+ unaided brand uplift

When Aimee Buchanan jumped ship to archrival GroupM, the knives were out for OMD’s joint CEOs Laura Nice and Sian Whitnall. “The only way is down,” per one nameless exec. One year on, they’ve so far proved the doubters wrong, retaining Coles and landing the consolidated NSW Government account, where a new behavioural science unit helped nudge the business over the line. By 2025, they’re aiming to launch ten similar new products in a push to break the media agency mould, with CX and UX top of the agenda. Unlike some rivals, they’re uninterested in going toe-to-toe with the big consultants eating market share, while suggesting rivals remain conflicted on tech recommendations now driving a big chunk of their cash. They think a very different leadership style to the previous regime is now paying off, and have even accepted the so-called ‘twats’ model – staff mostly in Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays – is working.

The ‘anti-consultancy’: OMD CEOs prove naysayers wrong, set new direction with behavioural science, UX, CX first of ten new products in push to break agency mould – say rivals still conflicted on tech

The results are in: Bunnings’ 25-year-old bluesy melody is the country’s most effective audio brand, per Southern Cross Austereo’s 2022 Audio Logo Index. It “might as well be the national anthem”, SCA’s Matt Dickson says. But Menulog has raced up the ladder and is now second in the minds of 4,000 people surveyed. In a super competitive set against the likes of Uber Eats and Doordash, Menulog, using Katy Perry and Snoop Dog, has formed strong memory structures in consumers with audio. “We don't have the same amount of dollars or funding as some of the bigger competitors, so we're constantly trying to get that cut through, get that stand out,” Menulog’s Fiona Bateman says. “It’s a jungle out there,” Neuro-Insights’ Peter Pynta says. “If you strengthen your network… you can also, at the same time, simultaneously be weakening the competition's strength.”

Sonic weapons: Why Menulog is crushing Uber Eats and Doordash but nothing compares to Bunnings: SCA and Neuro-Insight on how to crush the competition through audio branding

Telstra’s top marketer Jeremy Smart has moved on to run the telco’s digital sales and service operations, handing the CMO baton last month to former IAG marketing boss Brent Smart. Both are still working side by side at Telstra. The remits of digital, CX, ecom and marketing are increasingly intertwined - Nicholas now has responsibility for the 80 per cent of Telstra’s customer sales and service engagements which start online. Nicholas says he was partly lured to the role because brands are “defined increasingly by their customer experience and increasingly that’s a digital experience.” On the flipside, Brent Smart in 2019 was one of the few marketers who publicly called out the tech platforms which power blue chip customer experience deployments by saying marketing technology, or martech, was quickly turning vanilla. His position is softening. Here’s the full lowdown from two execs with among the biggest marketing and digital CX remits in the country. 

Telstra shakeup: Former CMO Jeremy Nicholas and new marketing boss Brent Smart chart their handover, debate creativity versus CX in brand building as Smart softens stance on ‘vanilla’ martech

As massive economic headwinds and Apple’s app tracking privacy push bear down on social platforms like Meta’s Facebook, the likes of News Corp Australia – long under pressure from Big Tech’s data smarts and audience scale – are positioning as full funnel alternatives. And it’s working. News reckons its News Connect data platform can target audiences on a granular level based on their interests and reading habits across retail, FMCG, travel, auto, and more. “You name it, we can find intenders in those categories,” says News’ GM of Client Product and Strategy Suzie Cardwell. Upper funnel ads drove a 55 per cent in-store boost for one furniture brand, while an auto manufacturer saw double the dealership visits for those exposed to ads on News’ platforms compared to those who weren’t. Per Cardwell: “The briefs are absolutely flowing in.”

Big Tech pain is publisher gain: Briefs ‘absolutely flowing in’ at News Corp as unified, granular user data play delivers, social platform effectiveness falters

Cartology has made the early running and noise in the bustling supermarket media category but ‘owned' media – that is, all media and audience assets controlled by a brand – is at least three times the size of the grocery and liquor sector. And ‘retail aggregators’ (think Officeworks, BigW, Myer and JB Hi-Fi) is nearly 20 per cent bigger than the grocery sector, according to Sonder via a new report, hot off the press. The firm calculates Australia’s owned media potential stands at $3.9bn – and 80-90 per cent margins have CEOs and CFOs licking their lips. That could alter the balance of power between marketing, sales and merchandise, and potentially change the dynamics between paid, owned and earned investment. Founding partners Jonathan Hopkins and Angus Frazer run the rule over five standout categories – grocery and liquor, aggregated retail, telco, petrol and convenience, and finance – which players may be next to market (hint, anyone with a loyalty programme) and the implications for Australian media market dynamics.

Beyond retailer media: $3.9bn ‘owned’ media wave coming – telcos, banks, service stations, travel and utilities undercooked; Power shift from merchandise to marketing

Last click attribution is back. Tightening wallets, soaring inflation and a VC focus on profitability over growth is prompting a return to the metric, which Pet Circle CMO Jon Wild reckons is the least bad of a range of “horribly flawed” attribution options. Pet Circle has 800,000 active customers and revenues in the hundreds of millions. “For far too long, I think our industry has been peddling reach and frequency and brand consideration,” Wild says. “These metrics are very hard to put in a spreadsheet.” And they don’t satisfy the C-suite when staring at one of the biggest lines in a P&L. Bupa’s performance chief, Clea Baker, says prices are due to jump in search and social – but she’s investing in media mix solutions to protect brand spend on the increasingly rocky road ahead. Atomic212’s James Dixon and Rory Heffernan outline how marketers can start sandbagging against rising waters of cost cuts.

Last click strikes back: Bupa, Pet Circle marketers say inflation, cost cuts will push CMOs, brands down funnel – so brace for search-social price spikes, but here’s how to protect budgets

It’s not a normal forensic look at marketing sciences, agency structures or CMO tactics this week – instead we speak to four alumni of The Marketing Academy’s exclusive scholarship program. Only 30 people get accepted into the course each year and, without exception, all of them rave about it being electrifying, transformative, emotional and raw. But why? BWS’ An Le, KFC’s Warren Mo, Edelman’s Fern Canning-Brook and former Broadsheet director Skye Rugless detail how they changed before and after completing the program, what super chickens can teach about leading and why quiet leadership can be a big strength.

Confessions of Marketing Academy alumni: KFC, BWS, Edelman and Broadsheet execs open up on their emotional, electrifying and raw takes on the program and why it works when others don’t

Journalists have long hated advertising and sales. Now Nine has a battle-hardened journo responsible for the P&L of its publishing division, perhaps the first hack to be entrusted with news media fortunes since John Hartigan chaired News Corp and John Alexander left the old Fairfax for the Packer camp. Chessell having already triggered James Packer in recent weeks, carefully espouses his views on News Corp’s corporate and editorial agenda, but jabs The Guardian for running “scared” of taking on risky, investigative stories. But can the one-time business journalist and masthead editor continue the renaissance of a sector once seen by many as flogging a dead horse? Chessell’s backing editorial integrity and trust to drive advertiser and subscription growth within news while plotting diversification into new turf, admitting Covid audience gains will likely drop off. Now straddling church and state, he agrees media sales is a “knife fight in a phone box”, but says Michael Stephenson and publishing sales chief Jo Clasby are killing it. Chessell knows financial markets gobbledygook inside out even if he’s not yet so savvy on ad market, adtech and marketing lingo. Here’s his plan.

After James Packer stoush, journo-turned Nine publishing boss James Chessell takes aim at rivals for running scared; plots news-lifestyle diversification play. Can a journo change his spots?

Forget demographics and traditional consumer segments, smart marketers are looking at how customers choose brands based on values – both lofty and personal, VMLY&R’s Ali Tilling reckons. For Rip Curl, it’s a community that loves surfing – CMO Michael Scott once arrived at an empty meeting room because almost everyone was out on the waves. He’s building “the largest and most engaged surfing community in the world” – it’s not a “transactional” loyalty program, but a membership. It’s sustainability for Colgate-Palmolive CMO Anthony Crewes, who is pushing past 80 per cent recyclable toothpaste tubes of the 50 million sold each year. The challenge now is getting consumers to actually recycle them. Destination NSW’s Kathryn Illy says new experiences are critical to the travel industry, once worth $44 billion to the state – now half that but bouncing back.

