Mi3 Audio Edition

  Tightening privacy regimes around the world are forcing Google to change the way it tracks and measures web traffic across the majority of the globe’s estimated 100m sites on the open web. That’s forced Google’s Universal Analytics to be swapped out with an entirely new product knowns as GA4. The problem is it’s a mess for most. And it's a likely marker for what’s to come in Australia - companie...

NAB CMO Suzana Ristevski is a touch emphatic after just completing a three-year, $45m grinding overhaul of the bank's marketing technology systems that has seen 95 per cent of the tools used by the marketing team switched out - a Pega decisioning engine and Tealium's customer data platform are among the new line-up. Now NAB is ready for the AI stuff.  Ristevski acknowledges “inflicting a lot of pa...

When Elsa Beaumont was tapped last year by Treasury Wines Estate – home of the mighty Penfolds – the former exec at global hot shops like Mother and Big Spaceship, and her colleague Ben Oliver, who’s running Treasury’s internal media unit at Splash, were worried. Could they beat all the warnings that come from agencies when brands try to go in-house with capabilities all previously outsourced: tal...

After ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra commissioned owned media specialists Sonder to conduct a valuation and audit of the media assets the bank owned and managed, her big discovery was that circa 85 million impacts a month, mostly from ANZ customers, were under leveraged by the business. Now ANZ’s marketing team think first about their owned channels before developing paid media briefs. New content hubs coupl...

Coles and IAG have joined the march to install Chief Customer Officers into roles that were either previously at least partly the domain of CMOs or now have marketing as a reporting line. But what does a CCO do? Is it job title semantics or is the mission sweep broader? And where does this new executive species come from? Three Chief Customer Officers from Inghams Group, Hipages and MyCar, the ove...

The Media Federation of Australia unveiled a hot shortlist of the brands and agencies delivering the best work and business impact in media for 2023, with Lego, NRMA, Campari’s Aperol, Netflix and Suncorp among those leading the finalists tally. About 30 advertisers and 20 agencies made the cut of finalists with three marketers among the judging line-up for the 2023 MFA Awards joining Mi3 to unpac...

Gen Z makes up 20 per cent of Australia’s population. There are more than five million of them – and they want very different things from brands. Purpose won’t cut it. They want action, locally and globally – and they are sick of nobody listening to them, per Chris Sanderson and Martin Raymond, founders of The Future Laboratory. They are also – aged between 11 and 26 – already wary of digital burn...

Mattresses selling for circa $3,000 are not typically a signal for how consumer spending is bending historical patterns but Tony Pearson, CEO at mattress maker AH Beard, is seeing two distinct consumer groups going in opposite directions. Sales of his premium lines in the $2-3,000 tier are holding strong just as his cheaper lines - from $600 - fell off a cliff in April. Meanwhile, mattress sales t...

If Nine’s former publishing boss Chris Janz and The Guardian’s Managing Director Dan Stinton are right, there’s a storm brewing for the media establishment as frustration rises among the business, tech and innovation elite – and even the broader public – over what and how mastheads and journalists produce content. Chris Janz did the “deal of a career” when brokering the 2017 ‘unholy’ alliance with...

With Voz in market and the TV networks seemingly moving forward with a BVOD marketplace, agencies and broadcasters have renewed impetus to converge TV trading and buying and flick legacy systems. But ditching decades of behaviour is never easy. Perhaps the best example is what has been dubbed the Unilever trial, where the FMCG giant, agency PHD and Seven West Media used early Voz data to boost rea...

During Covid, the big Hollywood studios played hardball with cinemas – rushing to take-on Netflix and Prime, feeding their own direct streaming plays, shortening releases windows, or cutting them out altogether. Sony was the streaming holdout. ‘We’re either going to look like the smartest person in the room, or the dumbest,” Sony Pictures local boss Stephen Basil-Jones told Hoyts CEO Damian Keogh....

NRMA’s data crunching suggested the brand would get more bang for buck by putting some of its sports marketing budget into entertainment. So it pulled out of The Broncos, unwound its Collingwood sponsorship and, flipping from a local club to national strategy, “made the biggest bet we’ve ever made on Cricket Australia,” per IAG Acting CMO, Zara Curtis. She recycled the remainder into cinema, last...

