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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.

WPP's VML is the tenth merger ANZ CEO Thomas Tearle has under his belt to date. As agencies locally and globally rush to consolidate brands, he says it's "becoming a specialism". Three months into the VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson smush, he claims it's not far off "humming" and isn't just a bid for efficiency. But in all mergers there is always a cultural unknown to navigate, "the only thing you can't predict is the team dynamics."

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.  

We’ve all read the advice about the importance of learning from failure. But let’s face it, it’s an awful lot harder to own up to something that went wrong. Taking it to the next level and celebrating the learnings failure brings takes another level of cultural courage and vulnerability again. Yet from Uber’s annual Mexican team dinners to celebrate the $1.4 million campaign failure via mariachi bands and rogue promo codes on Facebook Live, to throwing a party to farewell a short-lived product line with staff at Chobani, there are examples of brands providing safe spaces for employees to take stock, own and grow through failure. As can be seen from marketing leaders from TikTok and The Bridge, taking decisive and constructive action after recognising a digital video proposition or Covid-fuelled health checker couldn’t be scaled are lessons that help them shape strategies and go-to-market approaches today.  Uber’s Andy Morley, Chobani’s Olivia Dickinson, The Bridge International’s Lewis Pullen and TikTok’s Anny Havercroft unpack hard earned – but high value – lessons from failure.

The Australian leans too right, The Guardian and ABC too left, says the Editor-in-Chief of The West Australian, Anthony De Ceglie, who’s behind the push from Perth by the Kerry Stokes-controlled Seven West Media to launch The Nightly, a national news masthead targeting the “mainstream middle”. It’s also tapped several raging readership trends where ThinkNewsBrands CEO Vanessa Lyons says evening news consumption is on the rise and circa half the audience of state-based news mastheads come from outside their traditional borders as big swathes of the population hunt more lifestyle, sport, business and political content.

Young, cashed up and ready to party, the legion of Swifties who poured into the Sydney and Melbourne CBDs for the artist's recent concert series lifted spending by 4 per cent and 6 per cent respectively in each city. And those figures are conservative, says the Commbank iQ executive who ran the analysis. Here's where the money went.

Metcash has dropped some tantalising details about its incoming retail media network. The ASX-listed retail buying group is keeping cards close to its chest, but sees "significant" revenue and margin from joining larger rivals in building out a media business. Supermarkets are first, liquor comes next – and if the numbers stack up, the rest of the business will then follow, per CEO Doug Jones. While the likes of Coles and Woolworths are powering ahead with big national plays, Metcash spies competitive advantage – and pay dirt – in localised advertising and SMEs, with a profit share for its independent retailers.

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.