Deep Dive

Many predicted The Monkeys would be “roadkill” when Accenture in 2017 paid $63m for Australia’s hottest ad agency, its creative culture steamrollered by the immaculately polished heads of the consulting world. Instead, says creative chief Scott Nowell, who last week departed the agency he co-founded, The Monkeys began a cultural infiltration mission. Six years on, the broader Accenture Song creative-customer model has turned heads in the broader Accenture business – because it’s largely outperforming. But there were some awkward early moments. “A request that we lock our beer fridges until 5 p.m. went down very badly,” says Nowell. He admits moving to a hierarchical consulting giant can take some getting used to: “You’ve just got to ask a lot of people if you can do something or not.” But after some mutual “bum sniffing” the “more closed” corporate and “more open” advertising packs began to run together – and start building products and solutions that go well beyond advertising. Whether Nowell climbs back into the saddle, time will tell. For now he’s smelling the roses after 17 years building a business that won everything going, rejected an offer to reverse takeover Saatchi & Saatchi locally, came close to forming a “pan-Pacific micro network” with Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and tried – and failed – to revive ice cream brand, Homer Hudson, which it co-owned. His advice to anyone starting their own agency today? “Start smarter … get an accountant … try and balance your life.” 

GroupM global boss Christian Juhl says rival holdcos may now regret spending “billions of dollars on cookie-based solutions or personally identifiable information” as privacy moves dead centre in regulatory affairs. Some, he says, “are going to be sitting on a razor’s edge about whether they are going to be compliant ... it will definitely have ramifications for the industry.” In the meantime, he says a key challenge facing marketers across every facet of their business, and fundamentally “how they justify these massive budgets to their CEOs” comes down to measurement. But building post-privacy metrics and proxies, per Juhl, is probably the most “dynamic” – read challenging – part of his business. GroupM is building its own econometric or “full funnel” models for brands because, says ANZ CEO Aimee Buchanan, market mix models focused on shorter-term campaign metrics no longer cut it. Meanwhile, both Juhl and Buchanan have been pushing hard on carbon-based trading. Culling low performing, high emitting inventory is the easiest first step, says Buchanan, followed by stripping out digital weight from creative assets. But both bosses are less aggressive than previous statements around moving ad dollars based on emissions. Likewise, no hard mandates on getting staff back in the office beyond “probably more than we are right now,” per Juhl with hybrid flex built-in. For now, three days is a rule of thumb. Plus, Juhl is unsure how long brands will “pay more for less” on linear TV – and the world’s biggest media buyer thinks the world’s biggest streaming service, Netflix, has an opportunity to start integrating brands. Netflix’s Microsoft-powered ads launch may have underwhelmed, but Juhl sees “wide open” space ahead.

Brent Smart stepped into the Telstra CMO role a year ago. He's learned a lot: Performance marketing is a street-fight that Telstra – and he – must win; huge investment in digital transformation and customer experience has powered net promoter scores through the roof; and that creative excellence has to be systemised in a beast that big. Which is why he's lifting the template that has powered Anheuser-Busch to marketing greatness and is creatively scoring every piece of work that ever touches the customer. But he's still probably brand and creativity's biggest champion and thinks for all the NPS high fives, it's the only way Telstra can grow. So Smart's piling into market mix modelling and attention planning to prove it, and build the ammunition to put a greater portion of budget into brand building, while turning off the performance channels faking their ROI. Last month, he launched the first of Telstra's brand plays to win back customers that got fed up with the telco's service and complex plans pre-overhaul – mostly boomers – and he's got a choice word or two for armchair critics.

Mi3 is meeting the inevitable head-on with Fast News, an AI-powered news service launching next week. It means editors can remain focused on hard, shoe leather, original stories while the machines help crunch high-volume transactional news, moves and campaigns faster. ThinkNewsBrands CEO Vanessa Lyons unpacks why she’s backing the model commercially, while Salesforce’s Leandro Perez outlines the watchouts – and massive gains – generative AI now presents for marketers. He says the challenges and opportunities spawned by generative AI for Mi3 and B2B publishing more broadly are precisely the same as those facing the core industry sectors Mi3 covers for marketers and marketing’s supply chain. On that front, Mi3 this week also launched a new sector-focused newsletter edition: CustomerX. Led by Mi3 tech editor Andrew Birmingham, CustomerX dives deep into the weeds of CX, CRM and personalisation to gauge where customer transformation, capability and investment is headed next. Paul Brooks, GM at CustomerX commercial partner Coles 360 hints at the retail media player's big pushes for next year – off network media buys and closing the attribution loop; while Tracy Gawthorne, marketing chief at fellow sponsor Capgemini, outlines why McDonald’s and Ikea are smashing it in CX and loyalty. 

