Mi3 Audio Edition

Even the discount-averse Apple uses Bernard Wilson’s company to move product. The one-time investment banker - who was part of a consortium which made a failed hostile bid for Qantas - lead Woolworths’ first attempt at a loyalty program, which also didn’t work. The second version did. After stints at Myer and Quantium, the new CEO of cash-back trailblazer, Cashrewards, says as br...

Bigger budgets are pouring into content marketing this year but IAG’s Director of Content & Customer Engagement, Zara Curtis, says there’s “a lot of bad content” being produced by brands. IAG is producing less but better quality. Curtis says she’s a “content killer” as IAG works out the art of what not to produce. Meanwhile, Coles’ Senior Content...

Commonwealth Bank Chief Analytics Officer Andrew McMullan studied machine learning, taught mathematics and is now leading the bank’s AI-fuelled customer strategy. The ‘math man’ and CMO Monique Macleod have been working hand in glove on what is next for Australia’s biggest bank. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy inf...

Howcroft says media is the most ruthless industry, consulting the most influential but advertising the smartest. Nine Radio’s new boss Tom Malone, meanwhile, spills the beans on how Russel Howcroft left PwC to join 3AW’s breakfast slot and the complete overhaul he’s implemented at Nine Radio to skew younger and address advertiser bias against older, lucrative audiences in radio....

Peter Tonagh knows a bit about the media sector and is part of an investment group piling into new media ventures. Big Media is consolidating while he argues future media is specialising and fragmenting. There is tension everywhere.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

French-owned Havas Media last week acquired Australian independent agency HYLAND with plans to plug into its vast parent company Vivendi, controlled by the French billionaire industrialist, Vincent Bollore. Vivendi owns music labels, Hollywood studios, TV networks and gaming and ticketing companies and is moving Havas to a very different position versus its bigger global marketing services rivals...

Nestle’s Head of Media, Data and Content, Antonia Farqhuar is joined by UM’s Nicole Prior, Seven’s Kurt Burnette, Hearts & Science’s Issy Dunn and Amobee’s Liam Walsh in a robust discussion on a red hot industry theme...who emerges on top in a converged and connected TV world - digital video professionals or their broadcast TV peers? The playbook has started. See...

WPP’s founder Sir Martin Sorrell was ousted in 2018 and is now at the top of the $2.1bn challenger to Accenture, the big consulting firms and the global marketing services holding giants and agency networks. S4 is banking big time on tech firms like Adobe, Salesforce and Google for its growth and blending those capabilities with fast, borderless content production and digital media and busin...

Australia's first female CMO is teaching meditation at the firm through COVID and pushed through a major Salesforce rollout internally in the past two months to "connect the data pipes" - Rochelle Tognetti joins Matt McGrath, the new Australian global CMO, on the radical shifts in B2B marketing, the end of physical events, virtual pitching, deploying AI marketing chat bots and what next for the gl...

Behavioural science is the trojan horse marketers need to get psychology back into business and the boardroom. Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy UK and a founder of its behavioural science practice, suggests B2B marketers (and B2C marketers for that matter) must explode the myth that businesses and their people only make logical decisions, or they'll keep making the same mistakes until thei...

Nestle's head of eStrategy, Marketing and Brand, Martin Brown, says 50% of advertiser digital budgets going to working media is "not good enough" - 70% should be the baseline. With the competition regulator digging into the digital ad supply chain and PwC finding half of digital ad dollars are eaten up before they get to publishers, marketers must get a grip on where they are spending their money....

They’ve arguably been the hardest hit media companies through COVID-19 but the bosses of some of the world’s leading OOH companies - with iconic sites like NY’s Times Square, London’s Piccadilly Circus and Sydney’s Glebe Island Silos in their portfolios - come out swinging on this Mi3 podcast. Existential threats from COVID-19 and changes to public mobility and WFH ar...

A more privacy-aggressive Apple is again pressuring its big tech peers like Google and Facebook to play cleaner on gaining “informed consent” from users to be tracked. A September iOS mobile operating system update from Apple will bluntly force more disclosure on how users and their behaviour data is matched and traded across the open web, apps and minute-by-minute geo-location journey...

