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Deep Dive

Deep Dive 13 May 2024 - 10 min read
AMI CPD: 1
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Deep Dive 6 May 2024 - 10 min read
AMI CPD: 1
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The stampede by companies into CX, with massive associated investments into martech, specialists teams and organisational overhauls, is having little impact on customer experience scores – and big banks, telcos, and car brands are at best benchmarked as average, despite investing billions collectively. CSBA Managing Director, Paul van Veenendaal, has seven years of CX performance data from 12,000 annual assessments across 200 Australian firms and it’s a sobering read for those firms heralding their commitment to connecting up and improving the experience across all customer contact points. In short, all that tech investment is simply not hooked up to customer contact centres – and NPS scores, which many leadership teams have linked to performance and bonuses, are “being gamed”, he warns, for better but hollow CX benchmarks. No big brands feature in the top 10 of CSBA’s CX rankings, and only one, a superannuation company, makes the top 20. Chatbots aren’t up to scratch yet, says van Veenendaal, and companies have “pretty much parked” speech analytics. Meanwhile despite heavy investment in digital transformation, call centre volumes have not declined over the last seven years – and those call centres are focused on the wrong outcomes and metrics, he says. Hence underwhelming CX scores across CSBA’s rankings. But some sectors are nailing it: Universities and colleges, water companies and local authorities – the latter at least partially due to the policies of a one-time adman and former Victorian Premier. Here’s where van Veenendaal thinks it’s all going wrong – and how to fix it.

Deep Dive 30 Apr 2024 - 10 min read
 

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Deep Dive 29 Nov 2023 - 10 min read
 
Deep Dive 29 Nov 2023 - 7 min read
 

Like Mi3’s top Marketing stories for 2023, marketing and advertising effectiveness ruled the heatmap in our overall biggest stories for the year. But there’s a new wave of surging industry interest in customer tech – customer data platforms, martech stacks and decisioning engines have been notable areas of rising interest from marketers and the agency sector this year. Plus a little corporate intrigue went a long way when Thinkerbell split with PwC and its stake in the agency after the big audit and advisory firm’s tax scandal. There was also much intrigue around the broadcaster v streamer street fight and Australian adland’s biggest export – Accenture Song’s Global CEO, David Droga.      

Deep Dive 28 Nov 2023 - 8 min read
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Deep Dive 27 Nov 2023 - 10 min read
 
Deep Dive 21 Nov 2023 - 12 min read
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Deep Dive 14 Nov 2023 - 8 min read
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Many predicted The Monkeys would be “roadkill” when Accenture in 2017 paid $63m for Australia’s hottest ad agency, its creative culture steamrollered by the immaculately polished heads of the consulting world. Instead, says creative chief Scott Nowell, who last week departed the agency he co-founded, The Monkeys began a cultural infiltration mission. Six years on, the broader Accenture Song creative-customer model has turned heads in the broader Accenture business – because it’s largely outperforming. But there were some awkward early moments. “A request that we lock our beer fridges until 5 p.m. went down very badly,” says Nowell. He admits moving to a hierarchical consulting giant can take some getting used to: “You’ve just got to ask a lot of people if you can do something or not.” But after some mutual “bum sniffing” the “more closed” corporate and “more open” advertising packs began to run together – and start building products and solutions that go well beyond advertising. Whether Nowell climbs back into the saddle, time will tell. For now he’s smelling the roses after 17 years building a business that won everything going, rejected an offer to reverse takeover Saatchi & Saatchi locally, came close to forming a “pan-Pacific micro network” with Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and tried – and failed – to revive ice cream brand, Homer Hudson, which it co-owned. His advice to anyone starting their own agency today? “Start smarter … get an accountant … try and balance your life.” 

Deep Dive 7 Nov 2023 - 9 min read
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GroupM global boss Christian Juhl says rival holdcos may now regret spending “billions of dollars on cookie-based solutions or personally identifiable information” as privacy moves dead centre in regulatory affairs. Some, he says, “are going to be sitting on a razor’s edge about whether they are going to be compliant ... it will definitely have ramifications for the industry.” In the meantime, he says a key challenge facing marketers across every facet of their business, and fundamentally “how they justify these massive budgets to their CEOs” comes down to measurement. But building post-privacy metrics and proxies, per Juhl, is probably the most “dynamic” – read challenging – part of his business. GroupM is building its own econometric or “full funnel” models for brands because, says ANZ CEO Aimee Buchanan, market mix models focused on shorter-term campaign metrics no longer cut it. Meanwhile, both Juhl and Buchanan have been pushing hard on carbon-based trading. Culling low performing, high emitting inventory is the easiest first step, says Buchanan, followed by stripping out digital weight from creative assets. But both bosses are less aggressive than previous statements around moving ad dollars based on emissions. Likewise, no hard mandates on getting staff back in the office beyond “probably more than we are right now,” per Juhl with hybrid flex built-in. For now, three days is a rule of thumb. Plus, Juhl is unsure how long brands will “pay more for less” on linear TV – and the world’s biggest media buyer thinks the world’s biggest streaming service, Netflix, has an opportunity to start integrating brands. Netflix’s Microsoft-powered ads launch may have underwhelmed, but Juhl sees “wide open” space ahead.

Deep Dive 31 Oct 2023 - 12 min read
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Deep Dive 24 Oct 2023 - 9 min read
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