Deep Dive

Some B2B firms are realising Byron Sharp was right on distinctive assets versus differentiation all along. A slew of recent research underlines that buying committees are increasingly buying on brand, not product features – and they've usually made up their minds before the first marketing qualified lead (MQL) lands with sales, rendering MQLs increasingly redundant. IT firm Logicalis ran the numbers on its own campaigns and found only 21 per cent of its potential customers were even aware of it – and that a single percentage point awareness gain would drive massive revenue growth. Moreover, six in ten of its potential customers couldn't recall a single ad from any of its competitors in the last 12 months – presenting a major opportunity to start optimising to awareness and driving conversion via bolder comms. "Funnily enough, I didn't find much resistance," says head of marketing, Lara Barnett. ABB global digital marketing and content chief Sophie Neate says the engineering giant has dropped MQLs as a KPI altogether and is now getting more joy out of other metrics while creating and personalising content across a much broader range of buying committee stakeholders. Stuart Jaffray, MD of B2B specialist agency Green Hat, urges brands to go all out on distinctive brand assets, brand awareness, mental availability and recall. Plus, forget the answers you wrote in your last ten RFPs and instead look at the questions – and develop content around them. Then the buyers will come to you.

Machine-to-machine CX and an explosion of conversational commerce is set to bring $200bn of brand content contracts into play, forcing a total rethink for corporates, content firms and creators of all creeds for how they structure and deliver content for bots to read, process and action commerce and broader customer experience. Deloitte Digital is already retooling its entire content team to do just that. National Lead Partner Leon Doyle and global marketing and commerce boss Nick Garrett say brand-owned content and marketing is taking a swing to risk management and governance and brands must clear "content debt" fast or gamble on commerce-enabling AI applications scraping and ingesting forgotten, incorrect, outdated or even misleading corporate information and content lurking in digital corners. Garrett says conversational commerce is “exploding in every market” globally and thinks the impact on content economics is seismic – with everything that existed pre-AI at risk of obsolescence. That reality is likely also driving the next classic re-invention of consulting services and advisory practices.

Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz, of University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, suggests Professor Byron Sharp’s best known book, How Brands Grow, is a misnomer – it’s actually about how big brands keep big marketshare, not how they got there. He also says it’s based on flaws within Andrew Ehrenberg’s earlier work, primarily static markets and a requirement not to differentiate. Thomaz suggests that’s why FMCG firms adhering to those rules were caught napping by more nimble differentiated start-ups. Optimising media for reach alone no longer works, he suggests, because all reach is not equal – and used bluntly won't deliver business outcomes. “There is a missing dimension,” per Thomaz. He’s out to prove it with a peer-reviewed paper that analyses 1,000 campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and Wavemaker. The upshot? “None of it holds … I'm seeing that 1 per cent of campaigns are actually getting exceptional money, while the vast majority are choosing to get some really mediocre outcomes.” But there's potential upside for marketers, media agencies – and media owners – that grasp the category-specific implications.

Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind was “surprised” – read underwhelmed – by the first tranche of Privacy Act legislation laid before parliament last month. But she says the hard stuff is still coming after the election, which means businesses now diverting budgets away from compliance to other activities may regret it, especially as the regulator has sharper teeth. Kind says firms are failing under the current Privacy Act – and they are in the regulator’s crosshairs. Tracking pixels are under serious scrutiny across the piste, as are companies using data beyond what it was collected for and potentially passing it to third parties. In that vein, Kind has “existing concerns” about loyalty programs, customer data enrichment businesses and data broking: “It's something I'd like to look at again under the current framework,” she says, suggesting those operators “make sure that they're watertight”. Likewise firms targeting via geolocation: “We’re looking at a case at the moment … We have some real concerns about how it's being used.”

