Marketing

Three top marketers at McDonald’s, Kimberly-Clark and Philips suggest “creative business transformation” is the key to keeping industry alive – and that applies to agencies and consulting firms. Which means some operational and strategic tweaks. Plus the trio offered some tips on what they are looking for from their own teams – and why if marketers are ducking bold choices because they are scared of losing their jobs, they will probably lose it anyway.

Publicis Groupe is building an alternative media and audience reach network to legacy media channels, leveraging the $650m in influencer and creator platform acquisitions it has made in the past year to tap under-utilised and cheaper audience channels for identity-linked advertising campaigns. Gaming is next. It heaps more pressure on legacy media channels under sustained revenue assault from Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok and retail media networks, which between them are taking upwards of 75 per cent of the circa $800bn global digital ad market. According to WPP Media, the digital ad market commands 81 per cent of total global ad spend, which will surpass $1trillion for the first time in 2025.

Packaging up lots of fragmented audience channels with consumer attention thresholds lower than what many say is effective - including the work from Dr Karen Nelson-Field and Amplified Intelligence - is a reality, says Analytic Partners' VP, Dr Grace Kite. "Aggregate Attention" in a study by Havas Media Network and Lumen shows "seeing lots of little ads is a perfectly good substitute for lack of attention on any one ad," Kite posits. Equally Tom Roach, a one-time understudy to 'The Long and Short of It' co-author Les Binet at Adam&EveDDB, now at Jellyfish, challenges System1 – and Mark Ritson's Cannes keynote – that ad wearout doesn't exist. Instead, we're facing an emerging "battle between the theorists" of ad effectiveness and the all powerful platforms whose algorithms reward freshness – daily.            

Pepsi completed its $1.95bn acquisition of pre-biotic US soda challenger brand Poppi in May with all the fanfare of a new shiny breakthrough coveted by the marketing profession – creator-influencer Alix Earle, with circa 10m followers across TikTok and Instagram, played a central role in the deal as a Poppi collaborator and investor that reportedly tipped Pepsi’s decision to buy Poppi over archrival Olipop – along with the brand’s blend-in of traditional TV ads. Poppi rolled the dice on a TV ad in this year’s Super Bowl and new data from System1, which measures consumer emotional response levels to advertising and creative work, outlines the best explainer yet on the grand tension emerging between traditional brand advertising and what works in the creator economy.     

The open web’s only challenger to Google – and increasingly Amazon – in automated advertising trading exchanges has warned Amazon’s powering global ad business is lifting Google’s strategy by luring advertisers to consolidate their digital ad buying using its demand side platform. Amazon’s $60bn advertising business is growing faster than its online commerce juggernaut – the allure for brands is the promise of an advertising and data tie-up to Amazon’s vast online shopping customer base via Amazon's commerce focused search. But the problem is anticompetitive self-preferencing of Amazon’s own advertising assets across its global shopper juggernaut and Prime video streaming service, now with ads, according to Jed Dederick, chief revenue officer at US$33bn listed rival, The Trade Desk. “We’ve seen this movie before,” he told Mi3 at the Cannes Lions Festival last week. “This is Google’s playbook that came out in the antitrust trials”. Dederick should know – he was called by the US Department of Justice as an expert witness in its successful case last year against Google’s market manipulating adtech stack – the DoJ is seeking to break up Google’s ads and data products from its YouTube and search units, which it hopes will create a more level playing field for publishers across the open web. 

Amid a Cannes festival heaving with influencers striking corporate deals, and an officially unspoken nervousness about what comes next, EY Parthenon's Karen Crum, an ex-genetic scientist and global strategy lead at Ogilvy and McCann, was presenting hard data that underlines how badly corporates have underestimated brand risk. Now she's taking it broader – and with it, brand – deep into corporate boardrooms and investment markets. Suncorp's brand and customer chief Mim Haysom and Tassal's chief commercial officer Matt Vince back that push – but already have the buy in from their CEOs and CFOs because they have proved brand is massively moving the growth needle. Tassal's global parent company boss thinks it can lead the global marketing function; Haysom has full autonomy to drive strategy through brand. But both Australian marketers see some new risks – and opportunities – coming out of Cannes, along with some unmoved fundamentals. Here's there take-outs, take-homes and watch-outs.

