Mi3 Audio Edition

Forget demographics and traditional consumer segments, smart marketers are looking at how customers choose brands based on values – both lofty and personal, VMLY&R’s Ali Tilling reckons. For Rip Curl, it’s a community that loves surfing – CMO Michael Scott once arrived at an empty meeting room because almost everyone was out on the waves. He’s building “the largest and most engaged surfing com...

Agency executives have long dismissed the big consulting firms’ attempts to embrace creativity and creative services for their end-to-end professional services offerings, but Deloitte Digital is hard to ignore. It has 1,400 people across its operation, encompassing tech, customer experience, strategy, product, growth and more, and it has now arguably conquered creative – topping Campaign Brief’s T...

Salesforce has culled its content output by circa 30 per cent – and is seeing major results. It’s waging war on vanity metrics – and “preparing a funeral” for last click and last touch attribution, per EVP Global Brand Marketing Colin Fleming. The firm has just wrapped up Dreamforce, the annual global pilgrimage where users flock to be evangelised by the high priests of B2B. Circa 40,000 people fl...

In the boardroom, the marketers’ numbers are likely the least trusted, Brodie Arnhold, Chair of iSelect, Endota, says. Why? It was a “cost line without the accountability”. In his experience, adding up the sales, PR, and marketing figures, “the company should have been about eight times the size it really was. That always left with this kind of funny feeling of mistrust,” he says. Hence, he’s inve...

The revolution in content and production that is sweeping through Hollywood studios and streaming services is hitting marketing, and the surging content volumes that brands need to create for multiple channels and screens is up at least 2,000 per cent in the past five years, Richard Glasson, global CEO of WPP's booming production group, Hogarth, estimates. As marketer budgets come under increasing...

3D out of home advertising, pop up events and experiences, and ‘treasure hunt’-style, interactive campaigns across multiple screens are a few of the ideas QMS is hoping to bring to its new City of Sydney furniture network. With Sydney weekly audience numbers back to 90 per cent of pre-Covid levels, the QMS’s QMS' GM – City of Sydney Jemma Enright and Chief Customer Officer Mark Fairhurst say the s...

What happens when you put a marketing and consumer behaviour professor on the mics with a Chief Marketing Officer and the boss of a large media buying group to work out what might happen to media audiences and buyer behaviour as we tumble out of Covid and stumble into an economic downturn? The consumer mindset is inflationary, confidence is down, and wallets are likely to shrink considerably. Ther...

Those that have crossed the agency-brand divide – in either direction – say agencies can be a little narrow in their understanding of marketing’s full business remit but more often than not, agency experience delivers sharper and faster results. Kia marketing boss Dean Norbiato was “getting stale” before taking a pay-cut to head agency-side. But it brought fresh perspective to move the needle when...

In the midst of a cryptocurrency crash, Nine-owned Pedestrian Group, which has one of the largest 18-35 year-old audiences in the country, has launched its blockchain, Web3 and crypto publication, The Chainsaw. Pedestrian knows 20 per cent of its readers are already invested in crypto or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and has trawled the globe for its launch team, some from deep in the blockchain unde...

What do Australia’s top marketers with B2B remits see ahead? Commbank’s Jo Boundy, Salesforce’s Leandro Perez and ServiceNow’s Caroline Raj debate how the talent crunch may be set to flip, why B2B marketing has the data and analytics skills B2C marketers want and how they’re resisting more demand generation activity as the economy slows - for now.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informati...

McDonald's’ Chief Customer Officer Chris Brown is less than two years into his first brand-side role after leading DDB New York and IPG’s R/GA and already he says his scope and understanding of marketing, customer and business impact have broadened dramatically. He took one of the country’s biggest marketing roles in late 2020 and has overseen a successful loyalty program launch and a new brand pl...

Australia’s commercial radio players are diving into the advertising attention economy, building an in-depth study to understand attention levels in audio that, until now, have been lacking while audio visual media – TV and video – stole a lead. But how do you measure attention without eyeballs? “We get asked every single day how audio fits in,” Amplified Intelligence CEO Karen Nelson-Field says....

