Mi3 and the Australian Marketing Institute this year partnered to enable members to accrue Continuous Professional Development points by reading Mi3 articles. Certified Practising Marketers (CPMs) accredited by the AMI need to notch a minimum of 100 points a year.

As AMI CEO Bronwyn Heys says: “It's a brilliant and easy way to get your CPD points just by reading, remaining relevant and getting knowledge about what your peers are up to in the marketing industry.”

There are now close to 100 Mi3 articles that enable AMI CPMs to earn those points – which are awarded automatically based on reading an article in full. Just sign up as an Mi3 member or update existing account details. All the details and FAQs are here.

In short, all Mi3 Deep Dives carry a full CPD point, with other selected articles carrying half a point.

Use this Deep Dive tab for a shortcut – but there are lots more across the site. Look out for the yellow ‘AMI CPD’ icon at the top of selected articles.

In the meantime, below is a selection of Mi3 articles to help boost CPD scores – and key industry knowledge.

Mi3 launches FY25 Marketing & Customer Benchmarks: 105 companies, $3bn spend, three-speed marketing emerges

A deep, senior marketer study and report by Mi3, The Australian Marketing Institute (AMI), Qualtrics and Tumbleturn finds hard evidence across 105 top marketers responsible for $3bn-plus of budgets of an emergent three-speed marketing economy and upended KPIs and priorities. There are big question marks in key sectors such as retail around the effectiveness of personalisation efforts: Just 15 per cent think their CX is performing. There’s also a major swing to performance media as CMOs seek instant results. Meanwhile, marketer remits are exploding and the FY25 Marketing & Customer Benchmarks report, polling top marketers across all B2C and B2B sectors, finds the majority feeling ill-equipped to tackle what’s rapidly coming at them. AMI’s Bronwyn Heys, Tumbleturn’s Jen Davidson, Qualtrics’ Ivana Sekanic and Akcelo’s Aden Hepburn unpack the findings and implications for marketers, agencies and the broader supply chain for FY25 and beyond.

Enforcement mode: Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind takes aim at widespread pixel data spillage, loyalty, data enrichment, broking and geotargeting under existing laws

Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind says firms are failing under the current Privacy Act – and they are in the regulator’s crosshairs. Tracking pixels are under serious scrutiny across the piste, as are companies using data beyond what it was collected for and potentially passing it to third parties. In that vein, Kind has “existing concerns” about loyalty programs, customer data enrichment businesses and data broking: “It's something I'd like to look at again under the current framework,” she says, suggesting those operators “make sure that they're watertight”. Likewise firms targeting via geolocation: “We’re looking at a case at the moment … We have some real concerns about how it's being used.”

‘Really mediocre outcomes’: Oxford Uni professor says Byron Sharp and Ehrenberg-Bass’ marketing science rules no longer hold – 1,000 campaigns, 1 million customer journeys as evidence

Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz, of University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, suggests Professor Byron Sharp’s best known book, How Brands Grow, is a misnomer – it’s actually about how big brands keep big marketshare, not how they got there. He also says it’s based on flaws within Andrew Ehrenberg’s earlier work, primarily static markets and a requirement not to differentiate. Thomaz suggests that’s why FMCG firms adhering to those rules were caught napping by more nimble differentiated start-ups. Optimising media for reach alone no longer works, he suggests, because all reach is not equal – and used bluntly won't deliver business outcomes. “There is a missing dimension,” per Thomaz. He’s out to prove it with a peer-reviewed paper that analyses 1,000 campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and Wavemaker. The upshot? “None of it holds … I'm seeing that 1 per cent of campaigns are actually getting exceptional money, while the vast majority are choosing to get some really mediocre outcomes.” But there's potential upside for marketers, media agencies – and media owners – that grasp the category-specific implications.

Brands, media owners, loyalty operators face difficult fast decisions on all automated decision-making as Privacy Act forces policy – maybe business model – rewrite

As brands bid to wring every ounce of profit from every dollar earned through the efficiency of automated decision-making that understands customers better than they understand themselves, they now face a new and potentially costly risk – penalties in the millions of dollars, and a regulatory regime that makes it easier for the market policemen to write you a ticket. What's more, it's not fully clear how broad the definition of what constitutes automated decision-making will be – which puts almost everyone on notice. Privacy specialists Mi3 spoke with stressed there's much more work to be done than simply writing a new privacy policy. For starters, you have to adhere to it. That might mean costly and complicated business and system process changes that move at the speed of compliance – but in a market powered by the accelerant of generative AI.