Colgate-Palmolive CMO, Rip Curl CMO on new model loyalty, moving the needle with values-based growth, Destination NSW consumer marketing boss on $44bn demand-supply crunch

Agency executives have long dismissed the big consulting firms’ attempts to embrace creativity and creative services for their end-to-end professional services offerings, but Deloitte Digital is hard to ignore. It has 1,400 people across its operation, encompassing tech, customer experience, strategy, product, growth and more, and it has now arguably conquered creative – topping Campaign Brief’s The Work list earlier this year. Head of Deloitte Digital Australia Esan Tabrizi says advertising is not his team’s end game, but rather being a full-service provider of customer outcomes – which may include advertising – are his focus. But creativity and creative thinking is now at the top of Deloitte Digital's agenda. In this conversation, Tabrizi also unpacks how marketers missed the boat on tech over the past decade, leading to the rise of Chief Digital, Chief Customer and Chief Growth Officers. But the next generation of gun CMOs, he says, will be much more tech savvy, and won’t get caught up in the tech stack wars. And perhaps most interestingly, current CMOs can learn from government on CX and personalisation - who would have thought? 

Conquering creative: Deloitte Digital Australian boss Esan Tabrizi on how marketers missed digital amid brand, advertising focus; 1,400-strong team; CX, personalisation lessons and the push for creativity

Salesforce has culled its content output by circa 30 per cent – and is seeing major results. It’s waging war on vanity metrics – and “preparing a funeral” for last click and last touch attribution, per EVP Global Brand Marketing Colin Fleming. The firm has just wrapped up Dreamforce, the annual global pilgrimage where users flock to be evangelised by the high priests of B2B. Circa 40,000 people flooded San Francisco last week, paying US$2,000 a pop to attend what is morphing into the Disneyland of business branding and product. Fleming makes no apologies for lifting B2C’s playbook, stating he’d rather borrow from Disney than rivals like Adobe, Microsoft and SAP. He and LinkedIn global VP, Marketing Solutions, Jim Habig say they plan further B2C talent raids in a bid to lift B2B beyond spreadsheets and rational arguments – and say brand investment is helping to win the creative talent war. Meanwhile Habig is also set to overhaul account-based marketing – or ABM – by linking up with one of the world’s most successful restaurateurs, Will Guidara. Both are adamant that they will not slash brand investment amid market turmoil.

Salesforce and LinkedIn global brand chiefs doubleheader: Culling content by 30 per cent, ‘preparing a funeral for last click’, holding brand spend amid turmoil, raiding B2C talent – and why it’s better to be like Disney than Adobe or Microsoft

In the boardroom, the marketers’ numbers are likely the least trusted, Brodie Arnhold, Chair of iSelect, Endota, says. Why? It was a “cost line without the accountability”. In his experience, adding up the sales, PR, and marketing figures, “the company should have been about eight times the size it really was. That always left with this kind of funny feeling of mistrust,” he says. Hence, he’s invested in Mutiny, an Australian company shaking up how marketers use econometrics, with AI and cloud processing, to demonstrate return on investment. “Whoever can prove their budget’s worth is going to be the one who keeps it in a recessionary environment,” co-founder Henry Innis says. Marketers can turn procurement enemies into allies with the right data, TrinityP3’s Darren Woolley says.

‘Preparing for a big crunch’: Chair of iSelect, Endota Brodie Arnhold on fuzzy marketing investments, low accountability impacting CMO boardroom credibility, and why MROI is crucial through macroeconomic challenges

The revolution in content and production that is sweeping through Hollywood studios and streaming services is hitting marketing, and the surging content volumes that brands need to create for multiple channels and screens is up at least 2,000 per cent in the past five years, Richard Glasson, global CEO of WPP's booming production group, Hogarth, estimates. As marketer budgets come under increasing pressure globally, Hogarth is betting big on artificial intelligence, automated content and virtual production, tipping Woolworths, Woolmark, Suncorp and Bayer as winners among their stable of clients. Glasson says virtual production cuts costs – he wouldn’t say by how much – and will rapidly become “the default way of producing work” in both Hollywood and advertising, as CMOs manage content demands across more channels to reach an increasingly fragmented consumer base. How does a marketer begin to think about the metaverse or Web3 with no extra budget, for example? A mix of smart creatives, automation, offshoring and “modular” production is a solution, Hogarth Australia's CEO Justin Ricketts says. A recent campaign creating a blazing inferno and New York apartment in a single day in a Melbourne studio shows how it’s done.

Woolies, Suncorp, Woolmark, Bayer follow Hollywood's default to AI, automated virtual production and 'hybrid' in-housing, offshoring boom as brand content volumes surge 20x in five years

3D out of home advertising, pop up events and experiences, and ‘treasure hunt’-style, interactive campaigns across multiple screens are a few of the ideas QMS is hoping to bring to its new City of Sydney furniture network. With Sydney weekly audience numbers back to 90 per cent of pre-Covid levels, the QMS’s QMS' GM – City of Sydney Jemma Enright and Chief Customer Officer Mark Fairhurst say the screens are full funnel marketing assets: If used well, they can build awareness and consideration via brand investment and trigger a purchase or action at the bottom. But that requires a shift in out of home buying approaches. There are 30 packs – an FMCG pack, alcohol pack and movie-goers pack, for example – and a bank of Nielsen, transaction and location data. They are looking to tie-up a big chunk of budget commitment upfront – and early demand suggests the network is not short of suitors.

Full funnel, targeted OOH: City of Sydney network pushes activation and brand via 30 advertiser verticals powered by transaction and location data – but QMS needs buyers to change approach

What happens when you put a marketing and consumer behaviour professor on the mics with a Chief Marketing Officer and the boss of a large media buying group to work out what might happen to media audiences and buyer behaviour as we tumble out of Covid and stumble into an economic downturn? The consumer mindset is inflationary, confidence is down, and wallets are likely to shrink considerably. There has been “revenge spending in spades” within entertainment, travel and food – but that may be about to grind to a halt. GroupM ANZ CEO Aimee Buchanan, Premium Content Alliance CMO Claire Williams and Jana Bowden, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour at Macquarie University, unpack the outlook for marketers, media owners and agencies.

The consumer mindset is ‘what can I cut out of the budget?’’: Entertainment, travel, food budgets face crunch – GroupM CEO Aimee Buchanan, PCA CMO Claire Williams and Macquarie professor Jana Bowden on planning for soaring interest rates

Election and fundraising strategists for former US President Barack Obama accidentally invented the now booming “experimentation” industry which takes the ubiquitous A/B testing concept to new levels – and business is going large. Personalisation has got too much attention and corporate investment at the expense of experimentation, say Deloitte Digital Partner Nima Yassini and Coles’ Fallyn Lowe, Product Manager for Growth and Optimisation. They outline what’s next, including Google’s rapid rise to the top in experimentation software ahead of Adobe and Optimizely.        

Google rockets to top slot in ‘experimentation’ tech in Australia as A/B testing morphs beyond digital media, ad campaigns: Coles, Deloitte Digital unpack the e-comm, digital next wave

Three leading global authorities on advertising effectiveness are worried enough about the efficacy of advertising and the impact it has on business results that they have joined forces to present new data and observations in Cannes next week on why a triple jeopardy threat is a clear and present danger to the global industry. They go so far as to call for an overhaul in how advertising award shows like Cannes reward what is deemed the world’s best work. Advertising effectiveness supremo Peter Field, attention economy pioneer Karen Nelson-Field and creativity maestro Orlando Wood warn that ad effectiveness, ESOV and mental availability created by advertising for a brand is crumbling. The ESOV principle – spending more than rivals to gain extra share of voice relative to market share to outplace competitor sales – no longer applies. Get the lowdown before it is presented to a global audience in Cannes next week. The trio argue there is a fix. 

Cannes conundrum: Why ESOV isn’t working: Peter Field, Karen Nelson-Field and Orlando Wood warn the ad industry faces a triple jeopardy threat as effectiveness rulebook ripped up

Marketing is a dirty word for some – look no further than the ‘Scotty from Marketing’ jab. But Suncorp has spent three years building, quite literally, a powerful response to that. Its One House campaign last year and recent Resilience Road activation are entirely marketing-funded and led research projects that are changing the way Queenslanders build disaster-proof homes. And what’s more, the campaign is flowing through to Suncorp’s bottom line, driving a 38 per cent rise in enquiries and more than 100,000, four-minute-long website reads. As CMO Mim Haysom and Leo Burnett Chief Customer Officer Amanda Wheeler explain, there’s more to come.

