Explore every episode of the podcast Mi3 Audio Edition

YouTube last week officially ousted the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster ITV as the video platform now second only to the BBC in audience size, according to the tech and media regulator Ofcom. 

YouTube’s ad take is pumping everywhere – it raked $9.8bn in the June quarter, according to its latest earnings results – up 13% year-on-year. 

YouTube has been increasingly vocal on its ambition to target legacy broadcasters for bigger brand budgets and recast TV as swerving rapidly to the creator economy. 

Last week UK broadcasters lobbed a counterstrike, attempting to demonstrate that advertisers needed clearer, comparable reporting of YouTube  with TV audiences if it wants to take TV’s revenues. To date, YouTube has vigorously resisted joining any audience measurement system around the world if not on its terms and definitions - that position has not hurt its growth trajectory as advertisers large and small buy YouTube’s market narrative of being different. 

If there was any doubt YouTube sees itself as reframing TV to its likeness – broadcasters and global streamers are equally old-world in its eyes – the user generated content  platform last week pulled its involvement with the UK TV and streaming body BARB Audiences. To many observers, the timing was not random. Last week also saw BARB and its audience measurement partner Kantar release a world-first initiative reporting YouTube’s audiences at a channel level on connected TVs in the same way for broadcasters and streamers. The first week’s numbers from BARB and Kantar, showed YouTube’s top 200 channels dominated by content for kids aged under 5 like Peppa Pig, and lots of music. YouTube’s audience reach numbers by channel, central to how TV and streaming services win advertising contracts – were tiny. 

But does any of this matter? Do brands and advertisers care? The Future of TV Forum’s Justin Lebbon and global CEO of market mix modelling firm Mutinex, Henry Innis, duke out YouTube’s revenue romp, its surging adloads and a likely hurricane for traditional media-funded audience reporting – Innis argues business outcome-based audience measurement is set to shake-up decades of norms. 

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Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher

Brand evolution: It’s in the sights of every marketer, but how do you honour the legacy while seeking a new narrative that grabs attention, signals distinctiveness, and builds loyalty? How do you prove it’s worth investing in brand not just demand internally? What team structures and measures are better for driving a brand-led marketing approach? And what does it take to avoid what Mark Ritson calls “the pornography of change” in your creative and brand execution for the sake of it, versus innovating to ensure continued cultural relevance and commercial success?

Joining in this final episode in the CMO Awards podcast series for 2025 are three of our finalists and winners – Michael Hill CMO, Jo Feeney, Reflections Holidays CMO, Pete Chapman, and Allianz Australia general manager of customer strategy and marketing, Laura Halbert – who have made brand their mantra and mechanism for commercial success.

Each of these marketing chiefs is in a different lifecycle stage of brand maturity. Yet similarities in ingredients are in evidence: Capturing then leveraging data and customer insight, identifying and sticking to brand values, recalibrating media spend, committing to long-lasting creative and content that oozes distinctive brand assets, multi-year horizons, whole-of-company buy-in, baseline metrics and commercial smarts.

Take Reflections Holiday, a relatively young brand representing 40 holiday parks in Australia. As the business has transformed its operating model and committed to becoming a social enterprise, building brand has taken centre stage. Under the moniker, ‘Life’s better outside’, Chapman has been flipping category perceptions on their heads and stridently seeking engagement with a more discerning outdoors audience that puts nature, not novelty, first. From only 10 per cent of budget going on brand versus performance, it’s completely switched the other way. Last year, Reflections also underwent a rebrand complete with new positioning and brand look.

The new brand strategy made for some exceptional – and ironically, short-term – results, Chapman says. These include 10.1 year-on-year, topline revenue growth between February 2024 and February 2025, a +15.9 per cent lift in NPS, and a 20 per cent increase in loyalty club membership.

For Feeney, the lack of clarity on what Michael Hill stood for, overreliance on product and price promotions, limited insight into what customers thought and the absence of a narrative around a compelling lineage in fine jewellery all made rebranding a must. But you can’t tackle it all in one hit. So she introduced brand tracking first, and made the case for taking price points off advertising. Feeney also jettisoned the catalogues and shifted towards digital and “better media channels”, as the longer-term shift to reinvest an unprecedented 60 per cent of advertising funding into brand began.

“We couldn't have gone from zero to 100, we actually had to start to retell the story of Michael Hill,” says Feeney. “Resetting ourselves and getting a baseline was the really important part to then be able to even think about what could a rebrand look like.”

Even with persistently tough retail conditions, brand efforts helped turn three years of negative growth into three years of positive growth in group sales: +13.1 per cent (2021), +7 per cent (2023) and +9.8 per cent (2024).

Halbert meanwhile, is in the early stages of a rebranding effort for Allianz Australia, debuting its new brand positioning work, ‘Care you can count on’ in June. She’s already reporting a 15-point lift in brand awareness thanks to a creative approach grounded in leveraging distinctive brand assets that take their cues from a level of care Halbert felt in her first interviews before even joining the insurance giant.

“So the first marker was just in the experience. But the wonderful thing about a German organisation is we do have data. I was flooded with all the data and all of the research you could possibly dream of. When you really unpacked it… what was clear was that it was an amazing brand, with good awareness, good consideration, lots of trust. But when you unpack it further, it wasn't enough.

“We needed to be different. We needed to be distinctive. So we went on a mission over the course of the last 18 months to really go and understand who we were right at the core.”

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While the numbers have been improving, CMOs still have the shortest tenure in the c-suite globally. Spencer Stuart data shows CMOs in Fortune 500 companies now have average tenure of 4.3 years against a c-suite average of 4.9 years. But variance is huge: Tellingly, Forrester data shows a 75% variance in average CMO tenure across the industries it tracks, with B2B CMOs recording the lowest average tenure, while B2C record the longest.

Across the inaugural Australian CMOs of the Year finalists and winners, a list including both c-suite level marketers as well as heads of marketing reporting into divisional or other c-suite leaders, average role tenure came in at a much lower 3 years 3 months.
Yet across submissions, several marketing chiefs cited much longer role and company tenure – and delivered stronger marketing effectiveness case studies for it. Three joined us for the latest CMO Awards podcast, powered by Mi3, to reveal how longer tenure has helped them build trust and pursue bolder, more expansive decisions and work: Intrepid’s former chief customer officer and now president of the Americas, Leigh Barnes, Kennard’s Hire GM of marketing and customer, Manelle Merhi, and Patties Foods’ chief marketing and growth officer, Anand Surujpal.

The trio agreed: Tenure has seen them flip the switch on marketing as an ego-centric profession focused on delivering individual results – often, as quickly as you can – to putting the brands and business first. All of them are investing in longer-term opportunities and have the confidence to experiment, fail fast, pick up the learnings and progress. As well as sharpening their commercial aptitude, tenure has also opened doors they never would have found the handle on without embedding themselves truly as leaders within their respective organisations.

