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The effectiveness “revolution” is colliding with the AI-spawned efficiency uprising and it’s leaping the early consensus AI use cases in marketing around automating personalised content and communications. So much so Mark Ritson choked on his Wellfleet oysters when Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg told him they were leaving top jobs at the LinkedIn-backed thinktank, the B2B Institute. Then they told him why. Ritson promptly joined their venture, along with what Weinberg calls “the advisory board to end all advisory boards”.  Thus the synthetically-enhanced AI marketing outfit Evidenza was born.

The founders argue their new piece of “synthetic customer” tech, which starts with creating AI copies of target customers, can create an annual marketing strategy, category entry points, messaging and positioning at a fraction of the cost of traditional market research and in a fraction of the time it takes for a marketing team to do the same. They claim it completes major research projects in minutes – and have proven their digitally synthetic customers match real customer responses it took some of the world’s biggest brands long cycles to gather. “It can imitate essentially anyone by gathering and synthesizing massive amounts of data,” per Weinberg, including almost impossible-to-reach professionals, like airline chiefs, or the bosses of mining companies. Which is exactly what Evidenza did in a head-to-head test with EY Americas CMO Toni Clayton-Hine’s actual survey data – and “reached 95 per cent of the same conclusions,” per Weinberg. EY “has been a fantastic client ever since.”

But as well as synthesizing customers, the system also synthesizes marketing strategy and science: Imagine on one side a synthetic combination of Mark Ritson, Professor Byron Sharp teamed with ad effectiveness maestros Peter Field and Les Binet. Then on the other side, hundreds of synthetic CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CIOs, CMOs and each of those functions linked to the nuances of different industries and categories. Put them all into an AI blender, and you get what Lombardo and Weinberg think is an efficiency revolution in marketing fused with the effectiveness revolution from the marketing academics. The upshot for marketers? “A finance-friendly marketing plan that used to take months now takes maybe minutes, but more likely, a day,” per Weinberg. According to Lombardo that’s good news even for traditional market researchers. “Everyone is going to get better. Average is over.” So what’s left for the humans? The synthetic duo say the smart stuff - experience, strategic frameworks and brand and category nuance, for instance - that makes the machines do better. 

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Marketing mix modelling (MMM) only works if brands grant their agencies access to critical business data – and many don’t in a perplexing and decades-long challenge. But equally, agencies can be guilty of slowing media pricing and audience data into their client MMM models, rounding out the two-way data conundrum. It’s ironic given all the talk of partnerships and outcome-based incentives, per Mutinex APAC CEO, Mat Baxter.

Bupa and Atomic 212°, says Baxter, are standout examples of genuine client-agency transparency – and it’s powering not just “marginal gain theory” in which lots of small, incremental components are optimised to drive growth, but hard, 28 per cent ROI gains in specific incidences. Bupa plugged into the platform in 2022 and performance lead Angas Hill says without a free flow of business data to Atomic 212° – sales, revenue, pricing and competitiveness data included - “there's not much point in standing up an MMM model.”

Bupa does and now the CFO sees the MMM outputs as “the most trusted source we have in terms of attribution and forecasting”.

Bupa uses those monthly ROI insights to shape the quarterly media plan – with Atomic 212° already plugged-in across what’s working and what’s not at a business level. “It’s just speeding up that whole process,” says Hill. “We are seeing long-term growth in our effectiveness for what is essentially flat media budgets.” Plus, he says, on-off testing via MMM, e.g. testing one region and channel against another, “is where we are seeing much more drastic changes.”

Atomic 212°’s Tom Sheppard underlines broader benefits from using MMM outputs to inform trading strategy: “If we understand what the ROI is, we can negotiate. If [as a result] we can decrease that cost base of certain channels, all of a sudden we can automatically improve the return that the client is getting,” per Sheppard.

“The MMM is fantastic at telling us what's worked in the past and to give us the next best decision,” he adds. Now he says Atomic 212° and Bupa are adding new inputs and channels “to get even better signals – so as a result, everyone wins.”

Next step is making automatic media transaction feeds via API the norm, per Baxter. “That is the future of where we are going.”