"Avoid the pornography of change" was virtual Professor Mark Ritson's take on research by System1's Andrew Tindall that he thinks deserves a place in the marketing effectiveness pantheon of greats – because it spells out to marketers how to make great ads that drive a 12x profit multiplier over "shit" ads. Based on overlaying the Effies database with System1's ad testing data, it's a simple formula: Go back to basics with tight positioning, charge ads with emotion, pack them with brand codes – seven is the "magic number" – and run them for years. "You're taking your cakes out of the oven too early. Leave them in. Let the emotion work, let the codes work. Save money on creative, put it into working capital, make more money from your advertising." Here's the data to prove it, what good looks like – and what's so bad it deserves a "brown Lion" as Ritson underlines a back-to-basics theme running deep through a Cannes festival stalked by AI's impacts.

After making Barbie a cultural phenomenon, Gap Inc boss Richard Dickson is trying to repeat the trick. Except it’s not a trick. Few CEOs take the stage at Cannes to talk about brand, but Dickson knows better than most the direct correlation of brand to revenue, profit and growth. He transformed Mattel through a brand-led framework that culminated in a film that grossed $1.45bn and reversed sales declines. Now he’s writing another codified playbook for Gap – and it’s working. The group is consistently taking market share, margin is healthier and the last two quarters have seen shareholder dividends boosted 10 per cent. Dickson says CEOs that deeply understand their brand make better daily business decisions because it guides those decisions through turbulence and quarterly earnings pressure. “It's an incredible time to run any business, with all the uncertainty and all the challenges that we all have. But the best gravitational pull to make decisions is really looking at a playbook and a brand vision,” per Dickson. “That is what gets you through any hard times and out the other side.”

The Cannes Lions festivities are officially done and dusted. Check out the full list of brands and agencies from Australia and New Zealand that have won on the world stage at this year's Festival of Creativity - plus every Grand Prix in every category. Telstra and New Zealand Herpes Foundation end the week at the top of the tally, thanks to Grand Prix wins, while local work for Volkswagen, 1001 Optometry, Samsung, Netflix, Bristol Myers Squibb, Made By Dyslexia, Vogel's, Coca-Cola, Export Ultra, Legacy Australia, 2Degrees, 36 Months, Suncorp, 7-Eleven, Toyota and Meat & Livestock Australia was likewise recognised as world class. 

Procter & Gamble CMO Marc Pritchard delivered an unapologetic brand building 101 at Cannes, urging marketers to get off the "content hamster wheel" and get back to basics on craft, consistency and consumer insight, or watch growth tank. But Analytic Partners and Jellyfish presented counter-evidence that suggests the old marketing rules around attention and wear-out may no longer apply in a platform dominated world, requiring a rethink of some key effectiveness fundamentals.

Nestlé’s first ever global CMO spent 25 years in agencies. Now she’s rewired its marketing function around “lost” creativity, built an end-to-end content engine and is “in the midst” of merging data and insights functions. A Grand Prix at Cannes and multiyear marketing budget increases signed off by successive CEOs suggest its paying off. But Aude Gandon says the marketing funnel is now obsolete – requiring some fundamental shifts in approach.

A swathe of Australia's domestic market is banking on safe brand platforms, low risk personalisation and 'good enough' customer experience to deliver incremental growth. But global marketing, customer and brand bosses at Amazon, Mars and $50bn healthcare giant Novartis set the tone at this year's Cannes opener: creativity wins and marketers and agencies should be actively encouraged to embrace risk – within reason – or watch growth flatline. Plus Mars thinks it has cracked below the line attribution that MMM can't yet do. Amazon's brand chief thinks she has "atomised" a recipe for creativity and is giving her teams free rein on the "biggest out of home network in the world" – it's delivery boxes. But she's not yet handed over all the big calls. Novartis marketing and CX chief Gail Horwood has driven a full flip to bold brand platforms and creativity over the last 18 months – a reversal of decades-old regulatory tip-toeing. It's working.