Barnes, who has been with Intrepid for nearly 15 years and took 14th spot in our CMOs of the Year, has spent the last three years orchestrating a transformation of marketing from 90:10 performance-to-brand mix, to 60:40 in favour of brand. It’s been a huge adjustment but results speak volumes: From a $60.7 million loss in 2021 to a $21.8 million net profit, and a $29 million revenue bump from first-time customers in early 2025 alone.

“For me, tenure has enabled me to be real, and that gives me the opportunity to say what I think, say when I'm struggling, say when I don't understand something, be vulnerable. But also, when I'm really confident about something, I can say that with gusto, and the business backs and supports that,” Barnes comments.

Merhi, who joined Kennards as head of marketing 12 years ago,  was 25th in our CMOs of the Year list for her bold work revitalising the sales team, as well as embedding four key customer personas that are driving growth, including its latest commercial segment successes. Today, every Kennard’s branch and employee speaks the language of customer, she says proudly.

“I genuinely believe tenure allowed for the trust, for proven capability, for notches on the belt that make people want to sit, listen and be curious in return,” Merhi says.
It’s that willingness to back you that’s also helping Surujpal, an eight-year veteran at Patties Foods, to take recently acquired brand, Lean Cuisine, in a completely different direction. He’s also tasked with taking Four ‘N’ Twenty into international markets.
“It's the trust of the organisation that you've got this, you’ve done this before. You know you're going to get a few things wrong, but you're going to get more things right than wrong,” he says. “The relationship between myself, my sales counterparts, my CEO, my CFO, is really strong. We've got an incredibly strong business partner relationship.”

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This week’s podcast is a bit different. We’re unpacking two big new plays from Mi3: our first sector specific newsletter edition, CustomerX; and a daily generative AI-powered Fast News edition, where the machines, overseen by Mi3 editors, will crunch and distil the daily PR firehose of people moves, key announcements,  account changes and campaign launches across marketing, tech, media, agencies and consulting. Coles 360 and Capgemini are launch partners on CustomerX; Salesforce and ThinkNewsBrands are backing Fast News. 

On CustomerX, Mi3’s Andrew Birmingham outlines the massive CX challenges facing brands. “They believe they can discern the intent of one buyer out of a billion in a millisecond … and they are striving not just to identify customers, but also to really better understand them. But the reality is many are going backwards,” says Birmingham, despite blowing vast sums on martech. CustomerX will dive deep into the weeds of CX, CRM and personalisation to gauge where customer transformation is headed next – and spotlight those successfully navigating rapidly shifting turf. Blackmores, Country Road, Village Roadshow and Compass Group make up issue one. 

Meanwhile, generative AI is upending industries. But it also promises massive efficiency. Which is why Mi3 is meeting the inevitable head-on with Fast News: It means editors can remain focused on hard, shoe leather stories while the machines crunch transactional news faster. ThinkNewsBrands GM Vanessa Lyons unpacks why she’s backing the model, while Salesforce’s Leandro Perez outlines the watchouts – and massive gains – generative AI now presents for marketers as the cloud giant goes all-in - the challenges and opportunities spawned by generative AI for Mi3 and B2B publishing more broadly are precisely the same as those facing the core industry sectors Mi3 covers for marketers and marketing’s supply chain. For CustomerX, which launched yesterday, Coles 360 GM Paul Brooks hints at where the retail media player is headed next year – off network and closing the attribution loop; Capgemini marketing chief Tracy Gawthorne on why McDonald’s and Ikea are killing it in CX and loyalty.

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The Australian market has lagged on electric vehicles. But that’s changing fast says BMW’s top marketer Alex McLean, with EV sales this year making up 10 per cent of the total market after notching 300 per cent YoY growth. Next year BMW will have 14 EV variants in Australia – and the market shake-up means the Ultimate Driving Machine must flip its marketing strategy.

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Lego prides itself on being safe. Nothing wrong with safe, says ANZ Vice President and GM Troy Taylor, a safe-handed 21-year company veteran who’s presided over 16 consecutive years of growth. So he baulked when Initiative came up with a plan to partner with Nitro Circus to put the boosters on its new Lego City Stuntz range. He started to sweat. “My first thought was Mother energy drinks. Women in bikinis. Concerned mums in the stands waiting for kids to fall off motorbikes …. This sounds a bit risqué for a Danish brand … Do we have to do this?” per Taylor. “I was the resistor.” But sometimes, he says, “You just have to let go.” So he did – and Lego’s partnership with Nitro Circus delivered in spades, going global in the process. The upshot? Double-digit sales boost, massive jumps in desire and awareness – and a connection with an audience it hadn’t previously been reaching. Plus, it won the MFA’s 2023 Grand Prix. Lego’s Taylor and Initiative strategy & product chief Chris Colter unpack the process, the “cool currency” challenges in marketing to kids via their parents, why Lego Masters shows no signs of slowing, and the importance of sidestepping ‘care washing’ – even when you care more than most.

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Scentre Group’s Westfield destinations across Australia and New Zealand are seeing an increase of online pure-play retailers moving into retail and pop-up spaces as customer visitation grows. In the first half of this year, customer visitations increased to 314 million, that’s 9.8 per cent more than the same period in 2022.*

Just don’t call them shopping centres. They are destinations, where people go to be entertained and Moore sees his competition not only rival retail destinations, but Netflix, theme parks or anywhere people choose to spend their time.

Rebel Sport is tapping that rich vein: with a uniquely designed retail presence with direct access to the basketball court housed within Melbourne’s Westfield Knox, and Rebel’s sales are powering.

Moore says brands – including e-com pure-players – are heading into Westfield destinations, with 450 new businesses incoming this year alone*. Plus, the 3.5m strong Westfield membership programme and overhauled analytics are delivering sharper intel.

Don’t think spots, dots and audiences says Moore, think “need-states mindsets and customers”. And don’t think bricks versus clicks: “it’s just commerce”.

Brands need to do both better – especially now: Latest research from insights firm Nature shows swathes of shoppers cutting back in at least one key category over the last 12 months. If they find cheaper brands that are just as good, that risks a cross-category snowball effect.

Which means brands must work harder to keep them – but not with discounts, according to Nature’s Lizi Pritchard.

As Christmas looms large, Pritchard unpacks three consumer spending megatrends that brands and retailers need to get across, fast.

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The naysayers scoffed when Tourism Australia made a CGI Kangaroo and 1984’s Say G’Day tagline the main roll of a $125m tax-funded bet to bring the world back to Australia after three years of fire and plague. One year on, those “doofuses” are eating their words, per Mark Ritson, as the kangaroo eliminates misattribution, boosts consideration, delivers travellers in droves, primes high spending tourists to plan trips for next year and beyond, and remains at the very top end of System1’s effectiveness league table. Funnily enough, say Ritson and Tourism Australia CMO, Susan Coghill, following the marketing effectiveness playbook actually works – and the armchair critics were never the intended target. While Tourism Australia is now heading into a statutory review of its creative agency roster, don’t expect much to change platform-wise – which means more budget to keep hammering the message home, building brand and delivering demand. Ritson reckons it could run for 20 years without wearing out. Coghill’s planning for at least four. Here’s how Coghill did her homework, sold it in to stakeholders, went to market and how it’s tracking – and why, per Ritson, 20-30 per cent of marketers will never make the top grade because they cannot get comfortable with imperfect marketing datasets.