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There’s little contention today that the pro-consumer privacy lobby is winning the war over industry on privacy reform - they’re informed on industry techniques, loaded with compelling consumer research and aligned entirely on the need for a clampdown on the collection and use of an individual’s online data trail. Former NSW Deputy Privacy Commissioner and Salinger Privacy boss Anna Johnston and Choice Consumer Data Advocate, Kate Bower unpack what and why they expect a series of hard, industry-challenging privacy reforms to land in parliament next month - that’s less than six weeks away. Just how deeply the $25bn-plus marketing supply chain and tens of thousands of practitioners will be impacted will become clear as the reforms are tabled in Federal Parliament. Johnston and Bower think the updated Act will go harder than anywhere in the world. Hashed emails will be classified as personal information. Trading of geolocation data will be out. Trading of loyalty scheme data – the stuff that powers retail media and a vast targeting-attribution industry – will require companies to prove they have lawful consent to do so and they won’t be able to deny services to those that say no. But consent, says Johnston, is a very fragile thing – and companies might actually be best off concentrating on one of the legislation’s central tenets: Fair and reasonable use of data. In other words, says Choice’s Bower, does what you are doing with customer’s data pass “the privacy pub test?” If it does, meeting a very high consent threshold doesn’t apply. Right now, most are badly flunking the test. Johnston has a checklist for brands that likely have a 12-month compliance window to get houses in order. But ultimately, she says $50m fines are now in play and that “some product lines and business processes will have to stop … and frankly, that is the point of the reforms.” Cleanrooms, she suggests, may come under intense scrutiny.

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Hipages Chief Customer Officer Stuart Tucker and VP of Marketing Nick Ellery say growing an online marketplace requires an entirely new suite of marketing and media capabilities to create and match demand and supply between households needing a tradesperson and tradies needing work - and it’s loaded with tension. They’ve got to build a B2C and B2B brand simultaneously and mange short-term demand volumes for two completely different customer sets in real time down to postcode level. That means more sophisticated data feeds to inform fast direct response media channel tactics like paid search when plumbers need work in Melbourne’s Hawthorn next week or household demand for sparkies in Sydney’s Hornsby is surging today. They’re quickly mastering brand and performance levers together and now adding to the “mid-funnel” with content. Here’s what Hipages is doing next after a  three-year “transformational” investment building its brand that has slashed the reliance on paid search for new customers - although it remains a leading tactical strategy for the business. 

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A former Wesfarmers CFO, of all people, led the cull of the Kmart Tyre & Auto brand after 50 years in market but took on the challenge to rebuild as mycar's Chief Customer Officer, tasking a creative agency, TBWA, with full service CX, media and brand transformation. It worked: sales are up 23 per cent, at least since 2020. Now under Adele Coswello mycar is positioning for another major transition – electric vehicles – while bidding to steal share from free-spending pure-play rivals such as Bob Jane T-Marts and Ultra Tune. It's dropped a retail, up-sell focus and gone all out for 'people first’ and building pop-up stores next to shopping centres, putting vans on the road to deliver mobile services, while putting tech into its garages that give customers a stream of their cars' vital signs – and what's being done to keep them healthy. Meanwhile TBWA chief Paul Bradbury says moving into CX and media and taking on the consulting giants is the shape of things to come.

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Attention measurement has captured much of the ad industry’s focus in the past two years just as the out-of-home industry body, OMA, was well into its roadmap to apply a “Neuro Impact Factor” to thousands of individual digital and static screens. Neuro-Insight, the firm behind the measurement system, has among the most robust, academically peer-reviewed advertising science worldwide – initially developed by Professor Richard Silberstein and neuroscientists at Swinburne University’s Brain Sciences Institute to understand brain behaviour among ADD and ADHD children. Despite the science – real advertising science as its proponents argue – media agencies are dragging the chain on take-up, certainly versus emerging and scaled attention metrics. But here’s why the industry needs both and what should happen next according to Avenue C’s Pia Coyle, Neuro-Insight’s Peter Pynta and the OMA’s Grant Guesdon.

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Three months ago, The Guardian launched its first Australian brand campaign in a bid for double-digit audience increases – and ploughed its entire budget into one media partner. JCDecaux won the brief because it could deliver scale and the tech capability to enable real-time API feeds direct from the Guardian’s editors without any human intervention. But critically, because JCDecaux is also aligned on environmental, social and corporate governance, or ESG. Now both The Guardian and JCDecaux say they are winning significant new business on the back of green credentials, while the campaign is starting to move the needle. Meanwhile, the tech development work to deliver the year-long brand push has set a template for JCDecaux to lift and deploy globally. JCDecaux Chief Marketer, Essie Wake, and The Guardian Director of Growth, Jocelin Abbey, unpack the story behind the headlines on the billboards – and the strong parallels with the shift in strategy from pureplay online retailers to out of home formats.

