Marketing

In the age of the 'blue dot' consumer — that blue dot in Google Maps or on Uber — your brand doesn’t guide the journey. Instead, it orbits the customer. That’s the core message from customer experience futurist, Ken Hughes, who told delegates at last week’s Qualtrics X4 event that consumers no longer see themselves as passengers on a brand’s customer experience map. They are the fulcrum around which the map orientates. And if your business hasn’t figured that out yet, it’s probably already being rerouted.

Marketing’s AI arms race continues apace as Adobe debuts a slew of integrated AI capabilities, including its first 10 baked-in autonomous agents that have analysts lauding its pragmatism. Yet amid the hype, Marriott’s VP and global head of marketing orchestration, Hilary Cook warned AI cannot be a silver bullet for years of tech debt, poor data governance and process. That said, she’s notched a 4,200x lift in personalised growth, 93 per cent improvement in content production speed, tens of millions of content variations – without breaking the budget – and 6x revenue target results by taking the AI bull by the horns. How? By tackling the unsexy stuff, and realising you’re the roadblock, not the tech.

Brands will soon be confronted with a choice: Employ AI to make cheaper, more plentiful ad creative so you can keep chasing a prospect with iterative messaging until they finally click yes, or risk pissing off said consumer while doing it, says The Coca-Cola Company’s chairman and CEO, James Quincey. Speaking today at this year’s Adobe Summit, the beverage giant chief has no immediate plans to remove the real humans from its advertising, even after attaining cost and efficiency gains from its first generative AI-made holiday campaign at Christmas. But he admits the enticement of cheaper, faster, infinitely more personalised campaign creative at scale using AI is a lure most marketers are going to be hard pressed not to swallow – and that could prove seriously problematic. The last great hope? Live events.

One-time ADMA chief Jodie Sangster, ex-World Vision and Deloitte CMOs Louise Cummins, Rochelle Tognetti and former strategy lead at The Works, Douglas Nicol, are self-funding – for now – the launch of a new industry body: The Australian Centre for AI in Marketing (ACAM). Sangster says it’s not aiming to be another industry association, more a ‘pro-purpose hub’ that makes AI learning accessible and practical for all marketers. But the foursome are simultaneously launching an AI consulting business – dubbed Air, an acronym for AI ready – via which they hope to fund ACAM. They already have some big name CMOs on board. Next up, they're benchmarking marketers on how AI-ready they are.

The Australian Grand Prix (AGP) is done but F1 is flying – audiences are soaring and women are some of the fastest growing cohort. Hence more brands piling in – and getting serious traction – despite tier one sponsorship packages being almost instantly sewn-up. Marketers are therefore getting creative to find other ways in. Pernod Ricard's St Hugo, four years into its partnership with driver Daniel Ricciardo, has recorded a 12 per cent YoY growth in sales, with a primarily owned and organic social media approach. TCL Electronics has also taken the local approach activating at Melbourne Alfred Park as an official AGP sponsor since 2022. Others, including Chivas Regal, and Australian tech start-ups Airtasker and Airwallex, are racing to grow globally with F1 team partnerships. 

In retail, a 4X return on investment isn’t just a win - it’s a wake-up call. When Accent Group switched on its new customer data platform (CDP), the results blew away early expectations, delivering four times the ROI projected in its business case. Digital marketing performance surged, with the first YouTube campaign hitting a 100% match rate. For a business that has grown into a billion-dollar retail powerhouse, mastering customer data at scale isn’t just an upgrade - it’s a necessity. But while the right tech stack is critical, Accent’s biggest challenge wasn’t implementation. It was ensuring the entire business - from marketing to operations - actually used the system to drive smarter, more profitable decisions.

ASX-listed fresh dairy milk producer, The a2 Milk Company, has a market cap of $5.8bn. Now it's working through the upsides and challenges of partnering with paid influencers, often one-man bands ill accustomed to blue chip enterprise contractual rigour – but head of marketing Louise Tomkins is one of a swathe of marketers now recognising influencers as a new mainstream media channel, not just as next-gen paid ambassadors. Taking part in This is Flow’s recent Playgroup event series exploring how to make influencers part of the modern media mix, Tomkins shares with Mi3 why a2 Milk willing to place the bet even as it works to navigate its way through the assurances needed to truly embrace creators as a paid channel – and the challenge of metrics available right now through platforms such as TikTok.

