Marketing

Some of the world's largest advertisers – including PepsiCo, Unilever, Adobe, L’Oreal, Nestlé, Honda, Samsung, Paramount+ and the US Department of Homeland Security are among those mired in allegations that their ads were served on websites containing child sexual abuse. Those accused of failing to spot the warning signs and involved in the supply chain include Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Outbrain and others along with ad verification services monitoring brand safety and ad industry standards bodies including the US-based globally influential Media Ratings Council and TAG. Now US Senators have waded in and want answers. Former UM privacy chief turned watchdog at Check My Ads, Arielle Garcia, thinks the fallout is only just starting.

Part 1: WooliesX learned the hard way that misconfigured customer data platforms can rapidly rack up unbudgeted costs. It's not the only Australian CDP user to experience 'bill shock'. Almost all the CDP customers Mi3 spoke with had similar stories. But WooliesX at least got its money back after Tealium 'forgave' the cost. Most customers are not so lucky as big vendors push the onus onto them to use the tools provided to manage blowouts. Meanwhile, the market has cooled from the "CDP bender" of two years ago amid heightened competition, tough macros and the zombie effect of Google keeping cookies alive. The good news is that the firms Mi3 interviewed in 2023 about their fledgling CDP integrations are now driving gains. Media costs are down and engagement is up, and brands who have weathered rocky implementation experiences say they have much greater insights into their customer behaviours. Plus, the process prepares them for what's about to hit with AI.

As a result of its digital transformation, which kicked off at the start of the decade, the Sydney Opera House has revamped its operational strategy, fostering collaboration among ticketing, technology and marketing teams to enhance customer experience. With new tools like a 'Select Your Own Seat' feature and a password-less login system, the iconic venue is not just responding to customer feedback but actively prioritising innovations that streamline user interactions and improve accessibility across its platform.

"We already share helicopters," an upbeat Seven West Media CEO Jeff Howard told an analyst earnings call yesterday as he signalled the three major commercial TV bosses at Nine, Paramount-Ten and Seven are aligned on more collaboration. But Howard stopped short on the possibility of the free TV majors combining revenues via the circa $60m investment Seven has ploughed into the tech build of Phoenix, launching in March, which unites linear TV, regional TV and digital assets in a multi-screen trading platform. The upward swing in sentiment from Seven's new chief over a turning ad market, stabilising linear TV audiences and share and audience gains at 7plus is a long way from the carnage last year when Howard axed veteran commercial chief Kurt Burnette and chief marketer Mel Hopkins as part of a broader cost-out program. He said he's not planning to hire another CMO – but sales is set for a shake-up.

CEOs and CFOs at some of the world's biggest consumer brands – including Colgate, PepsiCo, Kimberly-Clark and L’Oreal, Ford and Mondelez – say they’re increasing spend on advertising and promotional activities because they believe in its power to drive growth. Yet study the commentary a little harder and there's a thread of ruthless and relentless marketing optimisation and efficiency connected to every dollar spent. Companies are throwing everything from AI analytics tools to agency relationship reviews at their approach to find better ROI.

Commerciality and AI are the hot skills Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) chief, Bronwyn Heys, sees people from all size of organisation, industry category and seniority level knocking down her door to develop. But they’re certainly not the only evolving skillsets marketers need if they’re to going to continue to be able to not only do the job today, but remain relevant tomorrow. With recruiters intimating there are too many performance-led marketers lacking well-rounded abilities in market, it’s equally clear breadth in skills is critical for career progression, she says. As the marketing association officially debuts its new Competency Assessment Tool, a little over a year after debuting its cross-disciplinary skills program and Competency Framework, Heys speaks to Mi3 about why it’s so critical marketers – and for that matter, agency account managers too – should be getting their personalised development learning pathway in order.

Australia’s consumers view the proposed social media age ban as the tech-policy equivalent of slapping duct tape on a leaky dam. The latest paper from the team charged with determining the best way to implement the technology behind the bipartisan policy reveals that while Australians are all for the principle, they’re less convinced about the practice. Concerns about flimsy enforcement, data privacy nightmares, and the nagging suspicion that kids will outsmart the system faster than you can say “parental controls” abound. In short: Everyone wants the fence, but no one believes it’ll hold.