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Personalisation is possibly “the worst idea we have come across in digital marketing,” per B2B Institute’s John Lombardo – even Amazon can’t do it properly. “Find the biggest things that matter to the biggest group of buyers – that's the real commercial opportunity,” per Lombardo. He thinks 1:1 personalisation ultimately leads to a surveillance state. The downturn-induced swing back to performance over brand is another big mistake. “It’s survival, I get it … But you can't just keep on adding up the short-terms and expect some sort of long-term strategy.” Former performance purist, Maria Grivas, now CEO at Mindshare, thinks performance marketers are much maligned – and are targeting longer-term growth as well as immediate gains. The problem is that CFOs demand demonstrable growth metrics. That means marketing to finance, per Lombardo, should be the “most urgent” CMO 2023 agenda item, “otherwise we get our budgets cut”. Elly Bloom, Executive Marketing, Business & Private Banking at NAB, is doing just that, using market mix modelling (MMM) to demonstrate which investments are generating returns in hard business terms – and where to spend next. “It’s been invaluable”, says Bloom. Lombardo doubts econometric models can accurately prove where marketing is moving the needle – but thinks even demonstrating attempted due diligence to CFOs via MMM serves its purpose.

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The intense heat and conjecture coming on the subscription models of Netflix, Stan, Paramount+, Disney+ and beyond may, ironically, not cut so deep for battle-weary publishers if they keep moving fast with new bundled products, content, AI and UX. That’s Mark Reinke’s view, who moved from financial services to the media industry in 2019 and admits plunging into a baptism of fire – publishing is tough, News Corp to many even tougher. Under Reinke, News Corp has launched subscription puzzles, mindfulness and wagering sites, its first podcast series - crime - with Apple that is casting for a global subscription audience and a younger version of The Australian – The Oz - which looks more like Instagram and has attracted 500,000 younger readers since launching six months ago. News Corp’s Australian experience is matching – ahead in some areas – what is underway globally among publishers according to Tim Rowell, APAC boss of subscription platform Piano, which counts 3,000 media titles worldwide using its tech. Rowell says editors and journalists have seen many of their assumptions challenged about how audiences consume and behave with content – the old newspaper lifestyle sections are returning as new gold in rebundled digital subscription packs – and there are big lessons for brands, their advertising plans and content marketing investments. Heads-up: move faster, experiment more, repackage content, use AI to find smaller but lucrative emerging audiences and blow up assumptions. New rules are playing out.

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QMS has carried out a world first outdoor attention pilot with Amplified Intelligence, aiming to train Artificial Intelligence to recognise audiences – not dogs – viewing assets like street furniture. After a feasibility study with Amplified Intelligence CEO Karen Nelson-Field last year, her team put cameras around assets to track gaze, recognise faces and even “pose estimation” to measure humans as opposed to cars, prams and dogs. “It is literally world first in this space,” says Nelson-Field. Outdoor attention is not necessarily fleeting – think people waiting for a bus. The aim, QMS’s Chief Strategy Officer Christian Zavecz says, is to understand outdoor assets and share that data with the industry. “It’s not about us versus them,” he says. “We've always had a major focus of moving from just eyeballs to influence and understanding what drives better results for our clients. It just made a lot of sense.”

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Australia’s AVOD wars are heating up. Foxtel Media boss Mark Frain reckons “tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars” will move in the next 12-18 months. User experience will win, making ad loads and frequency capping a key battleground. Razorfish boss Jason Tonelli warns that presents a new problem for publishers: As users hop from one service to the other, how will BVOD and AVOD players collectively manage frequency capping? “That will be the next frontier”. Brands are hungry to test the waters, adds Tonelli, with early adopters lenient on measurement. But down the track, measurement will need to be robust. “Is it OzTam or not? That is a debate we have to have.” Foxtel’s Frain says sitting outside of OzTam hasn’t stopped Foxtel writing revenue on Kayo. Ultimately, per Tyler Fitch, head of Advanced TV & Partnerships at Tubi – which has amassed 50m AVOD subscribers – breadth of content, personalisation and UX will determine winners from losers. He thinks the former SVOD purists that once “scoffed” ad ad-funded models have some hard lessons ahead.