The rise of the fractional CMO: The exec gig economy freeing marketers from meetings, politics and baggage to focus on craft – and why more are piling in

Fractional CMO models are quickly gaining momentum due to the flexibility they afford operationally and strategically – without the burden and politics that can come with being a FTE. It’s especially appealing to experienced marketers who want to practice the “magic and dazzle” of marketing and stay accountable and hands-on inside an organisation while controlling their own hours, says experienced marketer and fractional CMO, Taz Bareham. As complexity of CMO remits and growth expectations accelerate, a host of new curated ‘proto agencies’ are showing up, providing CMO skills and experiences on tap, such as CMO Syndicate and Tumbleturn’s Fractional CMO practice. Here’s why fractional executives are expected to keep growing their share of the jobs pool.

B2B marketing fundamentals upended: Bain-B2B Institute study consigns traditional lead gen, KPIs, metrics to bin as ‘hidden buyers’ missed, trillions lost

B2B buyers across 515 brands – including Tesla, PepsiCo, Delta, Pfizer, Hyatt and Comcast – add heft to a growing body of evidence that B2B marketing is literally missing half of decision-makers and losing trillions of dollars in deals annually as a result. The Bain-backed study, by LinkedIn-funded think tank The B2B Institute, suggests “hidden buyers” influence half of the buying process and have very different requirements from target buyers. They don’t care about features, it’s all about downside risk management, AKA backside covering. It means lead generation, measurement, KPIs and fundamentally, brand-performance strategies are all wrong. Those that flip the model and think of B2B marketing as “buyer group marketing” and brand as “deal risk insurance” will unlock massive upside, fast, say B2B Institute founder Jann Martin Schwarz and EMEA and LatAm lead, Mimi Turner. Schwarz is staking his reputation on it.

Synthetic customers meet synthetic CMOs (and CFOs): Evidenza clones Sharp, Ritson, Binet & Field to build annual marketing plans in minutes; Mars, EY sign-up

The founders of Mark Ritson-backed AI marketing outfit Evidenza claim their “synthetic customer” tech – which starts with creating AI copies of target customers – creates 95 per cent accurate customer responses. I.e. it mimics company CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CIOs and CROs with strong correlation to the real thing. “It can imitate essentially anyone by gathering and synthesising massive amounts of data,” per co-founder Peter Weinberg. Evidenza claims it can also synthesise marketing strategy, science and the “pantheon” of effectiveness gurus, like Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, Karen Nelson-Field, Les Binet and Peter Field. Which means marketers can ask them what they ‘think’ of their plans. As Ritson put it: "Once you've got unlimited free data, qual and quant, it opens the door for the real game, which is artificial intelligence marketing and brand planning." 

‘Radical inverse of what most people are doing’: Endeavour flips Dan Murphy’s, BWS to AI ‘inputs model’ of smarter humans upfront for faster, better machine output in sweeping personalisation, content overhaul

It’s perhaps one of the boldest moves to date in the stampede to unravel how brands marketing and CX teams can use AI to do more, better, cheaper. Except Endeavour Group’s marketing team didn’t just want cost-out and efficiencies – they wanted better, more effective work at massive scale for 4.5 million Dan Murphy’s loyalty members and millions of liquor brand portfolio customers beyond. To do it, the AI investment that collapsed process, time, cost and its in-house Creative Studio would be reinvested in smarter people – 20 per cent of head count now is on traditional production and creative execution skillsets, down from about 90 per cent in its Creative Studio. The rest has gone upstream to strategists, technologists and creative thinkers to look at the “business problems we’re trying to solve,” says Kate Dally, Endeavour’s General manager for brand creative and operations. Likewise Endeavour CMO Jo Rose: “We might be putting 40,000 assets out … but maybe we should only be putting four out. We [didn’t] have the right thinking in the front end to make sure that what we're actually creating is the right thing to be creating.”

Kmart delivers 20X improvement in engagement that results in sales while tripling its addressable online customer base from 2.5M to 7.5M in two years – here's how

Wesfarmers-owned Kmart has massively increased its consent-based addressable customer set, and built a model that has powered 20x improvement in engagements. It's also pumped sales while helping quantify just how personalised content performs versus non-personalised (hint: twice as good). Plus, it answered the vexed question of whether category upsell or category expansion was the best strategy to pursue (it's the latter). CIO Brad Blyth unpacks how they did it, the tech used and where next in pursuit of AI-powered efficiency.

‘A baptism of fire’: Funlabs CMO emerges unscathed from three-year digital transformation, marketing overhaul as online bookings soar – backs free-to-air TV for next growth spurt

“A baptism of fire, start to finish, and a much broader role than I anticipated going in.” Funlabs CMO Oonagh Flanagan isn’t kidding. She has driven a booking system rebuild, with online bookings at the leisure operator more than doubling as a result. She has replatformed the websites, implemented four Salesforce clouds, digitally rewired the phone system and has just completed the first phases of a customer resegmentation program, shifting from bucketing people by demographics to attitudes. Now she’s planning to do something a little less technical: Spend money on free-to-air TV.

