Uber’s ads business is starting to scale and its New York-based boss Michael Akkerman says Australia – one of its best performing markets, with a rapidly growing sales operation – will see the next wave of new formats first. He’s touting retail media meets “mobility media” and a collapsed funnel “brand-formance” model - brand and performance marketing in a single execution. A younger, richer set exposed to an Uber Ride brand ad is driving hard sales via Uber Eats with verified "closed loop”...

Marketing effectiveness is getting worse. Dan Krigstein, Director of think tank The Growth Distillery and Ogilvy Chief Strategy Officer and Innovation Lead, Toby Harrison, have spent the last six months working out why – and building a framework they are now bringing to market in a bid to reverse the effectiveness slump. Their findings literally flip industry-wide assumptions on their head – and expose deep misunderstanding on the power of influence (not influencers) in decision-making. If...

Five years ago media ecologist Jack Myers made a prediction in the second ever edition of Mi3: By 2025 media would be largely automated and almost totally AI-informed and just a quarter of sales would remain with people and ideas. It happened faster than even he thought. Now Myers predicts that within 12-18 months max, most media planning will be entirely machine-led. By 2030, he reckons “80 per cent or more of all media planning and buying will be done without human intervention or without...

IAG Chief Customer & Marketing Officer Michelle Klein returned to Australia last May after more than a decade abroad and embarked on arguably one of the most ambitious – and interesting - corporate customer experience transformation programs in this market for a long time. Such was the complexity and need for top tech and creative talent across every customer touchpoint for NRMA Insurance – think digital channels, apps and websites, retail customers, communities large and small, mass and...

Julie Nestor was one of the earliest Australian marketers to leverage owned media at scale, first at Optus and American Express and now – via Hilton Hotels and eBay – at Mastercard. The APAC marketing chief says owned media helped Optus get beyond mobile and into broader media and communications – and moved the needle for Amex, both in bringing on more merchant partners and driving customer loyalty, retention and spend through personalised offers. Now she says it is “by far” Mastercard’s...

Marketers and media companies had just about got to grips with audience fragmentation brought about by social media and online video. Now the next big wave is coming fast from global streamers piling into TV’s heartland with ad plays because their subscriber growth has maxed out. They’re targeting the young with localised reality shows, comedy and romantic dramas, and the old with documentaries and crime while taking aim at live TV’s biggest bastion by bidding for sports rights. That hasn’t...

Meta’s News Media Bargaining Code rug-pull lit up the media sector and has government, regulatory and lobbyist wheels spinning – some would say belatedly, given all the warning signals. Circa $70m in publisher cash - some argue it could be $100m - from Meta will no longer be on the table later this year, leaving Google the only game in town for a newsmedia sector already seriously pressured. Smaller publishers fear Meta pulling news from its feeds in Australia – as it did when Canada...

Domino’s and Asahi are both using Mutinex’s GrowthOS platform to make very different media investment decisions, faster, in a fluid market. Both have buy-in across the business after unlocking the impact of media investment on sales. Both are now taking the platform beyond media and into decisions around seasonality, pricing and planning. “It’s not just a marketing tool, it’s a finance tool, ultimately supporting you how to maximise your investment across the portfolio,” says Jemma Downey,...

People spend “roughly a third of their time, or four hours a day, listening to audio, yet only 6 per cent of ad revenues are coming towards the medium,” says SCA Chief Commercial Officer Seb Rennie. The network is betting on a data-powered push for performance ad dollars to change that with today’s launch of LiSTNR’s AdTech Hub. SCA has made huge gains – slashing cost of acquisition 60 per cent for its LiSTNR app – after embedding a CDP and overhauling its data capability. Now it’s aiming to...

Future of TV Advertising international keynote Jon Evans is Chief Customer Officer at marketing effectiveness data firm System1 – and one of the world’s top marketing podcasters. He's on a mission to help marketers hold the line and sell-in emotional, creative campaign investment to rational, hard-nosed exec teams by better predicting its P&L impacts. While the media industry obsesses on the medium – optimising channel mix, ROI, CPMs, the value equation of the channel – fully half of the...

Guinness (part of the Lion portfolio), UM, Vistar, Kinesso, and Thinkerbell have just landed Australia's first ever Programmatic Campaign of the Year award after a smart, highly targeted Out-of-Home push delivered 100,000 extra pints sold. The trick? Targeting blokes near pubs stocking the dark elixir when the weather turned cold – with only 2,000 of those pints as QR code freebies. After toasting 18 per cent revenue uplift as a result – and 15 per cent pub footfall boost, a “super happy”...

When it comes to principal-based media trading, AKA arbitrage, “we can argue about the pros and cons but collectively [marketers] are saying that they kind of accept, if not sometimes prefer, that model,” says Madison and Wall founder and one-time WPP global business intelligence chief Brian Wieser. It’s no coincidence that two of the “most aggressive” proponents of buying ad inventory from media owners and on-selling it to clients with handsome markups saw their respective media businesses...