The first-ever CMO Awards, powered by Mi3, are now officially open for nominations. From demonstrating effective marketing strategy and business influence, to exhibitions of data-driven decision-making commercial impact and people leadership, this recognition program is all about showcasing the vital role marketing leaders play in delivering business growth.  

After a record sales year, Australia's automotive sector is braced for change, with some brands potentially exiting as competitive pressure sharpens and regulatory changes force product and pricing shifts. BYD marketing boss Kate Hornstein, Kia marketing GM Dean Norbiato and BMW counterpart Alex McLean unpack what's coming down the track. Meanwhile fresh analysis from Adgile shows share of voice winners and losers from TV-streaming mix switches.

Former ABC director of audiences and marketer, Leisa Bacon, is following up a decade-long stint with the public broadcaster by taking up the reins as Creative Australia’s executive director of development and partnerships. It’s a job uniting her passion for arts and culture with her extensive - and highly necessary skillset in stakeholder management – plus a willingness to take on transformative challenges. Because the appointment comes a juncture when the government body, which dishes out more than $250m a year to support Australia’s arts and culture community, reshapes its approach to funding and supporting one of the nation’s most persistently challenged industries post-pandemic.

Twelve days ago, Boomi CEO and Chairman Steve Lucas issued a blunt directive: All customer interactions and half of all business processes must be AI enhanced. It was a mandate, not an aspiration. AI isn’t the future, it’s the battleground of now, and industry graveyards will be littered with the bodies of 'a thousand Blockbusters' who failed to change, Lucas told Mi3. Boomi isn’t just selling AI, it’s living it. By integrating AI agents into its own workflows, the company is already banking some big wins says CMO Alison Biggan. For instance, it has cut deal cycles by 41 days and boosted prospect-to-lead conversions by 47 per cent. Lucas’s message to his customers based on Boomi's own experience is clear: Audit your knowledge processes, mandate AI adoption over 12-18 months, or risk irrelevance in an economy where the giants are already automating at scale.

Adopting an Australian-made voice-to-AI assistant technology has already paid for itself – and 18 months of slogging through APIs connecting a disparate dealer management system network – by giving Suzuki Australia a way of measuring and understanding the volume and success of service calls to its national dealer network for the first time. It’s a customer retention and experience win the automotive company’s GM claims as a first for the local automotive industry and also an AI-first globally that’s now being eagerly watched by HQ in Japan.

Westpac’s chief marketer Annabel Fribence has departed the bank amid a strategic and reporting overhaul under new CEO Anthony Miller. Former marketing and brand boss Elaine Herlihy steps back into the breach almost a decade after leaving for PayPal – and the creative account pitch that saw long-term partner DDB jettisoned has been re-scoped with input from a significant number of Westpac execs. Reporting lines for both brand and procurement are now understood to sit with customer and corporate affairs chief, Carolyn McCann. It may be that DDB holds the account for a year longer than anticipated.

According to System1, consistency in creative translates to +10 per cent sales value gain, +18 per cent profit gain and +19 per cent market share gain. Its analysis finds brands save millions in annual media spend and attain double-digit growth by not changing their core messaging. Arnott’s CMO says adopting and holding firm to a masterbrand platform saw advertising ROI go from $2.95 in the first 12 months to $3.36 in the second year. Meanwhile, the 20-year-old ‘Should’ve gone to Specsavers’ distinctive asset and creative concept just keep on delivering. Analytic Partners reckons only 14 ads in Australia have actually ever actually worn out – and 51,000 never even got the chance to wear in. Yet marketers and agencies remain addicted to constantly switching.

Whether it’s switching from the banking sector to higher education, convincing cross-functional stakeholders to stop seeing marketing as a service function and instead a driver of growth, pivoting an annual student recruitment event into the virtual realm, or challenging her creative agency to let AI come up with new brand territories to explore, Swinburne University CMO, Carolyn Bendall, hasn’t been afraid to shake things up. Now, as she exits after a five-year stint even she didn’t think she’d complete, the former ANZ bank marketer shares the hurdles and wins from her attempts to modernise and digitise marketing in the tertiary and vocational education space – and what she’s about to do next.

