Mi3 Audio Edition

New ARN CEO, Michael Stephenson, has been unusually quiet for much of the year. After this week’s upfronts, we now know why. Stephenson has been rapidly redesigning ARN from an audio operator to a fully-fledged entertainment company. ARN unveiled a dozen big new content and commercial initiatives on Wednesday, and at the centre of Stephenson’s blueprint for ARN 3.0 is the iHeart digita...

Atomic 212°’s Chief Strategy Officer, Asier Carazo and Bupa's GM of Marketing, Naomi Driver once shared a common fear that permeates much of the industry: How does a brand advance the cause for the 20 per cent of Australians with a disability – without being unintentionally tokenistic or offensive?  Driver says those concerns often stop her marketing peers from doing anything...

Six years ago, media ecologist Jack Myers called it right on the almost total automation of media buying. Now he says extending principal trading models into retail media is the future for media agencies, as more retail media brands – the likes of Uber and United Airlines “that aren’t that interested in selling ads” – sell directly to agencies, who then arbitrage for...

What happens when you get a neurodivergent, a dopamine dissident and a socio demographic myth buster riding the boundaries of the media and marketing business on the mics together? We’ve done just that after The Media Federation’s (MFA) recent annual conference produced an eclectic mix of keynotes and speakers - the conversation and data should challenge long-held assumptions about wha...

Last October Nine corralled a posse of market mix model (MMM) providers, co-funding a program to prove what its assets could do in hard business terms. Since then Nine has poured over three years of historical data from dozens of campaigns, along with brand tracking, consumer attitudinal research, business case studies and other inputs from the likes of Neuro Insight, getting granular on what is m...

Host: Andrew Birmingham - Editor - CX | Martech | Ecom AI is reshaping the rules of business at breakneck speed - and likewise for marketing. Legendary tech sector analyst, founder, CEO and chairman of global analyst firm Forrester, George Colony, calls this the Seventh Wave . It’s an upheaval that will eclipse previous waves like the internet, mobile and cloud. It brings turmoil but also ev...

Just when you thought the bulging TV, BVOD, streaming and video sector had peaked with too many consumer and advertiser choices, along comes the no-subscription, ad-supported international streamer Tubi with 100 million global  viewers dominated by a younger set binging TV shows like the 30 year-old Friends and creating new genre “rabbit holes” like horror and Bollywood ‘ver...

YouTube last week officially ousted the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster ITV as the video platform now second only to the BBC in audience size, according to the tech and media regulator Ofcom.  YouTube’s ad take is pumping everywhere – it raked $9.8bn in the June quarter, according to its latest earnings results – up 13% year-on-year.  YouTube has been increasi...

Host : Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher Brand evolution: It’s in the sights of every marketer, but how do you honour the legacy while seeking a new narrative that grabs attention, signals distinctiveness, and builds loyalty? How do you prove it’s worth investing in brand not just demand internally? What team structures and measures are better for driving a brand...

Employment Hero and Salesforce are at opposite ends of the B2B spectrum. One’s a rapidly scaling $2bn platform, the other a $260bn behemoth. But both have adopted a consumer marketing playbook, applied it to B2B and are watching growth power. Employment Hero’s Tasman Page says the approach is notching 700 per cent gains. Lifting B2C’s distinctive assets, emotional, humorous playb...

Host : Andrew Birmingham, Editor - CX | Martech | Ecom Mi3’s tech editor Andrew Birmingham is joined by global Martech doyenne and Chief Martec's editor-in-chief Scott Brinker to dissect the 2025 Martech Landscape, his famed spaghetti-styled industry maps, now at 15,000 different tech solutions, and what it really means for marketers. From the prolific number of martech vendors and AI-powere...

It’s less than a year since Salesforce launched autonomous AI agents into the wild. But the bots are already reshaping business functions. In the US, online accounting platform 1-800 Accountants, which handles payroll and book keeping for circa 100,000 firms, has slashed the time staff spend on customer service by 70 per cent. Open Table and Singapore Air are deploying the agents to similar...

