Mi3 Audio Edition

John Wild, the Chief Marketing Officer for Pet Circle, invites his CFO to creative pitches and hires analysts with better data coding skills than the finance team. Why? So they can understand his job and buy into the creative messaging. “It’s incumbent on you to make [CFOs] your friend,” he says. “Make marketing look and smell very much like a financial output. Suddenly, wh...

SiteMinder is likely the biggest Australian tech company you’ve never heard of. The $1.1billion hotel booking system unicorn is headed for an IPO – so that will likely change. But what must also shift is Australia’s attitude to B2B marketing as the boring, rational sibling to B2C, says CMO Mark Renshaw. It’s where the smart money is headed, Renshaw reckons, and can teach FM...

Most publishers are winding down print operations. David Jones is ramping up – since launching a print magazine five years ago it has seen consistent double-digit growth across each of its digital channels. “The customer is overwhelmed with choice,” David Jones Marketing Communications General Manager Georgia Hack says. So the retailer decided to curate and repurpose its existing...

Launched by a former stockbroker and Booktopia’s CTO, Australian fintech Superhero has ripped up the start-up playbook and powered to massive growth off the back of out of home and TV. “To create big impact and really reach scale, brand awareness and credibility, fast... digital just is not going to get you there,” says marketing lead Rachel Hopping. With CommSec and the big four...

Australia’s streaming market is already crowded. There are only so many people who can sign up to Netflix, Stan, Prime, Binge, Kayo and the rest. That’s before you get to affordability issues – and the audiences for advertisers have been dwindling. Enter AVOD: advertising-based video on demand, where users pay less (or nothing) to see fewer ads. “It will allow people to rea...

Tasked with rewiring WPP’s media arm, GroupM Global CEO Christian Juhl is going a couple of steps further, attempting to redefine buying metrics and pressure suppliers – i.e. media companies, including Facebook and Google – to decarbonise. If media owners don’t play ball, will GroupM pull dollars? “We’ll certainly make that recommendation,” says Juhl. He t...

Seismic shifts are underway in cross-media audience measurement, and the IAB is preparing for looming turf wars by becoming the one ring to bind them all. It’s axed Nielsen and pulled in Ipsos – and a return to panels – ahead of the end of cookies and incoming privacy changes. The new metric is set to be in market next year, at least in basic form. But in a country where size mat...

Shirish Shrinet gets emails sending him offers and tutorials for make-up. There’s just one problem: he’s never worn any. “This is a classic example of customer experience vs customer expectations,” says Shrinet, SAP’s Senior Director in Customer Experience and Data Management. At some stage, because he bought his wife a present, he was categorised as female somewhere...

Optus is backing football (the big game, not the Australian version) to keep delivering customer growth and retention, particularly amongst immigrant Australians – but VP of Product Development for TV and Content, Clive Dickens, says Nine overpaid for the Champions League. He also has a dig at the naysayers at Seven who didn’t think 7plus could be delivered in nine months – inclu...

Inghams literally put all of its eggs in one basket with Out-of-Home, exclusively using oOh! Media’s network of retail and street screens to launch ‘The Free Ranger’ chicken – and hit pay dirt. It was a big call. But using Quantium data to target free-range humans, it delivered a 30 per cent increase in The Free Ranger buyers – 72 per cent of whom were new to the bran...

Returning to Australia after 20 years offshore, former Mars, Wrigley and Coke marketer turned Lion brand chief Anubha Sahasrabuddhe thinks the beer category has lost its way. Now “Lion is on the hunt” for new growth – and it’s looking beyond beer. The plan is to ditch tired tropes and brand positions that Sahasrabuddhe thinks are no longer reflective of Australian society &...

Digital out-of-home is powering massive east coast growth for WA-based health insurer HBF following a series of campaigns that include JCDecaux’s digital assets. “Our national growth is at plus 55 per cent… [but] 84 per cent increase year-on-year on the east coast,” Head of Marketing Louise Ardagh says. The programmatic out-of-home (pDOOH) sector is starting to motor, says...