Commbank has usurped Woolworths to become Australia's most valuable brand for the first time in five years. The shift comes as Australia's supermarket duopoly face sustained negative reputational pressure due to allegations of price gouging. But corporate affairs and marketing chiefs needn't think the sky's falling in when crises hit, per Brand Finance MD, Mark Crowe. Customers are highly unlikely to go the extra mile to do the shop – and impacts can be managed. But he warns long-term reputational hits will do upstream damage. Meanwhile, though brand value scores indicate how brand contributes to profit and economic growth, Crowe cautions against using it as a KPI for marketing teams.

Personalised product rates, piping micro-segmentation into owned and paid channels for more effective and personalised messaging, making marketing as much about service as advertising and better consent management are all part of TSB CMO, Emma Springham’s plan to improve customer outcomes at the mutual bank. Having been hit with multi-million-dollar fines by the UK’s financial regulatory body for historically lacking suitable systems to address customers falling into arrears, plus confronted by more rigorous UK consumer duty laws cracking down on financial services players, you could argue there are hefty regulatory reasons why TSB should do so. But Springham views the new laws as an enabler that’s further supporting her proactive, cross-functional and data-driven approach. The aim is to provide more “magical” than “miserable” customer experiences by highlighting and prompting around personalised benefits, she says, improving money confidence and taking the anxiety out of increasingly complex products during a cost-of-living crisis. Plus, it helps the results are coming down the line already, including a 300 per cent home loan sales boost in one month.

Having outlaid $100m per annum over the last three years to build out its Australian property and product footprint, privately owned caravan and holiday park giant, G’Day Group, has firmly turned its attention to end-to-end customer experience and with it, technology transformation. The Adelaide-based business, which generates nearly $400m in revenue and boasts of a portfolio valued at $2bn, put $10 million in the FY23/24 year alone towards a much-needed, multi-year transformation of its digital and mobile app experiences, along with advanced technologies across the business. Helping spearhead the digital revamp is CMO and GM of the group’s G’Day Parks digital bookings business, Lahnee White, who shares why it’s more critical than ever that marketers gain their technologist stripes in order to deliver better outcomes for their customers.

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 Katie 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.”

Tabcorp has followed up 200 fresh job cuts, one-quarter of which have hit its customer division, with the exit of chief customer officer, Jenni Barnett, along with CIO, Alan Sharvin. In their place comes a new executive structure introducing a chief wagering officer position with marketing and product oversight but even closer ties to wagering revenue, plus a chief commercial and media officer role assumed by former Paramount ANZ and Network Ten regional leader, Jarrod Villani. The redundancies are the latest marker of job cuts sweeping media companies, agencies and brands – some overt, others by stealth. The economy may be on the turn but some think slow growth and cost cutting due to sustained business model pressure may be "the new normal". 

An Australian publisher class action against Google’s alleged nefarious and anti-competitive practices to squash the publishing industry is being led by one of Australia’s top silks in competition and commercial law, John Sheahan. The widely regarded barrister is also representing Coles in its case defending ACCC allegations that the two big supermarket chains engaged in deceptive pricing conduct, including Coles “Down Down” marketing. Sheahan is also a member of the Takeovers Panel which is under the remit of the Federal Treasurer.

Selling marketing’s worth while avoiding selling success every time, along with how to work with boards now obsessed by risk, were key imperatives marketing leaders from Guzman y Gomez and Uber, along with one non-executive director, tackled on a panel at the launch of the CMO Awards, powered by Mi3. In a discussion that reflected the very nature of elevating marketing’s stature in business and its role in powering growth, the trio were quick to agree challenge is the mother of opportunity if you’re able to reframe macro-economic conditions – and trust your gut as well as data some of the time.

Last weekend Netflix’s #2 trending title in Australia underlined just how good marketing and product teams in fashion, FMCG and consumer tech have got at triggering desire to the extent executives who worked for – and ran – some of the biggest names in consumer goods and ecommerce globally now say convenient consumption brought about by the ecom revolution is producing such an increase in waste it's choking countries designated for dumped re-use and recycling – literally. Company presidents, top marketers, UX designers and even Unilever’s former CEO outline the impact of industry mastering the science of consumption for growth strategies that have already busted the thresholds for planetary trash. It's a perplexing conundrum going mainstream if the popularity of the Netflix film is any signal.

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.