“Be passionately inquisitive – about the data, the customer, the creative, the hypothesis, how we could make something better,” encourages Amaysim CMO, Pete Macgregor. “Basically, anything you work on.”

It’s these attributed the marketing chief has been exhibiting in spades since taking on the challenge of overseeing the SingTel-owned mobile virtual network operator brand and its marketing function nearly two years ago after earning his telco stripes at both Telstra, Optus and Virgin Mobile. Which is also why Macgregor’s  description of his own CMO style is so fitting: Energetic, and oriented to impact and growth.

He’s equally enthusiastic about the value of data and creative in the job that needs to be done by marketing teams. “Data first – always – be clear on the job to be done,” Macgregor believes. “Then let the creatives fly.”

Effective marketing strategy

The best example of this thinking in action at Amaysim is what Macgregor’s “Tent-Pole Marketing: Big Swigs, Big Returns” ambition. The objective: Find the breakthrough needed for further growth.

“We asked ourselves: How could we step-change customer interest and sales without increasing spend? The answer: Tent-Pole Marketing,” Macgregor explains. “We focused on four big, high-impact campaigns per year. The goal was to create thematic, creative campaigns that break through the noise, disrupt the seasonal sales cycle and shift consumer behaviour, targeting the top three telco customer segments.”

To get there, Amaysim briefed four agencies to pitch big ideas. From 30+ concepts, it finally landed on ‘The Escape Plan’ (twice), what Macgregor describes as a cheeky campaign inviting Aussies to break free from pricey telcos. The campaign triggered record sales and a more than double-digit increase in MROI year-on-year.

“We ran this as our EOFY campaign, but continued into July, when competitors traditionally slow down, further accelerating sales momentum,” he says.

Next up was ‘Spend & Win $50m’, inspired by Amaysim’s two-year running retention renew & win campaign and “stealing a bit from Macca’s Monopoly”, says Macgregor. The idea came from a junior customer value management (CVM) executive, via an innovation fund the CMO had launched to drive creativity inside the business. The exec tapped retention insights, which showed higher renewals ensued as the result of prizes.

“We took it to the head of Amaysim. Despite initial scepticism, it became our most successful acquisition and retention campaign in our company history, resonating with our ‘value seeker’ segment, driving more switches,” Macgregor says. “These big swings generated an uplift in sales from Apr to Feb, improved ARPU, our base health [customers stay longer/spend more] and exceeded revenue, margin and EBITDA goals.”

Importantly, the success also unlocked renewals. “Tent-Pole Marketing is now our operating rhythm, designed to surprise, delight, and drive performance,” adds Macgregor.

To elevate marketing’s effectiveness, speed and commercial impact, Macgregor has transformed Amaysim’s in-house creative function into a fully integrated studio, spanning design, copywriting and now idea generation and production.

 “Our goal was to reduce dependency on external agencies, save dollars, increase creative agility, and drive greater commercial returns. We prioritised speed to market, creative excellence, and stronger cross-functional collaboration, while improving creative effectiveness and impact,” he explains.

Helping here was empowerment of internal talent via expanding roles and accountability. This included giving Amaysim’s copywriter and social manager the opportunity to shape creative strategy, which led to standout work across major campaigns like ‘Koalas - better value’, Spend & Win and Escape Plan 2.

“By owning production all the way to TV, our team gained flexibility to iterate fast, act on live feedback, and align messaging with evolving customer insights,” says Macgregor.

Another big part of the shake-up was introducing a creative effectiveness and impact scale that benchmarks art versus science. “I often see creative scales in our industry [AB InBev, Telstra, Leo Burnett] but they never include the most important part, the impact of the work,” comments Macgregor. “We developed our own inhouse art v science scale and customised for marketing campaigns, CX and CVM [customer value management]. When we have an idea we put it on the scale, we also come back during the price investment ratio and see where we actually landed on the scale to enhance learning.”

Through all of this, Amaysim has reduced production costs by $710,000 year-on-year, allowing reinvestment into media and martech personalisation. It’s also increased team morale and motivation, and led to stronger brand storytelling via integrated design, content and marketing collaboration across all assets including app, web, retail and more. It’s equally assisted delivering an 68ppt uplift in marketing ROI.

“This reinvention along with the introduction of our art vs science scale has redefined how we build campaigns, deliver and measure effectiveness,” Macgregor says.

Discerning decision making

At the same time, Macgregor made the big call to stop investing in the Kapello personalisation platform, which was consuming a significant share of marketing resources and incompatible with Amaysim systems. Despite two years of effort from 10+ core team members spanning data science, martech, CVM and engineering, the platform wasn’t delivering commercial value.

“I had a one-to-one conversation with each core team member, revealing no one believed it would deliver a good commercial return,” says Macgregor. “Momentum was driven purely by senior stakeholder bias. I recalled advice from a former boss: ‘Too many leaders optimise a program that should never have existed’. That stuck.

“As CMO, I called an emergency SLT meeting, shared the feedback from each individual and pitched reallocating resources to Salesforce Data Cloud, a platform we already owned but had underutilised. Within three months, we saw stronger returns: 28 per cent higher campaign conversions at four times the scale, delivered faster with fewer people. The team is now more engaged and proactively identifying further martech to retire.”

This decision wasn’t just about cost for Macgregor. “It was about better utilising the limited resource we have for a better commercial return and empowering our team to drive, servant leadership approach vs parent child or top down.”

