Agencies & Consulting

Kenny Hill’s Akkomplice is merging into Howatson+Company, securing a new home for clients and talent in the face of a market moving headlong into consolidation as CMOs demand more services from fewer partners (usually for less margin). Howatson said acquisition was never part of the roadmap, but there is always an exception to the rule, even as AI in the medium term puts pressure on headcount across the board. He thinks the upshot is agencies may end up with fewer junior staff and more seniors. In the meantime, Howatson believes full-service integration enables agencies to take more slices of a shrinking pie at the expense of niche specialists – which means most will have to start “doing more things”, i.e. fuller service, to navigate incoming turbulence.

After 16 months as CEO of the troubled Dentsu ANZ operation, former Accenture and PwC consulting operative, Patricio De Matteis, has emerged and fronted another restructuring and more rounds of layoffs. Dentsu agency CEOs are out – media boss Danny Bass and Merkle CEO Steve Yurisich included – as a new power posse of three ANZ executives reporting to De Matteis was announced to staff yesterday. Market rumblings already have Bass set to join the expansionist Australian market mix modelling firm Mutinex. Bass and Mutinex CEO Henry Innis would not be drawn, "I don't confirm active or inactive processes we are in," Innis said. Dentsu briefed staff yesterday that Bass and Yurisich would leave the business, along with another 50 jobs at Merkle and iProspect that have been cut in recent weeks.

An eclectic group of business founders and c-suite execs gathered in Nine’s Sydney HQ recently as part of the Compadres business mentoring initiative created by former agency boss and founding partner of poverty non-profit, Global Citizen, Clive Burcham. The lure was a dazzling macro view on geo-politics, AI, retail, marketing, advertising and media and entertainment from a career marketer, John Batistich, who now sits or advises nine company boards from Zip Co and FoodCo to Ksubi International and the $1bn Australian toy company “you’ve never heard of”, Moose Toys.     

Stuart Archibald was one of the early proponents of database marketing in the 1990s, forming part of the exec team that launched Tesco’s Club Card, ultimately helping Tesco topple Sainsbury’s #1 UK supermarket slot. But Archibald says hefty corporate tech and CX investments today are spluttering after deployment and most companies “have lost their basic human understanding of customers”.

Programmatic digital out of home (pDOOH) is starting to make headway in the Australian marketplace, but remains a single digit percentage of the overall OOH pie. To start catching up with penetration in more advanced markets, agencies reckon owners must fully embrace the medium and stop selling – and setting targets – in silos. In return, they will do their bit on justifying higher CPMs. Nexus’ James Lambert, PHD’s Joanna Barnes, Initiative's Paige Wheaton, Kinesso's Michael Whiteside, EssenceMediacom’s Katherine Pochroj and Jean-Christophe Conti weigh in.

OMG Chief Investment Officer Kristiaan Kroon says advertisers have reacted to sustained macro pressures with "relationship rationalisation". That bodes ill for all but the largest publishers with tight propositions and the ability to execute at scale. Generalists will find ad revenues shrinking even if the bear ad market turns bullish, though he sees upside for publishers with niche, high value audiences. Private Media CEO Will Hayward agrees. The problem is, media agencies are not set up to work with myriad small publishers, despite some talking up media diversity. Even if planners and strategists buy-in, investment directors and CEOs have little incentive "if it's going to take five times as long" for the same percentage cut, per Avid Collective MD Luke Spano. Concrete Playground MD Alex Light says at least one investment director at a holdco-owned agency is more receptive to "deeper" connections over reach, but Spano thinks the only way for independents to compete with News and Nine is via aggregation. He's planning to build "The Trade Desk" of native content – and claims white labelling conversations with holdcos locally and globally are progressing fast.

Agency and media strategy guru, David Fish, sees an awful lot of short-term thinking going on – and it’s leading too many businesses and leaders to jump at shadows and fail to focus on things that matter most – like category disruption. Having signed up as one of the new mentors under former GroupM boss and McDonald's CMO Mark Lollback's Global Mentorship venture, Fish is looking to bring his agency and media strategy experiences – from good to bad and ugly – to mentees seeking a mindset reset and a way to grow in an evolving world of work where emotional connection and employee belonging remain paramount to future success.  

WPP's VML is the tenth merger ANZ CEO Thomas Tearle has under his belt to date. As agencies locally and globally rush to consolidate brands, he says it's "becoming a specialism". Three months into the VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson smush, he claims it's not far off "humming" and isn't just a bid for efficiency. But in all mergers there is always a cultural unknown to navigate, "the only thing you can't predict is the team dynamics."

One of the top global bosses for the Paramount+ streaming service, Marco Nobili, was in Australia this week in the lead-up to the launch of an advertising subscription tier for Paramount+ and he expects the $6.99 entry point will “take a lot of volume”. The newly minted President for Network 10, Head of Streaming and Paramount regional lead, Beverley McGarvey, acknowledged broadcaster BVOD services were never likely to replace linear’s TV’s audience erosion alone but when audiences from its SVOD, BVOD, linear and FAST – or free digital ad-supported linear TV channels – are bundled, the business is “getting closer to a one-for-one” replacement of linear TV. But both execs say that’s also less important than the business economics of a combined subscription and advertising business. Australia is in Paramount’s top tier globally for SVOD ARPU – or average revenue per user.

Archies Footwear's big bet on high quality content pays off as six times Golden Foot champion Yanderas Janderas proves a social media super star, driving higher sales and strong brand engagement. 35 million views later, the brand has achieved an average post-engagement increase of over 30 per cent. It's a second time collaboration for Archies Footwear head of marketing Ruben Thompson and the team at ODV. They first worked together on a campaign for NZ bathroom products brand Two Dudes.

Hello Social has broken cover on plans to step beyond social and into full service. MD Sam Kelly thinks there's a gap in the market for effective end-to-end agencies – and said the firm has already been filling it, using social media as a “Trojan horse” to sneak onto rosters and into agency villages to pick up wider work and build out its capability. The Surry Hills agency is now officially rolling out Hello Talent, Hello Media, Hello PR and Hello Create, alongside an expanded creative, studio and production division. MD Sam Kelly reckons there’s huge demand from brands for agencies that can drive campaigns in between big brand moments – but “don’t want to spend $2 million bucks just to play”. Now he’s eyeing more rosters.

Tourism Australia has knocked back conjecture that its hotly anticipated creative and digital pitch had landed. Clemenger Group, Publicis Groupe and Accenture are all still in the game – their responses over the next weeks to a comprehensive and strategic brief for the next iteration of Tourism Australia’s Come and Say G’Day campaign will determine who lands one of the most prestigious – and economically critical – accounts in the country. All three runners are making strategic capability moves to bring it home.

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.