Tech

In a landmark decision that exposes a decade of industrial-scale market rigging, a US court found Google illegally tied its dominant ad exchange to its publisher ad server, blowing a hole in the foundations of digital advertising's global power structure. Yet despite the chest-beating from regulators, brands – and perhaps more pointedly Google's publisher rivals – should curb their enthusiasm. Research by Forrester suggests American consumers are sceptical the US Supreme Court has the appetite to tear Big Tech apart. Corporate muscle has a long, patient track record of waiting out regulatory storms, and a clutch of recent US Supreme Court rulings suggests they are on a winning streak. For now, marketers and publishers would be wise to start contingency planning while assuming Google's grip could outlast the litigation.

Eighteen months on from signing up to pilot Adobe’s Mix Modeler Solution, fashion brand Michael Kors has thrown down the dollars and is rolling out the platform globally to execute marketing mix modelling and multi-touch attribution in one. For VP of global analytics, Manuel Neto, resetting team expectations and change management culturally and operationally is vital to ensure the new MMM and MTA approach sticks and delivers better marketing effectiveness. That requires empathy – and allowing people “the odd cry in the bathroom”, Neto says – as teams adjust to the modelling’s outputs and their channel preferences are tested. But with economic and political volatility in the US leading to declines in store footfall traffic of up to 50 per cent where there are higher concentrations of immigrant populations, Michael Kors has also had to learn how to factor in data on unique macro conditions to avoid reading market conditions and customer sentiment wrong. Yet here too lies an opportunity to rethink marketing messaging, media and campaigns and show customers the brand cares, Neto says.

In just six months, Beyond Blue pulled off a full-scale digital overhaul that delivered the kind of metrics most commercial CX teams dream about: A 35% lift in traffic to core content, a 50% surge in use of its flagship wellbeing tool, and enrolments in its small business mental health coaching program nearly doubled. Even fundraising starts jumped 15%, a secondary benefit in a redesign driven not by revenue, but by mission. This wasn’t simply optimisation for optimisation’s sake. It was a race against time to modernise an unsupported legacy platform and ensure Australians in distress could still find the help they needed, when they needed it.

Turns out  closed captions in television can provide powerful ad signals. UK broadcaster ITV and search-intelligence firm Captify are mining closed captions to drive real-time, contextually aligned ad targeting in connected TV. The setup is simple, the implications anything but. Think semantic AI parsing a scene from Desperate Housewives and spotting a “girls’ trip to a winery”. ITV’s sales team gets the signal, and wine ads follow. It’s not cookie-fuelled. It’s not ID-based. That’s exactly the point. Because in a world where third-party signals are collapsing, and Australia’s privacy laws are in the midst of a serious upgrade (Trump administration threats not withstanding), marketers, broadcasters and media agencies are all wondering what comes next. Captify’s answer: Target the moment, not the person. If the results from Ampersand's postcode-level CTV buys are anything to go by—Honda saw a 60% lift in both brand search and purchase intent—there’s serious commercial power in going identity-light, context-heavy. This isn’t just a tech story. It’s a blueprint for how CTV can grow its mojo back in a privacy compliant way, without blowing up the trust ledger.

Customer Data Platforms were born in marketing, but Gartner says they’ve outgrown the martech basement. Now, they’re facing scrutiny in the boardroom and under pressure to deliver, with CIOs, chief data and analytics officers and CFOs all in on the conversation. But that also means marketing's needs could become secondary to the wider corporate priorities.

Bupa is betting big on predictive models and is wiring AI into the core of its operating model – building what it calls 'preventative decision engines' that don’t just spot the problem, they act on it automatically and at scale. The health insurer's chief digital officer, Ed Falconer, wants to build machines that know when you’re heading for a health issue, and trigger an intervention long before you ever need a GP.

Small language models trump large language models for firms seeking rapid, targeted cost-out and growth gains, reckons Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz – and he's got examples to prove it. But he warns anyone telling you AI is oven ready is over-cooking it. Meanwhile, CPG, and telco are facing increasing pressure – as is retail, now a two-speed market between retail media haves and have nots. Across the piste, Australia has a lot of catching up to do, reckons Vaz, with one specific analogue process leaving him perplexed.