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At the height of anti-vaxxer revolt, with protest boiling out on the streets, NAB decided to nail its colours to the flag and launch a pro-vaccine campaign – changing its name to JAB seven days after signing off the brief. A bold move for a risk-averse ASX-listed bank and NAB was bracing for blowback from “keyboard warriors”. Within hours, it arrived in spades. But the bank “held the line”, per NAB Head of Group Brand Faycal Ben Abdellaziz – and the stream of vitriol actually helped propel NAB JAB to go viral. What’s more, anti-vaxxers vowing to close accounts were largely all talk. Instead, NAB gained thousands of customers, while engagement rates and brand reputation metrics shot to multiyear highs, and played a role in Australia reopening weeks ahead of schedule. With a downturn likely, Ben Abdellaziz suggests JAB’s legacy is bravery and that the bank won’t let “an extremely vocal minority” water down its approach to bold work. NAB, he says, won’t be pulling back on brand spend either, whatever the economy throws up next.

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Richard Facioni, chair of retail groups Alquemie and Mosaic Brands – with upwards of 1,000 stores and brands including Surf Stitch, General Pants, Lego Stores, Ginger & Smart, Noni B and Rivers – thinks ecom pure players may be in trouble. Shoppers have swung back to physical stores just as digital customer acquisition costs “are going through the roof”. If marketers turn off the taps, sales evaporate, which could spell danger for the likes of The Iconic and Adore Beauty. Versus last year, “we’re definitely seeing a pullback in online,” he says, with some brands back as much as 30 per cent. Meanwhile, retailers that stocked up to head off crunched supply chains may find themselves scrambling to offload in January as a “definite slowdown” bites. Facioni hates the word ‘omnichannel’, but says it’s the future of profitable retail – hence lining up a physical presence for $50m acquisition Surf Stich, currently an online pure-player. Fresh back from Dreamforce, Facioni’s helping steer both group’s commerce and ERP stacks, with a customer data platform likely to follow. He also predicts social commerce will be the next revenue frontier.

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Just how accurate is the user data being traded by advertisers, agencies and data firms in the $700bn global digital advertising system? The former Chief Privacy Officer of UM in the US, Arielle Garcia, is exasperated - it’s garbage she says and to prove it Garcia recently accessed her profile from an ad tech vendor and found she was in “500 different audience segments across seven different data brokers, and what I saw was just a bunch of contradictory, useless, garbage data.” I.e. she was both a man and a woman, worked in food service, agriculture, a defense contractor, an engineer and was simultaneously below the poverty threshold and classified as high income. “They're selling this garbage data back and forth to one another,” she says, allowing for a host of data “premiums” to be applied by various intermediaries in the process of executing digital advertising campaigns.   

“Marketers have been tricked into believing that precision and personalisation equals performance,” she says. "There's so much that's wrong with that, and the inaccuracy of the data is only one piece of that fallacy.”

Meanwhile, she says big agency groups have lost their way. “It’s not just principle media models (aka arbitrage) that are problematic, but the fact most of them are incentivised to hit targets by the likes of Google and it distorts the market - “it's literally about their objectivity,” she says. 

Agencies are not the only ones. “Google has captured the trade associations … they buy their way into every room.” If trade associations are saying “nothing to see here … of course that’s going to lull marketers into a false sense of security,” she says. Garcia argues Google’s manoeuvres with PMax – it’s AI-powered “just trust us” media placement product for it’s owned media assets like YouTube – “gives Google the ability to opaquely use their black box algorithms to move money wherever they want”, which could prove handy ahead of impending antitrust trials. Meanwhile, AI Overviews in search will “massacre traffic” for publishers. She says publishers must stop forcing people to log in and refocus on quality. For marketers, Garcia urges a “reorientation around people” and “prioritising quality over the illusion of precision.” How? “Demand transparency … there cannot be a market for black box products”, she says. Plus hold agencies accountable. “No one messes with the client that audits.” For everybody else in industry, Garcia has one ask – work out if YouTube is “covertly tracking people.” How? “Let's find out what X-Goog-Visitor-Id is.” Nobody seems to know. But that may change.

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News Corp’s new shoppable video format, which lets audiences buy without leaving the content, has been “flying off the shelves” across alcohol, beauty and consumer electronics, News’ data, video and product director Paul Blackburn says – and the trial with Moet & Chandon hasn’t even finished. “We have 14 other clients in flight, post-Moet,” he said, “and there’s a huge pipeline of other clients looking.” The format is part of News’ reengineering effort to unlock what McKinsey describes as ‘commerce media’ or ‘content media’ – a $50bn incremental goldmine buried within media companies. “We’ve always been really good at upper funnel, we’re really good – we’ve always been an amazing billboard,” News’ MD for Client Product Pippa Leary says. “Now we’re going to become a billboard and a shopfront.” The trial with Moet, with Kantar testing, has found a 10 per cent plus rise in purchase intent and a 38 per cent unaided brand awareness uplift.

