Tech

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to marketing planning, channel optimisation and reporting, designer retail brand Michael Kors has struggled to get past outdated last-touch attribution modelling.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.

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.

New Zealand’s third-largest on-demand TV player, TVNZ, has seen payback on its CDP investment within 12 months through higher-yield advertising buys that are taking advantage of richer audience profiles and more dynamic segmentation. Here, its digital chief talks through the reshaping of its advertising proposition through data and technology investment and how it’s generating insights around top of the funnel for brands for the first time.

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.

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.

In its latest half-yearly financial report, Carsales cited a 22 per cent rise in media business sales to $34.5 million, representing 16 per cent of total group revenue. It’s the proof point its media division leaders, Stephen Kyefulumya and Davor Vilusic, know shows their multi-year strategy to put first-party data at the heart of Carsales’ strategy is truly paying off.

Now, with Google’s plans for cookie deprecation finally becoming a reality in 2024, the pair are confident the seamless combination of identity resolution, CDP, tag solution, creative solution support and measurement they’ve put together will ensure 100 per cent addressable advertising and reporting for advertisers that meet their every need, regardless of the state of the advertiser’s own data sets. During the recent Adobe Summit, the pair caught up with Mi3 to discuss the status of their mediahouse play and focus on scaling the business.  

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.

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.

Legacy martech is not delivering the kinds of returns organisations want, and boards are reticent to keep filling the funding budget at a time of significant market constraint, according to a new study by technology research firm Forrester. Getting the balance right is an even tougher assignment for APAC marketers who face even greater challenges than their North American and European peers. Martech can no longer stand alone as self-service capabilities that CMOs license from multiple SaaS vendors using their operating budgets, say the analysts who warn that even the most well-thought-out independent martech stack is no match for a well-integrated technology ecosystem that includes martech capabilities as core components.

Nine is the latest media major to go large on a customer data platform (CDP), selecting Adobe over Tealium and Salesforce in a project that has just started its implementation phase. The move will help the media giant orchestrate its 20 million signed in users across its publishing ecosystem, and improve experiences for those consumers and commercial opportunities for clients. It also means Nine it better placed to deal with Chrome's cookie deprecation, new privacy rules out of Canberra, while also building capabilities on one of the fastest growing advertising sectors in Australia: Retail media.

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.

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.

Imagine this challenge: You need to deliver world-class experiences but you don't control many of the crucial aspects of that experience and there's no make-good if you stuff it up. Then imagine your customers are a massive stadium full of Swifties who have been sweating for weeks on what feels to them like a major life event. It's the first of four back-to-back concerts, and the Thunder Gods decide to pay a visit at exactly wrong moment. Venues NSW general manager for Members and CX, Matt Baker, describes what happens next and what he's learned about CX in the world of real things, beyond the clicks and keyboards. The lesson, he says, is focus on the complete experience, and don't underestimate the customers' good sense and goodwill.

Domain CMO, Rebecca Darley, is bullish about the property marketplace’s commercial performance against its larger rival, REA Group, and she has the figures to back her up. While overall category audience growth hit 5 per cent according to Ipsos’ Spring 2023 figures, Domain more than doubled performance against its major competitor, chalking up 10.3 per cent audience growth versus its rival’s 4 per cent. Meanwhile its media business is up 30 per cent this financial year – and Darley's targeting greater gains across utilities, finance and insurance. All of which adds directly to the bottom line for a marketer with an acute commercial focus. From building a proprietary market mix model and trebling internal data, tech and advertising team headcount, to driving dynamic AI-powered personalisation at scale, investing in a big brand platform, and emphasising internal capability, Darley believes she’s found the smarts that deliver results now resonating in the boardroom.

Faced with under-industry average ecommerce sales, a desire to win back lapsed customers, along with ambitions to increase replenishment and frequency rates, luxury beauty brand posterchild, Aesop, has embarked on a digital and martech strategic plan and personalisation journey. Now owned by industry giant L’Oreal, plans are underway to discover which tech stacks and capabilities can be leveraged to further Aesop’s omnichannel customer experience quest. Through all of it, Aesop’s digital strategy leader Richard Lindmark is only too well aware of the need to obtain zero and first-party data to drive its personalisation and experience ambitions. And that means putting customer trust before everything else.

Digital audio has been on a tear of late. It's the fastest-growing media category, according to recent IAB figures. Perhaps more importantly, with the emergence in recent years of podcasts as a success category, traditional radio companies now have a powerful new tool - first-party data - to help rake in those highly competitive advertising bucks. SCA, publisher of the popular Listnr app, last week announced increased personalisation and targeting, extensive dynamic creative optimisation, and an Australian-based CDP plus first-party data clean room solutions and services. Ultimately, the media company wants to extend to its partners and customers the same benefits it has realised by implementing a CDP, stronger customer acquisition and retention, and much greater media efficiency.

