Executive exits and arrivals  

• Nine has plenty on at present, including the hunt for a CEO which has names like ex-Seven boss James Warburton and even Foxtel CEO Patrick Delany orbiting lofty circles. But the new one that’s been alight for weeks is the apparent departure of Chief Sales Officer Michael Stephenson before Christmas. Scratch that one – Nine insiders say the market is dreaming. Stephenson, however, has long been public about his desire to run a media company – his hand was up for the Nine CEO gig but no word on how that is playing out – yet. 
• CMOs and marketing teams – headhunters are advising CMOs to stay put – jobs are all but drying up. Marketing team retrenchments across a range of industries are real but happening by stealth. But watch for this one – it’s looking ominous for a major financial institution’s CMO and marketing team. A messy agency tender review process that has been aborted and the advisor fired is but one of many moving parts for the company which is said to have a material strategic reset of the business coming sometime in 2025.
• Agency side, there’s plenty of fireworks and conjecture too. Top global brass from Omnicom’s creative agency fleet were in Australia last month – something big is brewing there for Omnicom’s DDB, TBWA, Clemenger BBDO, and CHEP agency networks. Clemenger execs scotched speculation it's in early merger manoeuvres with CHEP but the Omnicom smoke stacks are strongly signalling some sort of restructure or consolidation is being hatched. Earlier this year the global marketing services giant unveiled a new holding company unit housing its once fiercely autonomous and competing advertising agency networks – the Omnicom Advertising Group (OAG), which has expat Australian Troy Ruhanen as its first global CEO. OAG parallels what the business did with Omnicom Media Group and its media agency brands more than a decade ago. Expect fireworks sometime in 2025 on the Omnicom creative front. Equally, it’s gone quiet on an expected announcement last week of Omnicom’s Media Group’s new CEO to replace the outgoing Peter Horgan. Chief Investment Officer Kristiaan Kroon was set last week for an official drop although it might come in two phases – don’t ask. But there’s also likely new curveballs with Omnicom’s proposer acquisition of rival Interpublic Group. Inside IPG sits its Mediabrands business with the likes of UM, Kinesso, and Initiative – which if the deal proceeds will bump up against Omnicom networks OMD and PHD. Then there’s the question of Mediabrands’ top two execs in the region, APAC boss Leigh Terry and ANZ CEO Mark Coad. Both have been Omnicom Media Group CEOs – fast twists and thickening plots are flowing.

Mergers, acquisitions and offloads

• Media - plenty still circulating Southern Cross Austereo, big media machinations around Seven West Media and even Nine’s radio unit - and swathes of people cuts said to be coming from numerous media companies over summer dealing with global platform-invoked pain (Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok, Netflix et al) and their revenue poaching. Publishers, out-of-home, TV, and some digital operations are all on the redundancy radar. Indeed, a forecast out this week from Mediabrands’ investment unit Magna said Google and Meta alone now control 60 per cent of the world’s digital advertising supply outside of China. Media fragmentation is a headache for brand owners and if the pace at which the platforms are scooping their ad budgets continues, advertisers will have all but six global players to trade within the Australian market. But that convenience will come at a cost – even the biggest Australian blue chips will be subservient to global platform dictates on pricing and preferential access to the best advertising assets and audiences. Today’s marketing teams probably have five years before their apathy around macro media trends will return to bite and a new cycle attempting to unravel their reliance on global platforms will start. And likely too late for quick fixes, which will be the demand from their executive leadership. Best leave it to the next-gen, perhaps.
• Agencies and consulting – independent shops are still fuelling much conjecture – from Atomic to Hatched and beyond, the deals and suitors are wildly flying. The heated speculation over a deal between Atomic 212 and Accenture Song has been replaced by the global firm’s interest in perhaps another independent. Or not. Accenture Song’s new boss of Droga5 (previously The Monkeys), Matt Michael told Mi3 two weeks ago: “We frequently consider acquisitions to uplift our capabilities, however, in this instance, we decided to pursue a different path.” Was he still at least mulling an acquisition? “Our intent is to reinvent media and create a new model that is free from the legacy constraints of old systems. If acquisitions make sense in the future we are open to considering them." Given the media unit, headed by three former top execs poached from Initiative Media, is understood to have been competing for at least two major media tender reviews – Optus and Bunnings – it may need some fast infrastructure by way of an acquisition to reassure corporates. More broadly, a raft of agency retrenchments are also said to be slated for summer and the new year.  

The big and bitey 

Beyond the local market cut and thrust, there are at least five big macro industry themes that will impact most sectors next year – although the focus for many will remain downstream on bells and whistles.

• Privacy, big tech, and social media reform – most are confused by the armada of lawsuits, regulatory inquiries, and policy reform but all of them will impact marketing, its supply chain, and professional skillsets and jobs. There’s also the rapidly escalating policy debates around public health impacts from social media, which remains quite an inconvenience for brands loving the cheap reach and detailed user profiling they gain via the platforms’ algorithms, finely tuned for optimising attention and time spent – with them. By June next year, the Commonwealth Government (whoever is in power by then) will reveal details of what it technically means to ban children under 16 from social media when the team examining the various tech options finally reports back. Limiting most adults in some form, like cigarettes, would likely help society, health, and civics but trigger anarchy - we’ll leave that one for now. Another interesting government program to watch is the ongoing digitisation in the NSW public sector as the state government takes advantage of the Digital ID it has been developing for years – an early winner in this has been Adobe, which won the Customer Data Platform [CDP] tender for the Department of Customer Service which landed mid-year.
• A foundation media currency for decades - audience “reach” - is under scrutiny as a proxy for advertising effectiveness ie it’s a fallacy, according to Oxford University’s Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz, whose paper has just been published after peer review. It changes everything – read it or listen here. The debate is coming. 
• On the generative AI front, the question to be answered is at what point the “Tech Bros” declare victory and claim they have created artificial general intelligence [AGI] - an academic paper released in the Netherlands recently argues any such claim is nonsense, the maths doesn’t allow for it and that’s there’s not enough resource in the world to genuinely replicate human intelligence.
• Like media, martech stack consolidation continued throughout 2024. Last year we reported how Lendlease saved millions by trimming its martech line-up and we recently learned that MYOB had done the same. Many of the same vendors were involved. MYOB's Chief Customer Officer Dean Chadwick said: “Streamlining our martech stack has yielded great efficiencies and outcomes across our marketing and sales workflows..." More of that to come for marketing, ecom, and CX teams - and the tech sector obsessed with lead generation as their definition of marketing.
• The big sleeper issue – assuming the economy starts to improve and people marketers have the headspace to worry about something other than the quarterly number – sustainability. With mandatory emissions reporting beginning in Australia (in a limited form) in January – and compulsory Scope 3 emissions reporting due in a few years, the carbon intensity of all those generative AI initiatives – especially in the creative realm, will be in plain light. 

That’s it from the Mi3 team for the masthead editions for 2025. Fast News continues until Friday and returns Monday, January 13. Mi3 editions return Tuesday, Jan 21.