After the best part of three decades, iconic Australian brand Ampol is back from the dead with a massive relaunch across 1,900 fuel and retail stations and an emotive, unmistakably Australian campaign that’s landing with Aussies young and old. Chief Brand Officer Jenny O'Regan, Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Anthony Gregorio and National Chief Creative Officer Mike Spirkovski, plus Jason Smith, C...

Brands with “purpose” in their DNA face the biggest fallout when they make a mistake: think Patagonia and Thank You. So where does that leave everyone else? New research from The Guardian finds purpose drives growth and keeps customers, and demand is climbing. The dairy industry is a major emitter – belching cows emit a shedload of methane – but it’s working to clean...

When data regulators come knocking, black box solutions from data brokers won't fix the compliance issues fast coming at brands. Meanwhile, publishers must avoid a repeat of the audience data heist carried out by ad networks and early programmatic players, reckons New York-based Nick Jordan, CEO of Narrative.io. The former Adobe and Yahoo exec urges the digital ad industry to step up with technica...

BETA unblockers: Millennials are turning 40. They’re now B2B marketing’s key buyers – and they are making an entirely different set of decisions. A new global study from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute says 75 per cent of Australia’s professional workforce will be millennial “BETAs” by 2025. They’re B – blurring the work/home boundaries, E – evo...

Marketing used to be the biggest driver of sales. Today, consumer behaviour is increasingly influenced by trust – which is corporate affairs’ turf. Meanwhile, Australian firms are realising just how far behind they have slipped to US and European headquartered competitors when it comes to environmental and social governance (ESG), and the sense of purpose employees and external stakeho...

What happens when you get a top consumer goods marketer to leap from the biggest advertiser in the world, Procter & Gamble, to lead marketing at a bank? ANZ CMO Sweta Mehre joined ANZ four years ago from P&G and has driven a raft of reforms including a marketing masters program inside the organisation designed to build marketing team capabilities and deepen the understanding of how marketi...

After years in development, the first weekly top line consolidated VOZ market reports land 22 July. On July 23, Tokyo will host the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games. For 17 days, Seven says it will reach nine in 10 Australian homes. Suncorp CMO Mim Haysom spies a huge opportunity for Olympics sponsor AAMI to test the new linear and digital TV measurement service – and bespoke creative &...

The bar at John Singleton Advertising, later Singleton Ogilvy & Mather, was renowned in its prime. State of Origin and Australian and West Indies Cricket teams were named in the agency watering hole but there was a strict no drinking policy by day - you’d be fired. In this final episode, Singleton and his inner circle, Russell Tate and Mike Connaghan, lift the lid on Sir Martin Sorrell a...

John Singleton, the troublemaking larrikin adman who’s turning 80 this year, was all but penniless when he returned to advertising in 1985. Then he and his lieutenants, Russell Tate and Mike Connaghan ultimately built a holding company worth close to $1bn. He was “impossible to follow” in a new business pitch but with Singleton’s old group now back firmly in British control...

Former adtech insider and The Irish Times innovation boss Dr Johnny Ryan gave evidence before a US Senate Judiciary Committee in 2019 about how the global digital advertising industry was blatantly breaching consumer privacy and user data protection. Ryan is now spearheading a globally significant GDPR lawsuit against the international online ad standards body, IAB Tech Lab, as the fastest wa...

The majority of 18- to 39-year-olds watch little to no TV – but while linear TV audiences are trending down, TV advertising is booming. Guy Burbidge, Managing Director of Val Morgan, says advertisers and agencies should prepare for the bigger boom that is unfolding: Cinema. “We’re heading into the best six months of content we’ve ever had, and I can’t put enough of an...

Google’s move late last week to delay by two years the end of third party cookies will likely see brand owners take their foot off the gas to end their reliance on privacy-challenged tracking. But Mi3’s panel of digital experts warn ferociously against it. First party data is king. Keep going. Here’s the complete what, why and what next on Google’s surprise move from top in...

Global CMO Aude Gandon is shaking up Nestlé’s marketing function. With change in the wind Antonia Farquhar, Head of Media, Content and Data, is swapping Sydney for Switzerland and the global media gig. She’s overseen a strategic shift in Nestle’s first party data push and launched its first retail outlets globally – and if local KitKat sales are anything to go by, By...