Tech

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.

Ever wanted to design your own personal board? Talk under the cone of silence to someone who’s already been a CMO or CEO in the same industry or agency landscape and who actually relates to your struggles without the commercial rivalry? Share high-performance team or startup strategies, transformation plans or simply nut out your next career move with someone who has been there, done that? Or provide your talent with a way to develop and grow so you retain them for longer, and have a happier, more productive workforce? Maybe you've just been fired and need help mapping out the next strategic move. That's what GroupM chief and McDonald's and ANZ CMO, Mark Lollback, believes he can fix through his new venture, Global Mentorship – with some big names on board. Here's the plan.

NAB sent more than 100 of its executive team to Salesforce's World Tour in Sydney yesterday. Woolworths sent double that as 15,000 delegates descended on Sydney's ICC to gather intel on the likes of AFL, Barbeques Galore, Mecca, Spotify, Decathlon and BizCover's advancing forays into AI – and the intel was good. AFL reckons it has taken "hundreds of hours" out of every club while powering "hyper personalisation" and double digit member growth. Barbeques Galore said it has seen some sales double. Mecca's AI chatbot has cut cart abandonment by 75 per cent. But while AI promises a new generation of riches for Salesforce, there's still the matter of dealing with some immediate challenges, such as a move away from massive, all-encompassing monolithic tech stacks toward more agile composable kit. Meanwhile Salesforce's Australian EVP reckons its Data Cloud is the most important product in the company's history – and told Mi3 why, while lifting the lid on its own AI-powered gains, and where next.

It sounds like the holy grail of media spend: More efficiency, more effectiveness, more strategic thinking and more brand benefits. And that's what Asahi believes it's getting through its new investment into a marketing intelligence platform. During this week's Salesforce World Tour in Sydney, the FMCG giant was touting KPIs including a 46 per cent drop in cost per click, 20 per cent CPM reduction, 33 per cent lift in 3-second view rates, 17 per cent higher engagement rates on media assets and 50 per cent click through rate in the first few months of having a unified marketing intelligence platform in place across three brands. In the next month, it's expecting even more as all 23 brands in the Asahi portfolio benefit from the new approach to paid media investment and reporting. 

A line-up of big name entrepreneurs, investors and Australian and Silicon Valley VC firms have piled into the second, $20.5m funding round of three-year-old New Zealand SAS start-up Tracksuit, with ambitions of “creating the world’s best brand tracker”. The Series A funding, which values the firm at $142.9m, has eyes on disrupting global incumbents including Qualtrics, Kantar, Ipsos, Nielsen and YouGov. An intriguing competitive tussle between a new, automated and materially cheaper SAS-based brand tracking firm and the research establishment is in play – private equity firms control Qualtrics (Silver Lake), Kantar (Bain, WPP) and Nielsen (Elliott Investment Management).

Advertising, ecommerce sales and fulfilment plus subscription revenues are all powering north at Amazon in Australia – and its ad takings, up 51 per cent in 2023, should get a major boost in the second half of this year as it links streaming ads on Prime to its retail media business. I.e. vertically integrated brand and demand with sales and delivery. The company's claim to advertisers that it will hit 5 million subscribers may be a stretch but is doable, even if some analysts suggest its 40 per cent subscriber growth rate has maxed out. Either way, consultants suggest there is existential pressure for local incumbents as the juggernaut starts to hit top gear. After playing the long game, they reckon Amazon is finally approaching primacy, with pure-players likely to be "knocked off" as a result.

Two new appointments to the Mi3 team will see Kalila Welch oversee Mi3’s daily AI Fast News project and cover the agency and media rounds; Pamela Schoenhofer joins in Editorial & Partnerships.

CMOs need to get their consent management house in order or risk tainting the AI models they are currently spending millions to develop, says Tealium CEO Jeff Lunsford. His company has just been named a leader in the first ever Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms, along with Salesforce, Adobe and Treasure Data. In Australia, Tealium is the leading enterprise CDP, according to research conducted by Mi3 last year. Gartner warned however, that the sector may have peaked and consolidation could follow. Tealium's boss believes that's more of an issue for companies that piled into the CDP sector when it was running hot. He says AI will drive strong ongoing demand for a platform that not only addresses the challenges of data collection, enrichment and distribution, but also solves for activation.

It’s not quite the viewer utopia of universal search for any content on any streaming or broadcaster app but Foxtel’s launch last night of a connected TV super hub aggregating 18 competing apps in a single platform with a one-time sign-in for all is getting close. Hubbl will see Hamish & Andy front a major consumer marketing effort designed to tap growing viewer frustration managing dozens of streaming apps and subscriptions and the time it takes to find something to watch. Early results from Sky Glass in the UK and US – Hubbl’s genesis – indicates viewers spend less time choosing content and their viewing time and repertoire of shows and genres increases. “It’s a content-first experience, not an app-first experience,” Hubbl’s global Chief Product Officer, Fraser Stirling told Mi3 in what he argued was a groundbreaking shift in how people will connect with, manage and consume content.

