Marketing

The quagmire of doing good: Consumers want brands to do more, but there are contradictions galore in the way they expect ‘good’ to manifest. In the latest Leo Burnett The Good Study, authenticity and operating with integrity show up as table stakes for brands. Yet overt political participation and support and advocacy around societal causes can have very different affects on an increasingly woke consumer culture. Speaking on the report findings on a panel last week, UTS Business School dean, Carl Rhodes, former Domino’s CMO, Adam Ballesty, and activist, author and brand strategist, Azure Antoinette, presented conflicting views on how ‘greed-flation’, Australian belief in getting a fair go, war, politics, economics and the hip pocket are influencing the way consumers perceive how businesses should be doing good.

Last week under a request from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the Federal Attorney General [AG] Mark Dreyfus dropped a privacy curveball – the new Privacy Act will be introduced into Parliament in August, well ahead of an end-of-year deadline many thought would spill into next year. More pressing for the broad church of marketing, media, CX, adtech, programmatic and ecom teams across every industry sector, it appears the rhetoric from the AG and even the new Privacy Commissioner on the definition, treatment and transparency of personal information is firming against many current and emerging industry practices – first-party customer data matching between different entities is just one. The use of website tracking pixels is also under investigation, led by a Privacy Commissioner probe into how TikTok deploys such code. “It would have significant implications for a huge number of things,” says Omnicom Media Group’s Chief Investment Officer Kristiaan Kroon on any restrictions in customer matching programs.  “From an Omnicom perspective, we would say privacy reform is one of the top things that will redefine our industry in the coming decade.”

After a 15-year absence from market, ANZ has brought back its iconic Falcon creative and brand device in a new campaign promoting its increasingly sophisticated, personalised customer protection capabilities. The campaign is the first step towards delivering what ANZ’s GM marketing, Sian Chadwick, hopes will be a new era of distinctiveness in market for the big four bank that unites heritage with modern relevance. Chadwick unpacks the mechanisms she’s using to deliver relevance to a younger generation of consumers, along with the commercial mix modelling increasingly driving decision making and more informed, whole-of-customer “investment trade-offs” for ANZ’s newly unified marketing centre of excellence.

Robert Markey, one of the pioneers of Net Promoter Score — created by his colleague Fred Reichheld at Bain — says the real power of NPS comes from the creation of a three-layered system of the kind developed by Bain at Telstra, which sat at the heart of the giant telco's digital transformation. 

On one level, this week’s IAB’s Affiliate and Partner Marketing Summit felt like an ‘emerging marketing channel is coming of age’ moment. Brands, agencies and publishers touting the benefits of affiliate and partnership marketing as an increasingly viable, full-funnel solution to customer acquisition, building brand awareness, understanding sentiment and consideration that benefits both sides. If only everyone could align on commission schemes, upfront versus post-delivery payments, measures of success, perceived versus realised value – and cut the gamble out, of course. Because the event also signalled another contest is brewing between what a media / publisher / influencer thinks their channel, content and reach is worth, and what brands are willing to pay for it. And just like the battles still present in many of our more mature media channels, there’s a lack of consistency around metrics, immature referral and attribution models, perceived rigidity / flexibility of commissions and payment models, and simple education all inhibiting perceptions of value and alignment.

Customer obsession to attain product market fit, stronger team talent management, fostering singular creative vision that spurs brand growth – they’re all critical for marketers, media executives and agency leaders right now. And they’re all things Giles Pearman has a firm opinion on thanks to a raft of practical experience in the field. The current co-founder of MyBrandTruth and startup coach, who earned his stripes as group marketing chief of Global Radio UK and ice-cream product manager from the school of Unilever brand management, is now a mentor for the Global Mentorship program and is keen to coach others through the challenges they face through his own unique storytelling approach.

The way B2B customers purchase products and services has evolved but the way brands sell to them has not necessarily kept pace according to a new study by Arktic Fox which finds too much reliance still on traditional outbound sales approaches. The most successful methods these days involve a stronger alignment with marketing and the use of techniques like account-based marketing (ABM). However, there's still a lack of trust between Venus and Mars, which can lead sales to go off on their own tangent, even to the extent of creating their own content marketing assets. Sales leaders who have more direct relationships – and are usually the 'one throat to choke' for the B2B buyer – often feel marketers have an inadequate understanding of customer needs. But among marketers Mi3 spoke with, there's a recognition of the pressures on marketing, the value of brand, and the benefits of alignment. The good news: half of sales leaders give their marketing colleagues top marks on the quality of the working relationship. Of course, that means half don't, and indeed 50 per cent of those surveyed by Arktic Fox gave the relationship a neutral rating or worse.