Ahead of International Women’s Day (IWD), government pay gap data shows media, marketing, agency and tech industries are some way off gender equality. Release of the WGEA figures has women resetting their position on “lacklustre” programs designed to support fellow females in the workforce, but that aren’t in reality delivering. The accountability WGEA provides also has women in leadership questioning company policies that should be helping empower women, such as flexible work, as well as those that could hinder – they see promotion through meritocracy as one. Senior female leaders from Innocean, EssenceMediacom, Amaysim and Rackspace fear IWD is increasingly a tokenistic gesture instead of what is really required: Discussion – and action – that drives demonstrable change.

MadeComfy, a platform that helps real estate agents break into the short term bookings market is delivering significantly above-market return on booking revenues that to superior customer experiences. The Service Cloud which has enabled this provides another important benefit - eliminating scale costs. That's especially important as the business seeks to raise $20M and head offshore.

Coca-Cola, the original TV alpha advertiser, has flipped to digital first, now spending 60 per cent of its circa $4bn media budget on digital. But its digital transformation runs much deeper than media – and it appears to be paying off big time. Revenue in 2023 was up 6.39 per cent and CFO and President John Murphy said its marketing reorganisation is boosting agility and productivity, with marketing “not a cost, but an investment”. CEO James Quincey said its in-house Studio X, delivered by WPP with output underpinned by Hogarth, is powering, “bringing it all together,” per Quincey, with the firm balancing digital and massive experiential events to put cans in hands, build brand and scoop up first party data along the way. It’s now also using AI to help reformulate product. So far it seems to be working.

Accenture Song boss Mark Green said the deal for the 80-staffer martech consultancy The Lumery is about adding firepower, not plugging gaps as demand for end-to-end service capability soars – and the top end of town consolidates CIO, CTO and CMO remits under all-powerful chief customer officers. While some question whether any holdco or consulting firm is truly delivering integrated brand, strategy, tech, CX and data analytics, Green insists accenture Song is walking the talk – and delivering “high double digit” growth as a “standout” performer within the broader Accenture group. Green and the Lumery co-founder and CEO Raj Kumar see that boom accelerating as brands get serious about slicing tech stacks and services that are underperforming and asking much pointier questions both internally and externally in a bid to drive growth through customer experience.

“I didn’t know a lot about B2B – I’m fully aware of that. I didn’t know anything about the infrastructure industry,” says Steffen Daleng, ex-Booktopia marketing chief turned CMO of private equity backed Australian B2B infrastructure company Jaybro. But making a cross-category leap has not slowed him down. Tasked with transforming the digital and marketing capabilities of a complex portfolio of brands and businesses as Jaybro works towards an IPO, Daleng has promptly tabled productivity wins and soothed staff heebie-jeebies as he rewires marketing and digital. He hasn’t been shy in kicking off a swathe of transformation programs, from a martech and ecommerce overhaul to a marketing and digital team restructure, brand auditing, getting a handle on out-of-hand merchandising and extending the customer lens. But within all of that – and amid a remit to centralise – its long-term agency partners appear safe: “Either you build the best in the industry; or you accept when something else is better.”

A year ago, ecommerce hit the skids at Coles and Woolies as shoppers hit the streets and left the memories of lockdowns and rapacious online consumption behind. But ecommerce is back, and not just for the grocers. After years of investment, online revenues are finally starting to attain some scale at the huge Wesfarmers Group, which includes brands like Bunnings, Kmart and Target, and online marketplace Catch. The ingredients: Loyalty, retail media, and investment in distribution and in-store experiences.

We interrogate the H1 financial results for each business and read the digital tea leaves so you don't have to.

Legend has reduced customer service workloads by 1000 hours annually, gone from 100 per cent manual touch to 65 per cent order automation, unified its customer data into a single view and generated $1 million in ecommerce sales from a base of $30,000 in one year, after braving a Salesforce Cloud and Mulesoft technology overhaul. Yet the three-year project, delivered in two years to everyone’s pleasant surprise – and thankfully within budget – wasn’t without its hiccups, including a dire implementation partner swap at a critical juncture.

However, with automation and data insights capabilities firmly in place, and some solid business and customer wins under her belt, Legend’s head of marketing and digital, Alison Murphy and her team are now working to uncover and solve a greater number of internal and customer pain points. She’s confidently planning to tackle next-best action recommendations and more personalised customer experiences capabilities next too.

And, the combined IT, digital and marketing leader says, the whole project and buy-in to change will help Legend, historically a late adopter of technology and digital, introduce “AI in a gentler way, rather than overusing AI in our business” in the near future.