Mi3 Audio Edition

Professor Mark Ritson was right all along: “90 per cent of marketers fail to brief agencies effectively, and their failures begin with a total lack of strategy.” The headline findings of the Better Briefs Project and its research spanning 1,700 marketers and agencies make for grim reading. Marketers don’t even realise their briefs are mostly duds, yet agencies are “screamin...

How a marketer’s budget is set is often doomed to fail, Pet Circle CMO Jon Wild says. Typically, it stems from a business’s growth target. “There’s an arbitrary increase to marketing spend and you’re told to go hit the target. Typically, you fall short in the first quarter, and it’s death by a thousand cuts for the remainder of the year.” That method is &l...

10 ViacomCBS will headline its 2022 Upfronts by touting its credentials as a more diverse, full-service broadcaster with room to grow and a big hitting content slate straight out of the gates. I’m a Celebrity starts on January 3, with Survivor and MasterChef hot on its heels. After that, “you’re into that pattern of big franchises all year,” says Chief Content Officer Bever...

Dell tops US$94 billion in revenues, but it had been in a perpetual street fight on pricing for years and was losing margin with brand health metrics flatlining. With a new premium push it went large on brand, inviting Australia’s publishers to pitch their ideas. Around 150 publishers turned up, the response blowing away marketing boss Arjun Dueskar. Opting to go with 10ViacomCBS and MediaCo...

The QR code was once the daggy tech no-one wanted - but it’s now back, and even David “Kochie” Koch’s 87-year-old mother is using them. Five years of e-commerce development has been squeezed into the past 18 months, and Aussies haven’t been able to spend their money in lockdowns. “The economy is going to come out with a vengeance,” Koch, the host of Seven&...

The second and final episode in our two-part series breaks down five of the six recommendations in the ACCC report to the Federal government on the Digital Advertising Services inquiry – the first recommendation was covered in Part 1 yesterday. On the mics again today for the follow up are Peter Leonard, Professor of Practice at UNSW Business School, advisor at law firm Gilbert + Tobin...

Avoid reading another 200 page ACCC probe with this two-part series on the regulator’s final recommendations to the Federal Government from the Digital Advertising Services Inquiry. Google is squarely in the spotlight but as our panel of industry experts warn, what the ACCC is doing to Google is an early signal for broader industry. In today’s heavyweight line-up: Peter Leonard, Profes...

Consider a few stats: The Discovery Channel, Turbo, TLC and Animal Planet are having their best ratings years – ever. Back catalogue episodes are booming: Video on-demand consumption of Friends is up 103 per cent. Fifty-six per cent of people have watched more food and cooking shows, and 70 per cent of them said they would keep watching more post-lockdowns. New viewing habits are here to sta...

When Covid hit, BWS went all out to help local suppliers, which already battered by floods and bush fires, faced risk of extinction. BWS ditched its pre-Covid plan and campaign went all out for localism, launching a competition for independent brewers, distillers and winemakers to get stocked across its 1,400 stores, creating a marketing template for local suppliers to lift and getting locals to v...

John Wild, the Chief Marketing Officer for Pet Circle, invites his CFO to creative pitches and hires analysts with better data coding skills than the finance team. Why? So they can understand his job and buy into the creative messaging. “It’s incumbent on you to make [CFOs] your friend,” he says. “Make marketing look and smell very much like a financial output. Suddenly, wh...

SiteMinder is likely the biggest Australian tech company you’ve never heard of. The $1.1billion hotel booking system unicorn is headed for an IPO – so that will likely change. But what must also shift is Australia’s attitude to B2B marketing as the boring, rational sibling to B2C, says CMO Mark Renshaw. It’s where the smart money is headed, Renshaw reckons, and can teach FM...

Most publishers are winding down print operations. David Jones is ramping up – since launching a print magazine five years ago it has seen consistent double-digit growth across each of its digital channels. “The customer is overwhelmed with choice,” David Jones Marketing Communications General Manager Georgia Hack says. So the retailer decided to curate and repurpose its existing...

