Marketing

Young, cashed up and ready to party, the legion of Swifties who poured into the Sydney and Melbourne CBDs for the artist's recent concert series lifted spending by 4 per cent and 6 per cent respectively in each city. And those figures are conservative, says the Commbank iQ executive who ran the analysis. Here's where the money went.

Metcash has dropped some tantalising details about its incoming retail media network. The ASX-listed retail buying group is keeping cards close to its chest, but sees "significant" revenue and margin from joining larger rivals in building out a media business. Supermarkets are first, liquor comes next – and if the numbers stack up, the rest of the business will then follow, per CEO Doug Jones. While the likes of Coles and Woolworths are powering ahead with big national plays, Metcash spies competitive advantage – and pay dirt – in localised advertising and SMEs, with a profit share for its independent retailers.

Adobe global CMO of Digital Experience, Eric Hall, wants companies to make bigger, bolder bets on their technology investments like consumers do, and break free of the incrementalism mindset they’ve been holding onto. And he’s seeing Adobe’s increasingly solid platform play and its brand-safe approach to AI as a compelling way to achieve that – provided the martech vendor can get better at elevating its own brand story with CMOs, CIOs and CEOs. During this year’s Adobe Summit, the marketing chief caught up with Mi3 to discuss the very practical AI innovations coming into the Adobe stack to drive personalisation at scale, what it’s going to take to make AI less scary for marketers, and how the vendor itself is working to improve its own marketing to marketers.

Coca-Cola has 2 billion interactions with consumers on a daily basis globally, but it didn’t know much about these customers until it started working towards a unified marketing operations approach as part of its pursuit under CMO and EVP, Manolo Arroyo, to be the best marketing team in the world – by a lot. In partnership with Adobe and WPP, the FMCG has so far built out 152m actionable consumer profiles in 129 countries. Across this, it’s applying 2,200 customer segments, with 27 data sources contributing to profile richness. And the good news is it’s paying off commercially, with known customers spending 27 per cent more. During Adobe Summit, Coca-Cola’s global head of marketing technology, Shekhar Gowda, detailed the business challenge and what it’s taken to try and harness 180 creative brand managers and thousands of people globally into one portfolio approach while retaining creativity.

Reflections Holidays CMO, Pete Chapman, has spent between $500k and $1M on an all-encompassing rebrand of the $500m NSW social enterprise and park operator. He’s confident of payback within 12 months and 10x returns in coming years. Why does he think it’ll work? Getting buy-in from its 420 employees first, building brand strategy and creative idea from the inside out, rather than handing the reins to agencies, an eye on distinctiveness, and a commitment to building mental availability over quick performance wins all have something to do with it. Marketing investment, per Chapman, "from here, is going to be 80-85 per cent brand, and 15-20 per cent performance".

A year on from debuting its family of creative AI models, Adobe has used this year’s annual Las Vegas Summit to detail the latest ways it’s extending the tentacles of generative AI capabilities into all aspects of the content supply chain and across its Experience Cloud suite for marketers. It’s a play that brings AI directly into the tools marketers are using for everyday tasks. On hand to tout the benefits of the vendor’s martech platform and growing automation and AI capabilities was giant health brand, Pfizer. The vaccine maker cited 50 per cent-plus productivity gains plus 75 per cent faster content creation and is now eyeing bigger gains – a five-fold increase in content productivity via rapid adoption of Adobe’s tools and up to $1 billion in near-term value off the back of its broader AI play.

The 24^th edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer shows a 4 percentage point lift in trust sentiment across Australia, bringing us out of negative and into neutral territory. But underneath the topline figure is a bubbling pot of fear and scepticism, particularly with regards to new innovations such as AI and the way they’re being managed by government and business. Existential concerns prompted by technology – specifically cybersecurity and information wars – are also now superseding personal economic fears around inflation. This is despite the fact Australia’s wealth gap is playing a direct role in how we view and embrace innovation. For Edelman Australia CEO, Tom Robinson, increasingly politicised views plus the echo chamber of relying on peers and ‘people like me’ as trusted sources of information over and above government, business leaders, scientists and technical experts, is another worry. The message for brands and businesses? It’s time to reset thinking on business-government partnerships, spokespeople and messaging and turn up the dial on listening and nuance.

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.

Almost 18 months on from its belated official move into the bustling retailer media sector – and widespread calls from brands and suppliers for retail media networks to ‘close the loop’ on advertising’s ‘causality’ to customer purchases – Coles 360 briefed 250 suppliers last week on a measurement platform it has custom-built with global retail data specialist, Circana. The launch of 360Impact, led by former Meta marketing science boss Andy Ford, outlined ambitious plans for the scaled use of control groups in physical and online stores to prove advertising across Coles owned media assets directly stimulates demand at the checkout. 