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Cummins&Partners CEO Michael McConville returned home to Australia last year after five years at the helm of adam&eveDDB, home of effectiveness guru Les Binet – and where he was steeped in econometric modelling with the likes of John Lewis and Volkswagen. One marketer within the Volkswagen Audi Group, Benjamin Braun, nailed econometrics to the point that he could “forecast within 32 units [i.e. cars] what their campaign spend was going to get them in terms of sales”, per McConville. He’s aiming to go one better, probably with clients like Jeep and McCain although he won’t say just yet, after inking an exclusive creative agency deal with Mutinex for econometric modelling in real time. “We'll be looking to beat Audi,” says McConville. “This is a step ahead of what I’d been using in the past by a long way … This is the beginning of an industry repositioning. This is a form of applied marketing science … and agencies won't have excuses anymore to not put this sort of thing forward to clients.” Plus, he’s using it to change Cummins&Partners fee structures: less upfront, more of the client business upside later. “Creativity won't be talked about as a big bet anymore,” reckons McConville. “It's a sure thing.” And that, he says, will make marketing a growth centre once again.

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Spreadsheets are not going to save the planet. The threat of jail time might. “The world is facing enormous challenges, the clock is ticking, we are in an emergency,” says Ari Alexander, VP and GM, Salesforce Net Zero Cloud. Yet most businesses are all over the place when it comes to their environmental data. That makes it calculating where they are at nigh impossible, “let alone where they are going.” But regulators in the US and Europe are mobilising to make environmental reporting data as robust as financial data – and new standards will have profound implications for businesses globally. They can no longer hide, says Alexander, and the regulation is moving away from product-based carbon footprinting to enterprise-wide. As a result, marketers are already pulling back from green claims, with CPG giant Unilever being sued in Europe, per Alexander. He thinks it’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

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QMS landed the City of Sydney deal – one of the biggest contracts in Australian advertising history – in June 2020. Then Covid changed commuter patterns seemingly forever. Work from home initially left outdoor media companies sweating, not least QMS’s private equity owners Quadrant, given the scale of outlay required to build an entirely new City of Sydney network. But total audiences are now back to 2019 levels, out of home is powering and major advertisers reckon the shake-up is working in their favour. Stan CMO, Diana Ilinkovski, says the firm is getting a broader leisure-commuter mix within the 2.6m weekly sets of city eyeballs, enabling it to drive subscriber growth despite consumer belt tightening. Plus, the network’s digital flexibility means it can be far more agile in its messaging, targeting and creative optimisation. Bigger, brighter screens, per Ilinkovski, also boost cut-through – and QMS now has the in-day data to prove when, where and who those ads are hitting. Alongside lifestyle and entertainment, QMS Executive General Manager Mark Fairhurst says luxury advertisers are piling in, with the firm opening up a new batch of kiosk assets to further tap that literal rich vein. Plus its 3D screens are expanding – and Fairhurst reckons neither Sydney-siders nor advertisers will be able to miss what QMS calls ‘3DOOH’. Flight Centre is already on board, Maybelline is literally pushing product out of the screen and into the street and Ilinkovski hints Stan Sport may soon be kicking some 3D goals.

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After a wild week at Salesforce’s global jamboree in San Francisco, the tech giant’s full flip to generative AI was relentlessly hammered home. Like most, the heat is on APAC marketing boss Leandro Perez and his 100-plus regional marketing team to walk the talk,  applying Salesforce’s new AI-powered capabilities to his own operation. Perez claims it’s working – from freeing up masses of time to iterate social posts on different platforms, to summarising Slack meetings, driving thousands of personalised iterations and interactions on its website, notching up to 80 per cent engagement rates on email campaigns – and potentially turning customer service teams into sales teams - at least partially. But Perez insists all those productivity gains won’t see teams hollowed out. “We never have enough people to do what we need to do anyway, especially if you have big visions from brand to demand.” Creating 15 versions of a social post and scheduling it “isn’t marketing” anyway, he says, “it’s just operations work. So I personally am not getting any pressure to reduce as a team.” Perez says the major B2B firms he’s speaking with all proffer similar lines. If anything, says Perez, generative AI gains mean he can ask for greater resource – because he can prove to leadership that marketing is powering through greater workloads, in turn driving sales growth. And APAC is Salesforce’s fastest growing market globally. Here’s a few insider learnings from a company selling AI to the world. And where B2B marketing is headed next.

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The world “hates ads”, reckons Avid Collective boss Luke Spano. But high dwell times and engagement rates suggest they like native content. Marketers know this, but native content has been fragmented and highly manual, akin to insertion orders pre-programmatic. With little standardisation and patchy reporting metrics it couldn’t scale. While the likes of Taboola and Outbrain have hooked major publishers, they have “dirtied” native content’s reputation, per Spano. He suggests they are largely just repurposed ads. Avid Collective is bidding to fix all that. Locally, the firm has landed deals with the likes of Destination Gold Coast and ANZ-owned Cashrewards working with publishers from The Guardian and The Daily Mail through to Urban List and The Betoota Advocate as part of a 140-strong publisher network and platform that Spano claims reaches 18 million Australians, from students to boomers. It’s moving the needle for brands, says Spano, because those publishers along with Avid’s strategists create bespoke content they know will land with their audiences, not filler. Digital Publishers Alliance chair Tim Duggan spent years explaining native to marketers after founding Junkee. Avid’s platform would have cut dead time. But some of the 55 publishers in his alliance are piling in – eyeing major upside from native content over the next decade as marketers seek cost-efficient growth and greater media diversity as part of ESG mandates. Agencies are buying-in, per Spano, driving 70 per cent of spend on the platform. He’s aiming for 80-90 per cent by next year. After that Avid Collective aims to go global.

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The marketing funnel doesn’t exist, suggests RAA CMO, Michael Healy. He thinks “too many marketers get too ideological about how you have to do brand and then awareness and then conversion”. He has an interesting anecdote about a $329 knife, his wife, and Meta, to support the theory.

Healy says “the vast majority of marketers that I talk to – from startup to enterprise – don't actually have a marketing strategy.” They just have “a plan and a budget”. He recommends reading Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy – and stop treating brand and performance separately.

“It's all performance and it's all brand,” per Healy. “Everything is double duty.”

Equally, he urges marketers to focus on the metrics that matter: “What is driving business performance?”

Tammy Barton, CEO and founder of MyBudget is the brand, literally. Along with its customers, Barton features in its ads. The one time she changed tack, at the suggestion of “one of Australia’s largest agencies”, it backfired. Results tanked and she had to pull the expensive series of TVCs. She put the old ads back on TV “and leads immediately that week went up 15 per cent”. She shot low cost new versions – still using real customers – “and leads went up another 40 per cent”, says Barton. “So you just do whatever works.”