Part One: Terry Kawaja’s New York investment bank Luma Partners is behind the Lumascape spaghetti maps that try to make sense of the sprawling, connected pipes of the adtech industry. Kawaja thinks consolidation has to happen for the industry to shake the cowboys – “the environment is highly fragmented and that allows people to hide,” he says. That’s code for "nefarious" market behaviour which undermines adtech’s credibility. Kawaja argues a clean digital ad system is more important now than ever if open web players are to compete with big tech, especially as he sees retail media quickly eating a third of open web ad dollars. But consolidation and M&A has been lean of late. Kawaja admits adtech is still notoriously opportunistic and has played a starring role in the creation of some of the problems the market is struggling to address with junk digital data, fake people and opaque trading practices that nobody seems able to solve. Regardless, he sees another incoming wave of tech investment and reckons Google’s global advertising trading system being broken up would have huge financial upside for Alphabet shareholders – and the industry at large. Kawaja thinks Google may even be playing to lose.

Brands are spending “literally tens of millions of dollars with cloud providers” to train and fine-tune large language models from scratch. Wasteful, says Salesforce global CMO Ariel Kelman. “There are lots of use cases where you do need to train and fine-tune your models. But absolutely not sales, service, marketing and commerce – the models are smart enough that they can go and grab information.” Salesforce’s argument is that pointing AIs at existing repositories – catalogues and order management systems, for example – begets faster, useful results that "blur the lines" between sales, marketing, customer service and commerce. The alternative so far has been training and tuning LLMs on “thousands of hours of customer service calls”, to get so-so results for massive outlay per Kelman. He suggests cloud providers milking LLM training/tuning business teats are operating on perverse incentives akin to digital marketing being asked whether clients need branded keywords for every product: ‘Let me give you 50 white papers on why you need that…’ Next up Salesforce’s “autonomous agents” and “large action models” are coming for sales lead development.

Despite lofty purpose and customer-centricity talk, only one big brand, Hyundai, has put its heft behind Australia’s push to lift the age threshold for social media access to 16. But as the policy settings move from a cyber/tech issue to a public health crisis, the position brands need to take becomes more accute. Veteran social media marketer, Katie Palmer-Rose, has worked with the likes of L'Oreal, PepsiCo and Aldi and now runs influence agency Kindred. She thinks regulation is required for a legal age at 16 – and that brands will ultimately back it. For now they are “waiting to see where it lands”, but she reckons it’s time to prepare new teen approaches for “a digital world that doesn't live in social media”. Rob Galluzzo, one of the architects of the 36 Months campaign urging government to protect younger teens from the health risks of social media, suggests more brands are about to walk the talk and sign-up. But the platforms, he claims, are pointblank refusing to engage – and telling staff not to talk.

Regulating algorithms and forcing transparency about how they work – or just making platforms make them “dumb” for teenagers – might be a more proportionate response than an outright ban by the Australian government, argues former Facebook ANZ managing director, Liam Walsh. He warns a lack of support infrastructure means kids face shock impacts if “suddenly their whole network – not only their social network, how they commune with others – is gone”. But campaigners, and school principals, say the harms go far beyond algorithms with attention gamified and platforms made addictive in the process and young teens simply not developmentally ready to face the pitfalls of the anonymous digital world. But what comes next, in terms of education and support infrastructure for teens – and society more broadly – will be critical so that the ban comes with a plan. Either way, says Walsh, prepare for challenges.

Kincoppal-Rose Bay Principal, Erica Thomas, doesn’t take banning social media for under 16s lightly. But Thomas is at the coalface with 1,000 kids daily and from what she sees playing out in the classroom, thinks it’s critical. Concentration levels are dropping with learning and results affected despite teachers’ best counter-strategies. Meanwhile, girls are being conditioned to perfectionism from a young age and exposed to “toxic and harmful advice” daily, while boys are pushed increasingly violent content and AI bot-created “highly sexualised” stereotypes of women. Thomas says the negative impacts have accelerated in the last five years – and it’s getting worse.