Mi3 Audio Edition

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,...

Influence, influencers, creator economy and ‘systems thinking’… Standby for some new buzzwords like people-based influence and privacy-friendly zero party data, as the global influencer market is set to top $16bn this year. But the influence industry is still unhinged, poorly managed and needs integrated measurement to help marketing teams understand business impact. And for dif...

No-one in the advertising supply chain is immune to the challenge of how to work in the post-Covid world. NAB’s Thomas Dobson, Mindshare’s outgoing CEO Katie Rigg Smith and Foxtel Media CEO Mark Frain have had to manage this New Work Order. Is it “in the room, not Zoom”? Full flexibility? A mixture of both? Rigg Smith says the pandemic created an expectation that everyone w...

$6.5bn fund manager Australian Ethical, ‘clean fast food’ firm Guzman y Gomez, Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s, Lion’s Stone & Wood, The Body Shop and parts of Danone are all Bcorps. They are all driving growth through commitments to social and environmental good – and are all laser-focused on the sustainability and purpose credentials of those they d...

With the largest social media following in the world as a tourism destination – 17 million – an international advertising blitz in the wings and the expansion offshore of a new customer experience (CX) and post-cookie ID platform trial, Tourism Australia’s CMO Susan Coghill and team have a billion dollar fight on their hands. How do you attract tourists, competing against go...

In the six months since VOZ launched, giving a look at unduplicated viewers on linear TV, online streaming and catch-up services, dozens of agencies and hundreds of brands have started using its data – but the networks say there’s still a way to go (and myths to be busted). Nine’s Richard Hunwick says “streaming choosers” are a new category of streaming-only viewer, w...

GroupM’s new CEO Aimee Buchanan spent ten years at OMD, trading on a transparency ticket and throwing stones at the approaches taken by GroupM and other “enemy” holdcos. New Essence CEO Pat Crowley was the ultimate under-the-radar operator. As one industry observer has it, “Pat played by Covid rules before Covid existed”. But he led Ikon’s CommBank account for 1...

One year ago, SCA leapt into the unknown with a streaming platform that bundled radio, audio, podcasts, and live streaming and a signed-in audience. How has it gone? Well, every day over the past year, more than 1,300 people have signed up and signed into the LiSTNR app. CEO Grant Blackley and Chief Sales Officer Brian Gallagher say it has already smashed expectations – and the momentum is s...

It used to be that P&G and Unilever would almost guarantee a long and possibly illustrious marketing career as the gold standard for applied marketing after university. P&G, in particular, was currency on any CV. So perhaps no surprise ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra – who joined the bank from P&G – has overseen a multi-million dollar investment to develop an in-housed capability progr...

2022 is off to a rocky start: A supply chain crunch, a talent shortage, and campaign measurement challenges are just a few issues on the agenda. But BMW’s new GM for Marketing Alex McLean says it’s a great time to start – demand has never been so much higher than supply. Digital attribution is a growing challenge, Origin’s Sara Varnell says, and the big measurement companie...