Mi3 Audio Edition

Some media companies are feeling the heat on what they describe as a tightening advertising market, particularly linear TV. But there's a very different story coming out of investor briefings in recent weeks at some of the world's biggest brands. Many brands are increasing their advertising and promotion and much bigger overall marketing budgets. Some of these listed CFOs and CEOs apparently agree...

At one point “the performance marketing [team’s] main KPI was actually how much investment they could deploy,” says Uber APAC marketing boss Andy Morley. “The mandate was spend, spend, spend … It was getting crazy.” But then they realised it wasn’t actually working. Then they flipped hard to brand – well above Binet & Field’s 60:40 heuristic – and powered to delivery market leader. Today Morle...

It’s not often Suncorp’s CMO Mim Haysom is mentioned in the same conversation as Leonardo da Vinci but the latter’s rare ability to combine creative and analytical thinking is what 50 Australian CMOs working with WPP were briefed on recently as the next frontier for business growth and their own professional cred and advancement. Indeed, Marc de Swaan Arons, a former Unilever marketer who co-found...

The ANA’s latest transparency report looks ugly for agencies, the ad tech supply chain, marketers and their procurement departments. Probably why its findings – just 36 cents on the programmatic dollar stand a chance of being seen by audiences – have been met with deafening silence. None of the big agency holdcos have piped up, while Google, The Trade Desk, Pubmatic and other major adtech players...

It’s taken a couple of years, but the LinkedIn-backed B2B Institute’s mission to flip business-to-business marketing’s focus from performance to brand building – encapsulated by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute penned 95:5 rule – is starting to land, crucially in the boardroom and exec leadership echelons. LinkedIn’s polling of B2B CMOs and CFOs suggests most are planning to spend more on brand this y...

Marketing remits are expanding faster than most professions but unlike accounting or engineering, it remains splintered and without common professional capabilities, standards and accreditation. Indeed, marketing, agency, media and customer tech professionals across the entire customer and marketing supply chain risk career irrelevance because they're simultaneously losing sight of marketing's fun...

Owned media in Australia – brands’ own websites, email, apps, instore and social assets – now has $4.3bn in commercial potential. It could reach $5bn in as little as 12 months as brands, eyeing the growth of retail media, start to realise the value of their own media channels. Valuation firm Sonder has just released its annual Owned Media Market Report & Rankings for the '24 financial year and...

Jaguar Land Rover spotted an opportunity earlier this year in the lead up to Sydney's Vivid festival, where circa 3 million people show up for 23 days of live shows, music and forums. The carmaker needed to build awareness fast for the new Land Rover Defender and part of the brief included large out-of-home formats. Given the expected surge in people on the streets of Sydney's CBD, Jaguar Land Rov...

Arnott’s last month landed the Advertising Council’s Grand Effie after launching a master brand campaign that CMO Jenni Dill says delivered “10 per cent sales growth in dollar terms and three quarters of a share point growth” across the portfolio. It also helped put Arnott’s ahead of the three-year growth plan she’d had to present to the board 13 days after joining from McDonald’s. “Phenomenal” re...

Figuring out where potential customers are in the hectic media system and not waste budgets reaching them across disparate channels is driving marketers and media agencies to experiment with some interesting alternatives in cross-media audience measurement. Kmart, its agency UM and IPG tech stablemate Kinesso, think they have landed on a winner – Beatgrid’s automatic content recognition phone-base...

Many predicted The Monkeys would be “roadkill” when Accenture in 2017 paid $63m for Australia’s hottest ad agency, its creative culture steamrollered by the immaculately polished heads of the consulting world. Instead, says creative chief Scott Nowell, who last week departed the agency he co-founded, The Monkeys began a cultural infiltration mission. Six years on, the broader Accenture Song creati...

The problem with Samsung’s previous market mix models was they were too slow, says Carl Bunn, Head of Data and Solutions at Samsung Australia. By the time results came back in, “we’d moved on,” says Bunn. Part of that was on Samsung: Consistency of data is key, says Bunn, and lack of it scuppered much prospect of MMM agility. But having done the “single source of truth” hard yards and plugged into...

GroupM global boss Christian Juhl says rival holdcos may now regret spending “billions of dollars on cookie-based solutions or personally identifiable information” as privacy moves dead centre in regulatory affairs.. Some, he says, “are going to be sitting on a razor’s edge about whether they are going to be compliant ... it will definitely have ramifications for the industry.” In the meantime, he...

