Brent Smart is excited by ideas. As a creative-led CMO, he’s demonstrated time and time again that he’s the sum of his convictions when it comes to how he approaches, develops and executes on brand. In taking on the CMO reins at Telstra two-and-a-half years ago, he’s set about demonstrating not just what creative can do to win consumer mindshare for Australia’s largest telco, but how it can deliver commercial gains and foster a more learning-oriented culture, too.

Effective marketing strategy

Smart positions his approach as one of creative transformation: To overhaul one of Australia’s largest legacy brands and bastion of corporate risk aversion, Telstra, in an industry that views the creatively-led CMO as somehow less serious than the commercially-focused or data-driven one.

“Ironically, creativity is the smartest commercial decision a CMO can make, with high-quality creative driving 2.5x more revenue growth and 4x more profit than average creative. Proving that creativity is serious business after all,” Smart comments. “Lots of people talk about creativity, but how do you commercialise it and systematise it, without strangling it?”

For Smart and his team, creative excellence isn’t just a core belief, it is a program that embeds creativity into marketing culture, and he wants to coach people to embrace creative thinking to improve the effectiveness of every initiative.

“We treat creativity as a capability, setting out to raise the creative confidence of our team. We have designed a bespoke system to create a common creative language and quantify our creative output,” he explains.

Helping here is Telstra’s innovative bespoke agency model, +61, which sees creative led by independent agency, Bear Meets Eagle on Fire, paired with larger player, TBWA, and supported by OMD on media – all under one commercial arrangement. The structure rolled out in late 2023.

The fruit of these labours include Telstra’s work to create brand moments with cultural impact at Christmas, the Paris 2024 Olympics and the Footy Finals. “We obsess over the craft. Our work gets talked about, not just here, globally. Last year, we had not one but four Editor’s Picks in Ad Age USA, something no other Australian brand has ever done,” Smart says.

“But that’s not why we do it. We have transformed our brand creatively to transform our business commercially, with marketing delivering measurable increases in effectiveness from 2022 to 2024.”

Marketing Mix Modelling, for example, shows the work has grown additional revenue driven by marketing, with a double-digit increase in return on advertising spend.

One of the inputs that fed into Telstra’s rethought brand positioning was how it had been perceived in market. Despite significant improvements in customer experience and record-high NPS, its reputation was in the lower rungs of Australian brand ranks. The problem lay with non-customers who rated the telco lower on reputation than actual customers.

“All our CX investments were not felt by non-customers; only brand advertising could reach them and capture their attention and start to change how they felt,” Smart points out.

To shape the brief, Smart commissioned an ethnographic study, with the most telling insights coming from when people were asked to draw the Telstra brand. These inferred traits such as corporate, boring, profit-focused and a company that sometimes talked down to customers.

“Working closely with our agency +61, we developed a unifying brand idea for Telstra, ‘Wherever we go’. It was an optimistic promise of partnership and a better future, born out of our company’s purpose to ‘build a connected future so everyone can thrive’,” says Smart. “We didn’t just reinvigorate a way of working or capability, we reinvigorated the whole brand, giving it a warmer, less-serious and more human brand personality.

“Unlike other big brands that hold up a mirror to their customers and stick to corporate design templates, we wanted to stretch our brand into animation and hand-crafted visuals. While our executional styles may change, the brand has found a distinct voice and design language.”

The new brand work had instant cut through in-market. In the first week of launch, recognition hit 34 per cent, 14-points above the category norm for the end of campaigns. Telstra even saw traction with hard to move non-customers, who rated the business higher if they recalled the brand advertising, leading to the highest ever non-customer reputation score in late 2024.

According to Brand Finance, Telstra is the fourth-strongest telco brand in the world, increasing brand strength +2.9 points in the last year, while the average decline for the top 100 telco brands was -0.13 points. The Telstra brand is now outperforming its category by 20x.

Discerning decision making

The mobile phone market is hyper-competitive; to win against the other telcos, retailers and the handset makers, Telstra had invested heavily in trade / performance marketing. When Smart arrived in late 2022, this kind of work consumed a huge chunk of the media budget.

“As a disciple of Binet & Field, I knew we were a long way from the optimal 60:40 brand: performance mix for long-term growth,” he says. “To meaningfully change our mix would require a meaningful budget reallocation – and shifting out of what was seen internally as hard working, into brand that was seen as ‘soft’. This was a high-risk move; if business performance faltered in the short term, there would be no support for more brand investment longer term.”

The answer was designing a test market. In Adelaide from Feb-June 2023, Telstra changed its investment mix to 50:50 brand: performance, hoping it wouldn’t see a drop in retail metrics. In fact, the opposite happened, with sales higher than the national average. This gave Smart’s team the confidence to double brand investment and reduce trading spend, shifting the split to 40:60 brand: performance in the 2024 financial year. It’s seen marketing deliver a +13.4 per cent growth in media-driven revenue and +27.5 per cent growth in ROAS, including Trading ROAS of +39 per cent.

Business influence

Meanwhile, with such a sizeable share of sales happening in the Christmas retail period, rethinking the approach to market at this time was another must. Real headwinds had buffered the business in late 2023, including a recent price rise and offers were being outgunned by competitors. Yet the business objectives were to grow activations and revenue.