Launched by a former stockbroker and Booktopia’s CTO, Australian fintech Superhero has ripped up the start-up playbook and powered to massive growth off the back of out of home and TV. “To create big impact and really reach scale, brand awareness and credibility, fast... digital just is not going to get you there,” says marketing lead Rachel Hopping. With CommSec and the big four...

Australia’s streaming market is already crowded. There are only so many people who can sign up to Netflix, Stan, Prime, Binge, Kayo and the rest. That’s before you get to affordability issues – and the audiences for advertisers have been dwindling. Enter AVOD: advertising-based video on demand, where users pay less (or nothing) to see fewer ads. “It will allow people to rea...

Tasked with rewiring WPP’s media arm, GroupM Global CEO Christian Juhl is going a couple of steps further, attempting to redefine buying metrics and pressure suppliers – i.e. media companies, including Facebook and Google – to decarbonise. If media owners don’t play ball, will GroupM pull dollars? “We’ll certainly make that recommendation,” says Juhl. He t...

Seismic shifts are underway in cross-media audience measurement, and the IAB is preparing for looming turf wars by becoming the one ring to bind them all. It’s axed Nielsen and pulled in Ipsos – and a return to panels – ahead of the end of cookies and incoming privacy changes. The new metric is set to be in market next year, at least in basic form. But in a country where size mat...

Shirish Shrinet gets emails sending him offers and tutorials for make-up. There’s just one problem: he’s never worn any. “This is a classic example of customer experience vs customer expectations,” says Shrinet, SAP’s Senior Director in Customer Experience and Data Management. At some stage, because he bought his wife a present, he was categorised as female somewhere...

Optus is backing football (the big game, not the Australian version) to keep delivering customer growth and retention, particularly amongst immigrant Australians – but VP of Product Development for TV and Content, Clive Dickens, says Nine overpaid for the Champions League. He also has a dig at the naysayers at Seven who didn’t think 7plus could be delivered in nine months – inclu...

Inghams literally put all of its eggs in one basket with Out-of-Home, exclusively using oOh! Media’s network of retail and street screens to launch ‘The Free Ranger’ chicken – and hit pay dirt. It was a big call. But using Quantium data to target free-range humans, it delivered a 30 per cent increase in The Free Ranger buyers – 72 per cent of whom were new to the bran...

Returning to Australia after 20 years offshore, former Mars, Wrigley and Coke marketer turned Lion brand chief Anubha Sahasrabuddhe thinks the beer category has lost its way. Now “Lion is on the hunt” for new growth – and it’s looking beyond beer. The plan is to ditch tired tropes and brand positions that Sahasrabuddhe thinks are no longer reflective of Australian society &...

Digital out-of-home is powering massive east coast growth for WA-based health insurer HBF following a series of campaigns that include JCDecaux’s digital assets. “Our national growth is at plus 55 per cent… [but] 84 per cent increase year-on-year on the east coast,” Head of Marketing Louise Ardagh says. The programmatic out-of-home (pDOOH) sector is starting to motor, says...

After the best part of three decades, iconic Australian brand Ampol is back from the dead with a massive relaunch across 1,900 fuel and retail stations and an emotive, unmistakably Australian campaign that’s landing with Aussies young and old. Chief Brand Officer Jenny O'Regan, Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Anthony Gregorio and National Chief Creative Officer Mike Spirkovski, plus Jason Smith, C...

Brands with “purpose” in their DNA face the biggest fallout when they make a mistake: think Patagonia and Thank You. So where does that leave everyone else? New research from The Guardian finds purpose drives growth and keeps customers, and demand is climbing. The dairy industry is a major emitter – belching cows emit a shedload of methane – but it’s working to clean...

When data regulators come knocking, black box solutions from data brokers won't fix the compliance issues fast coming at brands. Meanwhile, publishers must avoid a repeat of the audience data heist carried out by ad networks and early programmatic players, reckons New York-based Nick Jordan, CEO of Narrative.io. The former Adobe and Yahoo exec urges the digital ad industry to step up with technica...

BETA unblockers: Millennials are turning 40. They’re now B2B marketing’s key buyers – and they are making an entirely different set of decisions. A new global study from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute says 75 per cent of Australia’s professional workforce will be millennial “BETAs” by 2025. They’re B – blurring the work/home boundaries, E – evo...