Marketing

Despite great in-house analytics capabilities and the will to bring insight to marketing planning, channel optimisation and reporting, designer retail brand Michael Kors has struggled to get past outdated last-touch attribution modelling. Which is why VP of global analytics, Manuel Neto, was keen to be one of five brands trialling a platform combining market mix modelling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution (MTA). "It’s been one of the most transformational, reassuring journeys we have been on," per Neto, with teams now modelling a hundred scenarios in 20 minutes versus two in 40 hours, and better able to make seasonal product calls, faster. "For me, efficiency is money. If you’re able to act faster you’re able to get competitive advantage faster. As a consequence, KPIs will improve." He wants to make the trial permanent.

Tradie marketplace Hipages, which competes in a $50bn subsegment of the $131bn trade services market, has reached an inflection point, and is now spending circa $9-10m a year developing CRM and ERP-like services for its core audience of tradespeople. In 2025, it will begin development of new capabilities for homeowners as well. It's all part of a plan to grow profitability and market share in the notoriously fragmented tradie ecosystem. On the marketing front, Hipages is back for a sixth year sponsoring Nine's The Block, and it has also taken a Platinum sponsorship of rival Seven's Dream Home, due for launch mid-year.

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.     

Brand tracking disruptor Tracksuit is getting a tailwind from the big tech platforms now pushing it to their advertisers as they seek credit – and brand dollars – outside of performance marketing budgets. After showing how brand awareness powers sales on Amazon, co-founder Connor Archbold is plotting further partnerships and bidding to join the dots between brand, channel choice and ultimately sales. If those “big bets” come off it could mean even faster growth – and pay dirt for a growing pack of big name investors.

Growing complexity of the CMO role and the realisation of the dream of having a seat at the boardroom table has brought with it a growing remit and demanding role that requires ever-more support. It’s also generating plenty of burnout and skills gaps. Enter Tumbleturn’s new fractional CMO service, capitalising on an increasingly popular construct and resource modelling approach with a specific focus on providing a 2IC to existing CMOs or a strategically-minded marketing resource to cash-strapped CEOs and executive teams.

Karen Ganschow has spent her career trying to identify customer problems then addressing them in product propositions, engagement, experiences and services. As the former customer marketing leader and first head of data sciences at Aware Super hangs up her full-time hat, she speaks to Mi3 about the urban myths around digital experiences and customer behaviours, how technology and machine learning have brought the cost of a 360-degree, data-driven customer view – and actionable capability – down by millions, and why she’s still worried marketers are seen as the colouring-in department.

Following on from its April 2023 merger with BT Super, Mercer Super has restructured its marketing and customer experience teams into a single team called Customer and Growth, and is embarking on a three-year overhaul of digital experiences for customers and advisors alike. A new mobile app is due in H2 this year for customers too, with an emphasis on delivering a better experience rather than new capabilities. That will come later in the project. Advisors will see improvements to their experiences early next year.

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.

It’s the sort of longer-term shift in brand narrative, customer base and commercial impact strategic CMOs crave. Three years on from becoming marketing chief at jewellery retailer, Michael Hill, Jo Feeney has seen loyalty program numbers increase by 1.5 million to over 2m, average transaction values lift circa 30 per cent, and a growth cohort of customers progressively responding to its premiumisation play. Playing the strategic long game hasn’t come without its challenges – the jewellery retailer hasn’t been immune to tough retail conditions and over the first six months of the financial year, overall sales remain flat. Several stores closed and executive redundancies occurred. But the jeweller retailer is holding firm. Now Feeney is about to unveil her latest program of work: A rebrand two years in the making, stretching from refreshed design systems and brandmark to Michael Hill’s first brand ambassador and a new-look retail approach.

Attaining 100 per cent consideration with tradies, a three-point jump in brand awareness, and 14 percentage point increase in first-choice consideration with enterprise buyers are some big proof points Kennards Hire’s Manelle Merhi has to show for her ‘Ken Oath’ creative investment. But behind the multi-year campaign is a whole experience and service commitment that’s been critical to turning a smart, fun marketing tagline into a fundamental business ethos.

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.  

After five years of diminishing incoming demand, finance and HR SaaS brand Workday embarked upon what its CMO Emma Chalwin called a bold brand strategy that has already powered massive gains in awareness, consideration, trust – and crucially, leads. Sales is now drinking the brand Kool Aid and the company, which has reached a growth inflection point with its global and vertical market expansion, is lifting the curtains on the second act of its award-winning Rockstars campaign as it chases giant tech brands like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft.

Fast food chain Mad Mex was able to drive a 9 per cent uplift in sales in restaurants within a proximity of its latest programmatic digital out-of-home campaign that also demonstrated the flexibility and agility of the channel. Just as importantly, digital efficiency helped to extend the life of the campaign.

We’ve all read the advice about the importance of learning from failure. But let’s face it, it’s an awful lot harder to own up to something that went wrong. Taking it to the next level and celebrating the learnings failure brings takes another level of cultural courage and vulnerability again. Yet from Uber’s annual Mexican team dinners to celebrate the $1.4 million campaign failure via mariachi bands and rogue promo codes on Facebook Live, to throwing a party to farewell a short-lived product line with staff at Chobani, there are examples of brands providing safe spaces for employees to take stock, own and grow through failure. As can be seen from marketing leaders from TikTok and The Bridge, taking decisive and constructive action after recognising a digital video proposition or Covid-fuelled health checker couldn’t be scaled are lessons that help them shape strategies and go-to-market approaches today.  Uber’s Andy Morley, Chobani’s Olivia Dickinson, The Bridge International’s Lewis Pullen and TikTok’s Anny Havercroft unpack hard earned – but high value – lessons from failure.

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.