Their remits and responsibilities seem poles apart, but Guzman y Gomez global CMO, Lara Thom, and Uber CMO APAC, Andy Morley share strikingly similar views on the importance of culture, CMOs aligning personally to company values, brand-led strategy, and bold, progressive marketing that grabs attention and strikes the right cultural chord. It’s surprising really. Thom has her hands full with...

Cannes was heaving with influencers striking deals, but the message from top marketers, academics and consulting firms was consistent: Go back to fundamentals on brand, embed brand at the heart of business, then execute with consistent creative excellence to drive outsized financial returns. Mark Ritson landed that message most emphatically via 10 years worth of Effie data analysed by System1. In...

This year’s inaugural CMO Awards weren’t just a showcase of Australian marketing leaders doing an excellent job of marketing stewardship and effectiveness. We also introduced the Best Growth Initiative of the Year award, supported by Publicis Groupe, to single out and recognise strategic growth initiatives led by marketing teams. In this podcast episode, we bring together Jenni Di...

Byron Sharp is a distinctive assets maximalist, suggesting how brands look and are recognised and embedded into people’s minds is more important than focusing on what they do differently to rival brands. Mark Ritson argues brands need differentiation to stand out from rivals and pull customers in. News Australia says you need both to drive growth – and that custom-made media that deliv...

Marketing budgets are declining just as paid media costs are rising – meaning brands get less for every dollar spent, and fewer dollars to start with. But latest research commissioned by The Trade Desk into omnichannel versus multichannel media planning could provide sweet relief. In short, the difference between omnichannel and multichannel planning is that omnichannel campaigns are connect...

While the numbers have been improving, CMOs still have the shortest tenure in the c-suite globally. Spencer Stuart data shows CMOs in Fortune 500 companies now have average tenure of 4.3 years against a c-suite average of 4.9 years. But variance is huge: Tellingly, Forrester data shows a 75% variance in average CMO tenure across the industries it tracks, with B2B CMOs recording the lowest average...

The marketing funnel doesn’t exist, suggests RAA CMO, Michael Healy. He thinks “too many marketers get too ideological about how you have to do brand and then awareness and then conversion”. He has an interesting anecdote about a $329 knife, his wife, and Meta, to support the theory. Healy says “the vast majority of marketers that I talk to – from startup to enterpris...

Lawmakers around the world are setting their sights on ‘dark patterns’, the way consumer choice is manipulated wholesale by companies for profit – either directly by upselling and herding them into higher yielding decisions, or locking them into services, or “data grabs” that can be monetised indirectly. Australia is next off the rank, and businesses should take actio...

Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher Short CMO tenure, job complexity, unrealistic expectations of delivery – commonly driven by short-term ultimatums – plus a disconnect on the metrics that matter, are all contributing to a dangerously common misalignment between CMOs and their CEOs and CFO. And it’s a recipe for trouble for marketing leaders wanting to...

Host:  Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher At its core, the job of the CMO is to deliver business growth. And if  Mi3’s story on marketing jobs recently and what company CEOs want in their marketing hires in 2025  is anything to go by, there is a recalibration back to topline growth rather than just pure cost cutting and efficiency, coming our way –...

Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher Being able to convince others is the most critical skill marketers need to possess  – the whole job of marketing is to influence consumers to consider then purchase your brand, after all. But as marketers progress into senior management positions, they also need to get better at getting team members as well as executive lead...

Oxford University Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz was a runaway Mi3 hit last year with a peer-reviewed paper that smashes the economics and relevance of audience reach. His analysis – based on 1,000 campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and Wavemaker data – finds blunt use of reach will not deliver business outcomes, because not all reach is equal. Business outcomes wa...

It was the sudden declines in footy audiences that did it for Suncorp Executive Manager of Media, Greg Kearney and OMD Chief Media Partnerships Officer, Marelle Salib. They knew that diehard sports fans don’t just ditch their teams overnight. But Kearney and Salib had years’ worth of market mix model (MMM) data that countered the volatile numbers coming from OzTAM back in 2023. Those z...