Mi3 Audio Edition

Aussie expat Nicole Taylor jumped ship from managing international creative firms to lead LEGO’s in-house agency, which has 400 people around the world, a content factory, and powerful creative, digital and production capabilities. Now, she’s leading a review of the company’s agency roster – and is very positive about the strengths of indies. “I love the fact that they're not thinking of a P&L...

Australia is Toyota country and holds similar clout and market dominance across 17 key markets in Asia. But there were looming clouds on the horizon that Toyota’s APAC execs could see would pose a near-future challenge for the region’s leading carmaker. Toyota’s “humility” around innovation and the future of mobility risked being too conservative and out-voiced by more aggressive, louder rivals at...

Digital out of home screens are the new retail catalogue, as the likes of Woolworths, Coles, Myer and JB HiFi place specific offers and sales depending on the weather, temperature and location. “It's basically a really flexible, tailored, measurable, targeted, third party guaranteed position,” QMS CEO John O’Neill says. Dan Murphy’s, for example, targets red wine messages for cold weather, white w...

Cannes unplugged: Suncorp’s Mim Haysom, Yahoo’s Rachel Page, Thinkerbell’s Adam Ferrier and LinkedIn’s Matt Tindale on incoming headwinds, rebalancing ‘techification’, Ryan Reynolds and the push for 'pragmatic purpose'  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2003, the billionaire former owner of Harrods, Mohamed Al-Fayed, tasked Guy Cheston with building a media business for the department store. By 2015, the luxury store’s media worked so well it paid for everything else. “Initially, this media sales or the owned media division was really just a little tiny element of the trade marketing team,” he says. “Harrods had set up its own in-house media d...

Election and fundraising strategists for former US President Barack Obama accidentally invented the now booming “experimentation” industry which takes the ubiquitous A/B testing concept to new levels – and business is going large. Personalisation has got too much attention and corporate investment at the expense of experimentation, say Deloitte Digital Partner Nima Yassini and Coles’ Fallyn Lowe,...

Three leading global authorities on advertising effectiveness are worried enough about the efficacy of advertising and the impact it has on business results that they have joined forces to present new data and observations in Cannes next week on why a triple jeopardy threat is a clear and present danger to the global industry. They go so far as to call for an overhaul in how advertising...

Marketing is a dirty word for some – look no further than the ‘Scotty from Marketing’ jab. But Suncorp has spent three years building, quite literally, a powerful response to that. Its One House campaign last year and recent Resilience Road activation are entirely marketing-funded and led research projects that are changing the way Queenslanders build disaster-proof homes. And wh...

When done well, OOH smashes it. Local brands have been lagging, but the smart ones are learning from the likes of Nike, driving a “creative revolution” in digital out of home, reckons Neil Ackland, oOh!media’s Chief Content, Marketing and Creative Officer. While tech like QR codes, 3D animation, location data and anamorphic screens can drive huge results, “There’s a d...

Brands and agency holdcos are restructuring for efficiency. But WPP says it’s done with post-Sorrell surgery and out the other side, proving the former CEO wrong in the process. Its “open source” integrated set-up landed the $4bn global Coca Cola account and means other rival agencies and non-WPP partners can tap into WPP’s platform for Coke. It could prove a template for c...

It’s the “hunger games” out there in the B2B talent wars. Software firm ServiceNow’s solution? In-house training. It’s the best way to get good analytics people, Head of Marketing Caroline Raj says. “Everybody is dipping into everybody’s pool at the moment,” she says. It has been a tough two years. Of the 140,000 marketing and advertising people in A...

Adam Ballesty spent most of his career building big brands at spirits business Diageo only to join retail-focused Domino’s in mid-2021, steering a team of 60 through the tail end of a global pandemic. The sector's pace is mind-boggling, he admits. Food aggregators like Uber Eats and Menulog account for the majority of Domino’s orders and were non-existent three years ago. The likes of...