Ecom’s runaway train has hit the buffers. Now brands must sweat massive investments made over Covid much harder, grappling simultaneously with how to drive profitable growth without harming customer experience. Expect a wholesale to push into loyalty and retail media, per Accenture Song MD and ANZ Commerce Lead Peter Davias. Meanwhile, he thinks Amazon may finally present the threat that everyone...

While Telstra’s massive CX overhaul has powered net promoter scores through the roof – with NPS linked directly to executive bonuses – CMO Brent Smart says that’s only half the job. To grow, Telstra needs to go harder on brand to woo those that don’t even know about its sweeping digital overhaul, including aggrieved former customers. As such Telstra’s 80:20 performance to brand investment ratios w...

News Corp Australia had more than 4 billion short form video views last financial year across its own assets and social feeds and it’s changing the way the Murdoch empire delivers content. Vertical video is the big play as audiences and advertisers pile in. Even boss Michael Miller is getting in on the act. Now News has launched a master plan – dubbed News Shorts – to siphon those social audiences...

This week’s podcast is a bit different. We’re unpacking two big new plays from Mi3: our first sector specific newsletter edition, CustomerX; and a daily generative AI-powered Fast News edition, where the machines, overseen by Mi3 editors, will crunch and distil the daily PR firehose of people moves, key announcements,  account changes and campaign launches across marketing, tech, media, agencies a...

The Australian market has lagged on electric vehicles. But that’s changing fast says BMW’s top marketer Alex McLean, with EV sales this year making up 10 per cent of the total market after notching 300 per cent YoY growth. Next year BMW will have 14 EV variants in Australia – and the market shake-up means the Ultimate Driving Machine must flip its marketing strategy. See omnystudio.com/listener fo...

Lego prides itself on being safe. Nothing wrong with safe, says ANZ Vice President and GM Troy Taylor, a safe-handed 21-year company veteran who’s presided over 16 consecutive years of growth. So he baulked when Initiative came up with a plan to partner with Nitro Circus to put the boosters on its new Lego City Stuntz range. He started to sweat. “My first thought was Mother energy drinks. Women in...

Scentre Group’s Westfield destinations across Australia and New Zealand are seeing an increase of online pure-play retailers moving into retail and pop-up spaces as customer visitation grows. In the first half of this year, customer visitations increased to 314 million, that’s 9.8 per cent more than the same period in 2022.* Just don’t call them shopping centres. They are destinations, where peopl...

The naysayers scoffed when Tourism Australia made a CGI Kangaroo and 1984’s Say G’Day tagline the main roll of a $125m tax-funded bet to bring the world back to Australia after three years of fire and plague. One year on, those “doofuses” are eating their words, per Mark Ritson, as the kangaroo eliminates misattribution, boosts consideration, delivers travellers in droves, primes high spending tou...

Cummins&Partners CEO Michael McConville returned home to Australia last year after five years at the helm of adam&eveDDB, home of effectiveness guru Les Binet – and where he was steeped in econometric modelling with the likes of John Lewis and Volkswagen. One marketer within the Volkswagen Audi Group, Benjamin Braun, nailed econometrics to the point that he could “forecast within 32 units...

Spreadsheets are not going to save the planet. The threat of jail time might. “The world is facing enormous challenges, the clock is ticking, we are in an emergency,” says Ari Alexander, VP and GM, Salesforce Net Zero Cloud. Yet most businesses are all over the place when it comes to their environmental data. That makes it calculating where they are at nigh impossible, “let alone where they are go...

QMS landed the City of Sydney deal – one of the biggest contracts in Australian advertising history – in June 2020. Then Covid changed commuter patterns seemingly forever. Work from home initially left outdoor media companies sweating, not least QMS’s private equity owners Quadrant, given the scale of outlay required to build an entirely new City of Sydney network. But total audiences are now back...

After a wild week at Salesforce’s global jamboree in San Francisco, the tech giant’s full flip to generative AI was relentlessly hammered home. Like most, the heat is on APAC marketing boss Leandro Perez and his 100-plus regional marketing team to walk the talk,  applying Salesforce’s new AI-powered capabilities to his own operation. Perez claims it’s working – from freeing up masses of time to it...