Mi3 Audio Edition

Salesforce reckons it’s the end of the DIY AI era – and global CMO Ariel Kelman is tasked with addressing what his CEO, Marc Benioff said last week is Salesforce's biggest marketing challenge: convincing global markets to think less about Open AI, Microsoft copilots and other generative AI companies that require businesses to custom-bake the tech into their organisations to make it work – and more...

Before launching its first-ever brand campaign, Virgin Velocity had to convince finance and commercial teams that investing in brand would drive long-term demand, re-engage its 10m members – and ultimately power growth. So it tapped Beatgrid, the same cross-media measurement platform used by Virgin Australia when relaunching its airline brand. Beatgrid’s audience measurement system uses a passive,...

The proposed ban on social media for teens has polarised industry and academia with warnings aplenty it could backfire. Ex-Facebook ANZ MD Liam Walsh argues rather than a ban, dumbing down the algorithms, forcing algorithmic transparency through regulation or removing them altogether – could actually be the solution if fears of the effects of algorithmically-generated dopamine addiction and attent...

The latest analysis of SVOD growth rates from tech and telco analyst Telsyte proves one thing: fear of streaming services losing subscribers by pivoting to ads is overblown: They’re growing – though some more than others. MD Foad Fadaghi says ads, plus AI personalisation, integration and format innovation, will power the next growth cycle but streaming growth has peaked.   Omnicom investment chief...

For anyone in ecom or performance marketing, this podcast is a must listen. Forget ROI and ROAS, think unit economics, says former investment banker (her last big deal was the Myer float) turned entrepreneur Carla Penn-Kahn. She was early into ecom and left Credit Suisse to launch four of her own –Kitchenware Australia, A Gift Worth Giving, Everten and Buy My Thing. But she sold her last venture l...

The effectiveness “revolution” is colliding with the AI-spawned efficiency uprising and it’s leaping the early consensus AI use cases in marketing around automating personalised content and communications. So much so Mark Ritson choked on his Wellfleet oysters when Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg told him they were leaving top jobs at the LinkedIn-backed thinktank, the B2B Institute. Then they tol...

Marketing mix modelling (MMM) only works if brands grant their agencies access to critical business data – and many don’t in a perplexing and decades-long challenge. But equally, agencies can be guilty of slowing media pricing and audience data into their client MMM models, rounding out the two-way data conundrum. It’s ironic given all the talk of partnerships and outcome-based incentives, per Mut...

Part Two: After last week's instalment with S4 Capital's founder and former WPP boss, Sir Martin Sorrell – in which he explained why the market cap of his next generation marketing services firm had plummeted from £5 billion to £300 million in the past three years – he's back for part two. We cover the consolidation of the $700 billion global digital ad market down to a handful of global tech medi...

Most attribution analysis by digital marketing and analytics teams is too narrow to base marketing investment decisions on – and it’s leading to a chronic over-investment in paid search and under-investment in digital video according to Analytic Partners. The firm conducted a major study to unravel the gaps between digital attribution reporting for brands and market mix modelling – and there's a b...

Part One: It's been three years since Sir Martin Sorrell was last on the Mi3 podcast - he declared then a mea culpa of sorts that he didn't - and couldn't - transform WPP, the giant marketing services holding company he founded in the 1970s, fast enough because it was listed. At the time (2021), Sir Martin’s next generation digital holding company, S4Capital, was firing with a market cap of circa...

Six weeks ago Mel Hopkins was rolled out of Seven amid a clinical round of cuts that added further fuel to the narrative that TV is in trouble as audiences bleed and revenue follows suit. But Hopkins, who as Optus CMO dumped the lion’s share of her media budget into Meta and Google, remains convinced TV is undervalued and undersold, says BVOD metrics and reporting are as good as anything the platf...

$18 trillion’s worth of B2B transactions take place annually. But “40-60 per cent of deals get stalled”, says B2B Institute founder Jann Martin Schwarz, because B2B marketers are focusing on the wrong things and the wrong people. They are missing the “hidden buyers” that don’t show up in individual-focused lead gen and those buyers – procurement, finance, legals, IT security, the c-suite – don’t c...