Credential stuffing attacks across Ticketek, The Iconic and Endeavour Group have ratcheted up mainstream awareness of a worryingly common cyber risk – but by blaming the data breaches on third-party websites or the dark web, brands are exposed to very real reputational and regulatory risk while failing their customers. They are also demonstrating a lack of insight, technical investment, governance and risk preparedness. Experts suggest CMOs are going missing in action, shirking responsibility and prioritising seamless digital customer experiences over responsible ones – to everyone’s detriment. Here’s what marketers should be doing, fast.

With the shift to a greater reliance on first party data due to privacy pressures from regulators, and the need to extract maximum juice from advertising budgets thanks to pressure from the C-Suite, Australia's marketers have been on a years long CDP "bender". Now buyers have a new tool in the purchasing arsenal – the first ever Gartner Magic Quadrant for CDPs which rates providers on their ability to execute and the completeness of their vision. But Gartner's leaders list is very different to the reality on the ground in Australia, where Tealium and Segment have the most customers. Instead Salesforce, which is probably under indexed locally, along with Tealium, Treasure Data and Adobe occupy the most expensive real estate on the Magic quadrant monopoly board – the Leaders quadrant. Sitecore however has not passed go, and did not collect two hundred dollars. It doesn't feature in the report at all. Meanwhile, Gartner thinks the CDP bender may have already peaked.

Greater digital connectivity with customers seems to have delivered a career boon for CMOs, who are now much more likely to be regarded as drivers of revenue growth and profitability, and as directly responsible for the customer experience, according to a Capgemini global study. Furthermore, with the emergence of generative AI CMOs, especially in Australia, marketers are embracing the potential of this emerging technology to improve areas such as data analytics, personalisation and campaign creation. And they are already looking forward to the day when they can build brand and customer avatars as a central part of customer experience. But they are not blind to the challenges and risks, with the number who believe the benefits of generative AI outweigh its costs and risks dropping by almost a third compared to another study earlier last year.

You might be wearing your bank on your face in the future, according to Westpac chief technology officer David Walker, who believes AI and other emerging technologies will not only improve productivity and customer experiences and accelerate new product development, it will usher in a world of intelligence banking. Westpac has been working with generative AI for three years and is already generating impressive results. Its programmers for instance, are each generating 22 per cent more code per day on average. But the need to operate responsibly with new technology is key and guardrails need to be robust. That's something Westpac found out the hard way in 2020 when it was hit with the highest civil penalty in Australian history: $1.3 billion for breaches of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act. It was not alone, rival Commbank was smacked $700 million.

With strong advertiser case studies from both programmatic and brand-focused clients, local Snap boss Tony Keusgen is keen to highlight the flexibility and utility of a platform he says dominates the under-40s in Australia. Facebook's ubiquity and TikTok's growing market share mean Snap can no longer bank on its new kid on the block appeal. Instead, he highlights examples of huge conversion increases clients experience, along with strong brand uplift. And with such a strong position in the 13-24 cohort, he also emphasises brand safety. Facebook and TikTok both took fire in recent US Congressional hearings over the issue, but so did Snap. At the coalface though, clients are getting good results. Oral hygiene firm HiSmile, for instance, drove a 15 per cent uptick in revenue through a campaign on the platform. Uber meanwhile was able to reach 2.08 million users in 24 hours, delivering 205k video views.

Google has insisted it will cull third party cookies before the end of this year but the UK’s competition regulator says that call isn’t Google’s to make. Unless it can solve serious concerns around the impact on competition, interoperability, self-preferencing and the very real risk of driving more money out of the open web and into walled gardens – like Google itself – it’s not happening. Now the IAB has piled in with 106 pages of complaints and stating Google’s bid to put much of the adtech world’s underpinnings into the browser is not viable. In the meantime, early analysis – the little that is available – of Google’s 30 million browser experiment, AKA the one per cent club, suggests a 30 per cent fall in CPMs. But Australian brands, publishers and the media supply chain will soon have bigger fish to fry.

Amazon’s advertising revenues surged 26 per cent last year as the juggernaut powers towards a $50bn ad business – with TV ad takings "growing quickly" and gaming markets now in its sights. Amazon’s Australian business, which last year cracked $100m in advertising takings, is also predicted to double in size by 2025, with retail ecom pure-players beginning to face existential threat in earnest.

It's a little over a year since Mark Cattini took the reins of Acoustic - best known in Australia as the spin out martech business from IBM's old Watson division. He believes the combination of behavioural and customer experience data down the the level of mouse movements and keystrokes will help marketers not only know what's happening on their sites, buy why, and what to do about it.