Lego prides itself on being safe. Nothing wrong with safe, says ANZ Vice President and GM Troy Taylor, a safe-handed 21-year company veteran who’s presided over 16 consecutive years of growth. So he baulked when Initiative came up with a plan to partner with Nitro Circus to put the boosters on its new Lego City Stuntz range. He started to sweat. “My first thought was Mother energy drinks. Women in bikinis. Concerned mums in the stands waiting for kids to fall off motorbikes …. This sounds a bit risqué for a Danish brand … Do we have to do this?” per Taylor. “I was the resistor.” But sometimes, he says, “You just have to let go.” So he did – and Lego’s partnership with Nitro Circus delivered in spades, going global in the process. The upshot? Double-digit sales boost, massive jumps in desire and awareness – and a connection with an audience it hadn’t previously been reaching. Plus, it won the MFA’s 2023 Grand Prix. Lego's Taylor and Initiative strategy & product chief Chris Colter unpack the process, the “cool currency” challenges in marketing to kids via their parents, why Lego Masters shows no signs of slowing, and the importance of sidestepping ‘care washing’ – even when you care more than most.

The naysayers scoffed when Tourism Australia made a CGI kangaroo and 1984’s Say G’Day tagline the main roll of a $125m tax-funded bet to bring the world back to Australia after three years of fire and plague. One year on, those “doofuses” are eating their words, per Mark Ritson, as the kangaroo eliminates misattribution, boosts consideration 18 per cent, delivers travellers in droves, primes high spending tourists to plan trips for next year and beyond, and remains at the very top end of System1’s effectiveness league table. Funnily enough, say Ritson and Tourism Australia CMO, Susan Coghill, following the marketing effectiveness playbook actually works – and the armchair critics were never the intended target. While Tourism Australia is now heading into a statutory review of its creative agency roster, don’t expect much to change – which means more budget to keep hammering the message home, building brand and delivering demand. Ritson reckons it could run for 20 years without wear out. Coghill’s planning for at least four. Here’s how Coghill did her homework, sold it in to stakeholders, went to market and how it’s tracking – and why, per Ritson, 20-30 per cent of marketers will never make the top grade if they cannot get comfortable with imperfect marketing datasets.

Cummins & Partners CEO Michael McConville returned home to Australia last year after five years at the helm of adam&eveDDB, home of effectiveness guru Les Binet – and where he was steeped in econometric modelling with the likes of John Lewis and Volkswagen. One marketer within the Volkswagen Audi Group, Benjamin Braun, nailed econometrics to the point that he could “forecast within 32 units [i.e. cars] what their campaign spend was going to get them in terms of sales”, per McConville. He’s aiming to go one better, probably with clients like Jeep and McCain although he won’t say just yet, after inking an exclusive creative agency deal with Mutinex for econometric modelling in real time. “We'll be looking to beat Audi,” says McConville. “This is a step ahead of what I’d been using in the past by a long way … This is the beginning of an industry repositioning. This is a form of applied marketing science … and agencies won't have excuses anymore to not put this sort of thing forward to clients.” Plus, he’s using it to change Cummins & Partners fee structures: less upfront, more of the client business upside later. “Creativity won't be talked about as a big bet anymore,” reckons McConville. “It's a sure thing.” And that, he says, will make marketing a growth centre once again. 

Asked what she’s been doing for the last 2.5 years, Are Media CEO Jane Huxley doesn’t hold back. She says the business was in a mess after the Pac Mags and Bauer mergers with massive inefficiency and tech duplication following years of chronic underinvestment. Even the IT department had no map of all the disparate systems. She had to get dirty in the bowels, remap and rebuild. Now she says the thrusters are firing and the digital overhaul will start paying dividends in 2024. Print has at least five years to run powering the bulk of revenues, per Huxley, but the business’ engine room – editors – are being trained to become omnichannel content-driven commerce curators. Are’s first marketplaces are now live – and Huxley says editorially-curated niches versus Amazon-style breadth deliver fat margins. Can they scale faster than circulation revenues decline? Per Huxley: “That’s the game”.

Spreadsheets are not going to save the planet. The threat of jail time might. “The world is facing enormous challenges, the clock is ticking, we are in an emergency,” says Ari Alexander, VP and GM, Salesforce Net Zero Cloud. Yet most businesses are all over the place when it comes to their environmental data. That makes calculating where they are at nigh impossible, “let alone where they are going.” But regulators in the US and Europe are mobilising to make environmental reporting data as robust as financial data – and new standards will have profound implications for businesses globally. They can no longer hide, says Alexander, and the regulation is moving away from product-based carbon footprinting to enterprise-wide. As a result, marketers are already pulling back from green claims, with CPG giant Unilever being sued in Europe, per Alexander. He thinks it’s just the tip of the iceberg.