Mi3 Audio Edition

The world “hates ads”, reckons Avid Collective boss Luke Spano. But high dwell times and engagement rates suggest they like native content. Marketers know this, but native content has been fragmented and highly manual, akin to insertion orders pre-programmatic. With little standardisation and patchy reporting metrics it couldn’t scale. While the likes of Taboola and Outbrain have hooked major publ...

After two decades at GroupM, Dave Gaines quit to launch Media by Mother, an offshoot of creative London hotshop Mother that he reckons may ultimately be subsumed by its progeny. A major frustration with the WPP-owned business, per Gaines, was the inability for swathes of its people to think laterally, critically and stay curious. He hired a shrink to try and fix the problem, and then tried to take...

Media buyers this week applauded Nine’s retailer media launch – but wanted more detail. They always do. Sales chief Michael Stephenson and CMO Liana Dubois unpack it here, alongside Nine’s bid to take the fight to Meta, Google and TikTok with a self-serve AI-powered ad platform aimed squarely at Australia’s 2.5 million small businesses currently spending $1.5bn a year on “less efficient” social vi...

Since leaving Telstra to take on a wide-ranging c-suite role at Tabcorp – spanning product, data and data science, customer experience and personalisation, brand, marketing and sponsorship with revenue responsibility – Chief Customer Officer Jenni Barnett has hit the turf running. The betting firm was haemorrhaging customers to digitally-savvier, free-spending rivals like Sportsbet and Ladbrokes....

David Jones’ new retail media business wants brand budgets – both from the suppliers it already works with as well as wooing marketers across travel, automotive and lifestyle. CMO James Holloman is backing shopper data from 5.4 million premium David Jones customers – and the ability to hyper-target them across DJs stores and digital assets as well as across the open web – in a plan to woo marketer...

The experts at Hoyts and Val Morgan didn’t see it coming quite as it did. Hoyts CEO Damian Keogh says he was “laughed out of the room” for suggesting Barbie would take $35m at the Australian box office. It will do double that – meaning Margot Robbie’s not the only one in the pink. Kia, AAMi, Chemist Warehouse, Modibodi and Nintendo aside, marketers are kicking themselves for being equally blind to...

Just about every B2C business is trying to build superglue stickiness into their user platforms. Nimble start-ups, at least prior to the big VC squeeze, were the poster children, leaving big legacy firms foundering in their wake. But SCA’s pivot to uber app Listnr is a standout exception, reinventing its digital audience business and building a new brand from scratch – pretty much all in-house. La...

Tectonic movement is reshaping blue chip marketing with remits expanding by the day. Coles and IAG replaced the CMO role with Chief Customer officers. ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra was last month promoted to Managing Director of ANZ’s Everyday Banking business. But Lion’s latest move tops the lot for adventure. Anubha Sahasrabuddhe in February became Chief Growth Officer at the $3bn drinks firm. The former...

Uber launched at South by Southwest, as did Twitter, Pinterest and Foursquare. Billie Eilish was discovered as an unsigned 14-year old. Mumford and Sons first made their name at the creative-tech-culture jamboree in Austin, Texas. In three months time the world will learn whether the powerhouse event can replicate itself outside of the Lone Star State. SXSW Sydney MD, Colin Daniels, is backing Sin...

  Tightening privacy regimes around the world are forcing Google to change the way it tracks and measures web traffic across the majority of the globe’s estimated 100m sites on the open web. That’s forced Google’s Universal Analytics to be swapped out with an entirely new product knowns as GA4. The problem is it’s a mess for most. And it's a likely marker for what’s to come in Australia - companie...

NAB CMO Suzana Ristevski is a touch emphatic after just completing a three-year, $45m grinding overhaul of the bank's marketing technology systems that has seen 95 per cent of the tools used by the marketing team switched out - a Pega decisioning engine and Tealium's customer data platform are among the new line-up. Now NAB is ready for the AI stuff.  Ristevski acknowledges “inflicting a lot of pa...

When Elsa Beaumont was tapped last year by Treasury Wines Estate – home of the mighty Penfolds – the former exec at global hot shops like Mother and Big Spaceship, and her colleague Ben Oliver, who’s running Treasury’s internal media unit at Splash, were worried. Could they beat all the warnings that come from agencies when brands try to go in-house with capabilities all previously outsourced: tal...

After ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra commissioned owned media specialists Sonder to conduct a valuation and audit of the media assets the bank owned and managed, her big discovery was that circa 85 million impacts a month, mostly from ANZ customers, were under leveraged by the business. Now ANZ’s marketing team think first about their owned channels before developing paid media briefs. New content hubs coupl...

Coles and IAG have joined the march to install Chief Customer Officers into roles that were either previously at least partly the domain of CMOs or now have marketing as a reporting line. But what does a CCO do? Is it job title semantics or is the mission sweep broader? And where does this new executive species come from? Three Chief Customer Officers from Inghams Group, Hipages and MyCar, the ove...

The Media Federation of Australia unveiled a hot shortlist of the brands and agencies delivering the best work and business impact in media for 2023, with Lego, NRMA, Campari’s Aperol, Netflix and Suncorp among those leading the finalists tally. About 30 advertisers and 20 agencies made the cut of finalists with three marketers among the judging line-up for the 2023 MFA Awards joining Mi3 to unpac...

Gen Z makes up 20 per cent of Australia’s population. There are more than five million of them – and they want very different things from brands. Purpose won’t cut it. They want action, locally and globally – and they are sick of nobody listening to them, per Chris Sanderson and Martin Raymond, founders of The Future Laboratory. They are also – aged between 11 and 26 – already wary of digital burn...

Mattresses selling for circa $3,000 are not typically a signal for how consumer spending is bending historical patterns but Tony Pearson, CEO at mattress maker AH Beard, is seeing two distinct consumer groups going in opposite directions. Sales of his premium lines in the $2-3,000 tier are holding strong just as his cheaper lines - from $600 - fell off a cliff in April. Meanwhile, mattress sales t...

If Nine’s former publishing boss Chris Janz and The Guardian’s Managing Director Dan Stinton are right, there’s a storm brewing for the media establishment as frustration rises among the business, tech and innovation elite – and even the broader public – over what and how mastheads and journalists produce content. Chris Janz did the “deal of a career” when brokering the 2017 ‘unholy’ alliance with...

With Voz in market and the TV networks seemingly moving forward with a BVOD marketplace, agencies and broadcasters have renewed impetus to converge TV trading and buying and flick legacy systems. But ditching decades of behaviour is never easy. Perhaps the best example is what has been dubbed the Unilever trial, where the FMCG giant, agency PHD and Seven West Media used early Voz data to boost rea...

During Covid, the big Hollywood studios played hardball with cinemas – rushing to take-on Netflix and Prime, feeding their own direct streaming plays, shortening releases windows, or cutting them out altogether. Sony was the streaming holdout. ‘We’re either going to look like the smartest person in the room, or the dumbest,” Sony Pictures local boss Stephen Basil-Jones told Hoyts CEO Damian Keogh....

NRMA’s data crunching suggested the brand would get more bang for buck by putting some of its sports marketing budget into entertainment. So it pulled out of The Broncos, unwound its Collingwood sponsorship and, flipping from a local club to national strategy, “made the biggest bet we’ve ever made on Cricket Australia,” per IAG Acting CMO, Zara Curtis. She recycled the remainder into cinema, last...

Debate on whether brand campaigns can drive short term sales performance and vice versa – aka ‘double duty’ – is running as hot as the budget knives pressed to the CFO’s whetstone. News Corp’s Pippa Leary says market-wide short-termism is fuelling demand for performance ads to drive immediate results but double duty works – results for Moet has LVMH marketers popping their corks. Brand strategist...

Search and SEO is facing major disruption – with implications for brands across both performance media and mid-to-upper funnel content marketing. Google is countering the threat from Bing and ChatGPT with Magi, set to soft launch later this month. Billed as a “hyper-personalisation engine”, it will change how search works and the way content on websites needs to be written and structured, per Step...

Three years ago Jenni Dill put a multiyear strategy plan to Arnott’s to management and board. The former McDonald’s CMO had been in the CMO gig at Arnott’s for 13 days. But Dill had just completed The Marketing Academy’s Fellowship course, which she says provided the clarity and confidence to speak business, not marketing – and to deliver a growth agenda at pace. It’s paying off. Despite the bigge...

Mel Hopkins says she hasn’t gone to Seven “to put lipstick on a pig”. The former Optus CMO says CEO James Warburton wants “total transformation” – and not just across ratings – so she’s hatched a four-point plan. Hopkins has also committed to linking Seven’s marketing activity and investment directly to earnings and the P&L “in real time”. Anything less, she says, “and I am failing to do my jo...