A year on from rolling out a brand tracking tool and adopting aided awareness as its business-wide guiding light for measuring improvement, Intrepid’s global GM of brand, Natalie Placko, couldn’t be happier with the significant role the insights have in demonstrating the value of brand investment. From earning more time in front of the board to a significant positioning strategy project as well as differentiation plan, insights are informing decision-making that she’s confident can ensure the travel company meets its ambitious 2030 strategy of $1.3bn in revenue via 600,000 customers in the next six years. Here, the brand chief talks through the dos and don’ts of building data literacy and avoiding “blow ups” around the insights such tools can uncover.

Despite great in-house analytics capabilities and the will to bring insight to marketing planning, channel optimisation and reporting, designer retail brand Michael Kors has struggled to get past outdated last-touch attribution modelling. Which is why VP of global analytics, Manuel Neto, was keen to be one of five brands trialling a platform combining market mix modelling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution (MTA). "It’s been one of the most transformational, reassuring journeys we have been on," per Neto, with teams now modelling a hundred scenarios in 20 minutes versus two in 40 hours, and better able to make seasonal product calls, faster. "For me, efficiency is money. If you’re able to act faster you’re able to get competitive advantage faster. As a consequence, KPIs will improve." He wants to make the trial permanent.

Tradie marketplace Hipages, which competes in a $50bn subsegment of the $131bn trade services market, has reached an inflection point, and is now spending circa $9-10m a year developing CRM and ERP-like services for its core audience of tradespeople. In 2025, it will begin development of new capabilities for homeowners as well. It's all part of a plan to grow profitability and market share in the notoriously fragmented tradie ecosystem. On the marketing front, Hipages is back for a sixth year sponsoring Nine's The Block, and it has also taken a Platinum sponsorship of rival Seven's Dream Home, due for launch mid-year.

An eclectic group of business founders and c-suite execs gathered in Nine’s Sydney HQ recently as part of the Compadres business mentoring initiative created by former agency boss and founding partner of poverty non-profit, Global Citizen, Clive Burcham. The lure was a dazzling macro view on geo-politics, AI, retail, marketing, advertising and media and entertainment from a career marketer, John Batistich, who now sits or advises nine company boards from Zip Co and FoodCo to Ksubi International and the $1bn Australian toy company “you’ve never heard of”, Moose Toys.     

Brand tracking disruptor Tracksuit is getting a tailwind from the big tech platforms now pushing it to their advertisers as they seek credit – and brand dollars – outside of performance marketing budgets. After showing how brand awareness powers sales on Amazon, co-founder Connor Archbold is plotting further partnerships and bidding to join the dots between brand, channel choice and ultimately sales. If those “big bets” come off it could mean even faster growth – and pay dirt for a growing pack of big name investors.

Growing complexity of the CMO role and the realisation of the dream of having a seat at the boardroom table has brought with it a growing remit and demanding role that requires ever-more support. It’s also generating plenty of burnout and skills gaps. Enter Tumbleturn’s new fractional CMO service, capitalising on an increasingly popular construct and resource modelling approach with a specific focus on providing a 2IC to existing CMOs or a strategically-minded marketing resource to cash-strapped CEOs and executive teams.

Karen Ganschow has spent her career trying to identify customer problems then addressing them in product propositions, engagement, experiences and services. As the former customer marketing leader and first head of data sciences at Aware Super hangs up her full-time hat, she speaks to Mi3 about the urban myths around digital experiences and customer behaviours, how technology and machine learning have brought the cost of a 360-degree, data-driven customer view – and actionable capability – down by millions, and why she’s still worried marketers are seen as the colouring-in department.

Following on from its April 2023 merger with BT Super, Mercer Super has restructured its marketing and customer experience teams into a single team called Customer and Growth, and is embarking on a three-year overhaul of digital experiences for customers and advisors alike. A new mobile app is due in H2 this year for customers too, with an emphasis on delivering a better experience rather than new capabilities. That will come later in the project. Advisors will see improvements to their experiences early next year.