Former PepsiCo, Kimberly-Clark, Interbrand and Westfield [now Scentre Group] marketer John Batistich transitioned to company board roles ahead of most – he’s now a non-executive director (NED) and advisor to seven boards, including the listed buy now pay later firm Zip Co, Muffin Break Bakeries and Jamaica Blue Cafes’ parent company FoodCo, Melbourne unicorn Moose Toys and Sydney-founded fashion l...

A deep, senior marketer study and report by Mi3, The Australian Marketing Institute (AMI), Qualtrics and Tumbleturn finds hard evidence across 105 top marketers responsible for $3bn-plus of budgets of an emergent three-speed marketing economy and upended KPIs and priorities. There are big question marks in key sectors such as retail around the effectiveness of personalisation efforts: Just 15 per...

RyanCap CEO Simon Ryan says 50 per cent of clients are “shifting a lot more money into search, digital and online video” as they scramble for immediate results and short-term sales going into FY25. Stubbornly high interest rates and crunched consumers mean major brand spending is likely off the cards for the foreseeable. “Any marketer going into a C-suite or a boardroom and pushing a big brand cam...

There’s little contention today that the pro-consumer privacy lobby is winning the war over industry on privacy reform - they’re informed on industry techniques, loaded with compelling consumer research and aligned entirely on the need for a clampdown on the collection and use of an individual’s online data trail. Former NSW Deputy Privacy Commissioner and Salinger Privacy boss Anna Johnston and C...

Just how accurate is the user data being traded by advertisers, agencies and data firms in the $700bn global digital advertising system? The former Chief Privacy Officer of UM in the US, Arielle Garcia, is exasperated - it’s garbage she says and to prove it Garcia recently accessed her profile from an ad tech vendor and found she was in “500 different audience segments across seven different data...

Hyundai is the first brand - with some bravery - to have signed on to the 36 Months campaign to lift the minimum age for social media accounts from 13 to 16, launched by Nova Radio’s Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli and Rob Galluzzo, the boss of production company Finch. 36 months is the time a teen will reclaim from social media between 13 and 16 years. Galluzzo is “100 per cent certain” more brands will f...

A year ago Ariel Kelman boomeranged back to Salesforce after a decade helming global marketing for the likes of Amazon Web Services and Oracle. As global President and CMO of the $200bn+ customer tech giant, he’s wasted little time shaking things up – and Kelman’s view that Salesforce had “lost our focus on sales pipeline and on marketing really being a vehicle for driving business results” now ap...

A year ago programmatic sales were just 2 per cent of QMS’ business. By the year-end, says Head of Programmatic, Laura Wall, it will be double digits. She says the market is starting to move, and latest SMI data, with pDOOH up 100 per cent in Q1, underlines that trend. Kinesso’s Chief Media Activations Officer, Michael Whiteside, thinks even that rise is “undercooked”. He sees programmatic out of...

It’s not sexy but like AI, it’s going to affect your job – and your company. Another salvo in the fast approaching privacy regime set for tabling in parliament in August was fired last week by the ACCC around how personal information is collected and used by data firms – Experian, Nielsen, Publicis-owned Epsilon and Woolworths-owned Quantium were among those flagged by the competition regulator la...

 News Corp’s first party tech build is now at point where the publisher will match spend from customers using its new platform and run it in parallel with a standard cookie-based approach to prove it delivers much bigger reach and more sales. Via a “privacy compliant” approach using its first party data and data matching via the likes of Google, LiveRamp, Adobe, InfoSum and AdFixus alongside its m...

In most B2B businesses lead generation, or individual qualified "lead gen” more accurately, is at the core of business marketing - certainly for the tech sector. The merits of focusing on groups of buyers influential in a large corporate purchase over an individual executive is not new, but what is has a veteranB2B marketing analyst warning that almost every sector in B2B is still “focused on comp...

The likes of CommBank, Westpac, Suncorp, McDonald’s and KFC are showing the rest of the market how to do women’s sports beyond just slapping on a logo – and it’s paying off in spades, according to GroupM Chief Investment Officer Mel Hey and Foxtel Media Head of Sport NSW, Caitlin O’Meara. But while existing men’s code sponsors are migrating spend into women’s sport, the broader market remains behi...

This conversation is about getting marketers, agencies, media and tech to become more like chartered accountants – in a good way. That is, have letters after their name that mark them out to employers, peers and recruiters as the most horizontally skilled and relevant in the business – and be required to continue learning every year to keep them. Which is precisely why Mi3 and the Australian Marke...