Within days of DDB Australia and New Zealand chairman and CEO Marty O’Halloran landing the global CEO role last week, he made a radical move to appoint a black, data-led CEO, Justin Thomas-Copeland, to the North American advertising institution. In this conversation, O’Halloran admits it’s a signal for the DDB world that he will shake things up. John Wren, the boss of DDB’s...

It won’t be music to some ears but Danny Bass has been conducting executive leadership offsites for media and agency top brass in recent weeks and he’s convinced those that can get their people back in the office, or at least physically interacting as groups beyond Zoom, will have “first mover advantage”. It’s about the industry’s culture breeding creativity, id...

Mark Ritson calls him one of our "truly great marketing iconoclasts". Professor Byron Sharp says “I wish I was brave enough to be this rude” and NY-based ID Comms CEO Tom Denford predicts Bob Hoffman will possibly be "the most influential person of the decade in media". Here’s Hoffman in full flight. Enjoy. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See omnystudio.com/l...

Cash for comment used to be - and still is - quicksand for advertisers and media companies but not so for influencer marketing, worth $87bn globally and upwards of $240m in Australia. But a new code of practice from the recently formed Australian Influencer Marketing Council (AIMCO) aims to tackle the big challenges that could thwart the credibility of mega, macro, micro and nano influencers. Big...

Deloitte partner John O’Mahony says advertising and marketing “definitely has a perception issue” amongst executive leadership while arguing marketing drives growth and shouldn’t be a cost centre. Volvo and IBM marketers respond on their strategic shifts and hurdles in moving to brand over short-term tactics. Rob Brittain, co-author with Peter Field on the Communications Co...

Paul Evans was one of the driving forces of Vodafone’s global in-housing of search, social and digital media but he’s still not sure the ad industry at large has solved John Wanamaker’s famed conundrum that half his advertising was wasted but he didn’t know which half. Evans was also involved in the early scoping of PwC's recent forensic dive in the UK into the programmatic...

Nine’s Chief Digital and Publishing Officer Chris Janz says the once contentious ad deal Fairfax struck with Google before Nine’s takeover will now "likely mean we’ll have a different relationship with Google" as the newly formed Premium Content Alliance (PCA) of major local publishers plans another counter strike on Google and Facebook with “effectiveness research”....

Mastercard and Intel are among the highest profile brands who have invested heavily in “sonic branding” but Procter & Gamble and a host of big names are now treating audio branding as important as visual and video identity. New York-based Veritonic and SCA tested a 400,000-panel of Australians to produce the first annual Audio Logo Index in which Bunnings, VB and Toyota were leader...

Australian marketers could be showing "signs of panic” if sobering new analysis from Peter Field and The Communications Council is right. What’s more, B2B marketers here could be powering ahead of their consumer marketing peers in reassessing short-term tactical marketing to longer term brand building to drive growth. LinkedIn’s Prue Cox joins Comms Council CEO Tony Hale and Pete...

After a $600m loan, standing down 85% of its staff and the competition set to restart on June 11, off-season audiences are up 50% for AFL Media as COVID forced new digital products for fans and fast-tracked a surge in women and younger audiences with more entertainment and lifestyle content. “We’re all working seven days a week but frankly we’re in great shape,” says ex-Net...

Massive complexity is creating “marketing cloud fatigue”, says Gartner’s California-based senior director and analyst Ben Bloom, who joins Publicis Sapient ANZ managing director Sarah Adam-Gedge, Citi’s Head of Digital and Segments Roger Slater and Brand Traction’s Jon Bradshaw in Episode Two on why personalisation is a quaint bygone - even with tech. See omnystudio.c...

Clemenger BBDO Group executive chairman Robert Morgan has a long-held view that "you take your medicine early” in a downturn, flagging more consolidation within the group as the big creative agency brands become central hubs for creative, e-commerce, data and precision marketing. But he “absolutely won’t” be replicating WPP’s centralised production model in Australia...