Agencies & Consulting

Ahead of International Women’s Day (IWD), government pay gap data shows media, marketing, agency and tech industries are some way off gender equality. Release of the WGEA figures has women resetting their position on “lacklustre” programs designed to support fellow females in the workforce, but that aren’t in reality delivering. The accountability WGEA provides also has women in leadership questioning company policies that should be helping empower women, such as flexible work, as well as those that could hinder – they see promotion through meritocracy as one. Senior female leaders from Innocean, EssenceMediacom, Amaysim and Rackspace fear IWD is increasingly a tokenistic gesture instead of what is really required: Discussion – and action – that drives demonstrable change.

Medibank’s four-day working week trial has slashed sick and carers leave across frontline teams by two-thirds. Unilever’s NZ pilot saw work stress decrease by 33 per cent, work/life conflict fall by 67 per cent and meetings reduce by 3.5 hours per week. House of Brand is successfully recruiting talent and seeing energy levels rise thanks to its 100 per cent pay, 80 per cent time, 100 per cent approach. Inventium’s ‘gift of the fifth’ combined with efficiency training saw financial goals achieved two months early and gave workers a new sense of empowerment. The concept of a four-day working week is one of a swathe of evolving work models gaining popularity. But how does it work? Can staff really deliver the same volume of work to the same standard in less time? Do you just end up working a compressed work week? Can you still win and service clients? And is this a model that cuts the mustard long term? We speak to four companies trialling or well-entrenched in a four-day working week to find out.

Accenture Song boss Mark Green said the deal for the 80-staffer martech consultancy The Lumery is about adding firepower, not plugging gaps as demand for end-to-end service capability soars – and the top end of town consolidates CIO, CTO and CMO remits under all-powerful chief customer officers. While some question whether any holdco or consulting firm is truly delivering integrated brand, strategy, tech, CX and data analytics, Green insists accenture Song is walking the talk – and delivering “high double digit” growth as a “standout” performer within the broader Accenture group. Green and the Lumery co-founder and CEO Raj Kumar see that boom accelerating as brands get serious about slicing tech stacks and services that are underperforming and asking much pointier questions both internally and externally in a bid to drive growth through customer experience.

Ever wanted to design your own personal board? Talk under the cone of silence to someone who’s already been a CMO or CEO in the same industry or agency landscape and who actually relates to your struggles without the commercial rivalry? Share high-performance team or startup strategies, transformation plans or simply nut out your next career move with someone who has been there, done that? Or provide your talent with a way to develop and grow so you retain them for longer, and have a happier, more productive workforce? Maybe you've just been fired and need help mapping out the next strategic move. That's what GroupM chief and McDonald's and ANZ CMO, Mark Lollback, believes he can fix through his new venture, Global Mentorship – with some big names on board. Here's the plan.

Two new appointments to the Mi3 team will see Kalila Welch oversee Mi3’s daily AI Fast News project and cover the agency and media rounds; Pamela Schoenhofer joins in Editorial & Partnerships.

Two and a half years after ditching Nielsen for Ipsos, the IAB is in market with the next phase of its plan to build a true cross-media currency. BVOD data via OzTam is now live, more connected TV data is incoming from both streamers and social media platforms – and the CEOs of all three organisations think "rat bag" Australia can ultimately succeed where markets such as the UK have seemingly succumbed to political stalemate. For now, the new data brings a sharper read not just on reach across the piste but on shifts in consumer behaviour – like how people are hopping from loyalty apps and into media and back again. Which means less guesswork for advertisers.

CMOs need to get their consent management house in order or risk tainting the AI models they are currently spending millions to develop, says Tealium CEO Jeff Lunsford. His company has just been named a leader in the first ever Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms, along with Salesforce, Adobe and Treasure Data. In Australia, Tealium is the leading enterprise CDP, according to research conducted by Mi3 last year. Gartner warned however, that the sector may have peaked and consolidation could follow. Tealium's boss believes that's more of an issue for companies that piled into the CDP sector when it was running hot. He says AI will drive strong ongoing demand for a platform that not only addresses the challenges of data collection, enrichment and distribution, but also solves for activation.

The maverick music artist manager-turned publisher of Rolling Stone, Variety and The Brag admits he knew little about media and “didn’t know what a media agency was” when he started his publishing business nine years ago trying to lure big brands like Lexus, Adidas and Jim Beam to the edgier end of culture. Luke Girgis is also outspoken on AI in publishing – journalists, he says, will earn “10x more” as AI moves further into content generation but only the good ones – “average journalists are going to lose their jobs, they probably should have anyway”, he says as his new music parent company, Vinyl, landed a $11m investment from billionaire WiseTech founder, Richard White, and eyes synergies from The Brag deal and expansion here and abroad.

Woolworths' ad business Cartology is approaching five years old, amassing north of 300 staff and, at least per Morgan Stanley estimates, $550m of Australia’s rapidly rising retail media market. But boss Mike Tyquin questions the numbers being thrown around by investment analysts, especially the hundreds of millions predicted to leak from TV. He needs the network majors onside to power the next leg of off-network growth beyond Youtube and while no deals are yet done, he likes the cut of Nine’s jib. Meanwhile, Tyquin warns the rush to capitalise on media’s fastest growing category could backfire without three critical foundations in place. But he suggests that brand marketers, their trade sales counterparts and media agencies are now aligning in earnest to move the investment needle.