The entry deadline for CMO Awards has been extended to 24 March 2025 but no later: Don’t miss out on you and your team being recognised as marketing champions at our gala event on 7 May 2025. 

News Corp is betting on connected TV to pull full funnel brand and demand ad dollars into its increasingly connected audience-data axis and an 'engaged reach' metric to drive hard sales. Subway marketing boss Rodica Titeica is buying in after a campaign using News' new stack – ahead of local and global rivals – boosted sales 3 per cent. Now News has to convince the broader market. Either way, the Tubi streaming deal gives it north of 1.3 million monthly Australian viewers, mostly younger demos – with zero marketing. Lou Barrett reckons it can quickly hit circa 3 million. If so, it will be taking on the streamers now piling into ads, as well as local BVOD rivals. The difference is News has a scaled local sales team, broader suite of assets and is talking a big game with its customer data platform and audience intelligence trove, Intent Connect, whereas soon-to-be streaming rivals are operating off "deeply flawed" data, reckons Commercial Data GM Dean La Rosa. He's not the only one saying it.

Step One is on a tear. The bamboo underwear disruptor is expanding its omnichannel strategy, taking its first steps into bricks-and-mortar retail with UK giant John Lewis. That’s a big swing for a 50-person team that started out catering to guys with thick thighs. But with revenues on the rise in a tough retail climate, Amazon sales up 28 per cent, and a Klaviyo-powered marketing machine, Step One is eyeing a $100 million run rate within the year at an impressive revenue per employer of close to $2million. That's bad news for bamboo plants, but great news for founder Greg Taylor.

Accenture Song CEO and New York-based Australian expat David Droga detoured a London trip via Sydney in a 60-hour lap to front the AFR Business Summit for a fireside chat replacing Accenture Australia boss Julie Sweet. Sweet underwent surgery after a breast cancer diagnosis and was “recovering, things are looking good … she’s in a good place,” Droga told Business Summit delegates. On a business level, Droga pointed to autonomous agents and synthetic personas as two material AI developments on his radar – AI and “agentic workforces” as they have been described, will cut a swathe through the “mediocre middle” of jobs in architecture, entertainment, advertising, design and journalism, he said.

Four years after unleashing global research into the woeful lack of briefing expertise across the marketing and advertising industry, the co-founders of BetterBriefs, Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler, have taken a plunge into creative ideation and found yet another whopping industry capability gap. Having canvassed more than 1,000 senior marketers and creative agency leaders across Australia, the UK and US – plus luminaries from the IPA, WFA, Saatchi & Saatchi, Beiersdorf, Nissan, Mastercard, AMV BBDO and others – the latest findings show a creative process that is flawed, stifling creative, failing to gain attention and costing marketers and agencies time, money, commercial effectiveness and a trusted relationship.

Amazon’s Australian ad business is accelerating, with its annual growth rate climbing 58 per cent to $242m per latest ASIC filings. With video ads on Prime only coming into effect for half of the year, that trajectory looks set to steepen further as Amazon eyes full-funnel marketing budgets and a slice of TV ad dollars while driving broader spend through its ad stack at the expense of rivals. Meanwhile, its e-commerce operation continues apace, with online store revenues up 23.5 per cent to $1.94bn. Revenues from third-party seller services powered 48 per cent to $839m and Prime subscriptions revenue surged 38.8 per cent to $480m. 

Qantas Group has lifted the Net Promoter Score of its flagship Qantas brand by 13 per cent, while Jetstar has improved by 9 per cent, but the improvement hasn’t come cheap. A 20 per cent rise in technology costs underpinned upgrades across customer experience, supply chain and fleet readiness. The airline’s latest investor deck highlights a surge in 'Other Expenses', largely driven by increased IT investment. CEO Vanessa Hudson says the dual-brand approach is paying dividends at a time when consumers remain cost-conscious. Meanwhile, CFO Rob Marcolina says tech and digital investments are delivering incremental earnings while improving both customer experience and sustainability. But with brand perception still recovering from the turbulence of the Alan Joyce era, Qantas has little choice but to double down on digital, mobile-first, and operational enhancements to rebuild trust and maintain momentum.

