News Analysis

McDonald’s is aiming for a bigger bite of Australia’s chicken obsession, pulling out all the stops to promote its McCrispy burger with The Kid Laroi spearheading a multi-million dollar campaign – its next big marketing push for 2023. Chief Customer Officer Chris Brown says "magnetic marketing" isn’t just about tapping into the cultural zeitgeist of the day, but matching brand to demand across channels – and personalising at scale to bring home the bacon. Amid the cost of living crisis, Maccas loyalty program is enabling delivery of value and user numbers have climbed nearly 40 per cent in the past year, meaning the firm can better tie brand to sales via personalised messages to keep people coming back to stores. It's working: In the last 12 months circa 14 million McDonald's products were redeemed through the app. In tandem with the McCrispy push, Brown and Maccas are also backing industry initiatives – namely Dylan Alcott’s Shift 20 – to better represent people with disability in advertising.

The CMO of Arnott's has heaped praise on the evolution of Ad Standards and how complaints are being policed but warns exploitable grey areas remain, specifically around influencer marketing. Nestlé Oceania CMO and AANA Chair Martin Brown wants more guidance on greenwashing so that companies can promote sustainability credentials without fear of facing an ACCC probe. The two were speaking at an industry gathering to celebrate 25 years of Ad Standards, where creative director Dee Madigan stole the show with an expletive-laden and acerbic take down of “digital charlatans”. Listen to the lot below – and note the most complained ads of all time.

ChatGPT can lift capabilities of worst performers and narrow the gap with high achievers according to a study by Harvard Business School but training is crucial. The study, based on tests at management consulting giant Boston Consulting Group, determined that on every task, staff using GPT significantly outperformed their peers, no matter how performance was measured. The AI-powered group completed 12.2 per cent more tasks on average than their peers, while completing tasks 25.1 per cent faster with 40 per cent higher quality results than those without, per one of the study's authors. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT seem to particularly outperform on tasks requiring creativity or innovation – sometimes at the expense of accuracy – but underperform on some simple mathematical or logical exercises. 

Brands, advertising and media should reflect the diverse world we live in. But they don't. Now FMCG giant Procter & Gamble and underwear brand Bonds aim to start walking the DE&I talk, joining the Dylan Alcott Foundation and Special Group’s Shift 20 Initiative to better represent people with disability in advertising. Launched on Sunday, P&G brands Pantene and Oral B featured a former international pole champion and Paralympic swimmer, while Bond’s spot starred a deaf actor signing in Auslan. P&G’s Company Accessibility Leader Sumaira Latif told Mi3 talent with disability not only represents 20 per cent of their products’ customer base – the actors are an “untapped strength'' that improve the creative process, drum up customer loyalty and build the morale of P&G teams internally. Bonds Marketing Manager Kedda Ghazarian agrees; the fashion brand has been on a journey to become disability confident in recent years and casting a deaf actor was a “natural next step”. Senior marketers argue there's a $13 trillion business case – with only 1 per cent of ads representing this audience.

Sunil Desai, Hubspot's VP brand marketing outlined to a packed session at the company's Inbound customer event in Boston last week the kinds of metrics that will make head office sit and listen if you want more budget for your B2B brand and more control over local and regional brand spending. Kat Warboys, the company's APAC marketing director brought the receipts – including evidence from a localisation experiment that delivered a double digit improvement in conversion rates, with even stronger impact when it came to influencing leads. And she only spent $1,000. It wasn't really an internecine corporate smackdown, instead both were reflecting on the kind of sentiment described in research conducted by Hubspot and LinkedIn late last year on the frustrations facing Australian B2B marketers.

Huge global CEO Mat Baxter reckons advances in AI will accelerate the demise of the media agency remuneration model – and give client procurement teams all the ammo they need to turn the screw, eating margin as billable hours become less relevant. But some agency bosses told Mi3 the opposite may be true, while others said they are already flipping how they get paid – and in some cases making better money. Publicis boss Michael Rebelo, Atomic 212 chief Claire Fenner, This is Flow CEo Jimmy Hyett, Media.Monks co-founder Wesley ter Haar and Thinkerbell's Jaime Morgan weigh in.

ANZ Bank's digital sales by volume has surged from 28 per cent a few years ago to 70 per cent today. That creates a huge lake of first-party customer data that can be deployed to optimise media, build better CX and ultimately increase the share of wallet and lifetime customer value. It’s little wonder then that the bank is now investigating a CDP. Carsales is at the other end of the journey. Its CDP went live in Q2 2022, and it's starting to reap the rewards, including match rates for clients closing in on 60 per cent. So one brand is just getting started and the other is live. But in Part Three of our investigation of the CDP market we interrogate the difficult in-between moments marketers must navigate, and – buyer beware – it’s much messier and more complicated than the slick sales pitches let on. Fights over data ownership, significant technical integration problems, and serious limitations with all those out-of-the-box connectors the vendors like to brag about creates risks to project deadlines, and in the worst cases, career advancement. Sometimes just identifying who has credentials and getting them to share can take months. And then there’s the simple (yet apparently not) question of whether you need a CDP at all.

There are north of 30 corporate use cases driving the current stampede for Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), per industry analysts like Gartner. But when Mi3 grilled tech industry heavyweights and their customers, only a few consistently emerged: digital identity, media efficiency and effectiveness, personalisation and regulatory compliance — especially privacy. And now there's a new incentive: It turns out the work required to get CDPs humming also helps organisations become more AI ready. In Part Two of our investigation, we spoke with marketing and digital leaders from University of Tasmania, Nova Entertainment and Suncorp about the business imperatives driving their decisions (they use Oracle, mParticle and Adobe respectively). Mi3 also interviewed execs from CDP platforms Segment, Tealium, Adobe, Salesforce, Celebrus, Amperity, Meiro, and more to get a handle on what's driving demand – and where capability gaps remain a challenge.

The CDP market in Australia is running red hot, with circa 500 companies now using customer data platforms or currently implementing. Segment dominates in volume terms with more than 330 customers, up from 50 just three years ago. But Tealium is capturing a big chunk of the loot thanks to its enterprise dominance. Together with Lexer (70-80 clients covering almost 110 brands) and Adobe, these four vendors have over 90 per cent of the installed base that Mi3 has identified. But it's the brand stories that really explain the appeal. The experience of Jetstar, Chemist Warehouse, News Corp, Moët & Chandon, SCA and a bunch of others suggest major marketing efficiency gains, strong customer growth, more effective advertising and the ability to save a packet by avoiding wastage. Plus better using all that first party data in an ad ecosystem in the middle of major structural upheaval.