After going to market in the middle of last year, market leading auto brand Toyota is sticking with R/GA as its digital agency. The carmaker, which is fighting off a renewed challenge from Ford in the ute category, has extended its relationship with R/GA as it bids to make personalised CX a key competitive advantage.

Mat Baxter was probably the highest profile – and most articulately outspoken – of the Australian contingent exported to the US in 2015 as IPG attempted to template its rapid and highly profitable charge under then boss Henry Tajer. After 14 years with the holdco, he’s plotting his next move, potentially as a marketer. If so, procurement departments can expect a reduced remit. Either way, Baxter says AI is moving rapidly upstream and will upend not just the lower end, but the mid and maybe even top tiers of media and creative. Which means strategic capability may become the only game in town for both brands and agencies.

Jacques Bergh, Marketing Manager for Quadrant and LAI-owned Kingpin brand, wouldn’t give up his in-house creative studio for anything. Why? Under 5 per cent fix rates, big productivity gains, 50 per cent-plus cost reductions on campaign work, more consistent brand messaging and ever-more sway with cross-functional business teams. “We’re miles better off as we are now”, says Bergh, who is bullish enough to want to put his team’s work up against any standalone agency willing to challenge him on creativity. He's not the only one singing from the in-housing song book. Per the In-House Agency Council’s latest report, 78 per cent of organisations surveyed have some form of agency handling the work an external advertising, media or marcomms agency would otherwise do. Yet there are hidden costs and considerations – and keeping staff motivated and creativity alive and thriving are high on Bergh's to do list.

The marketing supply chain’s talent pool – media and creative agency workers – is too focused on promotion and job titles versus capability, leading to over-promotion of under-equipped talent, particularly at the mid-tier. Brand-side marketing risks falling into the same trap of narrow specialism and short-termism at the expense of the big picture warn marketing and customer chiefs. Here's how marketing and agency bosses are trying to help – not crimp – those aiming to ultimately usurp them.

Data breaches and cyberattacks, poor customer service, dire employee experience management, leadership gaffs and empty purpose guff are taking their toll on how brands are perceived, per the latest FutureBrand Index. This year’s threats to success show Australian business leaders overindexing on concerns around the impact of leadership and workplace culture as well as meeting consumer expectations – more so than their global counterparts. Meanwhile, a looming purpose void, coupled with a desire for immediate payback and practical action driven by cost-of-living pressures and trust issues are increasingly impacting brand strength – or weakness – globally, as this year’s brand winners attest.

A new probe into the programmatic ad supply chain by the peak US industry group, Association of National Advertisers (ANA), has called out key digital advertising supply players, including Yahoo, The Trade Desk, Amazon, Google and Pubmatic, for either declining to take part in a new transparency study it just released or ‘could not provide data in the required timeframe’. The study, sanctioned by top US advertisers and brands, finds at least a quarter of programmatic ad spend is wasted while billions being directed to made for arbitrage sites and large private marketplaces were found to be little better in many cases than the open web. But it also has some relatively straightforward remedies for those with the appetite - so far marketers have been remarkably unmoved by the ongoing warnings of their budgets being siphoned off by fraud and dodgy players gaming the online advertising system.   

31 years ago Paul Keating famously observed that Australians had failed to ask how they would feel if society treated them the way we treat Australia's Aborigines. The result of The Voice Referendum confirmed — at least for 40 per cent of the population and it seems the overwhelming majority of the city's creative community — that the question remains unasked, let alone answered. City of Sydney, in collaboration with We are Warriors, a Social Indigenous Enterprise, and R/GA wants to use a series of multimedia and AI powered activations around the City's famous NYE fireworks display to focus the community's mind of indigenous excellence. It also wants to send a clear message to the country's indigenous youth that, in the words of Yuin artist, rapper, and Triple J Radio host Nooky, "They’re loved, they’re seen, and they’re heard." For R/GA, which has developed a new creative vision to organise itself based upon the concept of a creative innovation studio, the activations bring that new vision to life. Now, if they can just finish writing the code in time...

In three years, Tassal sales and marketing chief Matt Vince has overhauled brand tracking, struck up a partnership with Mutinex on media mix modelling then quit that camp in favour of an all-in-one measurement play with Kantar, and upped the ante on commercial knowledge across his sales, marketing and innovation teams, all in the name of better data-driven decision making. One of those decisions is to pull out of free-to-air TV. Meanwhile, he's cemented multi-year partnerships with core agency partners including Havas Host and Havas Media, overhauling KPI payment structures and giving them "skin". Now Vince is spearheading a new integrated brand platform ‘Australian for seafood’, plus a distinctly different media mix. As corporate brands farming salmon in Tasmania face increasing scrutiny from government and community groups, he’s acutely aware of the need to land the right message. Plus, Vince says, sales teams need to get marketing too.