OMG Chief Investment Officer Kristiaan Kroon says advertisers have reacted to sustained macro pressures with "relationship rationalisation". That bodes ill for all but the largest publishers with tight propositions and the ability to execute at scale. Generalists will find ad revenues shrinking even if the bear ad market turns bullish, though he sees upside for publishers with niche, high value audiences. Private Media CEO Will Hayward agrees. The problem is, media agencies are not set up to work with myriad small publishers, despite some talking up media diversity. Even if planners and strategists buy-in, investment directors and CEOs have little incentive "if it's going to take five times as long" for the same percentage cut, per Avid Collective MD Luke Spano. Concrete Playground MD Alex Light says at least one investment director at a holdco-owned agency is more receptive to "deeper" connections over reach, but Spano thinks the only way for independents to compete with News and Nine is via aggregation. He's planning to build "The Trade Desk" of native content – and claims white labelling conversations with holdcos locally and globally are progressing fast.

It’s the sort of longer-term shift in brand narrative, customer base and commercial impact strategic CMOs crave. Three years on from becoming marketing chief at jewellery retailer, Michael Hill, Jo Feeney has seen loyalty program numbers increase by 1.5 million to over 2m, average transaction values lift circa 30 per cent, and a growth cohort of customers progressively responding to its premiumisation play. Playing the strategic long game hasn’t come without its challenges – the jewellery retailer hasn’t been immune to tough retail conditions and over the first six months of the financial year, overall sales remain flat. Several stores closed and executive redundancies occurred. But the jeweller retailer is holding firm. Now Feeney is about to unveil her latest program of work: A rebrand two years in the making, stretching from refreshed design systems and brandmark to Michael Hill’s first brand ambassador and a new-look retail approach.

Attaining 100 per cent consideration with tradies, a three-point jump in brand awareness, and 14 percentage point increase in first-choice consideration with enterprise buyers are some big proof points Kennards Hire’s Manelle Merhi has to show for her ‘Ken Oath’ creative investment. But behind the multi-year campaign is a whole experience and service commitment that’s been critical to turning a smart, fun marketing tagline into a fundamental business ethos.

Agency and media strategy guru, David Fish, sees an awful lot of short-term thinking going on – and it’s leading too many businesses and leaders to jump at shadows and fail to focus on things that matter most – like category disruption. Having signed up as one of the new mentors under former GroupM boss and McDonald's CMO Mark Lollback's Global Mentorship venture, Fish is looking to bring his agency and media strategy experiences – from good to bad and ugly – to mentees seeking a mindset reset and a way to grow in an evolving world of work where emotional connection and employee belonging remain paramount to future success.  

After five years of diminishing incoming demand, finance and HR SaaS brand Workday embarked upon what its CMO Emma Chalwin called a bold brand strategy that has already powered massive gains in awareness, consideration, trust – and crucially, leads. Sales is now drinking the brand Kool Aid and the company, which has reached a growth inflection point with its global and vertical market expansion, is lifting the curtains on the second act of its award-winning Rockstars campaign as it chases giant tech brands like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft.

Fast food chain Mad Mex was able to drive a 9 per cent uplift in sales in restaurants within a proximity of its latest programmatic digital out-of-home campaign that also demonstrated the flexibility and agility of the channel. Just as importantly, digital efficiency helped to extend the life of the campaign.

We’ve all read the advice about the importance of learning from failure. But let’s face it, it’s an awful lot harder to own up to something that went wrong. Taking it to the next level and celebrating the learnings failure brings takes another level of cultural courage and vulnerability again. Yet from Uber’s annual Mexican team dinners to celebrate the $1.4 million campaign failure via mariachi bands and rogue promo codes on Facebook Live, to throwing a party to farewell a short-lived product line with staff at Chobani, there are examples of brands providing safe spaces for employees to take stock, own and grow through failure. As can be seen from marketing leaders from TikTok and The Bridge, taking decisive and constructive action after recognising a digital video proposition or Covid-fuelled health checker couldn’t be scaled are lessons that help them shape strategies and go-to-market approaches today.  Uber’s Andy Morley, Chobani’s Olivia Dickinson, The Bridge International’s Lewis Pullen and TikTok’s Anny Havercroft unpack hard earned – but high value – lessons from failure.