Business influence

Shaping the strategic agenda and fostering company-wide alignment has been another of Macgregor’s missions as CMO.

“The objective was to launch a bold new company ambition and strategy, motivate the team, and ensure clarity at every level: Company, team and individual,” he says. “I led the redesign of our strategic framework and ‘Plan on a Page’, flipping the structure to lead with purpose, values, and culture, placing people at the heart of our growth ambition. We introduced three company-wide strategic themes.”

To embed this, Macgregor co-designed and led ‘Play-2-Win’, a company-wide two-day offsite for all 117 employees. “Through immersive storytelling, customer insight presentations, persona-based skits, and interactive team and initiative sessions, we brought strategy to life in a way that resonated across Engineering, IT, Operations, CX, Customer Service, Finance, Sales and Marketing,” he says, adding a powerful new ambition also came out of the exercise.

The impact? A record-high engagement score in Amaysim’s 14-year history. “Employees cited unprecedented clarity, excitement about the new ambition, and a clear understanding of how their team and individual work connects to the company’s direction,” adds Macgregor.

Data-driven decision making

Another one of the shifts Macgregor is leading internally is around how to make decisions by embedding data-driven discipline into both customer experience and media investment strategies. A milestone thus far is an insight to action framework for voice of the customer.

“We were overwhelmed by disconnected customer insights, brand health trackers, churn surveys, acquisition surveys, social reviews, product reviews, customer care feedback, CX/UX insights, leading to fragmented decision-making and misaligned resource allocation,” he explains.

Tasked with consolidating insights, structure prioritisation, and creating focus, Macgregor came up with the strategic framework and governance model, then led a Voice of the Customer Forum to aggregate all sources (NPS, CSAT, churn, UX, sales, competitor research), identify common themes, and build a prioritised action plan and backlog.

“This ensured clear accountability, visibility on what we’re fixing, and alignment on what we’re not,” he says. “As a result, our SLT and stakeholder are crystal clear that our next quarter is laser-focused on improving what was identified as our highest friction and highest impact issue, rather than diluting resources across less critical improvements. If we can fix this, we estimate customer retention benefit in year along with increased CNPS as this is a high-volume issue.”

To help with data-driven marketing decision making and get away from digital first because it’s simply more measurable, Amaysim has also invested in the Mutinex Marketing Mix Modelling platform.

“Traditionally our media mix has been highly skewed to digital vs non and we didn’t have a great understanding of our attribution across it all,” continues Macgregor.

Since adopting the model, marketing ROI rose by double-digit percentage points in a year, with the head of Amaysim and CFO’s full support. “We have seen our overall cost per acquisition decrease – that is, more sales for less opex – helped by more investment in emotive channels like radio and video. It’s a strategy shaped entirely by data.

“Together, these initiatives demonstrate how structured data interpretation, capability building, and executive alignment can unlock smarter marketing decisions with a tangible customer and commercial impact.”

Commercial delivery

It’s clear Macgregor is committed to transforming marketing. The fruit of his labours is now visible to the executive leadership team. “With one week to go until year-end, marketing has been the undeniable growth engine of Amaysim,” he says.

“We’ve had marketing-led, breakthrough E2E tentpole campaigns that step-changed sales performance and awareness of Amaysim in the market, launched a new MMM-based media strategy, and overhauled web journeys, lifting conversion. We launched NBN with arguably Australia’s best CX, multiple steps for an existing customer to sign up and activate vs the industry’s 20, achieving one of the highest NBN NPS in market.”

Having also migrated customers off 3G devices, Amaysim has exited underperforming martech, and reinvested in undervalued platforms already delivering ROI, and scaled its mobile device portfolio year-on-year. Recognition followed, with parent company SingTel citing Amaysim as a ‘high-growth brand’ in 2025 HY results. Optus CEO also told  Amaysim drove “93% of all new subscribers” for the group.

People leadership

For Macgregor, it all comes down to building a playground for growth. To do that, he knows it’s critical to drive culture, capability and collaboration across the whole organisation, not just marketing.

“As CMO, I’m committed to building a high-performing, learning-first culture that thrives in a dynamic, competitive landscape. My mantra is to create the future CX, marketing, and commercial leaders of tomorrow,” he comments.

As well as offering the whole marketing team, plus finance, product and commercial teams, the ability to do an accredited Marketing MBA program, he’s introduced AI training, bringing in prompt engineers to upskill the marketing and product teams across prompting, tools, and innovation. Staff can additionally access specialist product, design and digital training via Macquarie University.

“Every week, our entire team connects to debate marketing craft, CX impact, and industry work. We use the creative versus impact scale to orient the conversation,” Macgregor says. “These sessions drive creative excellence, critical thinking, and shared learning. Our Play2Win offsite which I helped lead syncs the company on strategy, team and individual goals, while our weekly numbers session [run with my insight analyst] shares real-time performance in a fun, engaging way to the whole organisation.”

In addition, Amaysim has launched new internal awards as an incentive and recognition for the crew: GOAT Award, People’s Champion, Marketer of the Year, Biggest Swing & Energy Giver award.

“I take pride in our ‘Playground for Growth’ culture, supporting talent even when growth takes to another business outside Amaysim… I take pride in being one of our brand’s biggest champions, and inspiring a growth mindset, energising all to become one of our brand’s biggest champions, and energising all teams, guiding strategy, driving brilliant execution, to ensure we enjoy the journey together.”