MyBudget’s marketing team looks at “hundreds of metrics”, she says. “But the ones that are really important to us are, what is it costing us per lead? What is it costing us per contract? What is it costing us per acquisition, including our sales expense? And we have to look at our lifetime value … versus what are we investing for that cost of acquisition, and what is that ratio? We track that every month.”

Atomic 212° co-founder and Chief Digital Officer, James Dixon, thinks media agencies “have been guilty of metric vomit over the years”, spewing data and numbers at clients.

Dixon suggests only one “mother metric” is required: MROI – which can stand for marketing return on investment, or, in the media agency context, media return on investment.

To underline how media is delivering returns, Atomic 212° has been “doubling down on MMM” with clients, but focusing on media, rather than broader variables within market mix models.

RAA’s Healy thinks Dixon “is onto something”, though, “I just don't think it's applicable in all circumstances”.

Either way, he backs MyBudget’s Barton: “Just test everything. Whatever works, do that. And if it doesn’t work, get out of it, fast.”

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After two decades at GroupM, Dave Gaines quit to launch Media by Mother, an offshoot of creative London hotshop Mother that he reckons may ultimately be subsumed by its progeny. A major frustration with the WPP-owned business, per Gaines, was the inability for swathes of its people to think laterally, critically and stay curious. He hired a shrink to try and fix the problem, and then tried to take a creative-agency led approach to media within WPP. Ultimately, neither worked. Now Media by Mother staff – many liberal arts grads – are KPI’d to read, listen and learn outside of their current remits to better understand the bigger picture. If they do, they get up to 15 per cent more salary. If they don’t, “there are plenty of other places they can work.” The agency doesn’t make any money from trading media, “the money flows through their pipes, not ours”, and Gaines says media buying is a misnomer: “it’s just data entry”. Meanwhile, he reckons those arguing over Recma billings rankings are bald men fighting over a comb: “If you think scale is important, you don't know how an auction works.” After hitting its five-year growth targets in two years, Media by Mother is now planning an Apac office, and a Naked 2.0 model – except with execution, which Gaines reckons was Naked’s downfall. Its precise Apac location will be determined by finding curious, T-shaped contextual operators. He reckons Australians are better at that than US peers… but it’s a low bar.

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Media buyers this week applauded Nine’s retailer media launch – but wanted more detail. They always do. Sales chief Michael Stephenson and CMO Liana Dubois unpack it here, alongside Nine’s bid to take the fight to Meta, Google and TikTok with a self-serve AI-powered ad platform aimed squarely at Australia’s 2.5 million small businesses currently spending $1.5bn a year on “less efficient” social video.

For big advertisers, Nine is bringing all its data, reach and assets to bear as it fires the starter pistol on a decade-long Olympics run, with new ‘9Tribes’ or segments being created from 20 million signed in users and new ways to match.

Dubois is backing the games to drive major audience growth – and help convert light and lapsed viewers to heavy long-term users. Either way, she says Australia’s population will be at 30m by 2032, which means TV, and every other media channel, has 3.5m more eyeballs to aim for – and user experience will determine winners.

Media buyers at Nine’s Upfront also warned the network is making a “big mistake” by not following the likes of Netflix and Foxtel into SVOD advertising. Stephenson insists they are wrong.

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Since leaving Telstra to take on a wide-ranging c-suite role at Tabcorp – spanning product, data and data science, customer experience and personalisation, brand, marketing and sponsorship with revenue responsibility – Chief Customer Officer Jenni Barnett has hit the turf running. The betting firm was haemorrhaging customers to digitally-savvier, free-spending rivals like Sportsbet and Ladbrokes. One year in, she’s stemmed the flow after launching a new app and migrating nearly a million customers within months to make the Spring Racing Carnival, driving ten updates since and KPI-ing the whole firm on digital revenue share. Customer experience is the key battleground per Barnett – and she’s front-running regulation and pulling Tabcorp out of daytime TV. To reel-in rivals she’s undertaken a sweeping overhaul of the marketing, digital, data and product teams and their capabilities – and pushed talent to develop quickly. Game on.

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David Jones’ new retail media business wants brand budgets – both from the suppliers it already works with as well as wooing marketers across travel, automotive and lifestyle. CMO James Holloman is backing shopper data from 5.4 million premium David Jones customers – and the ability to hyper-target them across DJs stores and digital assets as well as across the open web – in a plan to woo marketers to spend with its new Amplify media unit. Years in the making, Holloman needed to convince powerful merchandising teams to cede control of how they strike deals with suppliers while building a tech stack from scratch and centralising control of its sprawling assets. Now the marketing-run Amplify has its own P&L and great management expectations. Jonathan Hopkins, whose firm Sonder helped value DJ’s assets and develop the media business, says the average department store retailer in Australia could make $34m annually from media. But that’s the average, and DJs is top-end, with 55m annual store visits and 110m hits to its website. It’s loyalty data-powered offsite media revenue could be significant but Holloman’s not putting a figure out there, and shies away from any suggestion it’s a ‘Cartology for premium shoppers’. “It’s early days,” he says. “But we’ve got ambitious targets.” Here’s how Australia’s oldest retailer got into the newest, fastest-growing media game in town – and where it’s headed next.

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The experts at Hoyts and Val Morgan didn’t see it coming quite as it did. Hoyts CEO Damian Keogh says he was “laughed out of the room” for suggesting Barbie would take $35m at the Australian box office. It will do double that – meaning Margot Robbie’s not the only one in the pink. Kia, AAMi, Chemist Warehouse, Modibodi and Nintendo aside, marketers are kicking themselves for being equally blind to the opportunity. Now Val Morgan’s phone is ringing hot with advertisers “asking what are our next ten Barbies”, per MD Guy Burbidge. He and Keogh have a good idea what they are. They think the lesson for brands is to think earlier and smarter about IP marketing. Meanwhile, Barbenheimer has brought lapsed cinema audiences back to screens – 15 per cent hadn’t been for a year, per Hoyts 2.5 million member loyalty data – auguring well for a year in which the box office is powering back to the billion dollar mark. Plus, says Burbidge, cinema’s investment in attention data is having a “significant” revenue impact as marketers seek mass cultural alternatives to sport. Here’s the next big screen bets they think marketers should be laying over the next 12 months.

