Mi3 Audio Edition

Men are scared and lost in the push for gender equality – they don’t even know if it’s okay to hold the door open any more. As a result, men are disengaging from the gender quality debate, progress is stuttering and women are worried. Hence a month ahead of International Women’s Day, an alliance of Australian publishers, agencies and brands are calling on men to “be t...

Quantifying marketing return on investment, or MROI, has long been hit and miss. But now marketers are using cloud-powered dynamic econometric models to show CEOs and CFOs their marketing investments are driving business results – and to spell out the declines that would occur if they were to cut marketing budgets. Meanwhile, as digital marketers’ ability to track people using cookies...

The battleground for multi-billion dollar defence contracts building high-speed weapons, armoured vehicles and submarines was once a classified world. But over the past decade, something curious has happened: Defence contractors increasingly need to build brand campaigns and need to reach very public audiences to do so. Two very big and expensive projects over the past decade – the now shelv...

Few have been as deeply involved as a marketing practitioner through the digital marketing boom of the past 20 years as Alexander Meyer, the former CMO at pureplay retailer The Iconic. But the targeting tools digital marketers have been using are fast hitting walls  – think cookies and the mass harvesting of user intent signals. Data and tech are just standard tools today - the biggest...

You probably know Noma in Copenhagen is officially the world’s best restaurant. What you probably didn't know is that its Chief Operating Officer is an Australian called Ben Liebmann, the media guy who brought the acclaimed Noma pop up restaurant to Sydney's Barangaroo six years ago with Tourism Australia. You also probably wouldn't know that Liebmann was handpicked by Elizabeth Murdoch a de...

There’s been a dramatic shift in B2B marketing over the past 18 months. B2B marketers have slowly clocked on that they over-invested in performance marketing tactics and hadn’t seen the long-term growth they expected. For tech hardware firms, global supply chain issues have meant they’ve had no choice but to try brand – there’s little to sell. “We’re defin...

In 2018 Australian carmakers were collectively rattled. The consumer and competition regulator, the ACCC, dropped a bombshell on the auto industry in the form of the biggest mandatory product recall ever in Australia – 4.1 million faulty and potentially deadly Takata airbags in more than 3 million vehicles had to be replaced. The problem? Car owners were apathetic and entirely disintere...

Yahoo’s new owners in Apollo Funds Management are backing Yahoo to the max – and the business is bolting. One of the earliest internet platforms is an entirely different beast today but what is Yahoo? Better question: ‘What isn’t Yahoo?’ US giant Verizon sold the company to Apollo for $5 billion earlier this year and it’s been unleashed. Yahoo’s a search c...

NRMA Insurance was “tanking” before IAG CMO Brent Smart returned from New York and appointed Accenture’s The Monkeys, without a pitch, in an early Australian textbook execution of Les Binet and Peter Field’s work around the business impact of investing long-term in brand. Smart went further but was unwavering from the get-go – as were The Monkeys - about returning to...

Most Australian mid-size businesses and up in Australia have hired very smart consultants, developed new business strategies and growth plans … and then seen most or all of the work shelved. “It’s about 90 per cent opportunity, 10 per cent frustration,” says Tightrope’s Managing Director Stijn De Vriendt, the former Strategy Director at Accenture Strategy. Tightrope...

Advertising legends Faie Davis and Sarah Barclay, creators of iconic ads from Yellow Pages’ “Not Happy Jan” to Singapore Airlines’ Singapore Girl have been inducted into the AWARD Advertising Hall of Fame. They’re the first two women ever to have made the list, even an agency – The Campaign Palace – was inducted before a woman made the hallowed halls. Join...

When the Big Bash League started on Network 10 in 2013, it was, well, not very big. But its audience skyrocketed by 370 per cent in the first year alone. “We know how to take a sport, bring it into the free to air landscape and grow it even bigger,” says Nick Bower, Sport Sales Director from 10 ViacomCBS. The network plans to do more of the same with the A-Leagues, and is adding the fi...