Young, cashed up and ready to party, the legion of Swifties who poured into the Sydney and Melbourne CBDs for the artist's recent concert series lifted spending by 4 per cent and 6 per cent respectively in each city. And those figures are conservative, says the Commbank iQ executive who ran the analysis. Here's where the money went.

Metcash has dropped some tantalising details about its incoming retail media network. The ASX-listed retail buying group is keeping cards close to its chest, but sees "significant" revenue and margin from joining larger rivals in building out a media business. Supermarkets are first, liquor comes next – and if the numbers stack up, the rest of the business will then follow, per CEO Doug Jones. While the likes of Coles and Woolworths are powering ahead with big national plays, Metcash spies competitive advantage – and pay dirt – in localised advertising and SMEs, with a profit share for its independent retailers.

Adobe global CMO of Digital Experience, Eric Hall, wants companies to make bigger, bolder bets on their technology investments like consumers do, and break free of the incrementalism mindset they’ve been holding onto. And he’s seeing Adobe’s increasingly solid platform play and its brand-safe approach to AI as a compelling way to achieve that – provided the martech vendor can get better at elevating its own brand story with CMOs, CIOs and CEOs. During this year’s Adobe Summit, the marketing chief caught up with Mi3 to discuss the very practical AI innovations coming into the Adobe stack to drive personalisation at scale, what it’s going to take to make AI less scary for marketers, and how the vendor itself is working to improve its own marketing to marketers.

Coca-Cola has 2 billion interactions with consumers on a daily basis globally, but it didn’t know much about these customers until it started working towards a unified marketing operations approach as part of its pursuit under CMO and EVP, Manolo Arroyo, to be the best marketing team in the world – by a lot. In partnership with Adobe and WPP, the FMCG has so far built out 152m actionable consumer profiles in 129 countries. Across this, it’s applying 2,200 customer segments, with 27 data sources contributing to profile richness. And the good news is it’s paying off commercially, with known customers spending 27 per cent more. During Adobe Summit, Coca-Cola’s global head of marketing technology, Shekhar Gowda, detailed the business challenge and what it’s taken to try and harness 180 creative brand managers and thousands of people globally into one portfolio approach while retaining creativity.

Reflections Holidays CMO, Pete Chapman, has spent between $500k and $1M on an all-encompassing rebrand of the $500m NSW social enterprise and park operator. He’s confident of payback within 12 months and 10x returns in coming years. Why does he think it’ll work? Getting buy-in from its 420 employees first, building brand strategy and creative idea from the inside out, rather than handing the reins to agencies, an eye on distinctiveness, and a commitment to building mental availability over quick performance wins all have something to do with it. Marketing investment, per Chapman, "from here, is going to be 80-85 per cent brand, and 15-20 per cent performance".

A year on from debuting its family of creative AI models, Adobe has used this year’s annual Las Vegas Summit to detail the latest ways it’s extending the tentacles of generative AI capabilities into all aspects of the content supply chain and across its Experience Cloud suite for marketers. It’s a play that brings AI directly into the tools marketers are using for everyday tasks. On hand to tout the benefits of the vendor’s martech platform and growing automation and AI capabilities was giant health brand, Pfizer. The vaccine maker cited 50 per cent-plus productivity gains plus 75 per cent faster content creation and is now eyeing bigger gains – a five-fold increase in content productivity via rapid adoption of Adobe’s tools and up to $1 billion in near-term value off the back of its broader AI play.

The 24^th edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer shows a 4 percentage point lift in trust sentiment across Australia, bringing us out of negative and into neutral territory. But underneath the topline figure is a bubbling pot of fear and scepticism, particularly with regards to new innovations such as AI and the way they’re being managed by government and business. Existential concerns prompted by technology – specifically cybersecurity and information wars – are also now superseding personal economic fears around inflation. This is despite the fact Australia’s wealth gap is playing a direct role in how we view and embrace innovation. For Edelman Australia CEO, Tom Robinson, increasingly politicised views plus the echo chamber of relying on peers and ‘people like me’ as trusted sources of information over and above government, business leaders, scientists and technical experts, is another worry. The message for brands and businesses? It’s time to reset thinking on business-government partnerships, spokespeople and messaging and turn up the dial on listening and nuance.