How Suncorp, Leo Burnett flipped an advertising brief to a long-range marketing investment in a (real) street of climate change-ready homes, influenced national policy and drove a 38% lift in enquiries, surge in brand consideration

When done well, OOH smashes it. Local brands have been lagging, but the smart ones are learning from the likes of Nike, driving a “creative revolution” in digital out of home, reckons Neil Ackland, oOh!media’s Chief Content, Marketing and Creative Officer. While tech like QR codes, 3D animation, location data and anamorphic screens can drive huge results, “There’s a difference between what is available that creatives can use and then what’s actually coming through the pipeline,” he says. Jetstar ran a QR code-based campaign in Melbourne and reached 6 million people with press coverage. Nike and Twitter are trying innovating creative – then sharing the campaigns on social to drive more engagement. Ackland says oOh! has launched a creative department, Poly, to reverse the lag. “We have to show brands through action how to deliver great out of home creative,” he says.

Out of home creative in Australia ‘lagging’: Nike, Twitter, Jetstar flying as QR code, animation, anamorphic screen tech lands, blurring digital, social, PR, outdoor lines

Brands and agency holdcos are restructuring for efficiency. But WPP says it’s done with post-Sorrell surgery and out the other side, proving the former CEO wrong in the process. Its “open source” integrated set-up landed the $4bn global Coca Cola account and means other rival agencies and non-WPP partners can tap into WPP’s platform for Coke. It could prove a template for consolidation plays to come, per global CMO Laurent Ezekiel. WPP ANZ’s Rose Herceg is equally bullish on the holdco’s growth prospects after overhauling leadership and smashing an unwieldy list of business units into nine networks; she says both staff and clients are “loving” a story simple enough to articulate. Ezekiel meanwhile reckons the marketing industry is past “peak complexity”… until the “untapped” metaverse arrives. But he’s unapologetic for the daunting privacy challenges industry faces, and shrugs off concerns around Big Tech’s dominance, given the growth he suggests the platforms are driving. 

WPP global CMO Laurent Ezekiel, ANZ lead Rose Herceg on bringing other networks into $4bn ‘open source’ Coke account, peak complexity, consolidation end game – and proving Sorrell wrong

It’s the “hunger games” out there in the B2B talent wars. Software firm ServiceNow’s solution? In-house training. It’s the best way to get good analytics people, Head of Marketing Caroline Raj says. “Everybody is dipping into everybody’s pool at the moment,” she says. It has been a tough two years. Of the 140,000 marketing and advertising people in Australia, 20,000 have moved jobs in the past 20 months, per LinkedIn’s Prue Cox. Agency churn has increased by 50 per cent in the past year – off a high base. Average marketing tenure is now a mere 1.4 years. “That’s quite terrifying,” Telstra’s Kelly Tyson says. She’s not seeing that at the telco, which works hard on culture, but the talent pool is tight. The market for B2B savvy, IT and tech-literate marketers is running hot.

B2B talent ‘hunger games’ as brands in-house analytics, tech, digital upskilling to cover shortfall, raiding B2C guns and ‘boomerangs’ as business-consumer marketing lines blur

Adam Ballesty spent most of his career building big brands at spirits business Diageo only to join retail-focused Domino’s in mid-2021, steering a team of 60 through the tail end of a global pandemic. The sector's pace is mind-boggling, he admits. Food aggregators like Uber Eats and Menulog account for the majority of Domino’s orders and were non-existent three years ago. The likes of McDonalds and KFC are powerful competition and are driving culture. Ballesty’s new agency team are hoping to take the QSR battle royale directly to them, while baking purpose as a key ingredient in the company. In the meantime, he's fielding calls from franchisees asking for the TV ad schedule so they can prepare for the inevitable demand spike.

Seven pizzas a second: Domino’s CMO Adam Ballesty on brand building in scaled QSR, breakneck pace in creativity and campaigns, baking purpose into pizza, taking fight to Maccas and KFC, acquisition trumping retention, and why owning drivers will win delivery app battle

News Corp has reached the level of Big Tech, Client Product MD Pippa Leary says, uniting its famously independent business units – publishing, Foxtel and REA Group – to create a pool of 16-million audience IDs. A consumer could watch Kayo, browse News.com.au, look at property on RealEstate.com.au, and News Corp can link them all, Leary says. The “arms race” of just having big numbers is over. “Claiming a big number is one thing, but actually, if you don't have a lot of daily active users and you do not have high match rates, it's actually quite meaningless,” she says. Using 13 data partners, including crucial IDs and location data from Near, News reckons it can achieve high match rates with brands and – in stark contrast to Big Tech – share more of those insights with brands. “All of [those IDs] have consent attached to them to be shared and to be matched,” Suzie Cardwell, GM Client Product and Strategy, says. News is now pushing hard for one click transactions within content, including video.

‘We can recognise 16m individuals’: News Corp claims united CDP, 13 data partners, high match rates compete with Big Tech, commerce integrations ahead

Growth hacking was once a favourite term of the Silicon Valley crowd instead of marketing, fuelling the meteoric rise of early tech pioneers like PayPal, Tesla and Amazon. But there’s a fascinating blurring going on, where once successful growth hacks are starting to falter – “failing miserably”, in the words of one-time growth hacker and services marketing advisor Jonathan James. Instead, tech companies – think Canva – are turning to out of home, television, and other traditional media. In most verticals, there’s increased competition, meaning start-ups are rediscovering the need to have a “brand”. Traditional marketing smarts and brand talent are increasingly sought-after, and what’s old is becoming new again.

Growth hacked: Old tricks new again as ‘growth hacking’ fails, tech yields plummet, start-ups build brand to compete - Canva going big on billboards

Nine last month claimed massive active attention for BVOD ads playing on mobile devices, 72 per cent for a 30-second commercial, per Amplified Intelligence’s study. But Karen Nelson-Field’s data is in for Val Morgan – and it suggests cinema blows other channels out of the water for active attention, with zero decay across the entire ad. As attention metrics pick up major attention globally, Nelson-Field is just back from a World Federation of Advertisers conference, warning marketers not to let themselves get gamed by those touting cheap, “dirty” attention CPMs while brushing off naysayers briefing against the march of attention metrics. Locally, the likes of NAB want to bring attention data into econometric modelling; agencies are already using it to reweight channel spend and show marketers that their share of voice models could be way, way off.  

Val Morgan and cinema winning attention battle; Amplified Intelligence data finds 80 per cent active attention, zero decay; Nab, OMD, Hatched, on where next; Nelson-Field on why sprint for ‘dirty’ attention CPMs risks everything

Chris Stephenson, global CMO of media agency Network PHD, thinks the marketing community has a weird and massive blindspot around gaming.  That may be because they are buried in admin rather than doing actual marketing. Per PHD’s latest research study, 1,700 marketers around the world say their biggest time allocation is spent on reporting, not strategy, innovation and idea development. Those unable to shake off administrative shackles risk being overtaken by a marketing function overhaul now fast approaching – at least according to the group’s new book, ‘SHIFT: a Marketing Rethink’.  In the short-term, it forecasts that key marketing and media roles will span influencer programmatic teams, game commerce, clean room development teams and decision scientists through to ‘layer designers’, VR world designers and ‘brain-computer interface developers’ in the mid- to long-term. Within 20 years we could see ‘quantum simulation developers’ “simulating the entire media universe” for brands. But for now, Stephenson thinks those rushing headlong into the metaverse and Web3.0 are barrelling into the trough of disappointment.

Shift happens: PHD Global CMO says marketers buried in reporting instead of growth generation, risk obsolescence as marketing function restructures for next wave of gaming, influencer, commerce, decisioning disruption

There’s a fundamental flaw in how advertisers approach the concept of “platform audience reach”, ThinkPremiumDigital says, and the argument goes like this: advertisers care about audiences, but despite large user numbers – the audiences aren’t always paying attention. And yet, a platform’s reach often dictates a brand’s investment level. “Somebody on the platform doesn’t mean they saw an ad,” ThinkPremiumDigital General Manager Venessa Hunt says. MediaScience’s CEO Dr Duane Varan looked into this, finding it took five hours of social video to reach one minute of effective audience exposure. Conversely, it took just 12 minutes for premium video. “You cannot assume all exposures are equal,” Dr Varan says. MediaCom’s Client Partner, Lynsey Mogridge, says clients are open to this, they’re already planning on sales, not just reach or CPMs. Foxtel Media Director of Customer Engagement, Toby Dewar, says this research “talks to the old tradition, which is: context matters.”