The Formula One Australian Grand Prix is fresh off another record breaking year of attendance that Australian Grand Prix CEO Travis Auld hopes signals the event's endurance in the Australian sporting landscape. But he says evolving off-track entertainment – and working out how to get more people into the event without ruining it – are key to putting it into the same league as the Australian Open. Paramount ANZ's GM of ad sales, Nick Bower, says local brands are queueing for sponsorships despite restrictions. He's hoping Paramount still holds the rights in three years time.

A decade after launching Australian beauty brand Frank Body and going global, co-founder Bree Johnson invested in the $20.5m Series A funding round last month of New Zealand brand tracking start-up, Tracksuit, along with a star line-up of Silicon Valley VCs and high profile investors. Tracksuit is taking on the global research giants and expanding into the UK and US markets with a faster and cheaper platform that sits inside companies – not research houses. Johnson’s investment was born out of her own experience – like many start-ups, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram used to be a powerhouse for customer acquisition but that lower funnel cash cow today has less kick.

Little did Westpac's Executive Management Team (EMT) realise in 2019 when it ignored the advice of its own staff who told it to buy the Pega decisioning engine that five years later its choice would leave the bank trailing rivals in what has emerged as a key competitive capability — real time interaction management, often referred to as real time decisioning. Commbank now has a decade's head start, while ANZ and NAB are bidding to catch it. Likewise Suncorp. Instead the EMT backed a management decision to accept a pitch from EY to build the bank a decisioning solution from scratch in a project code-named In the Moment. The circa $70m project failed. Much of the work was written off in 2021, buried amongst almost $344m in software impairment charges that hit the balance sheet that year. However, due to the commercial terms of its agreement with the bank, EY owned the IP and has subsequently launched EY Data Cloud IQ. Five years after In the Moment first began, and despite Westpac footing the bill for another company's product development, there is still no real-time decisioning solution in place with capabilities comparable to its competitors' Pega-based platforms.

It’s been a big flip from performance-led marketing to global brand play, but 12 months on, the results are showing it’s paying off for Intrepid. Lifts in brand awareness, brand search and engagement across markets are on the scorecard, and there’s record revenue of $621m – the majority of which comes through owned channels – on the balance sheet. Not bad for a ‘phantom brand’ and tour operator that has been helping deliver experiences for 35 years but hasn’t always had the logoed T-shirt, branded bus or social feed recognition to prove it. While climbing that brand mountain, Intrepid chief customer officer, Leigh Barnes, has been working on his bigger, multi-year plan to firstly get to know customers better, then drive more ways for them to interact, engage and book. It’s a strategy fuelling digital and personalisation investment, as well as diversification outside tour products into accommodation – and the latest foray, book publishing.

Socially conscious social platform Weare8 is unsurprisingly finding scale a challenge in a market dominated by big tech. The app locally has "hundreds of thousands" of downloads and 2.5 million globally but is well off "conservative" targets outlined back in 2022. Global Chief Growth Officer, APAC boss and former Nine Entertainment MD, Lizzie Young, has called time at the business. But despite low numbers, global chief marketing officer, Luke Robinson said the platform is providing partners like BBC Studios with comparable levels of engagement from 6,000 followers to circa 11m on Instagram.

Consumers are understandably sceptical about any changes supermarkets make to pricing tickets right now. Yet Ritchies is confident it can back up a 6 per cent uplift in fresh vegetable sales by permanently bringing in what it sees as more useful per nutritional serve pricing to fresh fruit and vegetables aisles. The independent supermarket chain partnered with Monash University on a joint academia-industry program exploring the issue of fruit and vegetable affordability across Australia, plus the dire gap between the ‘two-and-five a day’ recommendations of health experts versus actual amounts consumed by Aussie adults. Pilot results were so encouraging, Ritchies has rolled out per-serve pricing across all 76 stores, directly connecting nutritional serving sizes to sticker prices for the first time. It’s no silver bullet, but a small step towards benefiting consumer health while overcoming price barriers many cash-strapped Aussies are erecting in the face of the cost-of-living crisis, Monash and Ritchies say. It should also help win over consumers increasingly wary of the pricing narrative Australia’s dominant supermarket giants put in front of them.

Foxtel’s Hubbl is the third platform-based new brand the media group has launched in Australia in the past six years and is “bigger’ than Kayo and Binge, says executive director Dani Simpson, a former expat CMO and agency boss who returned from the US last December after 16 years. Simpson is in a big hurry to create a mass-market brand for the entertainment gateway which so far aggregates 18 SVOD and BVOD apps including Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Stan and Paramount+. And Simpson needs to create consideration for Hubbl ahead of rivals like Amazon’s Firestick, Google Chromecast and Telstra-owned Fetch, which also has a 35 per cent stake in Foxtel. But Hubbl represents new territory for Foxtel – its hardware via a Hubbl “puck” or premium Glass TV set are selling via retail in Harvey Norman and JB Hi-Fi as well as a direct-to-consumer offer.

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.