Debate on whether brand campaigns can drive short term sales performance and vice versa – aka ‘double duty’ – is running as hot as the budget knives pressed to the CFO’s whetstone. News Corp’s Pippa Leary says market-wide short-termism is fuelling demand for performance ads to drive immediate results but double duty works – results for Moet has LVMH marketers popping their corks. Brand strategist...

Search and SEO is facing major disruption – with implications for brands across both performance media and mid-to-upper funnel content marketing. Google is countering the threat from Bing and ChatGPT with Magi, set to soft launch later this month. Billed as a “hyper-personalisation engine”, it will change how search works and the way content on websites needs to be written and structured, per Step...

Three years ago Jenni Dill put a multiyear strategy plan to Arnott’s to management and board. The former McDonald’s CMO had been in the CMO gig at Arnott’s for 13 days. But Dill had just completed The Marketing Academy’s Fellowship course, which she says provided the clarity and confidence to speak business, not marketing – and to deliver a growth agenda at pace. It’s paying off. Despite the bigge...

Mel Hopkins says she hasn’t gone to Seven “to put lipstick on a pig”. The former Optus CMO says CEO James Warburton wants “total transformation” – and not just across ratings – so she’s hatched a four-point plan. Hopkins has also committed to linking Seven’s marketing activity and investment directly to earnings and the P&L “in real time”. Anything less, she says, “and I am failing to do my jo...

Here’s how two firms in different parts of the supply chain are upending legacy marketing practices. Tracksuit, a two year-old New Zealand-based brand tracking platform has slashed the cost, turnaround time, cred, and the role of brand – historically considered fluffy by the business community. The rapidly growing start-up has caught the eye of VC Blackbird, with Mark Ritson and Ascential, the fir...

It’s not often Australian and New Zealanders can teach the giant US market a thing or two but hear this one out: If you're one of those hard-nosed types who think all this marketing science and advertising effectiveness stuff is too rubbery – ESOV, mental availability, investing in brand to drive long-term demand over short-term sales – here’s some contrarian proof that might just change your mind...

Volvo Car Australia boss Stephen Connor has hit the accelerator on the carmaker’s plan to ditch combustion engines. He’s going all-in on electric vehicles (EVs) by 2026 – faster than any of its global markets. Volvo has deep sustainability commitments, pledging to become climate neutral across its supply chain by 2040. But Connor’s gone for first mover advantage for profit just as much as purpose,...

There’s been just a little happening inside the $8 billion Yahoo business globally - and in Australia. The digital content and advertising business announced last month it would reduce its total workforce by 20 per cent but global CEO Jim Lanzone told Axios recently the layoffs were not about financial challenges. Rather it was an important strategic change. No longer is Yahoo pushing a “unified t...

Ask any marketer with CX and martech in their remit to prove the return on those investments and it can get a little awkward. But CFOs are increasingly asking the same question. Here’s a full and frank download from a marketer doing exactly that: assessing ROI on its customer experience strategy - on and offline - after going all in on Salesforce, just before the pandemic hit. Rob Lopez, GM of CX,...

Australia will escape a recession this year but not a downturn, per Sky News Business editor, Ross Greenwood. But the impact of rate rises means the average mortgage payer is now $20k out of pocket. If fewer people move home, fewer white goods and consumer electronics get bought – creating a negative cycle and something of a two-speed economy as the squeezed middle and lower income households cut...

The killer combination of Covid and voluntary administration decimated Virgin Australia’s marketing team to a handful but under its new private equity owners, Bain Capital, Virgin’s head of paid media, Ben Will, finally got to deploy a massively scaled and personalised programmatic ad campaign that he had been dreaming about for years – but it nearly cracked the Virgin team and its media and dynam...

There’s an easy way to cut carbon emissions from digital advertising. Stop buying “crap” ads that “no human sees”, ditch “gamed” viewability metrics and instead buy on attention, never buy another outstream video ad, and cull the bloated programmatic supply chain, per Brian O’Kelley. The CEO of Scope 3, a global emissions measurement firm focusing on decarbonising digital media and advertising, kn...

Katrina Barry is Deloitte Tech's Fast 50 female leadership winner for 2022 and CEO of the globally ambitious Australian restaurant and pubs ordering app me&u, backed by a Hollywood style list of Australian names including Merrivale’s Justin Hemmes, Rockpool's Neil Perry, Uber Australia co-founder Mike Abbott and former Google ANZ and current Domain boss Jason Pellegrino.  She's about a year in...