Choosing a holiday destination used to be such a a simple affair. You heard a glowing review from a friend, saw a particularly sun-drenched beach on a travel show, and - provided your bank account agreed - booked the trip. Alas, that golden age of naive wanderlust is no more. The modern traveller, armed with an endless scroll of influencer-packed itineraries and a healthy dose of geopolitical anxiety, increasingly picks their vacation spot based on the information from new media channels. According to the latest data from Zenith’s Imagine Panel, Australians still put their faith in word-of-mouth recommendations, but the fastest-growing sources of travel inspiration are social media, YouTube travel bloggers, and influencers. Meanwhile, older generations remain steadfast in their belief that if a destination is good enough for a BBC documentary, it must be worth the trip. But what truly weighs on the traveller’s mind these days isn’t just price, it’s politics. Safety (79 per cent) and stability (71 per cent) are now top concerns, pushing the usual allure of breathtaking scenery (68 per cent), cultural experiences (50 per cent), and vibrant nightlife (26 per cent) further down the priority list. In a world teetering on the edge of various calamities, the ideal holiday isn’t just about relaxation, it’s about making it back home in one piece.

Next week the Federal Court will rule on whether three separate Australian publisher class actions against Google alleging market manipulation – including advertiser bid rigging within its dominant online advertising exchange, which most publishers rely on for digital revenues – will need to roll-up into a single case. Google has hired top defence firm, Herbert Smith Freehills, to counter the incoming lawsuits. The lead lawyer on the Maurice Blackburn claim, Miranda Nagy, would not be drawn on the compensation sum for local publishers her firm thinks is likely but said it will account for "well over $10-12bn" in advertising volumes that publishers could have tapped over the last six years.     

The British adman who packed Brad Pitt into a Levi’s ad campaign before he stormed Hollywood and created Audi’s tagline ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik', thinks the global state of business, media and communications is so dominated by “left brain rationalists” that another 60s-style creative revolution is brewing. “That’s got to happen. We are genuinely losing [public] support,” he told delegates in his Business of Creativity program in Sydney and Melbourne this week. Data was important, he ceded, but was only “knowledge, not inspiration”, pointing to his iPhone on stage: “Absolutely no data went into the creation of this product, none at all.” Telstra’s CMO Brent Smart and Publicis Groupe Chief Media Officer Imogen Hewitt were in eclectic solidarity on a panel in Sydney after Hegarty’s keynote although all three stopped short of welcoming the next “creative revolution” if it rebirthed hippy fashion.

Ecom pureplays are buckling under crunched unit economics and rising pressure from Temu, Shein and Amazon. Adore Beauty has flipped to omni, with queues literally out of the shopping centre for its first store launch this month. CMO Dan Ferguson says recently installed CEO Sacha Laing has outlined a crystal-clear strategy: physical stores, profit-powering retail media, ramping up owned brands and better gross margins while notching higher CLVs by priming more active customers. Here’s the plan – and what’s next for product, stores and a retail media strategy that taps an audience Ferguson says is “larger than most TV programs”.

Nine is going all out for digital video at scale in a bid to halt the leakage of ad dollars to global tech giants – and is plotting deals with local rivals, platforms and marketplaces to make it happen. Nine boss Matt Stanton also confirmed ads are coming to Stan – though gave himself wriggle room on timings – and that it is in talks about potentially sharing the same trading platform with Seven, though likewise no timeline has been set on deciding whether Seven’s Phoenix or Nine’s Galaxy would be king. Meanwhile the firm is bridging business units, processes and data to start walking the talk on tracking, targeting and personalisation across all its channels based on the trails and contextual signals audiences are dropping. Stanton said the ad market is in recovery – but that marketers and media buyers “should be piling in” far harder based on audience growth and what Nine can now do with those audiences from brand to demand.

It’s taken nearly 18 months and the instalment of new CEO, Stephen Rue, but Optus has officially added an MD of corporate affairs and marketing to its executive ranks.