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Just about every B2C business is trying to build superglue stickiness into their user platforms. Nimble start-ups, at least prior to the big VC squeeze, were the poster children, leaving big legacy firms foundering in their wake. But SCA’s pivot to uber app Listnr is a standout exception, reinventing its digital audience business and building a new brand from scratch – pretty much all in-house. Launched mid-Covid in a bid to see off local incursion from the likes of Apple, Spotify and iHeart, Listnr has already powered past 1.5m signed-up users. Now SCA is using the logged-in data – alongside a new martech stack and digitally upskilled marketing department – to move the needle across acquisition, retention and engagement, while giving advertisers sharper incentive to spend. CMO Nikki Clarkson said the pivot required the entire business to suspend traditional thinking – from finance, sales, marketing, content, distribution, research and tech – without dropping the ball on its day-to-day game. Then the business had to go through a major systems overhaul while learning the language of tech and customer experience. But she says the pay-off and ROI is already landing, with marketing alone making “monumental gains” by aligning sharper digital tools with brand-building assets. Her takeout for those planning mass audience transformations? Go broad or go home.

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Tectonic movement is reshaping blue chip marketing with remits expanding by the day. Coles and IAG replaced the CMO role with Chief Customer officers. ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra was last month promoted to Managing Director of ANZ’s Everyday Banking business. But Lion’s latest move tops the lot for adventure. Anubha Sahasrabuddhe in February became Chief Growth Officer at the $3bn drinks firm. The former Mars global marketing chief has responsibility for marketing, M&A plus enterprise-wide transformational innovation beyond new product development. Just to make things more interesting she’s also been handed responsibility for IT and technology. Which means the CMO is now effectively CTO, CIO and CDO to boot. Lion CEO Sam Fischer, former APAC chief at Diageo, is backing Sahasrabuddhe to deliver. She’s given herself and her team 500 days to move the needle and reengineer the company’s culture, including IT, entirely around the customer. “If we can't demonstrate sufficient progress, then we can't justify our existence,” says Sahasrabuddhe. “The days are ticking.” This podcast is as wide-ranging as the remit. Tuck in.

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Uber launched at South by Southwest, as did Twitter, Pinterest and Foursquare. Billie Eilish was discovered as an unsigned 14-year old. Mumford and Sons first made their name at the creative-tech-culture jamboree in Austin, Texas. In three months time the world will learn whether the powerhouse event can replicate itself outside of the Lone Star State. SXSW Sydney MD, Colin Daniels, is backing Sin City to deliver – with the likes of futurist Amy Webb, Coachella co-founder Paul Tollet and Slack co-founder Cal Henderson joining “titans of every industry” across tech and innovation, music, games and screens. He says every one of its 70 featured speakers would likely be the keynote at any other event. No wonder circa 500 brands are keen to get involved – which is one of the reasons Seven West Media is going large, partnering with SXSW Sydney and planning to spring a very different kind of upfront during the week-long festival. Chief Revenue Officer, Kurt Burnette, said getting the investment over the line was a “difficult conversation”, but he’s backing the play to position the network at the heart of the creative-tech nexus and change perceptions. CMO Mel Hopkins will have a big hand in shaping what that looks like. No pressure then. 

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 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 - companies in Europe, and even the US, are pulling out of Google'snear-ubiquitous [and once free] analytics platform as marketers fumble with new tools, unable to quickly pull key reports, historical comparisons and insights. Many are raging against the big Google data-swiping machine as European regulators enforcing stricter rules on how people’s data is used, stored and transferred and dishing out big fines over GDPR breaches. Some of the big questions hovering over Google’s new analytics products include whether they’re fully privacy compliant, particularly if Google is feeding its vast global advertising business via sample data carved out from website owner data, most of whom are only now discovering they don’t own or often see all their real audience behaviour. In France, about 80 per cent have reviewed their analytics, per Piano’s global analytics chief Marie Fenner, and “about 60 per cent” have switched". That scenario may soon repeat in Australia as data privacy rules are beefed-up. Scentre Group performance marketing lead Jason Elk thinks the shake-up threatens Google’s analytics dominance and by proxy its broader business. Matomo CRO Dion Blair, agrees. “Right now, unlike any time in the past 15 years, we're seeing the choice [businesses are making for analytics] is potentially not the big behemoth.” With Google shutting off Universal Analytics a few weeks ago, here’s what marketers locally and globally are likely to face.

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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 pain” on the bank’s marketing team in the tech transformation and there’s more to come but "more exciting" as NAB works to embed machine learning and generative AI to deliver personalisation at scale that isn’t just “sending out rubbish”. She’s already sent out 10x more comms, now circling at 500m. But the bank is acutely aware of the risks posed by AI – and the strategy goes all the way up to the top. Tabcorp is onto its third in-house generative AI program and the creation of a centralised unit, Next Labs, to experiment - the problem with the other two was that they lied, or suffered “hallucinations”, per Chief Data & Analytics Officer Amy Shi-Nash. But Tabcorp can’t risk plugging into things like ChatGPT. The Monkeys and Accenture Song ANZ boss Mark Green, meanwhile, is back from Cannes where the AI banter was redlining on a "moral crisis" crisis for creativity, not dissimilar to the previous metaverse hype cycle. Green’s not worried. He reckons he’s slipped Accenture Song Global Creative Chair Nick Law an idea “that’s as good as any we’ve ever created” with generative AI at its core - and he says the client briefs are coming in from all angles. New York-based Law thinks there are new AI risks which will undermine the fascination and effectiveness of personalisation - namely, tonnes of mediocre messaging that will be created under the guise of 'right person, right time', unleashing a sea of sameness. NAB's Ristevski agrees.

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Lawmakers around the world are setting their sights on ‘dark patterns’, the way consumer choice is manipulated wholesale by companies for profit – either directly by upselling and herding them into higher yielding decisions, or locking them into services, or “data grabs” that can be monetised indirectly. Australia is next off the rank, and businesses should take action now, starting with UX design, according to Chandni Gupta, Deputy CEO of influential think tank the Consumer Policy Research Centre, who’s work underpins key planks of the ACCC’s regulatory overhauls and which holds sway in Canberra.

Dark patterns are “entrenched” across the digital economy – with companies “reverse engineering” the “nudge” principles of Daniel Kahneman’s behavioural economics to serve profit rather than help people make better choices, says Gupta. Already, the likes of LinkedIn, Amazon, TikTok, Meta and Epic Games have run afoul of regulators, while ticketing platform StubHub has conducted experiments that show the double-digit profit impact of manipulating consumer choice via hidden costs. 

Gupta, back from a global tour or regulators, lawmakers and enforcement bodies, and armed with a fresh report on her findings, says the practice is so widespread across the digital economy that most young adults have probably never lived in a world where they are not being manipulated. AI risks “supercharging” the practice – and making dark patterns darker still.

But Gupta warns businesses to prepare for regulation, enforcement and redress, with the Australian government committed to a ban on unfair business practices – and a strong overlap between dark patterns and the Privacy overhaul now gearing up for its second act.  

She sees profit upside for those that overhaul UX design now “to put the person and their wellbeing at the centre” rather than “waiting to be caught”.

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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: talent is hard to attract and keep stimulated, burnout is a high risk and any cost benefits would be shortlived. Burnout risk turned out to be true but the talent, quality and volume of work is rocking, they say  – and now Splash is preparing for a global rollout across Treasury Wines’ international markets. The upside is faster turnarounds, tighter links with marketing teams and better output than what was possible by just using agencies. And in the case of media, Oliver is chasing down transparent digital media buys and practices that he never quite got in life before Splash.