Traditionally, marketing had approached Black Friday and Christmas tactically, and as two retail campaigns to end the calendar.

“We saw a bigger strategic opportunity to make Christmas a cultural moment for the brand. We used emotional storytelling at the brand level to establish a theme that we could integrate across both sales events and all channels,” says Smart. “This required big changes to our go-to-market planning and execution, with marketing collaborating closely with retail, trading, merchandising and digital teams to deliver integration across all touchpoints.”

Smart points to another little-known gem, ‘Free Calls to Santa’, which employed recorded voice messages on Telstra payphones at Christmas. “We wanted to make it a famous Christmas ritual, elevating the experience through conversational AI, requiring deep collaboration with data, AI and technology teams at Telstra and partners at Google.”

This whole-of-business approach to Christmas delivered impressive business results. Telstra CEO Vicki Brady even called it out when talking about financial results in the Australian Financial Review:  “Brady played down any major boost from her competitor’s (Optus) misfortune, pointing to a strong Christmas advertising campaign from Telstra.”

For Christmas 2023, the story of a lost reindeer established the theme ‘Hello Christmas’ and grew mobile revenue while delivering ROI of 505 per cent for every dollar spent on the campaign. In all, 590,000 free calls were made to Santa, up 400 per cent year-on-year, and the Telstra marketing team won a silver Effie amongst 15 global and local awards for the effort.

By Christmas 2024, the story had evolved to a singing donkey, linking the brand idea with the theme ‘wherever we go, together is for Christmas’.  It managed to beat 2023’s impressive results, increasing revenue further year-on-year and seeing calls to Santa climb even higher.

Data-driven decision making

Smart is creative-led, always. “But data comes first in the process, to understand the business problem and audience,” he says. “I see my role as chief storyteller; yes, emotional brand stories, but also telling stories with data to demonstrate the commercial value marketing is delivering.”

To do that in a compelling way, Smart knew the team needed to get beyond clicks and attribution to more sophisticated modelling. Marketing partnered with Annalect to build a bespoke econometric model with unrivalled scale and sophistication in this market, including more than 7500 campaigns modelled using 40 distinct data sources and 10 automated data feeds.

“Granularity is clarity - we can model not just by campaign, media channel or product, but down to the purchase channel, device and partner,” says Smart. “Our model measures both short-term ROI within the quarter and has nested models to measure long-term brand impact.”

The model also focuses on new activation revenue, to align with the company’s growth objectives. So far, it’s showing marketing directly contributes close to half of new connection revenue, doubling its revenue contribution in two years.

“We also believe in constantly testing and learning with data-driven experiments,” continues Smart.

As well as the brand testing already mentioned, data has fuelled multi-state search experiments, revealing a point of diminishing returns where search delivers more traffic but less conversion. Tests removing brand search terms and reinvesting into generic search drove sales uplift and cemented organic search’s power. It’s also helped guide where and when to use and turn off performance marketing for the long-tail of products supported, delivering sales uplift.

Commercial delivery

Through all of these efforts, marketing under Smart has delivered impressive commercial growth at the top and bottom of the funnel, despite price rises and Telstra’s position at the premium end of the market.

“Overlaid with Australia’s cost-of-living crisis, it is clear our growth is defying market and category trends,” says Smart. “Increased brand investment and stronger brand creative has increased the commercial value of the Telstra brand. Telstra is the third-most valuable brand in Australia, valued at $12.1 billion.”

Smart can demonstrate marketing added millions upon millions to the value of the brand in 2024, with stronger brand a multiplier effect, improving the effectiveness of trading and performance marketing. Since shifting brand: trading media budget allocation from 20:80 to 40:60, he’s seen ROAS increase by 75 per cent, for instance.

“We have also elevated the craft of our retail advertising and optimised digital performance marketing, improving commercial performance at the bottom of the funnel,” he says, adding trading activity ROAS has also increased.

People leadership

With creativity his key to effectiveness, Smart has also made it the focus of learning and culture, treating creativity as a capability to be build and improved.

“That demands a capability lead, in our case, Head of Creative Excellence; a role on my leadership team that you won’t see on many others,” he notes. “We benchmarked our creative capability against the best marketers in the world with the help of Cannes Lions Advisory. Through this process, we realised the capability gap in our people was a lack of creative confidence.

“To build creative confidence, you need a common creative language and a way to mark improvement. We designed the Telstra Creative Dial to do just that. It helps us quantify every output, every channel, every quarter. We also include an external perspective from the Global CCO of TBWA, to keep us honest. Having scored every quarter since September 2023, we have seen our creative output improve from an average of 3.8 to 5.5 in December 2024.”

However, the Dial more than a score for Smart, it is a coaching tool. “We use it for quarterly deep dives with each team to give feedback and train in areas such as brief writing,” he says. “We even do ‘before and afters’, where we take low scoring work and re-execute it with the team, so they can learn from doing [or re-doing]. We don’t just critique our work, we also celebrate it, with our annual internal creative awards, the Dials, each October.

“Turns out we have created a virtuous circle at Telstra. As the creative confidence of the team has improved, the quality of our creative product has improved and the effectiveness of our marketing has improved, delivering better commercial results for our business. That’s why we wanted to be more creative in the first place.”