Mi3 Audio Edition

Four’N Twenty pies are literally baked-in to footy and Patties Food Group marketing boss Anand Surujpal gets a related proposition across his desk every week. But his challenge is to grow share through new buyers beyond “diehard footy fans” and tradies. So when the prop for the Paris Olympics landed, Surujpal saw an opportunity for a bigger demographic slice of the action by mash...

Host: Nadia Cameron, Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher Amid all the hype, excitement and trepidation around digital, marketing automation, data utilisation and now AI coming into marketing, is the very real need to build team capability and empowerment to actually use the tools effectively – and in a way that delivers business outcomes. As Infosys global CMO, Sumit Virmani, told Mi3 r...

SCA has spent four years building its uber-app LiSTNR from idea to the fulcrum of its audio business. It’s got 2.25m logged-in users, knows their postcodes – handy ahead of the federal election – what they listen to and what they might want to hear next. Kelly says acquisition is no longer core focus – “we’ve got the base we wanted to get” – and SCA...

Host:  Paul McIntyre | Executive Editor Media agency holding company CEOs are openly acknowledging the importance of arbitrage-based principal trading to their business models – and it’s spreading rapidly out of digital display into TV, audio, digital out of home, connected TVs and beyond. Former UM Global Chief Media Officer Joshua Lowcock, who left the IPG-owned media agency net...

Four years ago, Flight Centre’s global CMO Megan Henderson was tasked with leading a sweeping restructure of Flight Centre’s worldwide marketing operation – centralising five teams into one while overhauling its martech stack and contracts and simultaneously finding efficiencies and growth. Daunting. But Henderson knew that Fight Centre’s 60 million annual unique online vis...

Mi3’s most read story of 2024 came via an Oxford University marketing scientist’s peer-reviewed paper underlining precisely why not all reach is equal. Based off analysis of 1,000-plus campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and Wavemaker, the data shows optimising for reach alone rarely tallies with business growth. In fact, in almost all cases, per Saïd Business Sch...

Welcome to the first in our CMO Awards podcast series, powered by Mi3. This limited-episode series dives into the key topics and issues making up how marketing as a function, and its leaders, contribute to growth. To do this, we’re engaging in a select number of conversations with industry luminaries, CMO Awards judges, former CMO50 winners, current and former marketing and customer leaders...

Mim Haysom’s world-beating, Cannes-winning One House initiative at Suncorp in 2022 was a big bold bet on innovative, mould-breaking marketing that Suncorp’s executive leadership and board only saw days before a documentary on the initiative was set to broadcast on Nine. “The first time the board saw One House, I took them into the auditorium and played them the 26-minute document...

A world first creative benchmarking study from System1 and JCDecaux has run stacks of Australian Out-of-Home ads through its globally-renowned effectiveness scoring system and drawn a stark conclusion: 70 per cent of outdoor ads fail to move the needle. Andrew Tindall, SVP – Global Partnerships at System1, goes even further: “No-one understands how Out-of-Home works,” he says, pa...

Host:  Andrew Birmingham, Editor - CX | Martech | Ecom Two years after a Mi3 published a comprehensive analysis of the customer data market in Australia, we revisited many of the brands we spoke with to assess their progress and measure their return. Companies that have persevered are realising strong returns and extending beyond their early use cases. But it has often been a hard road to hoe...

Rival radio networks are transplanting big talent from Sydney and trying to make it work in Melbourne. SCA Chief Content Officer, Dave Cameron, is taking the opposite strategy. Local talent that “speaks the language of the city” and gets the “fabric” of its suburbs is particularly crucial for breakfast audiences, he says. Plus, as platforms and content globalise, localism b...

Nico Neumann is deep in the weeds on digital marketing attribution, market mix modelling [MMM] and incrementality testing – likewise the dangers of narrow audience targeting and junk user data - the latter a $20bn market in the US alone. The Melbourne Business School Associate Professor in 2019 published research proving that closing your eyes and randomly selecting male or female audience t...