‘Big difference between 1,000 Corollas and 1,000 Ferraris’: Why ThinkPremiumDigital argues platform audience reach is a poor proxy for effective attention – especially on digital video

Skills and capabilities across digital marketing, CX, data and analytics have flatlined in Australia over the last three years according to a study of more than 200 marketers. If the data is right, brands are delusional about the skills they have versus what they need, while half the market has either been stripped of CX responsibility, or never had it to start with. Fresh from a decade in the UK, Coles GM of Brand, Digital and Design Sam McLeod thinks Australia is way behind the data-to-insight curve. Willem Paling has just left Woolies X and Cartology and says marketing must present itself as greater than the ads or promotional function if it is to regain the CX remit. Teresa Sperti, whose firm Arktic Fox is behind the Marketing State of Play study, thinks ANZ’s marketing team and Kate Young have set the standard when it comes to equipping teams with the skills now sorely required. But there’s a big chunk of the market that needs a plan, pronto. 

Australian marketers flatlining on data and digital capability and losing CX remit: Coles Sam McLeod, ex-Woolies X exec Willem Paling on why and what next

The hottest topic in the digital market, Salesforce’s Jo Gaines reckons, is loyalty. And she has two words for brands not delivering personalisation, killer experiences, and a rewarding value exchange: ‘Watch out’. “They really expect you to know all of that,” she says. Competitors are likely circling. Beauty giant MECCA is nailing it, and there are smaller businesses emerging that are looking at partnerships to deliver similar experiences. Likewise, Gaines says, purpose-driven organisations are seeing fundamentally better returns, and the work by big corporates during disasters isn’t going unnoticed. “People are going to Woolies and Coles, they're going to Bunnings, they're relying on companies like Cotton On,” she says. “They are front and centre in the community. They are holding the community together.” These are some of the latest shopping trends in 2022.

Digital winners – how beauty giant MECCA is nailing loyalty while Coles, Woolies and Cotton On are making brand purpose pay: Salesforce VP Jo Gaines

Digital audio is growing at about 35 per cent year-on-year, and is now north of $150 million, Southern Cross Austereo’s Chief Sales Officer, Brian Gallagher, reckons. And as digital audio grows, so too are the learnings. For one, smart speakers make up 20 to 30 per cent of the total audience, and those people are listening for hours at a time. Two in every three dollars spent with SCA are buying direct insertions – just one third are programmatic ads. And agencies are still splitting audio and digital teams. There’s more growth ahead, Gallagher says. “At this stage of the history of the development of audio, there are absolutely no excuses for not having some form of audio product with you at every stage of your day,” he says. Jonathan Mandel, SCA’s Head of Digital Sales and Ops, says the network’s LiSTNR app has passed all expectations gaining trust and consumer opt in on Apple iOS devices.

‘No excuses’ for not having audio devices all day: SCA says dynamic ads, smart speakers, long sessions and high ‘we’re not Facebook’ iOS opt ins fuelling massive digital audio growth

Some have labelled as futile the “WaitingOnZuck" news freeze mounted by 40 independent Australian publishers three weeks ago to protest Facebook and Google’s dismissive and arrogant treatment of smaller, independent media publishers under the Federal Government’s globally acclaimed Media Bargaining Code legislation.

But a street fight engineered by independent media, and intervention by the philanthropic foundation of billionaire Fortescue Metals founder, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, to lead a collective bargaining agreement forcing Big Tech to reverse dismissive, stalling tactics, may just have shifted the winds…and delivered blue chip brands a lesson in what to do when their audiences, and tech stack, are all but monopolised by global platforms.

Can Australia’s richest man, Andrew Forrest, save contextual & diverse audiences and indie media frozen out by Facebook & Google as Big Tech’s $200m pay-off silences Big Australian Media

NIB is reinventing itself, looking to reach young types not necessarily into health insurance – rather than the 45 per cent of Australians who already have a policy. It ran 20 different messages, influenced by location, targeting gyms and supermarkets on programmatic digital out of home screens with Val Morgan Outdoor. “Rather than focusing on advertising that talks to a joining offer, it was more about who NIB is as a brand,” Marketing Manager Mitch Leman says. That meant reminders to eat healthily, walk further, or exercise longer. It took time but was worth it. With Yahoo location data, VMO’s facial analytics, postcode-level third party data, it hit a “sweet spot of programmatic”, MediaCom’s Nick Thomas says – and he didn’t even work on the campaign. Yahoo’s Andrew Gilbert, Essence’s Katie Rooney and VMO Managing Director Paul Butler unpack NIB’s campaign – and why it’s delivering healthier returns.

Healthier returns: Contextual, location-powered pDOOH targeting healthy youth without insurance via dynamic creative moves needle for NIB, sets ‘new industry benchmark’

The first detailed attention data from a major media group is out with Nine releasing findings of its attention study with Professor Karen Nelson-Field’s Amplified Intelligence. For a 30-second spot on linear television, the average person pays just 11 seconds of “Active Attention”, or 37 per cent of the ad. BVOD on connected TVs and mobile phones score higher on active attention but when added to “Passive Attention”, linear television vastly outperforms most of its rivals, say Nine’s Liana Dubois and Jonathan Fox. So what to do with this conundrum? Hatched Media's Head of Planning, Andrew Pascoe, who has gone all in on attention, says the opportunity is nuanced but massive. To boot, "attention CPMs", currently being used by many agency groups, are deeply troubled, the trio warn.   

Nine reveals first media attention data from Prof. Karen Nelson-Field: Mobile beats Connected TV which beats broadcast for active attention; YouTube feels heat for "skip ad button" focus

Mi3’s most read story of 2021 unpacked the critical role of mental availability in business metrics, as well as its impact on ESOV, or extra share of advertising voice. Now Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Professors Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk and John Dawes, the people behind ‘mental availability’, have produced a paper with the B2B Institute that should have far-reaching implications for marketing and advertising practice. From flipping the marketing funnel sideways to scotching “delusions” that retention and loyalty trump acquisition – and a new performance-enhancing twist on Binet & Field’s 60:40 brand to performance rule (it should be 95:5) – the rules unpacked in How B2B Brands Grow equally apply in B2C marketing, says co-author, Jenni Romaniuk. Jon Lombardo, Global Research Lead at The B2B Institute hopes the science emboldens brands to stop making “drab and dull” performance ads and stop worrying about offending customers. The truth, he says, is few people care about brands at all: “It’s all upside. The job is always to build mental availability.” LinkedIn’s ANZ and SEA Enterprise boss Prue Cox says the likes of Westpac and DocuSign are nailing it. 

Read the original 'mental availability' story here: https://www.mi-3.com.au/28-06-2021/mental-availability-critical-brand-growth-and-extra-share-voice-says-aca-report

Mental availability, brand rejection, Binet & Field, ESOV and Ehrenberg-Bass: New B2B data shows marketers should flip the funnel sideways for business growth, B2C strategy also on the hook

Former McDonald’s CMO Jenni Dill joined the old but iconic Arnott’s in the same role 18 months ago after US private equity firm KKR paid $3.2 billion for the business from Campbell's. Rather than stripping out costs in pursuit of rapid profit, the new owners are investing to build Arnott’s return as a contemporary Australian iconic brand. The growth plans are ambitious and, in the case of a sell-out of Tim Tam perfume, unconventional – but this year will see Dill and her team put the foot down an accelerate an all new Arnott’s. A booming retailer media sector, by the way, is promising for Arnott’s growth but Dill remains pragmatic on its potential. For now, it’s sitting at circa 10 per cent of the biscuit maker’s budget. 

Cookies, cream and crackers: Arnott’s CMO Jenni Dill on retailer media, selling out of Tim Tam perfume and fixing a tired, older-skewing brand for youngsters, the decadent and the healthy

Influence, influencers, creator economy and ‘systems thinking’… Standby for some new buzzwords like people-based influence and privacy-friendly zero party data, as the global influencer market is set to top $16bn this year. But the influence industry is still unhinged, poorly managed and needs integrated measurement to help marketing teams understand business impact. And for different reasons, corporate strategy, market research and agency strategy planning are facing structural overhauls that a new venture, The Influence Group, is banking its new model on. Here’s why. 