Imagine this challenge: You need to deliver world-class experiences but you don't control many of the crucial aspects of that experience and there's no make-good if you stuff it up. Then imagine your customers are a massive stadium full of Swifties who have been sweating for weeks on what feels to them like a major life event. It's the first of four back-to-back concerts, and the Thunder Gods decide to pay a visit at exactly wrong moment. Venues NSW general manager for Members and CX, Matt Baker, describes what happens next and what he's learned about CX in the world of real things, beyond the clicks and keyboards. The lesson, he says, is focus on the complete experience, and don't underestimate the customers' good sense and goodwill.

NAB this month launched the latest iteration of its ‘More Than Money’ platform, dubbed ‘Wrangle Your Money’, in partnership with TBWA\Melbourne and Mindshare. Around since 2016 as a marketing line, the campaign platform has proven itself to be a usefully flexible brand tool for adapting to the changing needs of customers, says head of group brand, Sue Brailsford. That’s particularly important given Australia’s explosive interest rate rise and cost-of-living conditions over the last 18 months. But the proposition’s longevity is also paying off in terms of record levels of brand consideration, 20 per cent media efficiency gains and stronger consideration across Gen Z consumers..

Domain CMO, Rebecca Darley, is bullish about the property marketplace’s commercial performance against its larger rival, REA Group, and she has the figures to back her up. While overall category audience growth hit 5 per cent according to Ipsos’ Spring 2023 figures, Domain more than doubled performance against its major competitor, chalking up 10.3 per cent audience growth versus its rival’s 4 per cent. Meanwhile its media business is up 30 per cent this financial year – and Darley's targeting greater gains across utilities, finance and insurance. All of which adds directly to the bottom line for a marketer with an acute commercial focus. From building a proprietary market mix model and trebling internal data, tech and advertising team headcount, to driving dynamic AI-powered personalisation at scale, investing in a big brand platform, and emphasising internal capability, Darley believes she’s found the smarts that deliver results now resonating in the boardroom.

Ernst & Young Oceania chief economist, Cherelle Murphy, is predicting a year of two halves for sentiment and spending as consumers with a mortgage or rental agreement trudge through months more of tougher cost-of-living conditions before getting a minor reprieve through real wage growth and tax cuts. She’s not alone – latest Roy Morgan consumer confidence figures tell a similar story of the early parts of 2024. Yet while retailers continue discount heavily after the slowest year for retail sales growth in a generation, according to Deloitte Access Economics, market indicators suggest retailers think the worst is behind for shoppers. 

Amid heated conversation around Australia’s gender pay gap and women’s progress, Reckitt Benckiser brand, Nurofen, debuted its new campaign, ‘See my pain’ and first-ever Australian Gender Pain Gap Index Report. It reveals a 7 per cent gap existing between women and men nationally when it comes to pain diagnosis and management, and takes its cues from the debut of similar benchmark UK research kicked off by Nurofen last year. Beyond the supporting campaign, Nurofen is backing up its commitment to change by helping train 9,000-plus pharmacists on how to avoid unconscious bias when dealing with female consumers. It's no commercial ploy to sell another packet of Zavance, says Reckitt marketing director health ANZ, Holly McCarthy, but a multi-year effort to wield brand power to progress action and advocacy against an all too real bias.

There’s ever-growing consumer concern around the way personal information is handled off the back of Australia’s high-profile data breaches at Optus, Medibank and Latitude as well as AI use, says former privacy and now information Commissioner, Angelene Falk – and brands should be worried. Prevention is better than cure when it comes to meeting consumer demands and forthcoming privacy legislative change, and Falk is urging businesses to ensure data breach plans are not gathering dust but are operationally ready. Where businesses also need to do better is around the human intersection with systems and information, Falk says. That’s especially the case with more AI on its way, consuming more and more data sets, often without the ethics of human oversight, from all edges of the internet.  

Faced with under-industry average ecommerce sales, a desire to win back lapsed customers, along with ambitions to increase replenishment and frequency rates, luxury beauty brand posterchild, Aesop, has embarked on a digital and martech strategic plan and personalisation journey. Now owned by industry giant L’Oreal, plans are underway to discover which tech stacks and capabilities can be leveraged to further Aesop’s omnichannel customer experience quest. Through all of it, Aesop’s digital strategy leader Richard Lindmark is only too well aware of the need to obtain zero and first-party data to drive its personalisation and experience ambitions. And that means putting customer trust before everything else.

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.

Coca-Cola, the original TV alpha advertiser, has flipped to digital first, now spending 60 per cent of its circa $4bn media budget on digital. But its digital transformation runs much deeper than media – and it appears to be paying off big time. Revenue in 2023 was up 6.39 per cent and CFO and President John Murphy said its marketing reorganisation is boosting agility and productivity, with marketing “not a cost, but an investment”. CEO James Quincey said its in-house Studio X, delivered by WPP with output underpinned by Hogarth, is powering, “bringing it all together,” per Quincey, with the firm balancing digital and massive experiential events to put cans in hands, build brand and scoop up first party data along the way. It’s now also using AI to help reformulate product. So far it seems to be working.

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.