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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 coupled with ANZ’s two year investment overhauling its tech and personalisation capabilities, for example, has seen “up to a tripling of conversion rates”, says Mehra.

Sonder Co-Founder Jonathan Hopkins says ANZ also has a big upside in acquiring new customers from its owned media assets, not just better cross-selling of products to existing customers."ANZ have screens outward facing in most branches around the country - in some cases they can also do customer acquisition."

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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 overhauled Kmart Tyre & Auto, breakdown their agenda and why their firms opted for the role – and in Inghams case, why everything starts with “balancing the bird”.

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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 unpack why some entries got their likes - and laments. Arnott’s CMO, Jenni Dill, Unilever’s Director of Digital Marketing, Media and Commerce, Sarah Sorrenson and Deakin Business School’s Adjunct Professor and former CMO at Coles and Tourism Australia, Lisa Ronson, reveal their collective observations and scorecards (well some of them) on the standard of work in the past year. 

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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 burnout. They’ve been bombarded with digital content their whole lives. Which means many are blind to the ads they’ve not already blocked. But not Out-of-Home: Out-of-Home is “so important for them [and to reach them] because Gen Z don’t see it as an intrusion,” per Sanderson. “They see it as a logical, seamless connection with their world of brand.” They are also making their purchase decisions in very different ways to previous generations – the pyramid and related funnel are now “circular”, reckons Raymond, with profound impacts for brands. Plus they say its time to stop “sneering” at the notion of crowd-sourcing aspects of ad campaigns – or at least getting far broader inputs, particularly when marketing on billboards, because Gen Z is all about community, collaboration, and commitment: “It guarantees the sharing of the campaign,” says Raymond. Off the back of a deep dive commissioned by JCDecaux, the two unpack what brands need to know about marketing to Gen Z.

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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 to hotels are soaring as even the cash-strapped masses keep spending on holidays and experiences – first hand evidence of the consumer spending divide mapped by Commbank-Quantium analysis of 7 million bank accounts playing out. But Pearson saw it all coming, because that’s exactly what Roy Morgan’s segmental database of NEOs, or ‘new economic order’ consumers, said would happen. Ross Honeywill helped pioneer the typology – the quarter of the population that earns more, and critically spends more. He says the NEOs are currently keeping Australia out of recession and with latest rate rises yet to hit home, Honeywill says brands must have a premiumisation strategy that targets NEOs, or risk pain. CommbankIQ innovation and analytics chief Wade Tubman agrees: Marketers without “stratified” or multi-layered brand strategies “might be starting to feel the walls are closing in.” Following clothing and household goods, Tubman says insurance extras and telco are next as pinched consumers wring out every last dollar to spend on experiences, which he suggests are becoming “the new essentials”. The good thing for marketers is that comms to NEOs deliver double duty, per Honeywill, tapping the aspirational but squeezed masses as well as those with money still to burn. 

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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 Google to sell Fairfax’s premium ads and audiences programmatically, reportedly for guaranteed annual revenues north of $40m. Now Janz has flipped entirely with VC-backed media challenger Scire: He says Scire won’t collect any personal data at all and thinks those relying on Facebook and Google for traffic, while trying to compete on data and tracking – areas in which News Corp, Nine and others have invested heavily – “are playing someone else’s game” and have already lost. The future of mastheads, he says, is all about trust and serving smaller, smarter segments with content they will, in some way, pay for. Either way, privacy regime changes will soon disrupt tracking-based ad-funded business models – and Scire isn’t going to do traditional advertising at all, per Janz. Outgoing Guardian Australia MD, Dan Stinton agrees on trust, contextual targeting and the push away from open exchange “direct response” advertising. The Guardian has slashed its reliance on open ad exchanges from half to a tenth of its ad business in five years under Stinton – reader contributions now make up more than half of revenues but ads are still growing at a fast clip. Stinton and Janz unleash on the new challenges facing the media establishment and the full force of AI scrape and lifts that are about to hit.  

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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 reach by 20 per cent while cutting audience duplication to four per cent by combining linear and BVOD. Alex Tansley, Head of Converged Audience Trading at Seven and PHD investment chief Joanna Barnes were key architects of that trial. They unpack what converged TV trading will look like in the next 12 months – and what that means for marketers, media agencies, TV networks and perhaps ultimately the pure-play streaming platforms now entering the advertising game.

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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. But facing spiralling losses on their streaming businesses, stars and directors in revolt and booming box offices, Basil-Jones says the studios have universally changed their tune. “They’re saying ‘We’re back, baby! We need you!’ Sony Pictures has avoided the dunce cap and Basil-Jones forecasts a “shake-out” and consolidation ahead for the streamers. Keogh thinks the studios will go back to making episodic series for their platforms – while channelling investment into A-grade films for cinema and increasing flexibility on release windows to maximise returns. It's a tale of content economics and consumer behaviour that runs almost diametrically to the ecom boom – and Keogh and Basil-Jones see another leg to come.

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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 year “owning the top ten films” via Val Morgan category exclusivity, and using cinema first on the plan to launch longer-form versions of its ads, before pushing out shorter cuts to TV. Wise move, says Matt Sandwell at research firm The Owl Insights, because in a fragmented media landscape, “water cooler moments” are rare beasts. Per the firm’s research, sport is still the number one cultural connector and memory encoder. But it’s expensive and crowded. Cinema is number two – and can deliver better bang for buck. Esports, he says, are another cost-effective bet, along with live theatre, but don’t deliver at scale. Curtis says NRMA’s tracking proved the theory: “We saw 50 per cent more efficiency in driving a brand uplift across recognition and brand cut through recognition tracking at 55 per cent, branding at 84 per cent, and cut through at 46 per cent.”

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Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher

Short CMO tenure, job complexity, unrealistic expectations of delivery – commonly driven by short-term ultimatums – plus a disconnect on the metrics that matter, are all contributing to a dangerously common misalignment between CMOs and their CEOs and CFO. And it’s a recipe for trouble for marketing leaders wanting to enact strategic growth.

That’s the view of four luminaries participating in the latest CMO Awards Podcast episode. All know a thing or two not only about providing marketing’s value as CMOs, but also now sit on the other side of the c-suite: ADMA CEO and former FMCG CMO, Andrea Marten; Lounge Lovers CEO and former Aldi and Westpac marketing chief, Samuel Viney; Adobe director of digital strategy group APAC and former Tourism Australia CFO, John Mackenney; and Seek commercial growth APAC leader and former consumer marketing lead for ANZ and customer chief at Mercer, Cambell Holt. 

There is an ongoing refrain marketing leaders need to do more to build and demonstrate commercial acumen and their value to the c-suite. And we have a fresh report making the point again: In the latest Gartner survey, only 27% of CEOs and CFOs reported their CMO’s performance exceeded expectations over the past year.