‘He’s well versed in current structures of power in media and marketing’: Why Henry Tajer has put millions into a new venture to upend corporate, agency strategy and planning… and the $16bn influence business

No-one in the advertising supply chain is immune to the challenge of how to work in the post-Covid world. NAB’s Thomas Dobson, Mindshare’s outgoing CEO Katie Rigg Smith and Foxtel Media CEO Mark Frain have had to manage this New Work Order. Is it “in the room, not Zoom”? Full flexibility? A mixture of both? Rigg Smith says the pandemic created an expectation that everyone was at their computer, working, morning till night. “You don’t build trust over email,” she says. Frain says half the workforce came back from the summer holidays exhausted from Covid isolation or illness. Likewise, remote working isn’t easy on culture. “The old adage was, ‘get in your chair and start learning the job’,” he says. “Pretty hard if you’re sitting in your living room”. NAB’s Thomas Dobson says future workplaces will come down to trust. “You underestimate how much trust is there, especially when you’re talking about millions of dollars’ worth of media investment that has to pay off.”

New Work Order: NAB partnerships chief, Mindshare and Foxtel Media CEOs break down post-Covid client, agency and publisher supply chain challenges, flexible working, bad industry practices, and where media goes next

$6.5bn fund manager Australian Ethical, ‘clean fast food’ firm Guzman y Gomez, Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s, Lion’s Stone & Wood, The Body Shop and parts of Danone are all Bcorps. They are all driving growth through commitments to social and environmental good – and are all laser-focused on the sustainability and purpose credentials of those they do business with. That includes media owners and agencies. In a few weeks, a new media carbon calculator developed by Benedictus Media sister company Net Zero Media – in beta and set to launch ahead of those being touted by the likes of GroupM – will shine a light on which publishers or media channels will deliver lowest carbon footprint per campaign. Bosses of Australia’s three certified Bcorp indie agencies, Benedictus, Alchemy One and Optimising, say those clients can then reweight spend – and may even make shorter ads – in a bid to lessen environmental impact. And they think it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Tip of the iceberg: Brands want to reweight media campaigns to lowest carbon publishers; Australia’s Bcorp indie agencies plan to pip holdcos with Net Zero Media calculator; Shift happening faster than publishers realise

With the largest social media following in the world as a tourism destination – 17 million – an international advertising blitz in the wings and the expansion offshore of a new customer experience (CX) and post-cookie ID platform trial, Tourism Australia’s CMO Susan Coghill and team have a billion dollar fight on their hands. How do you attract tourists, competing against governments the world over throwing everything at kickstarting decimated tourist economies – and travellers eschewing long-haul flights? TA has a potential head start on first party data-driven CX designed to pass muster in a post-privacy, post-cookie world but it’s got to build and convert intent first. There’s $60 billion at stake for the Australian economy, and hundreds of thousands of livelihoods in every state counting on Tourism Australia to pull every lever at its disposal. The early indications are positive. CMO Susan Coghill unpacks the early roadmap.

Tourism Australia CMO Susan Coghill: Search volumes up 160%; Times Square, Piccadilly Circus billboards spearhead Oz ad blitz; Local CX, unique ID trial expands to UK, Singapore for post-cookie travel crunch

In the six months since VOZ launched, giving a look at unduplicated viewers on linear TV, online streaming and catch-up services, dozens of agencies and hundreds of brands have started using its data – but the networks say there’s still a way to go (and myths to be busted). Nine’s Richard Hunwick says “streaming choosers” are a new category of streaming-only viewer, which ThinkTV CEO Kim Portrate says includes the light viewer – like young people and women. Seven’s Craig Johnson says a lot of marketers are still buying TV in silos, and some agencies are using their own data, which lacks the competitive tension of the three major broadcasters keeping VOZ unbiased. There are seams of gold, too. Five of the top 15 BVOD programs last year were on demand first or exclusives like Love Island UK or Survivor South Africa, 10 ViacomCBS’s Gareth Tomlin says. ThinkTV and OzTam say TV blows YouTube out of the attention water.

Seven to 10% of TV viewers aren’t watching any linear TV – but are streaming BVOD; VOZ adoption growing, but networks say many marketers still buying in silos

GroupM’s new CEO Aimee Buchanan spent ten years at OMD, trading on a transparency ticket and throwing stones at the approaches taken by GroupM and other “enemy” holdcos. New Essence CEO Pat Crowley was the ultimate under-the-radar operator. As one industry observer has it, “Pat played by Covid rules before Covid existed”. But he led Ikon’s CommBank account for 17 years, and the Sydney agency for half a dozen – and says grown-up kids mean it’s time to step up to steer Essence through the turbulence of a triple whammy agency merger. The two make the perfect odd couple, eerily aligned on transparency, what’s under the trading hood, diversity and decarbonisation of media supply chains – coming soon – and executing the new operating framework for the holdco, its people and business units locally. Buchanan says she even has license to make changes at the expense of profit targets. But she’s not known for missing them.

GroupM boss Aimee Buchanan and Essence CEO Pat Crowley spell out where billions of brand dollars are heading next; time to walk the talk on transparency, media diversity and why publishers should prepare for carbon targets

One year ago, SCA leapt into the unknown with a streaming platform that bundled radio, audio, podcasts, and live streaming and a signed-in audience. How has it gone? Well, every day over the past year, more than 1,300 people have signed up and signed into the LiSTNR app. CEO Grant Blackley and Chief Sales Officer Brian Gallagher say it has already smashed expectations – and the momentum is still building. There are 500,000 signed in users now, and there have been 14 million streams over the past 11 months. “We’ve got the same kind of audiences as Spotify in the ad-funded space,” says Gallagher. Monetisation always lags uptake, Blackley says, but the “J-curve” they predicted a few months ago is steepening fast.

SCA’s audio platform LiSTNR takes off: A year on from a risky plan to bundle live radio, podcasts, news and sport into a platform people must sign-in to listen, SCA’s CEO Grant Blackley and CSO Brian Gallagher reveal the data-rich numbers, challenges and success: ‘We can target Nike ads to someone who's jogging’

2022 is off to a rocky start: A supply chain crunch, a talent shortage, and campaign measurement challenges are just a few issues on the agenda. But BMW’s new GM for Marketing Alex McLean says it’s a great time to start – demand has never been so much higher than supply. Digital attribution is a growing challenge, Origin’s Sara Varnell says, and the big measurement companies haven’t cracked it yet, but she’s working with Atomic 212° on an AI-fuelled platform to keep track of valuable conversion data. Atomic212°’s National Managing Director, Rory Heffernan, says clients are facing targets based on historical figures that they can’t replicate. Asier Carazo and Sarah O’Leary, both from Atomic212°, say the days of annual planning are gone and brands being brave is key to success.

 

Why creativity, old school contextual tricks, clever segmentation, and post-cookie measurement are on the 2022 agenda for BMW’s new GM of Marketing Alex McLean and Origin Energy’s Sara Varnell

Men are scared and lost in the push for gender equality – they don’t even know if it’s okay to hold the door open any more. As a result, men are disengaging from the gender quality debate, progress is stuttering and women are worried. Hence a month ahead of International Women’s Day, an alliance of Australian publishers, agencies and brands are calling on men to “be the change-makers”. Otherwise women are “just talking to themselves” as their would-be allies – men - muzzle themselves for fear of saying the wrong thing. 10 ViacomCBS sales boss Rod Prosser is on board; Impact.com CEO Adam Furness openly admits to getting things wrong in the past – costing him his job at Southern Cross Austereo – and says forty-something white men like him “are the problem” and need to become part of the solution. Now industry gender initiative, Fck The Cupcakes, wants more men – and brands – to do the right thing, and are holding the door open for blokes to enter the room.

Fear and loathing: Women need men to get ‘casual sexism’ – but they’ve been scared off: How Australia’s agencies, media and brands are trying to re-engage disengaged blokes (if we can call them that)

Quantifying marketing return on investment, or MROI, has long been hit and miss. But now marketers are using cloud-powered dynamic econometric models to show CEOs and CFOs their marketing investments are driving business results – and to spell out the declines that would occur if they were to cut marketing budgets. Meanwhile, as digital marketers’ ability to track people using cookies and online identifiers is removed by platforms and regulators, the ability to perform faster media mix modelling (MMM) is rapidly climbing the CMO agenda.

Which is why Mutiny’s WarChest platform is being deployed by the likes of Samsung, Bank of Queensland Group and CUB. The brands are making more informed marketing investments as a result – and shifting how they think about customer acquisition. Bank Of Queensland Group’s Melody Townsend, Samsung’s Carl Bunn and CUB’s Megan Quinn unpack how MROI is moving the needle.