Private and public sector employers are putting pressure on work from home arrangements – some scrapping them completely. WPP is going hardest among agency groups with a four-day mandate that some have complained amounts to layoffs by stealth. Coles, Woolworths, ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, Tabcorp, AGL and Flight Centre are among brands now issuing hard mandates, with some of those firms now linking bonuses to in-person attendance. For agencies, STW exec turned advisor Chris Savage reckons the shift is inevitable. He predicts four days in the office will become the benchmark over the next year, and that those resisting making staff physically come to work, indies included, will struggle to survive incoming structural change. Problem is, employee sentiment still sits firmly with the hybrid approach, unless a shorter week is on the table: Seven in ten would be happy to ditch WFH flexibility in return for a four day working week in office at full pay, per Mi3's polling. It's a model that has so far proved successful for Brisbane-based shop Claxon, where boss Daniel Willis says the arrangement has driven productivity gains – with staff completing reoccurring tasks 18 per cent faster.

Yahoo and Magna have polled Australians and claim the findings suggest data security and fear of hacking is being conflated with digital ad targeting and personalisation, use of which barely registers on consumer worry lists, per their survey. It's a direct counter and contradiction to earlier consumer research that has informed Australia's ongoing privacy overhaul and suite of digital platform inquiries, and Yahoo's Dan Richardson and Magna's Lucy Formosa Morgan suggest that puts the onus on brands, the digital ad industry – and the government driving through regulatory changes – to fill in the consumer knowledge blanks.

Generative AI is supposed to be marketing’s golden ticket. Yet, reality - for now - suggests otherwise. A Gartner survey of 418 marketing leaders (July–September 2024) reveals over a quarter of organisations report “limited or no GenAI adoption.” That said, high-performing marketing organisations, which outperform their peers on revenue, are leading as early adopters, although it's not clear in the data what role if any GenAI plays in their overperformance. And CMOs remain wary of the technology. A separate Gartner survey of brand reputation leaders indicates 55 per cent are concerned about the risks associated with generative AI. Start with strategy, says Suzanne Schwartz, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice who adds, "It's about having understanding and guidelines about what you can and can't do for your organisation."

After an above-average five-year tenure as group CMO and 16 years with Woolworths, Andrew Hicks has confirmed he's stepping down at the end of the financial year.

Tony Kendall says ACM’s digital and data play is starting to mine fresh revenue seams and drink just a little of Meta’s milkshake as the platform refuses to play ball with news media on the media bargaining code. It comes as the regional and agricultural publisher announced today that weekday publishing would end for 14 regional mastheads – some 100 years old – and switch to advertiser-friendly “Weekend Collection” editions.

Out-of-home was the fastest-growing media channel in Australia in 2024 surpassing $1.2bn for the first time, according to SMI data last year. It's "loved" by marketers, planners and creatives alike but proving its effectiveness remains a bone of contention if simply reach and frequency provides the benchmark measurement for impact. And that bone only collects more teethmarks as MMM and diverse modelling methods raise questions about what channels really work short and long-term, and billboards continue to be stuffed with too many messages or poor creative that fails to generate brand recall or build memorability. Enter this week’s JCDecaux upfronts events in Melbourne and Sydney, and a fresh swathe of evidence to demonstrate how quality out-of-home environments and creative executions can drive significant brand and business gains through the funnel. Top of the list was global-first research from System1, which found 7 in 10 OOH ads aren’t working, and put forward seven practical principles for doing creative well in response. But there was also plenty of debate from Specsavers and UM on what makes up effective measurement, and how media agencies and marketers embrace MMM and emerging modelling methods to shift the dial from outputs to outcomes – with the hugely important caveat of avoiding garbage data in, garbage data out.

The biggest sports rights deal in Australian history – $4.5bn over seven years, or $643m per season – starts in three weeks and the urgency from the two broadcast and streaming signatories, Foxtel and Seven West Media, to recover their outlays is at full throttle. Foxtel Group CEO Patrick Delany told an upbeat Fox Footy launch event in Melbourne yesterday that brand partners and viewers were about to see a “massive game changer” from a combination of Foxtel, Kayo and Binge although bigger audience and subscription gains would come in the second season based on its experience with the NRL. Brands that have signed-up so far include Toyota, McDonald’s, AAMI, LG, Harvey Norman, Bunnings, Sportsbet, and Coles.