UPDATED: Mi3 is creating its first global media event, capitalising on surging interest in principal-based trading media models with marketers and procurement. Principal Media 2025 is a free-to-attend event for procurement chiefs, legal departments, auditors and compliance leads, thanks to generous sponsorship from platinum sponsors Google and Meta. Marketers, agency execs and publisher sales teams will also be catered for across an unrivalled program.

Catapult, Sealy and Jaycar are all banking big CX gains by rolling AI into their customer service stacks. The result? Fewer handovers, faster response times, and bots that don’t just deflect tickets—they close them. In Catapult’s case, resolution times are down by a third. Jaycar’s fridge brand bot is solving 27 per cent of queries solo. And Sealy’s agents are handling more tickets with fewer people—and reporting less stress. For brands chasing speed, empathy, and consistency at scale, it’s not about replacing humans. It’s about clearing the runway.

Fisher & Paykel is using AI to figure out when your fridge filter needs changing, then nudging you to subscribe before you even realise it. That’s not personalisation, says digital ops boss, Mark Henderson: It’s predictive experience. And it’s already led to 11,000 personalised recommendations, a 40 per cent lift in product views, and data segments that once took 100 hours now built in minutes. The shift is powered by Salesforce Data Cloud and machine learning. Henderson says the real unlock came from cultural buy-in—getting business leaders to trust the automation, and moving fast once they did.

Taboola CEO Adam Singolda reckons he can swing $30bn out of social media and back to publishers – by putting performance ads on their pages that deliver lower customer acquisition costs to advertisers than Meta. Long term, he’s eyeing a further $25bn from the adtech market, “a scary, dark place” for advertisers, bidding to bite into the revenues currently swallowed up by a morass of DSPs, SSPs, affiliates and the rest of the sprawling digital ad supply chain. In the short term, he’s aiming to double publisher revenues – and Taboola’s own – while taking a fat slice of the money pouring into retail media. Brand, he says, is fighting a losing battle as pressured marketers pile into performance channels despite spiralling cost inflation. CMOs that invest in brand as a way to fill the bucket and beat performance price hikes, Singolda reckons, risk the sack. But if publishers can prove they drive conversion at a cheaper cost than search and social, then they can at worst arrest declines – and at best see a revenue renaissance.

AMP is in year three of a multi-year marketing transformation and platform overhaul, and its marketers say they’re finally in charge of their own destiny. Wins include building customer journeys two-and-a-half times faster and getting emails out eight times quicker than before, leading to 93 per cent overall clickthrough rates, more than 75 of journeys being launched per month, and incremental gains in campaign ROI, says head of digital and customer, Bonnie Thorn. Yet the warts-and-all case study of what it takes to actually make automation and technology work for marketing is far removed from AI’s shiny promise taking centre stage elsewhere. Instead, AMP’s story is a reality check, an expose of the luridly unsexy stuff marketing teams face right now – including staff poaching and tech team wooing – to get to personalisation and better customer engagement.

"Don't mess with the fries!" It’s a customer mantra turned operational gospel at KFC, and it says everything about how the world’s biggest chicken chain is linking employee experience to customer experience and then linking both to better customer outcomes – from fryer to franchise to frontline. Turns out a soggy chip is more than just a missed detail. In Australia, it was a symptom of a broken loop between staff experience, operational rigour, and what ultimately landed in the customer’s hands. And it's exactly the kind of problem that spurred the world’s most famous chicken brand to roll out an ambitious global transformation play that first began as a pilot project in 2020. The critical challenge was how to accelerate standardised customer and employee listening across an international, multi-location QSR or food service brand, hardwiring the connection between team member engagement and customer loyalty – while building an experience engine where one fuels the other. At the heart of the play is KFC Listens – a cross-XM initiative built on Qualtrics tech that’s rapidly evolving from post-meal survey fodder into a frontline tool for driving growth. Already live in 70 per cent of KFC restaurants worldwide, it’s reengineering everything from fry cycle protocols in Australia to forgotten condiments in India – all while quietly proving that engaged employees don’t just drive customer satisfaction; they also drive revenue. Welcome to the age of operational empathy...