Showing the C-suite how budget decisions impact growth: How ME Bank, Samsung and CUB marketers sharpened MROI to shift metrics, move the needle, defend spend

The battleground for multi-billion dollar defence contracts building high-speed weapons, armoured vehicles and submarines was once a classified world. But over the past decade, something curious has happened: Defence contractors increasingly need to build brand campaigns and need to reach very public audiences to do so. Two very big and expensive projects over the past decade – the now shelved French submarines contract and the ‘future frigates’ project – illustrate the change. Former BAE Systems exec and Chandran Thinc founder Chandran Vigneswaran and Tory Shepherd, a journalist at The Guardian, explore how recent bids have lured top marketers, and leveraged social media, journalists and mainstream ads to reach the right audiences.

High speed weapons, subs and warships: Once-secretive defence industry turns to marketing - consumer, B2B, brand, voters and government - to win lucrative contracts. What changed?

Few have been as deeply involved as a marketing practitioner through the digital marketing boom of the past 20 years as Alexander Meyer, the former CMO at pureplay retailer The Iconic. But the targeting tools digital marketers have been using are fast hitting walls  – think cookies and the mass harvesting of user intent signals. Data and tech are just standard tools today - the biggest business differentiator, says Meyer, is a swing back to creativity. Meyer, born in Communist East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, has moved to Canada to take up a role at The Bay, the new digital-first retail play by The Hudson’s Bay Company. Digital “pureplays won the battle”, Meyer says, but “omni retailers will win the war”. This is the most exciting retail tech platform in the world right now, he reckons. He also says marketing can 'save the world' - but it needs radically new DNA.

Iconic no more: Why former CMO Alexander Meyer left The Iconic for Canada’s oldest retailer; creativity now trumps ‘table stakes’ digital marketing for competitive advantage

You probably know Noma in Copenhagen is officially the world’s best restaurant. What you probably didn't know is that its Chief Operating Officer is an Australian called Ben Liebmann, the media guy who brought the acclaimed Noma pop up restaurant to Sydney's Barangaroo six years ago with Tourism Australia. You also probably wouldn't know that Liebmann was handpicked by Elizabeth Murdoch a decade ago to create Shine 360, the commercial arm of her production business, to run rights management, sponsorship, brand integration and consumer products. Shine's Master Chef ended up becoming a $700 million beast from sponsorship deals, consumer products such as pots and pans, book sales events and the rest. At Noma, Liebmann is working with the real master chef in Noma founder René Redzepi, who is eschewing the well-worn path of licensed restaurants or Gordon Ramsay style entertainment shows. Instead, they have built a different kind of media unit, with shows now being picked-up by a global streaming giant. And it may be that Liebmann is heading back to Australia permanently to expand the business. Suffice to say Mi3 listeners are in for a veritable feast of creativity, growth and a hunger for more.

How Ben Liebmann, an Australian media guy, ended up COO at Noma, the world’s best restaurant – and now has streaming platforms coming back for seconds

There’s been a dramatic shift in B2B marketing over the past 18 months. B2B marketers have slowly clocked on that they over-invested in performance marketing tactics and hadn’t seen the long-term growth they expected. For tech hardware firms, global supply chain issues have meant they’ve had no choice but to try brand – there’s little to sell. “We’re definitely seeing this swing away from your heavy focus on that lower funnel activity,” says LinkedIn’s Prue Cox. DocuSign, a cloud-based e-signature platform, is a case in point. It boomed through Covid and has just launched a brand campaign with influencers like Boost Juice’s Janine Allis and former Nine host Jules Lund. CMO Andrea Dixon says DocuSign had to pivot from B2B to “business to everyone” – virtually overnight. Meanwhile, Zenith Media CEO Nickie Scriven reckons there’s a real opportunity for B2B firms to lift their cut-through on lead gen. “I get at least 20 (emails) a day and I just delete every single one of them,” she says.

B2B’s great tension: Lead gen v brand building, why tech hardware firms and DocuSign are racing to brand and Zenith’s Nickie Scriven on lifting B2B cut-through, webinar overload

In 2018 Australian carmakers were collectively rattled. The consumer and competition regulator, the ACCC, dropped a bombshell on the auto industry in the form of the biggest mandatory product recall ever in Australia – 4.1 million faulty and potentially deadly Takata airbags in more than 3 million vehicles had to be replaced. The problem? Car owners were apathetic and entirely disinterested. Here’s how 23 car brands joined forces to head-off hefty ACCC penalties and deployed a media strategy that got spooked automakers to a 99.9% success rate. And a happy ACCC.

Behavioural economics? What 23 fierce auto rivals did together to make 3 million car owners do something they didn’t want to

Yahoo’s new owners in Apollo Funds Management are backing Yahoo to the max – and the business is bolting. One of the earliest internet platforms is an entirely different beast today but what is Yahoo? Better question: ‘What isn’tYahoo?’ US giant Verizon sold the company to Apollo for $5 billion earlier this year and it’s been unleashed. Yahoo’s a search company, a digital publisher, a creative agency,  a demand- and a sell-side platform used by at least 20 local publishers, an email service used by five million Australians, and a specialist in the emerging market of Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality (AR, VR and MR). “Yahoo is back,” Rachel Page, Yahoo’s GM of Sales, says. And while the Googles and Facebooks of the world are building soaring walls around their products, data and tech, Yahoo has taken a different approach: the community garden. Walled gardens have “some inherent challenges”, Vice President ANZ Paul Sigaloff says. “At Yahoo, it’s a very different approach. It’s about flexibility and collaboration.”

‘Yahoo is back’: new owners, 5m Aussie emails, a powering AR creative studio, digital publishing, DSPs, SSPs and ‘community gardens’, not walled’

NRMA Insurance was “tanking” before IAG CMO Brent Smart returned from New York and appointed Accenture’s The Monkeys, without a pitch, in an early Australian textbook execution of Les Binet and Peter Field’s work around the business impact of investing long-term in brand. Smart went further but was unwavering from the get-go – as were The Monkeys - about returning to “HELP" in late 2017, according to a redacted entry submission to the Effies seen by Mi3. A series of brand-led campaigns, spearheaded by The Monkeys, took out the Advertising Council’s Grand Effie Award last month for returning the ailing insurance company to category-leading growth. But just how bad were things at NRMA Insurance, and how and why did they return to a 20-year-old idea? Smart and The Monkeys’ CEO Mark Green and Chief Strategy Officer Fabio Buresti get brutally honest.  

NRMA brand was ‘tanking’: Why Brent Smart and The Monkeys won the 2021 Grand Effie: $300m lift in brand value after four years investing 70% of budget in brand over performance; competitors treating customers as ‘fools’

Most Australian mid-size businesses and up in Australia have hired very smart consultants, developed new business strategies and growth plans … and then seen most or all of the work shelved. “It’s about 90 per cent opportunity, 10 per cent frustration,” says Tightrope’s Managing Director Stijn De Vriendt, the former Strategy Director at Accenture Strategy. Tightrope is RyanCap’s new boutique strategy consultancy, which has a sweet spot positioned just below the big end of consulting and strategy advisors like Bain, McKinsey, Accenture and the big four audit and consulting giants. Typically they’re too big – and perhaps too expensive - for mature mid-tier companies grappling with business transformation programs and high-growth scale-up companies needing to go to the next level but lacking the internal horsepower to get there. Tightrope is pulling the best attributes from agencies and consulting firms to target digital pureplays – aka “the disruptors” – and helping them scale, as well as legacy bricks and mortar businesses – aka “the disrupted” – to help them go digital. But instead of just writing a report and leaving, Tightrope wants to do more. “We don’t just stop at strategy,” De Vriendt says. “We want to go beyond and develop prototypes, test those with customers, and help a client get ready to actually scale.” And Tightrope says the balancing act is already working.

Why Accenture Strategy’s Stijn De Vriendt left to lead Tightrope, RyanCap’s boutique strategy play targeting mature mid-tier and high growth scale-ups

When the Big Bash League started on Network 10 in 2013, it was, well, not very big. But its audience skyrocketed by 370 per cent in the first year alone. “We know how to take a sport, bring it into the free to air landscape and grow it even bigger,” says Nick Bower, Sport Sales Director from 10 ViacomCBS. The network plans to do more of the same with the A-Leagues, and is adding the first ad slots to new streaming service Paramount+ to entice advertisers. “The only way to get access to that incredibly valuable and rich audience within that streaming service is through our football coverage,” Bower says. Ant Hearne, A-Leagues’ Chief Commercial Officer, reckons the challenge is one of conversion: There are 8 million football fans in Australia, but viewers compare the standard to the “incomparable” leagues in Europe. “The conversation has got more into what we’re not, rather than what we are,” he says – but he’s out to change all that.

