Mi3 Audio Edition

When Aimee Buchanan jumped ship to archrival GroupM, the knives were out for OMD’s joint CEOs Laura Nice and Sian Whitnall. “The only way is down,” per one nameless exec. One year on, they’ve so far proved the doubters wrong, retaining Coles and landing the consolidated NSW Government account, where a new behavioural science unit helped nudge the business over the line. By 2025, they’re aiming to...

The results are in: Bunnings’ 25-year-old bluesy melody is the country’s most effective audio brand, per Southern Cross Austereo’s 2022 Audio Logo Index. It “might as well be the national anthem”, SCA’s Matt Dickson says. But Menulog has raced up the ladder and is now second in the minds of 4,000 people surveyed. In a super competitive set against the likes of Uber Eats and Doordash, Menulog, usin...

Telstra’s top marketer Jeremy Smart has moved on to run the telco’s digital sales and service operations, handing the CMO baton last month to former IAG marketing boss Brent Smart. Both are still working side by side at Telstra. The remits of digital, CX, ecom and marketing are increasingly intertwined - Nicholas now has responsibility for the 80 per cent of Telstra’s customer sales and service en...

As massive economic headwinds and Apple’s app tracking privacy push bear down on social platforms like Meta’s Facebook, the likes of News Corp Australia – long under pressure from Big Tech’s data smarts and audience scale – are positioning as full funnel alternatives. And it’s working. News reckons its News Connect data platform can target audiences on a granular level based on their interests and...

Cartology has made the early running and noise in the bustling supermarket media category but ‘owned' media – that is, all media and audience assets controlled by a brand – is at least three times the size of the grocery and liquor sector. And ‘retail aggregators’ (think Officeworks, BigW, Myer and JB Hi-Fi) is nearly 20 per cent bigger than the grocery sector, according to Sonder via a new report...

Last click attribution is back. Tightening wallets, soaring inflation and a VC focus on profitability over growth is prompting a return to the metric, which Pet Circle CMO Jon Wild reckons is the least bad of a range of “horribly flawed” attribution options. Pet Circle has 800,000 active customers and revenues in the hundreds of millions. “For far too long, I think our industry has been peddling r...

It’s not a normal forensic look at marketing sciences, agency structures or CMO tactics this week – instead we speak to four alumni of The Marketing Academy’s exclusive scholarship program. Only 30 people get accepted into the course each year and, without exception, all of them rave about it being electrifying, transformative, emotional and raw. But why? BWS’ An Le, KFC’s Warren Mo, Edelman’s Fer...

Free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels are going to keep viewers in Paramount’s ecosystem watching for longer, the network has bet via its upfront last week, unveiling a wave of new partnerships, products, shows and – crucially – a longer content slate. While competitors roll out male-skewed audiences over summer, Paramount will run The Bachelors, following The Challenge in December. “It’...

Journalists have long hated advertising and sales. Now Nine has a battle-hardened journo responsible for the P&L of its publishing division, perhaps the first hack to be entrusted with news media fortunes since John Hartigan chaired News Corp and John Alexander left the old Fairfax for the Packer camp. Chessell having already triggered James Packer in recent weeks, carefully espouses his views...

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...