Four Pillars Gin is now four times the size of the entire Australian premium gin category when it started in 2013. Much of the category’s explosive growth is down to three cofounders having a crack, while seeing off the cops, who thought they were making meth. Now under Lion’s ownership, itself part of Japanese drinks giant Kirin, two of the founders – ex-Olympian Cameron Mackenz...

When experienced B2B marketer and former agency planner Taz Bareham decided to take on the title of 'Fractional CMO' three years ago, there were a handful of people on LinkedIn using the moniker. Fast forward to today, and the supply pipeline has grown to thousands, even outpacing solidly growing demand for these forms of executives. Why? Better work / life balance, avoiding burnout, a desire to s...

The upside of market mix modelling (MMM) is it “certainly helps with credibility,” when proving marketing’s return on investment, per Optus consumer marketing boss Cam Luby. The downside is that it spits out a shedload of data. Hence Mutinex combining its real-time MMM platform with an AI-powered co-pilot called Hendren to hep marketers more easily interrogate and interpret the data with prompts –...

Australian law firm Maurice Blackburn is investigating a publisher class action against Google in a strikingly similar $8 billion lawsuit already underway in Canada – led by a tiny regional community publishing boss, Lisa Sygutek, who won’t be cowed. “Find your inner warrior, sign-up, go for it,” she urges Australian media owners. Miranda Nagy, the lawyer leading the Australian class action invest...

The B2B world is a market where you don't call customers, customers call you - although it’s the opposite of widespread B2B marketing assumptions and practice today. A B2B awakening is underway as business marketers see increasing evidence that an under-investment in B2B brand work leads to a sea of sameness and mediocre results among buyers – across most industry sectors, many feel there is littl...

SCA in March launched three big tech bets for its LiSTNR master app – a customer data platform (CDP), customer-specific data matching clean rooms and dynamic creative optimisation. The bets are paying off and SCA is no longer reliant on third party data sources. Execs say the platform and its 2.1m logged-in users already command over 40 per cent of all digital audio ad dollars, helping SCA’s $50m...

A decade after launching viewability metrics, the Media Ratings Council is moving to standardise attention metrics globally. That means buying media based on attention metrics will scale faster. But a world first out of home study into attention by QMS and Amplified Intelligence is already going global – and the findings for brands are huge. In short, out of home completely flips ratios around ave...

TikTok marketing science chief Rory Dolan says performance media costs are soaring while conversions flatline. He has the data to prove it. After mapping TikTok platform activity with Tracksuit’s brand tracking data, Dolan has one key message – invest in brand to boost conversion and beat biddable auction inflation: “Advertisers with 60 per cent-plus awareness have a 2.86 times increase in their b...

Six months ago conversational commerce wasn’t really on the radar of Deloitte Digital’s National Partner Lead Leon Doyle. Now Doyle is reorganising his entire content team around it – and believes it’s coming at the $200bn content industry like a freight train. AI-powered chatbots and the speed at which all major platforms are developing and deploying, particularly on messaging apps, are accelerat...

Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz, of University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, suggests Professor Byron Sharp’s best known book, How Brands Grow, is a misnomer – it’s actually about how big brands keep big marketshare, not how they got there. He also says it’s based on flaws within Andrew Ehrenberg’s earlier work, primarily static markets and a requirement not to differentiate. Thomaz suggests...

Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind was “surprised” – read underwhelmed – by the first tranche of Privacy Act legislation laid before parliament last month. But she says the hard stuff is still coming after the election, which means businesses now diverting budgets away from compliance to other activities may regret it, especially as the regulator has sharper teeth. Kind says firms are failing under t...

Part One : Seven companies now account for a third of the total value of the US S&P 500 – and the bulk of their collective trillions in market value happens to come from marketers and advertising. It’s a crazy number, but Terry Kawaja, the fast talking banker, considered by some the ‘godfather’ of adtech start-up investment, says another wave of advertising and marketing related tech spin offs...

Paramount went early on both converged trading and a streaming ad tier in the US. Now it’s doing likewise in Australia and Lee Sears, Paramount’s international ad sales chief, thinks both plays will pay off for the media and entertainment conglomerate, its advertisers and crucially – viewers. Unlike some rivals, Paramount didn’t push subscribers automatically onto the streaming ad tier. Sears says...