Network 10 grew Big Bash cricket by 370% in its first year, says A-Leagues will go bigger; touts ‘incredibly valuable’ ad spots in Paramount+ games

The definition of what counts as personal information is set to change in Australia – with online identifiers even down to geolocation under review, alongside use of loyalty and credit card data – while the very definition of consumer consent is being primed for change by privacy lawmakers and enforcers. The upshot is that the fundamentals that have underpinned digital advertising’s tracking and targeting capabilities may be culled or significantly curtailed – and data privacy experts think Australia’s rules are set to be tighter than GDPR. Meanwhile, those that flout incoming law changes may find themselves open to class actions as well as regulatory punishment.  Lauren Solomon, CEO of the Consumer Policy Research Centre, former deputy New South Wales Privacy Commissioner Anna Johnston, Peter Leonard, professor of practice at UNSW's Business School, and Guardian MD, Dan Stinton, unpack what’s coming down the track for Australian brands, publishers, tech platforms and the media supply chain.

De-identified data is no longer enough: Brands, publishers and media supply chain face fundamental changes as Australia’s privacy regulators go harder than GDPR; status quo upended for tracking, targeting and consent

In the middle of a global pandemic, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age watched lifestyle content numbers boom. They dropped the quantity and boosted the quality of non-news content, embraced newsletters, and it paid off in spades. “The top of the homepage can be so grim,” Executive Editor Tory Maguire says. “But if we present [other content] properly to our audience, they’re really engaging with it.” The Australia’s editor, Michelle Gunn, saw the same. “People yearned for lifestyle content, rich storytelling, stories which took them away,” she says. “We saw a strong move towards weekends.” The West Australian saw a surge in readers, but also for its late TV show and morning radio audiences. “Some of the numbers we were seeing during live streaming of press conferences would rival traditional TV and traditional radio,” says Editor in Chief Anthony De Ceglie. All of which presents advertisers with new options now Australia is opening up.

Editors at The Age, The Australian, The Herald and The West Australian on where audiences have shifted post-Covid – and the rich pools advertisers should be fishing in

Marketers have been smashed by the pandemic – but have emerged more powerful, with much bigger, broader remits, according to The Marketing Academy CEO, Sherilyn Shackell. The Academy has spoken with thousands of marketers over the last 18 months and finds greater numbers are becoming board members and CEOs. But they must now carry even greater weight under broader demands and silo-busting skillset requirements.  Agencies, however, are struggling to stem severe blood loss. Leaders must step up – because their people are burnt out and disillusioned – and new blood is in short supply. Shackell sees more in-housing incoming. Both agencies and brands, she says, underestimate the need for ‘soft’ skills around leadership and staff wellbeing at their peril. “If you don't look after that stuff, you're shafted.” 

Marketing Academy CEO Sherilyn Shackell: CMOs more powerful post-pandemic but stretched to limits; agencies must stem talent blood loss to survive

The marketing and media world are rushing to get to market first with engagement metrics – or at least talk about them. But how is that playing out on the ground, and are brands ready? “Before you can go to market and thump the table and expect clients to buy to engagement, you need to be really clear about … the proof that engagement can deliver better results for brands,” says Foxtel Media’s Customer Engagement Director, Toby Dewar. Westpac brand, media and ad chief Jenny Melhuish says the bank is testing engagement and attention-based campaigns but agrees the metrics are yet to catch up with prevailing market sentiment. “The CPM metric is a rational one… we need to believe in the robustness of a metric, and currently, we don’t have a robust metric.” Either way, Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Anthony Gregorio says the creative is vital, whatever metrics people use: “If no-one is paying attention to your message, then it doesn’t really matter how good the media buy is.”

‘Before you thump the table and expect clients to buy engagement you need to prove it delivers better results’, says Foxtel; Westpac brand chief Jenny Melhuish agrees, but the bank is testing the water

How a marketer’s budget is set is often doomed to fail, Pet Circle CMO Jon Wild says. Typically, it stems from a business’s growth target. “There’s an arbitrary increase to marketing spend and you’re told to go hit the target. Typically, you fall short in the first quarter, and it’s death by a thousand cuts for the remainder of the year.” That method is “set up for failure”, he says. Rather, growth should be function of the whole company – with marketing being one factor – working towards those targets. Budgets and spend is the last of eight steps detailed in a new book from Atomic212’s James Dixon and Claire Fenner on how to build an Effective Media System. “The place we want to get to is where we know for every dollar we spend on media, what we’re going to get back out,” Dixon says.

Marketers ‘set up for failure’ by arbitrary growth targets and short-term budget boosts, but building a scientific model can get C-suite buy in

10 ViacomCBS will headline its 2022 Upfronts by touting its credentials as a more diverse, full-service broadcaster with room to grow and a big hitting content slate straight out of the gates. I’m a Celebrity starts on January 3, with Survivor and MasterChef hot on its heels. After that, “you’re into that pattern of big franchises all year,” says Chief Content Officer Beverley McGarvey. “It’s about consistency, maintaining big brands, but also adding some fresh content and fresh shows.” The network is investing heavily in streaming service Paramount+, which McGarvey admits is “a hungry beast that you need to feed with lots of new shows all the time”. Key to the new 10ViacomCBS offering is its full suite: “Paramount+, 10Play, MTV, Nickelodeon… we don’t run those businesses separately,” Jarrod Villani, Chief Operating and Commercial Officer, says. “Bev and I have oversight over all of those businesses.”

10 ViacomCBS’s Upfronts preview: I’m a Celebrity, Survivor, MasterChef, the streaming shift from primetime ratings to lifetime engagement and ‘feeding the hungry beast’

The second and final episode in our two-part series breaks down five of the six recommendations in the ACCC report to the Federal government on the Digital Advertising Services inquiry – the first recommendation was covered in Part 1 yesterday. On the mics again today for the follow up are Peter Leonard, Professor of Practice at UNSW Business School, advisor at law firm Gilbert + Tobin and principal of Data Strategies; Gai Le Roy, CEO at the IAB; Dan Stinton, Managing Director at The Guardian Australia and Kristiaan Kroon, Chief Investment Officer at OMG. Buckle in because as our experts say in this two-part series, apathy won’t work for the industry this time. It's no time to ignore the regulators.   

Part 2: Cheat’s guide to the ACCC’s final Digital Advertising Services report - the six recommendations unpacked

Avoid reading another 200 page ACCC probe with this two-part series on the regulator’s final recommendations to the Federal Government from the Digital Advertising Services Inquiry. Google is squarely in the spotlight but as our panel of industry experts warn, what the ACCC is doing to Google is an early signal for broader industry. In today’s heavyweight line-up: Peter Leonard, Professor of Practice at UNSW Business School, advisor at law firm Gilbert + Tobin and Principal at Data Strategies; Dan Stinton, Managing Director at The Guardian Australia; Gai Le Roy, CEO at the IAB and Kristiaan Kroon, Chief Investment Officer at OMG. 

Part 1: Cheats guide to the ACCC’s final Digital Advertising Services Inquiry - everything explained for marketers, agencies, media and tech

Consider a few stats: The Discovery Channel, Turbo, TLC and Animal Planet are having their best ratings years – ever. Back catalogue episodes are booming: Video on-demand consumption of Friends is up 103 per cent. Fifty-six per cent of people have watched more food and cooking shows, and 70 per cent of them said they would keep watching more post-lockdowns. New viewing habits are here to stay. Brands with environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals can tap into this by targeting ads to those audiences. “If someone is going to sit down and watch an hour-long documentary on conservation, then they must be interested in that space,” Rebecca Kent, Discovery’s Senior Vice President of Transformation, says. “There’s lots of opportunity, I’m not seeing us capturing it yet.” Tim Christlieb, BBC Studios’ Director of Branded Services, says the era of a hidden sustainability web page are over. Meanwhile, when we’re all on video calls, all we can talk about is what we’re watching, Foxtel Media’s Daniella Serhan says. “We’re making it really easy for… brands to a part of that conversation.”