The definition of what counts as personal information is set to change in Australia – with online identifiers even down to geolocation under review, alongside use of loyalty and credit card data – while the very definition of consumer consent is being primed for change by privacy lawmakers and enforcers. The upshot is that the fundamentals that have underpinned digital advertising&rsqu...

In the middle of a global pandemic, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age watched lifestyle content numbers boom. They dropped the quantity and boosted the quality of non-news content, embraced newsletters, and it paid off in spades. “The top of the homepage can be so grim,” Executive Editor Tory Maguire says. “But if we present [other content] properly to our audience, they&rsqu...

Marketers have been smashed by the pandemic – but have emerged more powerful, with much bigger, broader remits, according to The Marketing Academy CEO, Sherilyn Shackell. The Academy has spoken with thousands of marketers over the last 18 months and finds greater numbers are becoming board members and CEOs. But they must now carry even greater weight under broader demands and silo-busting sk...

The marketing and media world are rushing to get to market first with engagement metrics – or at least talk about them. But how is that playing out on the ground, and are brands ready? “Before you can go to market and thump the table and expect clients to buy to engagement, you need to be really clear about … the proof that engagement can deliver better results for brands,&rdquo...

Professor Mark Ritson was right all along: “90 per cent of marketers fail to brief agencies effectively, and their failures begin with a total lack of strategy.” The headline findings of the Better Briefs Project and its research spanning 1,700 marketers and agencies make for grim reading. Marketers don’t even realise their briefs are mostly duds, yet agencies are “screamin...

How a marketer’s budget is set is often doomed to fail, Pet Circle CMO Jon Wild says. Typically, it stems from a business’s growth target. “There’s an arbitrary increase to marketing spend and you’re told to go hit the target. Typically, you fall short in the first quarter, and it’s death by a thousand cuts for the remainder of the year.” That method is &l...

10 ViacomCBS will headline its 2022 Upfronts by touting its credentials as a more diverse, full-service broadcaster with room to grow and a big hitting content slate straight out of the gates. I’m a Celebrity starts on January 3, with Survivor and MasterChef hot on its heels. After that, “you’re into that pattern of big franchises all year,” says Chief Content Officer Bever...

Dell tops US$94 billion in revenues, but it had been in a perpetual street fight on pricing for years and was losing margin with brand health metrics flatlining. With a new premium push it went large on brand, inviting Australia’s publishers to pitch their ideas. Around 150 publishers turned up, the response blowing away marketing boss Arjun Dueskar. Opting to go with 10ViacomCBS and MediaCo...

The QR code was once the daggy tech no-one wanted - but it’s now back, and even David “Kochie” Koch’s 87-year-old mother is using them. Five years of e-commerce development has been squeezed into the past 18 months, and Aussies haven’t been able to spend their money in lockdowns. “The economy is going to come out with a vengeance,” Koch, the host of Seven&...

The second and final episode in our two-part series breaks down five of the six recommendations in the ACCC report to the Federal government on the Digital Advertising Services inquiry – the first recommendation was covered in Part 1 yesterday. On the mics again today for the follow up are Peter Leonard, Professor of Practice at UNSW Business School, advisor at law firm Gilbert + Tobin...

Avoid reading another 200 page ACCC probe with this two-part series on the regulator’s final recommendations to the Federal Government from the Digital Advertising Services Inquiry. Google is squarely in the spotlight but as our panel of industry experts warn, what the ACCC is doing to Google is an early signal for broader industry. In today’s heavyweight line-up: Peter Leonard, Profes...

Consider a few stats: The Discovery Channel, Turbo, TLC and Animal Planet are having their best ratings years – ever. Back catalogue episodes are booming: Video on-demand consumption of Friends is up 103 per cent. Fifty-six per cent of people have watched more food and cooking shows, and 70 per cent of them said they would keep watching more post-lockdowns. New viewing habits are here to sta...

When Covid hit, BWS went all out to help local suppliers, which already battered by floods and bush fires, faced risk of extinction. BWS ditched its pre-Covid plan and campaign went all out for localism, launching a competition for independent brewers, distillers and winemakers to get stocked across its 1,400 stores, creating a marketing template for local suppliers to lift and getting locals to v...