Some media companies are feeling the heat on what they describe as a tightening advertising market, particularly linear TV. But there's a very different story coming out of investor briefings in recent weeks at some of the world's biggest brands. Many brands are increasing their advertising and promotion and much bigger overall marketing budgets. Some of these listed CFOs and CEOs apparently agree with marketing’s brand building champions – at least at face value. L'Oreal's overall...

At one point “the performance marketing [team’s] main KPI was actually how much investment they could deploy,” says Uber APAC marketing boss Andy Morley. “The mandate was spend, spend, spend … It was getting crazy.” But then they realised it wasn’t actually working. Then they flipped hard to brand – well above Binet & Field’s 60:40 heuristic – and powered to delivery market leader. Today Morley says both Uber’s rideshare and food business has seen no slowdown despite squeezed wallets. Now...

It’s not often Suncorp’s CMO Mim Haysom is mentioned in the same conversation as Leonardo da Vinci but the latter’s rare ability to combine creative and analytical thinking is what 50 Australian CMOs working with WPP were briefed on recently as the next frontier for business growth and their own professional cred and advancement. Indeed, Marc de Swaan Arons, a former Unilever marketer who co-founded the non-profit Institute for Real Growth [IRG]  - backed globally by Google, Meta, WPP and...

The ANA’s latest transparency report looks ugly for agencies, the ad tech supply chain, marketers and their procurement departments. Probably why its findings – just 36 cents on the programmatic dollar stand a chance of being seen by audiences – have been met with deafening silence. None of the big agency holdcos have piped up, while Google, The Trade Desk, Pubmatic and other major adtech players didn’t allow the ANA into their systems. Not even P&G played ball. Nick Manning, who...

It’s taken a couple of years, but the LinkedIn-backed B2B Institute’s mission to flip business-to-business marketing’s focus from performance to brand building – encapsulated by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute penned 95:5 rule – is starting to land, crucially in the boardroom and exec leadership echelons. LinkedIn’s polling of B2B CMOs and CFOs suggests most are planning to spend more on brand this year and are beginning to grasp that rational, product-focused messaging doesn’t cut it. The likes...

Marketing remits are expanding faster than most professions but unlike accounting or engineering, it remains splintered and without common professional capabilities, standards and accreditation. Indeed, marketing, agency, media and customer tech professionals across the entire customer and marketing supply chain risk career irrelevance because they're simultaneously losing sight of marketing's fundamentals – like strategy and commercial nous –  and the diverse new capabilities they need to...

Owned media in Australia – brands’ own websites, email, apps, instore and social assets – now has $4.3bn in commercial potential. It could reach $5bn in as little as 12 months as brands, eyeing the growth of retail media, start to realise the value of their own media channels. Valuation firm Sonder has just released its annual Owned Media Market Report & Rankings for the '24 financial year and it again contextualises the retail media boom - retailers might be making all the noise around...

Jaguar Land Rover spotted an opportunity earlier this year in the lead up to Sydney's Vivid festival, where circa 3 million people show up for 23 days of live shows, music and forums. The carmaker needed to build awareness fast for the new Land Rover Defender and part of the brief included large out-of-home formats. Given the expected surge in people on the streets of Sydney's CBD, Jaguar Land Rover’s just appointed media agency, Resolution Digital, part of Omnicom Media Group (OMG), thought...

Arnott’s last month landed the Advertising Council’s Grand Effie after launching a master brand campaign that CMO Jenni Dill says delivered “10 per cent sales growth in dollar terms and three quarters of a share point growth” across the portfolio. It also helped put Arnott’s ahead of the three-year growth plan she’d had to present to the board 13 days after joining from McDonald’s. “Phenomenal” results, says Publicis Groupe CEO Michael Rebelo, given the effort it takes to move FMCG “super...

Figuring out where potential customers are in the hectic media system and not waste budgets reaching them across disparate channels is driving marketers and media agencies to experiment with some interesting alternatives in cross-media audience measurement. Kmart, its agency UM and IPG tech stablemate Kinesso, think they have landed on a winner – Beatgrid’s automatic content recognition phone-based panel.  Beatgrid counts the likes of Amazon, Google, P&G, Unilever and Virgin as clients....

Many predicted The Monkeys would be “roadkill” when Accenture in 2017 paid $63m for Australia’s hottest ad agency, its creative culture steamrollered by the immaculately polished heads of the consulting world. Instead, says creative chief Scott Nowell, who last week departed the agency he co-founded, The Monkeys began a cultural infiltration mission. Six years on, the broader Accenture Song creative-customer model has turned heads in the broader Accenture business – because it’s largely...

The problem with Samsung’s previous market mix models was they were too slow, says Carl Bunn, Head of Data and Solutions at Samsung Australia. By the time results came back in, “we’d moved on,” says Bunn. Part of that was on Samsung: Consistency of data is key, says Bunn, and lack of it scuppered much prospect of MMM agility. But having done the “single source of truth” hard yards and plugged into Mutinex’s platform, the marketing teams are now getting more “credibility” within the...