'Marketers are unprepared for what is coming': How Google's AI search overhaul affects organic SEO for brands – and what to do about it

Plummeting top search rankings and click through rates following suit have marketers and SEO agencies worried. Commissioned by local and international publishers, UK-based Authoritas has been running the numbers on both publisher and brand search terms and how they compare with Google’s new AI-compiled amalgamated answers for the last year. AI Overviews isn’t yet in Australia, but it’s coming. There are potential upsides for brands, per CEO Laurence O’Toole. But the hard work starts now – because search is about to change forever and the millions sunk into SEO may soon be largely stranded.

Unit economics lessons: Investment banker turned ecom entrepreneur says social, search ad rates, customer acquisition now unviable for ecom pureplay, DTC profits without retail media

For anyone in ecom or performance marketing, it’s time to downweight ROAS and ROI and laser focus on unit economics, says former investment banker (her last big deal was the Myer float) turned entrepreneur Carla Penn-Kahn. She was early into ecom and left Credit Suisse to launch four of her own – Kitchenware Australia, A Gift Worth Giving, Everten and Buy My Thing. But she sold her last venture last year when she realised it had hit peak profitability. With performance ad prices doubling in four years, and Amazon reaching full speed, the unit economics weren’t going to get any better. Penn-Kahn thinks direct-to-consumer trailblazers now face the same dilemma, because they can no longer sustainably scale through advertising and VCs are sharpening their bottom line focus as much as the top.  Hence she’s cool on the outlook for many, but particularly the likes of The Iconic, Temple and Webster, Adore Beauty and Australian marketplaces like Woolworths-owned Catch. Loyalty programs and retail media offer a lifeline for some, per Penn-Kahn, but most DTC brands don’t have the latter option.

NIB lands major digital ad emission reductions via supply chain cull, metrics switch, Uni of Tasmania triples conversions as marketers face new reporting rules

NIB and University of Tasmania are two Australian organisations that have begun squaring up to the sustainability reckoning coming to marketers, agency and media publishers as legislated climate reporting ratchets up a notch and Scope 3 emissions become front and centre. With media and marketing emissions estimated at a whopping 59 per cent of total group emissions at NIB, marketing this year adopted GroupM’s Project Alpha reporting tool to start accurately measuring and optimising campaigns with immediate double-digit reductions effect. Uni of Tas has already achieved 30 per cent-plus reductions just by tackling the low-hanging fruit of digital advertising optimisation – largely programmatic display and made for advertising sites. Meanwhile switching out clicks to conversion metrics not only won over the c-suite, it’s cementing the education provider’s global number one position for climate action with prospective students, and led to a 264 per cent increase in conversions in early campaign trials.

Principal media: Holdcos 'trapped in prison they built' as publishers plot escape route from 100% mark-ups – yet 'complicit' marketers the smart ones, per Brian Wieser

Principal media models – where agency groups take ownership of media and then sell it to client brands at a profit – are piling pressure onto publisher models with some going direct amid 100 per cent mark-ups and sub-prime inventory blends pushing them off the media plan. Some ex-global holdco execs warn it's rapidly going to go sour with holdcos – equally dependent on big tech reseller incentives – now trapped in a "prison" of their own making. Tumbleturn Marketing Advisory Partner and ex-Ikon, Havas and IPG exec Dan Johns thinks the impacts of principal models are coming to a head – and may see agencies disintermediated by impartial advisors, with creative agencies circling. But Brian Wieser, a former GroupM global business intelligence chief turned Madison and Wall Principal, reckons otherwise. Marketers are willingly "complicit" in principal models, he suggests, because giving agencies revenue leeway means they get the other services they need – but would otherwise be scuppered by procurement.

Kincoppal girls-only high school principal: ‘Social media the most damaging influence I’ve ever seen’, backs 16 minimum age as concentration levels crash

Kincoppal-Rose Bay Principal, Erica Thomas, doesn’t take banning social media for under 16s lightly. But Thomas is at the coalface with 1,000 kids daily and from what she sees playing out in the classroom, thinks it’s critical. Concentration levels are dropping with learning and results affected despite teachers’ best counter-strategies. Meanwhile, girls are being conditioned to perfectionism from a young age and exposed to “toxic and harmful advice” daily, while boys are pushed increasingly violent content and AI bot-created “highly sexualised” stereotypes of women. Thomas says the negative impacts have accelerated in the last five years – and it’s getting worse.