Australian brands are behind on ESG messaging, but post-Covid TV viewing habits, and booming back catalogues, make for a fast – and sustainable – solution

When Covid hit, BWS went all out to help local suppliers, which already battered by floods and bush fires, faced risk of extinction. BWS ditched its pre-Covid plan and campaign went all out for localism, launching a competition for independent brewers, distillers and winemakers to get stocked across its 1,400 stores, creating a marketing template for local suppliers to lift and getting locals to vote for the brands stores would stock. The new plan “smashed it,” according to Head of Marketing Vanessa Rowed. The retailer had been hoping for a 5 per cent sales increase, but hit 20 per cent, delivering the “highest ROI of any campaign we’ve run”, according to Carat’s Bianca Falloon. As states plot routes out of lockdown, Rowed thinks localism is here to stay. Meanwhile, she says local brands can help solve the supply chain crunch looming large over Australia’s Christmas retail – and says the Covid “sprint” has permanently changed BWS’ marketing strategy. 

Walking the talk: BWS’ top marketer on how going all out for local booze brands lifted sales 20%, permanently changed its marketing strategy

John Wild, the Chief Marketing Officer for Pet Circle, invites his CFO to creative pitches and hires analysts with better data coding skills than the finance team. Why? So they can understand his job and buy into the creative messaging. “It’s incumbent on you to make [CFOs] your friend,” he says. “Make marketing look and smell very much like a financial output. Suddenly, when it comes to cutting costs, you’re not cutting costs, you’re cutting growth, you’re cutting customers, you’re cutting revenue.” Nicole McInnes, Director of Marketing at WW (formerly Weight Watchers), says she used to have “dark weeks” when she worked at eHarmony – when the time came to review media spend. “There is still a lot of misunderstanding in non-marketing executives on the effectiveness of some channels because they don’t have that data,” she says. Too many marketers don’t understand the basics of media and how to demonstrate media’s value, Atomic212’s James Dixon and Claire Fenner say. So much so, they’ve written a book – quite literally – on the topic.

‘I invite my CFO to creative pitches’: Pet Circle CMO John Wild says hiring analysts, using data bridges destructive divide between finance and marketing, protects budgets

SiteMinder is likely the biggest Australian tech company you’ve never heard of. The $1.1billion hotel booking system unicorn is headed for an IPO – so that will likely change. But what must also shift is Australia’s attitude to B2B marketing as the boring, rational sibling to B2C, says CMO Mark Renshaw. It’s where the smart money is headed, Renshaw reckons, and can teach FMCG marketers everything they need to know about going direct-to-consumer. Meanwhile, the former Leo Burnett Chief Digital Officer says in-housing is where it’s at – and that media and marketing guns can get a far “deeper” business education sitting within brand teams than agencies. He’s bucking the holdco consolidation model and working with specialists instead, and thinks ANZ’s top talent need no longer head oversees to pick up experience with global giants; the local tech scene provides far more opportunity to drive change than taking instructions from global HQ. 

Attitude adjuster: IPO-bound Australian unicorn SiteMinder CMO plots growth surge as travel rebounds, but says brands, agencies have B2B marketing – and in-housing – all wrong

Most publishers are winding down print operations. David Jones is ramping up – since launching a print magazine five years ago it has seen consistent double-digit growth across each of its digital channels. “The customer is overwhelmed with choice,” David Jones Marketing Communications General Manager Georgia Hack says. So the retailer decided to curate and repurpose its existing branded content into print. “Yes, it is a printed magazine, but it also is a blog on our website. It's a pillar in our email content strategy. It's a pillar on social.” And it’s delivering. News Corp’s Managing Director of Commercial Content, Mike Connaghan, says the need for content can be draining. “All marketers face a chasm of content creation,” he said. “They need the content to fill those channels.” Naturally, News has a solution: David Jones works with its content agency Medium Rare, whose group content director Nick Smith says the secret to branded content success comes down to treating the consumer like a human being.

David Jones launched a print mag – and it drove double-digit growth across all its digital channels. Now it’s moving more marketing budget

Launched by a former stockbroker and Booktopia’s CTO, Australian fintech Superhero has ripped up the start-up playbook and powered to massive growth off the back of out of home and TV. “To create big impact and really reach scale, brand awareness and credibility, fast... digital just is not going to get you there,” says marketing lead Rachel Hopping. With CommSec and the big four banks worried, she and Hardhat’s Dan Monheit are planning the retail investment and superannuation management platform’s next major push. With 12m Australian trading virgins to target, the plan is to go large – with an IPO more than likely.  

 

‘Digital is just not going to get you there’: How fintech Superhero binned the start-up playbook, went large on TV and OOH, smashed growth targets – and is only just getting started

Australia’s streaming market is already crowded. There are only so many people who can sign up to Netflix, Stan, Prime, Binge, Kayo and the rest. That’s before you get to affordability issues – and the audiences for advertisers have been dwindling. Enter AVOD: advertising-based video on demand, where users pay less (or nothing) to see fewer ads. “It will allow people to really target their audience in a way they’ve never been able to do before,” says Foxtel board director Mark Kaner. Foxtel Media CEO, Mark Frain, forecasts ad-supported streaming platforms will come to Australia “pretty quickly”. The future, he says, is lower ad loads – viewers won’t stomach 16 minutes per hour – but more innovation. Thirty second, 10 second, and even shorter ads are paying dividends in the US. Now the Australian market has to prepare for launch – and the return of eyeballs.

Foxtel: ‘SVOD will replace Pay TV, AVOD will replace linear TV’; Australia must prepare now for the advertising-based video streaming boom taking off in the US – because it’s about to land

Tasked with rewiring WPP’s media arm, GroupM Global CEO Christian Juhl is going a couple of steps further, attempting to redefine buying metrics and pressure suppliers – i.e. media companies, including Facebook and Google – to decarbonise. If media owners don’t play ball, will GroupM pull dollars? “We’ll certainly make that recommendation,” says Juhl. He thinks focusing on bigger, better global outcomes can make advertising a good place to be for agencies, brands and consumers – and the rewards will follow. Meanwhile, he says incoming ANZ boss Aimee Buchanan has pretty much carte blanche to make sure GroupM is top dog locally. Which means dethroning OMG. 

‘We will recommend clients pull spend from publishers that do not decarbonise’: GroupM Global chief Christian Juhl bids to build new metrics, puts media on notice

Seismic shifts are underway in cross-media audience measurement, and the IAB is preparing for looming turf wars by becoming the one ring to bind them all. It’s axed Nielsen and pulled in Ipsos – and a return to panels – ahead of the end of cookies and incoming privacy changes. The new metric is set to be in market next year, at least in basic form. But in a country where size matters more than most, there will be pain for publishers, especially tagging laggards – even IAB buyer members are telling agencies to cool their boots on what is coming, and when. Meanwhile, there’s work to do on integrating the Iris metric with total TV measurement system, VOZ, not to mention audio, out of home and the rest, while bringing engagement and attention into play. IAB’s Gai Le Roy, Seven’s Nicole Bence, PHD’s Amelia Ward and Ipsos’ Heather White unpack the fundamentals of media measurement’s future. Next year should prove interesting.

‘It’s going to change how we plan digital media’: IAB unpacks Australia’s new Ipsos-powered cross media currency, urges patience from buyers, urgency from publishers, but warns size-obsessed mastheads that numbers may fluctuate

Optus is backing football (the big game, not the Australian version) to keep delivering customer growth and retention, particularly amongst immigrant Australians – but VP of Product Development for TV and Content, Clive Dickens, says Nine overpaid for the Champions League. He also has a dig at the naysayers at Seven who didn’t think 7plus could be delivered in nine months – including some of his staff, who subsequently left the building. While BVOD is booming, Dickens says display advertising will continue to “hit the floor” and publishers that can make subscription revenue pay will be those left standing. Which is why Optus aims to take a slice of what it forecasts will soon be a $4bn market with an aggregation play. The former SCA and Seven digital supremo thinks SubHub will help set Optus apart from big dog Telstra and the pack of hungry mobile virtual operators trying to nip its heels. But he’s not committing to numbers just yet. 

'We weren't willing to overpay for Champions League', but Optus' Clive Dickens backs football to drive customer gains - and subscription aggregation play for slice of $4bn market

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How AI is hitting paid search, content strategies; where prices are headed; why Google is changing its LTV tune; and why trusting media mix modelling may backfire on brands

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