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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 launch ten similar new products in a push to break the media agency mould, with CX and UX top of the agenda. Unlike some rivals, they’re uninterested in going toe-to-toe with the big consultants eating market share, while suggesting rivals remain conflicted on tech recommendations now driving a big chunk of their cash. They think a very different leadership style to the previous regime is now paying off, and have even accepted the so-called ‘twats’ model – staff mostly in Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays – is working.

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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, using Katy Perry and Snoop Dog, has formed strong memory structures in consumers with audio. “We don't have the same amount of dollars or funding as some of the bigger competitors, so we're constantly trying to get that cut through, get that stand out,” Menulog’s Fiona Bateman says. “It’s a jungle out there,” Neuro-Insights’ Peter Pynta says. “If you strengthen your network… you can also, at the same time, simultaneously be weakening the competition's strength.”

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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 engagements which start online. Nicholas says he was partly lured to the role because brands are “defined increasingly by their customer experience and increasingly that’s a digital experience.” On the flipside, Brent Smart in 2019 was one of the few marketers who publicly called out the tech platforms which power blue chip customer experience deployments by saying marketing technology, or martech, was quickly turning vanilla. His position is softening. Here’s the full lowdown from two execs with among the biggest marketing and digital CX remits in the country. 

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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 reading habits across retail, FMCG, travel, auto, and more. “You name it, we can find intenders in those categories,” says News’ GM of Client Product and Strategy Suzie Cardwell. Upper funnel ads drove a 55 per cent in-store boost for one furniture brand, while an auto manufacturer saw double the dealership visits for those exposed to ads on News’ platforms compared to those who weren’t. Per Cardwell: “The briefs are absolutely flowing in.”

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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, hot off the press. The firm calculates Australia’s owned media potential stands at $3.9bn – and 80-90 per cent margins have CEOs and CFOs licking their lips. That could alter the balance of power between marketing, sales and merchandise, and potentially change the dynamics between paid, owned and earned investment. Founding partners Jonathan Hopkins and Angus Frazer run the rule over five standout categories – grocery and liquor, aggregated retail, telco, petrol and convenience, and finance – which players may be next to market (hint, anyone with a loyalty programme) and the implications for Australian media market dynamics.

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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 reach and frequency and brand consideration,” Wild says. “These metrics are very hard to put in a spreadsheet.” And they don’t satisfy the C-suite when staring at one of the biggest lines in a P&L. Bupa’s performance chief, Clea Baker, says prices are due to jump in search and social – but she’s investing in media mix solutions to protect brand spend on the increasingly rocky road ahead. Atomic212’s James Dixon and Rory Heffernan outline how marketers can start sandbagging against rising waters of cost cuts.

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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 Fern Canning-Brook and former Broadsheet director Skye Rugless detail how they changed before and after completing the program, what super chickens can teach about leading and why quiet leadership can be a big strength.

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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’s tactical – moving here when they go there,” EVP and Chief Content Officer Beverley McGarvey says. She’s eyeing early wins and a bigger share of budgets. With PlutoTV’s extra channels through 10 Play, advertisers – especially those embedded in shows – will see incremental reach as key viewers keep watching. And as well as a tonne more inventory around dedicated channels – MasterChef and Survivor channels for example, pulling in series from around the world – Paramount’s going back to the future, as those channels will be curated in a bid to keep audiences glued to the channel, and therefore the commercials. There’s also e-commerce through Twitter, viewers choosing their own ads, automated content recognition through Samba TV and dynamic ads. Sales chief Rod Prosser now has more wares to sell, and expects “big take up”.

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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 on News Corp’s corporate and editorial agenda, but jabs The Guardian for running “scared” of taking on risky, investigative stories. But can the one-time business journalist and masthead editor continue the renaissance of a sector once seen by many as flogging a dead horse? Chessell’s backing editorial integrity and trust to drive advertiser and subscription growth within news while plotting diversification into new turf, admitting Covid audience gains will likely drop off. Now straddling church and state, he agrees media sales is a “knife fight in a phone box”, but says Michael Stephenson and publishing sales chief Jo Clasby are killing it. Chessell knows financial markets gobbledygook inside out even if he’s not yet so savvy on ad market, adtech and marketing lingo. Here’s his plan.