News Corp has reached the level of Big Tech, Client Product MD Pippa Leary says, uniting its famously independent business units – publishing, Foxtel and REA Group – to create a pool of 16-million audience IDs. A consumer could watch Kayo, browse News.com.au, look at property on RealEstate.com.au, and News Corp can link them all, Leary says. The “arms race” of just having b...

Growth hacking was once a favourite term of the Silicon Valley crowd instead of marketing, fuelling the meteoric rise of early tech pioneers like PayPal, Tesla and Amazon. But there’s a fascinating blurring going on, where once successful growth hacks are starting to falter – “failing miserably”, in the words of one-time growth hacker and services marketing advisor Jon...

Nine last month claimed massive active attention for BVOD ads playing on mobile devices, 72 per cent for a 30-second commercial, per Amplified Intelligence’s study. But Karen Nelson-Field’s data is in for Val Morgan – and it suggests cinema blows other channels out of the water for active attention, with zero decay across the entire ad. As attention metrics pick up major att...

Chris Stephenson, global CMO of media agency Network PHD, thinks the marketing community has a weird and massive blindspot around gaming.  That may be because they are buried in admin rather than doing actual marketing. Per PHD’s latest research study, 1,700 marketers around the world say their biggest time allocation is spent on reporting, not strategy, innovation and idea develop...

There’s a fundamental flaw in how advertisers approach the concept of “platform audience reach”, ThinkPremiumDigital says, and the argument goes like this: advertisers care about audiences, but despite large user numbers – the audiences aren’t always paying attention. And yet, a platform’s reach often dictates a brand’s investment level. “Somebody on...

Skills and capabilities across digital marketing, CX, data and analytics have flatlined in Australia over the last three years according to a study of more than 200 marketers. If the data is right, brands are delusional about the skills they have versus what they need, while half the market has either been stripped of CX responsibility, or never had it to start with. Fresh from a decade in the UK,...

The hottest topic in the digital market, Salesforce’s Jo Gaines reckons, is loyalty. And she has two words for brands not delivering personalisation, killer experiences, and a rewarding value exchange: ‘Watch out’. “They really expect you to know all of that,” she says. Competitors are likely circling. Beauty giant MECCA is nailing it, and there are smaller businesses...

Digital audio is growing at about 35 per cent year-on-year, and is now north of $150 million, Southern Cross Austereo’s Chief Sales Officer, Brian Gallagher, reckons. And as digital audio grows, so too are the learnings. For one, smart speakers make up 20 to 30 per cent of the total audience, and those people are listening for hours at a time. Two in every three dollars spent with SCA are bu...

Some have labelled as futile the “WaitingOnZuck" news freeze mounted by 40 independent Australian publishers three weeks ago to protest Facebook and Google’s dismissive and arrogant treatment of smaller, independent media publishers under the Federal Government’s globally acclaimed Media Bargaining Code legislation. But a street fight engineered by independent media, and interven...

NIB is reinventing itself, looking to reach young types not necessarily into health insurance – rather than the 45 per cent of Australians who already have a policy. It ran 20 different messages, influenced by location, targeting gyms and supermarkets on programmatic digital out of home screens with Val Morgan Outdoor. “Rather than focusing on advertising that talks to a joining offer,...

The first detailed attention data from a major media group is out with Nine releasing findings of its attention study with Professor Karen Nelson-Field’s Amplified Intelligence. For a 30-second spot on linear television, the average person pays just 11 seconds of “Active Attention”, or 37 per cent of the ad. BVOD on connected TVs and mobile phones score higher on active attention...

Mi3’s most read story of 2021 unpacked the critical role of mental availability in business metrics, as well as its impact on ESOV , or extra share of advertising voice. Now Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Professors Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk and John Dawes, the people behind ‘mental availability’, have produced a paper with the B2B Institute that should have far-reaching implica...

Former McDonald’s CMO Jenni Dill joined the old but iconic Arnott’s in the same role 18 months ago after US private equity firm KKR paid $3.2 billion for the business from Campbell's. Rather than stripping out costs in pursuit of rapid profit, the new owners are investing to build Arnott’s return as a contemporary Australian iconic brand. The growth plans are ambitious and,...