According to Adobe APJ VP marketing, Duncan Egan, AI in martech is finally giving B2B marketers the tools to do what B2C marketers have been striving to do for years: Personalisation at scale, creatively and to context, not just stilted linear journeys. The rise of agentic AI to take on burdensome tasks in the marketing supply chain will further free up marketers to find efficiencies that allow them to finally think about what and why they’re pursuing a campaign, not just executing it, he claims. But even as B2B vendor ServiceNow doubles down on its own Adobe martech investments and identifies dozens of new category entry points through AI, its global CMO, Colin Fleming, says it’s not enough to just tailor an interaction to realise demand, or rely on what he calls “FOG, or 'fact deficient, obfuscating generalities'”. Without concerted brand building, B2B marketers will keep short-changing themselves on the strategic standing they should have in organisations given the hefty 70 per cent of GDP comes from B2B transactions today, he says. If you’re not building mental availability in B2B, you’ll miss out on the 81 per cent of people buying the first brand that springs to mind, Fleming warns. 

In the age of the 'blue dot' consumer — imagine 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 is oriented. And if your business hasn’t figured that out yet, it’s probably already being rerouted.

AI won't nibble at the edges at customer experience. Instead, it has the potential to devour current practices. For businesses that get it right, the feast is worth US$860 billion. But according to fresh research from McKinsey and Co along with Qualtrics, most companies are still stuck in pilot mode, paralysed by fear and fragmented strategies. The result? A massive missed opportunity, as AI-powered competitors race ahead, redefining customer interactions in real time.

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.

Three years ago, Australia was on “a CDP bender”, with marketers wooed by the prospect of a single source of truth linking disparate customer data and the ability to slash customer acquisition costs, activate more smartly and efficiently, delivering personalisation at scale while insulating against a twin pincer of a looming cookie cull and major privacy tightening. In other words, “invest in a CDP and – boom – the money rains down”, per one market observer. Three years on, the landscape has changed, use case development has often stuttered – and a lot of contracts are up for renewal. Sitecore CEO Dave O’Flanagan, mParticle CEO Michael Katz, Forrester’s Joe Stanhope, Adobe’s Gabbi Stubbs, Salesforce’s Leandro Perez and others weigh in on where next, and how.

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.

The battle for first-party data is on, and two of Australia’s leading audio networks, Southern Cross Austereo (SCA) and Nova Entertainment have both put customer data platforms at the heart of their martech stacks. For SCA, that's Salesforce and for Nova it's mParticle - which was recently acquired by Rokt. With ad markets tightening and digital competition heating up, both companies needed a way to better understand and monetise their audiences. Enter Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)—but while both took the plunge, their journeys have been anything but identical. SCA went all-in with Salesforce Data Cloud, a sprawling, multi-platform implementation designed to unify marketing, ad-serving, and personalisation efforts across its digital ecosystem. The result? Acquisition costs slashed by as much as 60%. It is achieving greater audience segmentation and advertiser insights—but also challenges around cost management and integration. Meanwhile, Nova chose a more streamlined route with mParticle, focusing first on cutting customer acquisition costs (down 25-30%) and improving audience engagement before shifting towards data monetisation. Now, three years in, both companies are looking at what's next and eyeing the potential of composability in future.

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.

CareerOne has just torched the old job board playbook, swapping passive listings for AI-driven talent matchmaking—and the early numbers look impressive. Matches between employers and candidates have jumped 65 per cent, and job seeker engagement is up eightfold. Powered by Decidr’s agentic AI, CareerOne is ditching keyword-driven guesswork in favour of deep-learning-fuelled precision, putting job seekers in front of the right employers, at the right time, with the right skills. Forget classifieds: CareerOne is transforming into  AI-powered headhunter agent for corporates and recruiters.

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.

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.