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Hyundai is the first brand - with some bravery - to have signed on to the 36 Months campaign to lift the minimum age for social media accounts from 13 to 16, launched by Nova Radio’s Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli and Rob Galluzzo, the boss of production company Finch. 36 months is the time a teen will reclaim from social media between 13 and 16 years. Galluzzo is “100 per cent certain” more brands will follow Hyundai to help create and fund the programs that rebuild a physical social network for teens that isn’t manipulated by the anxiety-inducing algorithms that have made young teenagers the product. Which creates the perfect platform for brands to walk all the talk about ‘purpose’ and ‘showing up in the right way’. “A brand can go to its board, and ask ‘how do we want to show up for these kids, these families, the community?’ If they don't have an answer to that, they probably need to have a pretty big discussion about what they stand for as companies,” per Galluzzo.

As of last Friday, Wippa and Galluzzo had landed 90,000 signatures, more than enough to have the petition head to Canberra. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already endorsed the campaign, stating “what we want is our youngest Australians spending more time outside, playing sport, engaging with each other in a normal way, and less time online”. State and territory premiers have also backed the move – and Wippa thinks the upcoming election creates an opportunity for legislation sooner rather than later. “There’s some easy votes to be picked up from parents if you made this an election promise,” he says.

Now 36 Months is building out three crucial pillars to use the time reclaimed from the platforms to better prepare young Australians for physical and digital life ahead. Here’s Wippa and Galluzzo on where next, and how brands can help repair the fractured civics they have inadvertently funded.

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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 community in the world” – it’s not a “transactional” loyalty program, but a membership. It’s sustainability for Colgate-Palmolive CMO Anthony Crewes, who is pushing past 80 per cent recyclable toothpaste tubes of the 50 million sold each year. The challenge now is getting consumers to actually recycle them. Destination NSW’s Kathryn Illy says new experiences are critical to the travel industry, once worth $44 billion to the state – now half that but bouncing back.

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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 The Work list earlier this year. Head of Deloitte Digital Australia Esan Tabrizi says advertising is not his team’s end game, but rather being a full-service provider of customer outcomes – which may include advertising – are his focus. But creativity and creative thinking is now at the top of Deloitte Digital's agenda. In this conversation, Tabrizi also unpacks how marketers missed the boat on tech over the past decade, leading to the rise of Chief Digital, Chief Customer and Chief Growth Officers. But the next generation of gun CMOs, he says, will be much more tech savvy, and won’t get caught up in the tech stack wars. And perhaps most interestingly, current CMOs can learn from government on CX and personalisation - who would have thought? 

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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 flooded San Francisco last week, paying US$2,000 a pop to attend what is morphing into the Disneyland of business branding and product. Fleming makes no apologies for lifting B2C’s playbook, stating he’d rather borrow from Disney than rivals like Adobe, Microsoft and SAP. He and LinkedIn global VP, Marketing Solutions, Jim Habig say they plan further B2C talent raids in a bid to lift B2B beyond spreadsheets and rational arguments – and say brand investment is helping to win the creative talent war. Meanwhile Habig is also set to overhaul account-based marketing – or ABM – by linking up with one of the world’s most successful restaurateurs, Will Guidara. Both are adamant that they will not slash brand investment amid market turmoil.

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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 invested in Mutiny, an Australian company shaking up how marketers use econometrics, with AI and cloud processing, to demonstrate return on investment. “Whoever can prove their budget’s worth is going to be the one who keeps it in a recessionary environment,” co-founder Henry Innis says. Marketers can turn procurement enemies into allies with the right data, TrinityP3’s Darren Woolley says.

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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 pressure globally, Hogarth is betting big on artificial intelligence, automated content and virtual production, tipping Woolworths, Woolmark, Suncorp and Bayer as winners among their stable of clients. Glasson says virtual production cuts costs – he wouldn’t say by how much – and will rapidly become “the default way of producing work” in both Hollywood and advertising, as CMOs manage content demands across more channels to reach an increasingly fragmented consumer base. How does a marketer begin to think about the metaverse or Web3 with no extra budget, for example? A mix of smart creatives, automation, offshoring and “modular” production is a solution, Hogarth Australia's CEO Justin Ricketts says. A recent campaign creating a blazing inferno and New York apartment in a single day in a Melbourne studio shows how it’s done.

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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 screens are full funnel marketing assets: If used well, they can build awareness and consideration via brand investment and trigger a purchase or action at the bottom. But that requires a shift in out of home buying approaches. There are 30 packs – an FMCG pack, alcohol pack and movie-goers pack, for example – and a bank of Nielsen, transaction and location data. They are looking to tie-up a big chunk of budget commitment upfront – and early demand suggests the network is not short of suitors.