Confidence in a CMO's ability to prove the value of marketing to the enterprise is held by just half (54%) of senior executives. Gartner’s survey also found only 34% of CEOs and CFOs agree with CMOs on the role of marketing in supporting growth. And only one in five CEOs and CFOs report receiving significant clarity from their CMO regarding marketing accountabilities.

They’re sobering figures, and they’re not in isolation. Viney paints an all-too-common “chicken-and-egg” scenario: New CMO comes into an organisation and is confronted with demands to improve marketing’s performance “after the last person didn’t achieve what we expected”.

“When asked if you’re going to be able to do it, the CMO will say of course I am, that’s why I’m here,” Viney comments. “What you get then is two challenges: Number one is you're perhaps being unrealistic with the expectations you're setting … secondly, just understanding the metrics that matter in the context of a new organisation, particularly if you're changing sectors, takes time.”

As a former CFO, Mackenney agrees there’s a further translation issue between the language of finance and marketing which he’s constantly coming up against in his current role at Adobe – in fact, he often finds himself being the “CFO whisperer” for marketers. But he doesn’t put all the blame on CMOs.

“I think it's incumbent on a lot of CFOs to better understand, actually, what are the levers that the CMO has, really, what are the some of the cost drivers and the benefits drivers there, so we can have a better understanding between two really critical roles in the organisation,” he says.

Yet Martens points out we're still seeing many CMOs reporting on outputs like campaign performance instead of strategic business outcomes and things like customer growth, retention, margin, contribution, pricing, power and overall business improvement and business performance. “They're the metrics that, at the end of the day, the CEOs and the CFOs are looking for, and they're the metrics that actually influence the total enterprise value. They're the conversations that are not being had,” she says.

Holt agrees CMOs need to do a better job of business-grade insight to align their own ability to deliver value. “Early on, I discovered the best way to align yourself and to create mutual understanding is to take on the task of learning someone else's language, then also take on the task of translation within the marketing function. Don't make it the CFOs challenge to learn your language, learn their language and speak it, and train as many people in your function as a marketing leader to speak the other person's language as well.”

This CMO Awards podcast series is hosted by Nadia Cameron, associate publisher and editor of marketing at Mi3, plus program leader for the CMO Awards.

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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 James Hurman says brand campaigns can drive short-term sales, but that trying to make one ad to do both is “way harder” than just making two ads, so why try? Either way, using the same metrics for brand building and short-term sales “is like judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree,” per Hurman, “it’s always going to be a shit fish”. Rob Brittain says marketers only have themselves to blame: Few can articulate the difference between the two – nor why long and short need to work together – to CFOs under pressure for short-term sales. Meanwhile, he says marketers are getting the basics of ESOV wrong, ending up closer to double jeopardy than “difficult” to achieve double duty by wasting money on low attention channels. But partially reformed growth hacker turned growth advisor to companies up to $100m in revenues, John James, thinks ESOV is a flawed concept based on touting the benefits of being “the loudest person in the room” by those who “want to sell more advertising media to clients”. He also throws a jab or two at Ehrenberg-Bass ‘how brands grow’ thinking. Brittain can’t let either go unanswered. This one gets politely punchy. 

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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 Stephen Downward, Head of SEO at Atomic 212°. That’s on top of Google algorithm changes that call time on the days of 500 word blogs and average content. The key to ranking and traffic is now all about EAT: Expertise, Authority, and Trust – plus Google has added another E: Experience, which is why News Corp, alongside Atomic, created a vast trove of articles via masthead financial journalists to feed its new comparison site and take on Finder, says Downward.  Within paid search, prices will continue to climb, per Atomic Head of Performance Media Sascha Bonomally, which is why Google’s new rhetoric is around amortising the cost of its upfront click to lifetime value. Either way, Bonomally thinks advertisers now optimising clicks to products with best margin are making a mistake.

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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 biggest spending squeeze in a generation, Arnott’s brands are powering. Tim Tams, Shapes and Vita-Weats sales are up double digits as Australians cut out restaurants but keep buying branded snacks and staples, resisting the siren call of supermarket’s own brands. Dill puts it down to brand re-investment after a decade of underspend, enabling her to link marketing spend directly to the P&L. She was also one of the first Australians to complete The Marketing Academy Fellowship program run by McKinsey that is launching in APAC this year for 20 elite CMOs - 10 Australian marketers could land in that group who want to be the next CFO, CEO or board member. Dill, along with Lisa Gilbert, CMO of the $20bn IBM managed services spinout Kyndryl, unpack what’s required and what the best of the best – today’s ‘super CMOs’ – will get in return.

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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 job”. That means growing both the brand and its equity as well the number of eyeballs tuning in as a destination – fast. Hopkins thinks Seven, particularly Seven Plus, can outpoint the streamers and reckons their ad-funded tiers may fizzle out as Covid-driven growth wanes. But just as Hopkins is finding media an entirely different world to telco – it’s way more complex than she realised – she says Seven’s media-focused marketing team must also “sharpen up” when it comes to “strategic marketing and advanced digital marketing”. Plus, Hopkins opens up on the Optus data hack, not sleeping for five weeks, but why living through the experience, in all probability, will pay off.

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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 firm behind Warc and Cannes Lions, also investors. Now it’s bidding to carve out a major slice of a market dominated by big global research firms like Ipsos, Kantar and Nielsen – and has just inked a partnership with fellow SaaS disruptor Mutinex. The two aim to align the in-market perceptions of a brand directly to the P&L while doubling the $4bn addressable brand tracking market. Crucially, the hardcore VC types are piling in not just as investors, but for their early stage startup investments to actually harness the tech to grow faster and more sustainably as growth hacking bites the dust and startups flip to brand investment that, amid far more sober money markets, must be quantified in hard financial terms. Tracksuit co-founder Connor Archbold and Mutinex CEO Henry Innis join Paul McIntyre on the mics. 

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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. It’s a textbook case from a CMO who took a giant leap and deployed a whole suite of marketing's new and established thinking in one strategic gulp, rolling it out across a $7bn US healthcare brand and sweeping away pretty much everything that had gone before. It worked, massively. All growth KPIs for Douwe Bergsma, CMO of Georgia-based healthcare firm Piedmont, are busting upwards and the CEO handed him the biggest marketing budget in the company’s history to do it. Here’s how Bergsma, a former P&G marketer and current ANA board member, along with NZ-based brand and start-up strategist James Hurman, hatched a plan to do everything by the marketing science and effectiveness handbooks, sold it into the leadership team, brought every single one of its agencies into 20 marketing effectiveness briefings – and literally ended up with a runaway best seller. It’s the story of a Dutchman and a Kiwi taking Australian and UK marketing science to the US, and winning big.  

