Agencies & Consulting

ARN has appointed departing Nine Chief Sales Officer Michael Stephenson as Chief Operating Officer in a new role which signals the company behind the Kyle & Jackie O Show is set to ramp-up its ambitions after a protracted and ultimately aborted takeover of rival Southern Cross Austereo [SCA].

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 5.5 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.”

Gaming advertising in Australia overtook news media's ad revenues for the first time this year. By 2028, PwC reckons it will climb north of $2bn. But that includes in-game product placement, not the traditional digital ad market – which agency execs say locally is lagging the $70bn global market, despite circa 80 per cent of Australian adults engaging with games in some form. It's a massive, high attention medium that dollar for dollar can yield bumper results, per latest attention studies – but the need for a clearer identity in gaming advertising is becoming critical. Is it a channel, an audience, or an environment? Time for marketers to rethink their strategies say execs from Havas, RGA, iion and Amplified Intelligence.

Last year, Apple made an iOS update that podcast businesses hadn't seem coming – and as a result downloads globally plummeted 15 per cent. For some, the impact was massive, with The Kyle & Jackie O Show losing 48 per cent. Cue commercial scrambling. With the dust now settled, industry execs reckon the new numbers are more transparent and have downweighted downloads – which can be misleading – as a core commercial metric. What's more, podcast revenue is strongly climbing locally. Acast's Henrik Isaksson, LiSTNR's Grant Tothill, and Nova's Nicole Bence unpack what happened when the numbers dropped, how things have panned out – and what's next.

Netflix is is pitching its media account, with incumbent Wavemaker understood to be involved in a four-way shoot-out against Initiative, Kaimera and S4's The Monks. The pitch has triggered some speculation over its timing, coming after WPP landed Amazon's mega media account in the APAC and EMEA regions. Though the holding company has kept the detail of its Amazon remit tight, it's understood to involve the creation of a bespoke agency solution dubbed OpenDoor – with heavy shades of the solution it built for Coca-Cola in 2021.

The Government has gone all out to make its $22.7bn Future Made In Australia plan land with a splash. On paper a $45m campaign budget – with $4m for The Monkeys – should be a recipe for success. The challenge is getting voters to give a toss about a vision of future prosperity years away from today's long-running wallet squeeze and spiralling bills. Whether Australians are willing to pay more to support beefed-up local industries over cheaper imported alternatives will determine the policy's success or failure. Consumer researchers say it comes down to collective willingness to put the bigger picture over our own back pocket. The data says it's highly unlikely – and the odds of an ad campaign moving the needle are pretty long.

Months after Google was ruled an illegal monopolist in its search business that paid handsomely for market dominance, crushed rivals and hiked prices at a whim, the proposed penalties and remedies are known, including more transparency in ad pricing and open data flows for advertisers – a long-held market frustration.

One of Australia’s top marketers has died in a tragic accident this weekend. Lisa Ronson, who joined Medibank as CMO in July, was on her country Victorian farm in Ullina near Daylesford when an accident involving an all terrain vehicle [ATV] occurred. A collection of early industry tributes follows from marketing, media and agency peers.

GroupM is making a major play for commerce revenues as retail media continues to rise. Ex-Amazon and IPG Mediabrands' Cadreon boss, Marc Lomas, is spearheading the play – along with former Goodman Fielder marketer Leah Jackson, who in her previous gig played a key role in handing trade marketing budgets as well as media to Initiative. Now at GroupM Commerce, the duo will be aiming to convince more brands to take a similar approach. But that requires proving incrementality – i.e. that media investments are leading to new sales and hard growth outcomes and linking measurement across all digital channels directly to the in-store shop floor. No mean feat, but Lomas, Jackson and Mindshare CEO Maria Grivas say they can do it.  First port of call? Busting measurement mind-sets away from “dumb” ROAS metrics, per Lomas. Then convincing more brands that an integrated operating model that aligns sales, marketing, brand, ecom and retail media should no longer be an outlier.

Virtual professor Mark Ritson reckons key strategic marketing planning functions face automation within five years or so. Marketing and its supply chain should prepare accordingly, though Ritson thinks creative agencies may survive a cull coming faster than many realise. With a hard swing to the right globally, he suggests sustainability and purpose are being rapidly downgraded – and only the "naive" now position the latter as a revenue driver. Big platforms have likewise pivoted to mass reach over pure personalisation – hoovering up what the virtual professor sees as an investment swing back to brand. Hence TV, especially locally, being overlooked despite continuing to deliver the goods, per Ritson: "I've never seen a bigger delta or disparity between how the tool [TV] continues to work very well for brands and how marketers look at it ... It's still a very strong medium."

Dentsu Creative ECD Sarah McGregor has parted ways with the business, meanwhile Kmart might be ending its on-again-off-again relationship with the agency as a creative pitch looms.

Suncorp’s CMO Mim Haysom confirmed the now insurance pureplay had consolidated its nine insurance brands with Publicis-owned Leo Burnett after a sweeping review of its creative and production partners in a strategic overhaul following the sale of Suncorp Bank to ANZ. 

More than 3,500 media agency professionals can’t be wrong: They all voted for the best media sales execs and teams in Australia – with the top guns awarded last night at a sold out Ivy Ballroom in Sydney. Here’s the full list of winners.

Cummins & Partners is without a CEO after Michael McConville's departure from the indie creative shop. It is not yet clear whether his role will be replaced. The former Adam&EveDDB boss had attempted to put creative effectiveness and econometric modelling at the heart of the agency's model, arguing it could reset fee structures based on results. How far McConville managed to implement that change is open to question – but at least he tried.

Expect more structural upheaval in the $14bn ad market in the next 12-18 months as more corporates like Commonwealth Bank’s move this week to monetise owned media assets join retailers in carving out new touchpoints to customers, says Coles360 boss Paul Brooks. Broad consensus has retailer media growing 10-20 per cent at present and will exceed forecasts of a $1.6bn to $1.9bn pool by 2025.

Tech investment advisor Terry Kawaja – the man behind the adtech Lumascape – thinks adtech’s lean M&A period might be about to turn, driven by an incoming wave of what he calls “creative tech” start-ups. Canva's $370m acquisition of Leonardo.AI is an early example and Luma Partners, he says, is “one hundred per cent” eyeing potential deals. Meanwhile, he thinks agency arbitrage via principal-based media buying is anything but nefarious. “It’s fine,” per Kawaja. But he doubts it will prop up business models under “encroachment” from all quarters. The holdcos, he suggests, are going to need a bigger tool belt. Kawaja’s also spoiling to fight Apple CEO Tim Cook, at the very least verbally, for hobbling the digital ad industry in the name of privacy while, he claims, using the same data to fuel its own ad business. Apple, per Kawaja, is putting itself in antitrust crosshairs – he hopes it’s next.

This year’s winner of the Australian Marketing Institute’s Certified Practising Marketer award, Paper + Spark’s Paul Everson, is in plenty of conversations right now, but reports a market afraid to commit to decisions as socio-economic uncertainty and short-termism persist. It’s not helping many marketers are either struggling to draw insights from data, or lack commercial nous to connect the dots to the business bottom line, he says – a big reason why skills development programs like Certified Practising Marketer are so critical to the industry. But with the core fundamentals of marketing as solid as ever – even with more channels and sophisticated terminology at our disposal – this experienced agency leader, marketing industry mentor and Uni lecturer is keen to see the industry embrace big M marketing with more confidence.