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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. There has been “revenge spending in spades” within entertainment, travel and food – but that may be about to grind to a halt. GroupM ANZ CEO Aimee Buchanan, Premium Content Alliance CMO Claire Williams and Jana Bowden, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour at Macquarie University, unpack the outlook for marketers, media owners and agencies.

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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 going back brand-side with the carmaker. Tourism Australia CMO Susan Coghill started out handing agency briefs to Steve Jobs, and preparing to duck flying smoothies. She prefers to hire agency people for their dynamism and creative thinking. Nestle’s Anneliese Douglass thinks agencies tend to be braver than corporates, but taking ownership of P&L is a heavy responsibility. CMC Markets APAC marketing boss Liam Loan-Lack, a former lawyer, thinks the marketing world should follow legal precedent and drop the brand-agency division altogether. His advice to agency execs mulling the switch? Accept that the best and boldest ideas are often trumped by those easiest to sell internally – and forget about having more control. “It’s not easier, and if anything there is less control.”

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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 underground. The Chainsaw will cover the business and culture of Web3 – and Pedestrian CEO Matt Rowley says there’s ample advertiser opportunity. Financial and tech brands are circling. There’s also potential for the ‘holy grail’ of publishing – integrated microtransactions and commerce, as well as high value subscriptions. For the moment, Head of Editorial Sam Howard, back from Silicon Valley, is set on building The Chainsaw’s readership and community. 

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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. 

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A year ago Ariel Kelman boomeranged back to Salesforce after a decade helming global marketing for the likes of Amazon Web Services and Oracle. As global President and CMO of the $200bn+ customer tech giant, he’s wasted little time shaking things up – and Kelman’s view that Salesforce had “lost our focus on sales pipeline and on marketing really being a vehicle for driving business results” now appears prescient. Last week Salesforce’s stock price crashed circa 20 per cent after missing revenue guidance for the first time in decades. Ironically, most analysts still have a ‘buy rating’ on the stock – citing a “very healthy” pipeline and backing its new AI tools to power renewed growth.

Kelman has driven a forensic effort unpacking marketing’s contribution to sales – from a brand investment perspective and more tactical, performance-based campaigns. He’s also reset KPIs and marketing metrics and re-engineered the firm’s attribution model – not for the fainthearted, given “you can provoke very angry religious fights” amongst attribution’s fractured tribes. Either way, Salesforce has ditched last touch for a “deep learning” model that blends and weights sales’ and marketing’s contribution to pipeline growth and revenue.

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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 platform focusing on value, while maintaining the Australian business’s reputation as a global innovator – it created the McCafe brand back in 1993 and was the first market to do salads . Brown is working hard to shield Maccas from growing economic volatility, hoping to convince the two million-odd Aussie customers who walk through the doors of a franchise each day that it is a valued part of their lives, whatever else may be happening. Improving tech, new products and appealing to ‘flexitarians’ are on the agenda.

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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. Nelson-Field and Southern Cross Austereo’s Sales Insights lead Abi Wallis explain the research, due to land in October, which they say will lead audio being added into the attention planning and buying mix. The ultimate aim is tradeable audio attention.

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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 facing the group, which is “and always will be” a media company, while exploring agency culture, remote working, talent shortages, the net zero push and the future of holdcos.

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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, pensioners and the squeezed middle are talking about cutting back, a quarter of the population are comfortable, can play the system and will keep spending – and brands and retailers shouldn’t think about discounting to that cohort. For the broader population, brands and retailers need to communicate price hikes honestly and effectively – or lose community trust earned during Covid, fast. SCA’s Jasmine Beech, Roy Morgan’s Michele Levine and qualitative consumer researcher Neer Korn unpack what’s coming own the track – as far as anyone can tell.

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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 in M&A negotiations and Crowe thinks marketers should be brought into those deals much earlier. A case in point, he says, is that analysts hungry for future cashflow indicators are driving demand for brand valuations. Meanwhile agencies and marketers have woken up to the fact they can demonstrate their direct impact on a brand by measuring the change over time – a major factor in NRMA landing the 2021 Grand Effie.

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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 from increasingly attritional talent wars while future-proofing the business – and she has a few tips for those wondering how to get ahead in marketing. Meanwhile, the bank’s martech stack overhaul and bid for personalisation at scale is starting to move the needle, with conversion rates heading north, and ‘nudge theory’ doubling saving rates. With economic headwinds incoming, Mehra expects pressure to pull different levers. But she thinks budgets, for now, are safe. 