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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, because by 2030 “every manufacturer in Australia will be standing on the mountain beating their chests about EVs”. By then, the market will be awash with technologically advanced electric cars. Hence Connor thinks brand will become the key differentiator – and he’s backing Marketing Director Julie Hutchinson to ensure Volvo builds a greater share of mind. "The race is already on," she says, with EV ad spend tripling last year.  But the sprint to all-electric cars means major change ahead for dealers and retail operations (Volvo is about to launch a direct-to-consumer play) while a rapid rollout of new electric models requires new business models – including subscriptions – to scoop a new cohort of younger buyers. Here’s the plan.  

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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 tech stack” to compete with Google or Meta.

“We really had to take a hard look at the business and make the big decision to refocus and prioritise where we really succeed the most,” says John McNerney, Yahoo’s new Managing Director for Australia and Southeast Asia. “It was nothing to do with financial challenges or troubles in the advertising market but really instead about a strategic restructuring and refocus globally for long term success. We were trying to be the masters of everything, building a unified tech platform with DSPs and SSPs to compete against Google and Meta but we realised change was needed.”

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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, Brand and Innovation at Norths Collective – which operates eight venues and clubs and two fitness centres across Sydney – has embarked on "Project ROI" to quantify its contribution to profit. Lopez already knows the transformation is working: engagement rates are through the roof thanks to what he calls “ethical personalisation” and the firm is able to attribute comms output to member action, digitally at least. Now it is digitising memberships to better understand offline – or in-venue – activity. The kind of insights it is delivering to the likes of Lion has the drinks giant smacking its lips to get inside the new app. Meanwhile, smarter data and analytics capability means Norths is de-risking its next phase of growth – because it knows the dollar value existing members can bring to new venues “before we even open the door”. Lopez has five tips for marketers embarking – or rethinking – their digital transformation strategies. 

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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 back. But the third of Australians with no mortgage cash in the bank are still spending, and luxury is booming as a result. Meanwhile, Western Australia is as ever forging its own path and younger consumers still spending, creating a three-speed national economy. But Buy Now Pay Later buttons “are taking a hammering” in WA, warns The West Australian's Business Editor Sarah Jane Tasker. “That raises some concerns about when the pay later kicks in”.

Across the economy, the Federal Treasurer is talking up ‘values-based capitalism’, which will chime with brands putting purpose at their core. AFR economics editor John Kehoe thinks that trend is here to stay – though may be scuppered in the short-term should economic headwinds strengthen and cost hikes outweigh good intent. “But for the now, in the foreseeable future, people want governments and businesses involved in these sort of social and ESG causes.”

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Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher

At its core, the job of the CMO is to deliver business growth. And if Mi3’s story on marketing jobs recently and what company CEOs want in their marketing hires in 2025 is anything to go by, there is a recalibration back to topline growth rather than just pure cost cutting and efficiency, coming our way – good news for marketers, it seems.

Yet companies are increasingly favouring alternative job titles, such as chief growth officer and chief customer officer, or creating new functional structures and ways of working to set the north star and signal the need for disruptive, transformational growth. At the same time, diversity of marketing remits makes it difficult to understand what levers marketing chiefs will actually control in their pursuit of growth for a business.

In episode three of the CMO Awards podcast, powered by Mi3, three marketing and business luminaries with the mantle of delivering net new approaches to growth, share how they define and pursue that ambition: Lion co-MD and former chief growth officer and CMO, Anubha Sahasrabuddhe; SiteMinder chief growth officer, Trent Innes; and recently installed McCain growth marketing director and former Chobani GM of growth, Olivia Dickinson.

All agree putting ‘growth’ front and centre in job titles sends an unambiguous message as to a company’s intent to pursue new growth opportunities, the whole-of-organisation approach required to get there, and the disruptive nature of what is required. It’s also given each executive the power to make the hard decisions necessary to deliver sustainable growth. In Lion’s case, generational shifts around beer consumption provided a burning platform for change, while in organisations such as Chobani, pursuing agility in product innovation pipelines, again with the aim of following consumer trends, created the path to new growth – even amid fears of cannibalising existing SKUs.

For Innes at Australian hotel management software-as-a-service company, SiteMinder, growth is encapsulated in the phrase ‘win, love and grow’. “It's not just a simple case of winning them. You actually need to love them. And if you actually do that, you have the opportunity to grow with them.”

It’s this thinking that has Innes suggesting marketers too commonly fall into the trap of generating short-term demand instead of thinking about customer lifetime value. “I think marketing has fallen a bit too much into the ‘we're here to create demand’ position… Growth is not demand, it's not sales. It is a team sport, so it has to be across the entire end in business.”

Which is why Innes advises marketers to think like a CEO and to “try to get outside of your lane and think about the broader business … How does the broader business look at marketing, and what role do you play in growth?” he asks. “For marketing leaders moving forward to remain relevant, they're going to have to start thinking like that.”

Dickinson describes growth in three words: “Bold, strategic choices … we're talking bold bets, sharp focus, but really importantly, knowing when to walk away if it doesn't serve the bigger picture,” she says.

Ensuring employees understand Lion’s growth investment is about delivering for future generations is not a won-and-done job, but requires ongoing productivity hunting, is another must for Sahasrabuddhe. “That really helps change your mindset when you are faced with going through the tough choices,” she says. “And there are plenty of tough choices, but they're in service of growth, which gives you a very clear why.”

This CMO Awards podcast series is hosted by Nadia Cameron, associate publisher and editor of marketing at Mi3, plus program lead for the CMO Awards.

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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 dynamic creative partners at PHD and Adylic in the process. It took months after launch to fine tune but they survived, ultimately lifted revenues 30% and won the MFA’s top award for real-time marketing for their efforts. But Will is worried new privacy laws will hand much of the control he currently has to "test and learn" to the walled gardens like Google and Meta, where their unknown tools and AI do all the optimisation without any visibility for advertisers.  

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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, knows how much waste lurks within that supply chain – the sprawling Lumascape – because he was in deep and early, founding AppNexus, which ultimately sold to ATT&T for $1.7bn. Even “turning off five to seven per cent of inventory gets you a 29 or 30 per cent reduction in carbon,” says O’Kelley. Publishers feeling the heat to decarbonise – GroupM and Mediabrands are talking about money moving next year – needn’t fear. He reckons they will see more cents in the ad dollar as the bad actors get punted. Marketers will also stop wasting billions of ad dollars while saving millions of tonnes of carbon. But marketers have to lead, because everyone else will follow the money. Suncorp CMO Mim Haysom, NAB Head of Marketing Planning & Performance, Tom Dobson, and Australian Marketing Institute CEO, Bronwyn Powell join Mi3 on the mics to ask the pointy questions on where next – and how fast.   

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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 into the role – me&u already controls about 70 per cent of large format hospitality venues in Australia and is now going global. Barry argues the little round device on bar and food tables is actually about business transformation, customer experience and, for venues, at least 30 per cent more orders if patrons don't have to wait for a negroni or a kale infused pheasant at the counter - or for a host. Hence, many venues are now creating dark bars as one tactic to improve customer experience and sales. Here’s why a little bit of tech in a pub or restaurant is transforming the economics of the hospitality sector - and customer happiness. 

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