It’s been a big few months for Danny Bass. The former Mediabrands, GroupM and News Corp exec resigned from Snap to focus on his Berry Hill Farm property, which then flooded – multiple times. Now, he’s joined Dentsu as CEO of Dentsu Media. Dentsu isn’t the beast it once was, having taken a turn towards tech and consulting services in the past few years. Bass unpacks the advantages and challenges fa...

Social market researchers think the deepening cost of living crisis will play out very differently to Covid. But there are parallels with previous bust cycles. The “lipstick effect” comes into play, and certain categories – homeware, the everyday luxury of branded goods – will probably hold up. But home renovations could end up consisting of nicer taps than a whole bathroom suite. While the young,...

Nestle’s Milo brand is in danger of losing its status as an iconic brand in Australia, Brand Finance Managing Director Mark Crowe says, unpacking the leaders and laggards in the latest Top 100 most valuable brand rankings, where 66 brands rose and 22 fell. But brand value and strength are more than just 'soft metric' leaderboards – they’re being leveraged in hard financial terms by CFOs and CEOs i...

Ten years into a data-analytics career, ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra pulled a u-turn and took a demotion to learn brand marketing from the ground up. She says it’s the smartest move she ever made, with marketers in narrow swim-lanes at risk of obsolescence. Mehra says ANZ’s push to bridge the skills gap within its own four walls via self-built Brand Academy and Marketing Masters programmes have shielded it...

Aussie expat Nicole Taylor jumped ship from managing international creative firms to lead LEGO’s in-house agency, which has 400 people around the world, a content factory, and powerful creative, digital and production capabilities. Now, she’s leading a review of the company’s agency roster – and is very positive about the strengths of indies. “I love the fact that they're not thinking of a P&L...

Australia is Toyota country and holds similar clout and market dominance across 17 key markets in Asia. But there were looming clouds on the horizon that Toyota’s APAC execs could see would pose a near-future challenge for the region’s leading carmaker. Toyota’s “humility” around innovation and the future of mobility risked being too conservative and out-voiced by more aggressive, louder rivals at...

Digital out of home screens are the new retail catalogue, as the likes of Woolworths, Coles, Myer and JB HiFi place specific offers and sales depending on the weather, temperature and location. “It's basically a really flexible, tailored, measurable, targeted, third party guaranteed position,” QMS CEO John O’Neill says. Dan Murphy’s, for example, targets red wine messages for cold weather, white w...

Cannes unplugged: Suncorp’s Mim Haysom, Yahoo’s Rachel Page, Thinkerbell’s Adam Ferrier and LinkedIn’s Matt Tindale on incoming headwinds, rebalancing ‘techification’, Ryan Reynolds and the push for 'pragmatic purpose'  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2003, the billionaire former owner of Harrods, Mohamed Al-Fayed, tasked Guy Cheston with building a media business for the department store. By 2015, the luxury store’s media worked so well it paid for everything else. “Initially, this media sales or the owned media division was really just a little tiny element of the trade marketing team,” he says. “Harrods had set up its own in-house media d...

Election and fundraising strategists for former US President Barack Obama accidentally invented the now booming “experimentation” industry which takes the ubiquitous A/B testing concept to new levels – and business is going large. Personalisation has got too much attention and corporate investment at the expense of experimentation, say Deloitte Digital Partner Nima Yassini and Coles’ Fallyn Lowe,...

Three leading global authorities on advertising effectiveness are worried enough about the efficacy of advertising and the impact it has on business results that they have joined forces to present new data and observations in Cannes next week on why a triple jeopardy threat is a clear and present danger to the global industry. They go so far as to call for an overhaul in how advertising...

Marketing is a dirty word for some – look no further than the ‘Scotty from Marketing’ jab. But Suncorp has spent three years building, quite literally, a powerful response to that. Its One House campaign last year and recent Resilience Road activation are entirely marketing-funded and led research projects that are changing the way Queenslanders build disaster-proof homes. And wh...

When done well, OOH smashes it. Local brands have been lagging, but the smart ones are learning from the likes of Nike, driving a “creative revolution” in digital out of home, reckons Neil Ackland, oOh!media’s Chief Content, Marketing and Creative Officer. While tech like QR codes, 3D animation, location data and anamorphic screens can drive huge results, “There’s a d...