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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 outcome,” she says. They just want the best thinking and ideas. LEGO is flying, posting record profits and sales in 2021 and outstripping major rivals Mattel and Hasbro. Taylor, who started in Sydney AGENCIES in the late 90s, says in-housing can work wonders – speed is key, and businesses are starting to recognise the benefit of having creativity close by. Creatives are now in high demand among corporates, who see financial incentives to different thinking.

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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 attempting to own these new greenfield areas - and Toyota knew its next generation customers were being lured. Here’s how Toyota’s APAC VP of Sales and Marketing, Jerome Louis, and an Australian firm, Houston, mapped and delivered a four-year program to unify, for the first time, 17 highly-autonomous countries, all with their own market positionings, brand strategies, taglines and imagery, with a sweeping and unified overhaul of Toyota’s brand positioning and architecture. It’s an instructive case study in not having a fixed plan at the get-go but letting each of the markets discover and create a new positioning and suite of brand assets together – “Move your world”. Here’s how it happened.

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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 wine for hot and champagne for celebrations. “They do a really good job,” he adds. In the digital v static debate, O’Neill says digital reigns – it is the butterfly to static’s caterpillar. There’s a 63 per cent higher neuro impact factor with digital, QMS’ Chief Strategy Officer Christian Zavecz says. The OOH industry has agreed to verify 60 per cent of campaigns per hour, but QMS, two months from opening its City of Sydney contract to new clients, is staking its credentials on a 100 per cent guarantee. “We’ve gone out on a limb,” O’Neill says. “We think it’s really important.”

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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' 

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A year ago programmatic sales were just 2 per cent of QMS’ business. By the year-end, says Head of Programmatic, Laura Wall, it will be double digits.

She says the market is starting to move, and latest SMI data, with pDOOH up 100 per cent in Q1, underlines that trend. Kinesso’s Chief Media Activations Officer, Michael Whiteside, thinks even that rise is “undercooked”. He sees programmatic out of home – or pDOOH – making up 20 per cent of the market within two years. That’s partly because advertisers are seeking increased efficiency and trying to stretch budgets; partly because programmatic buying brings in a new cohort of advertisers that might have been priced out of traditional out of home; and partly because pDOOH delivers both brand and demand.

But Whiteside thinks there needs to be a better understanding of the value that programmatic out of home brings. CPMs, he says, are not the only factor – and advertisers with weak attribution models cannot correctly value the flexibility and targeting afforded by pDOOH – especially if they are comparing it to other programmatic media.

Understanding out of home’s nuance from a planning and buying perspective remains imperative – and it cannot be lumped in with broader programmatic channels. Hence QMS’ teams selling on a “total out of home basis”. Creating sales silos, says Wall, played out badly in publishing’s early programmatic days.

Either way, some of Essencemediacom’s early adopter clients are now pushing 100 per cent of OOH budgets into programmatic, says Group Director Katherine ‘KP’ Pochroj, who suggests “remnant inventory … is simply not a thing any more”.  Entertainment and ecom brands, she says, are making major gains from mapping stores and high value audiences through mobile data – and are able to directly attribute sales increases to their programmatic buys. But better measurement, says Pochroj, is required to keep pDOOH’s momentum moving. Kinesso’s Whiteside thinks the launch of MOVE 2.0 will provide sharper answers – and “highlight the value of each panel”.

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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 division, which was funding the entire marketing function of the store.” It went from £1m to £22m in a bit over a decade, and then went skyward. Not every brand is Harrods, but those that nail owned media can make serious cash. First step: Valuing what’s available.Jonathan Hopkins, Founding Partner of owned media consultancy Sonder, says the reaction tends to be: “‘Wow, I didn't realise we were sitting on a $150 million worth of own media’… Once it's given that dollar amount and valuation, it changes the way that the business views the channels,” he says. “When you’re talking about profit margins of 80 to 90 per cent, CEOs and CFOs are going to stand up and take notice.”

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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, Product Manager for Growth and Optimisation. They outline what’s next, including Google’s rapid rise to the top in experimentation software ahead of Adobe and Optimizely.        

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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 award shows like Cannes reward what is deemed the world’s best work. Advertising effectiveness supremo Peter Field, attention economy pioneer Karen Nelson-Field and creativity maestro Orlando Wood warn that ad effectiveness, ESOV and mental availability created by advertising for a brand is crumbling. The ESOV principle – spending more than rivals to gain extra share of voice relative to market share to outplace competitor sales – no longer applies. Get the lowdown before it is presented to a global audience in Cannes next week. The trio argue there is a fix. 

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