GroupM global boss Christian Juhl says rival holdcos may now regret spending “billions of dollars on cookie-based solutions or personally identifiable information” as privacy moves dead centre in regulatory affairs.. Some, he says, “are going to be sitting on a razor’s edge about whether they are going to be compliant ... it will definitely have ramifications for the industry.” In the meantime, he says a key challenge facing marketers across every facet of their business, and fundamentally...

Ecom’s runaway train has hit the buffers. Now brands must sweat massive investments made over Covid much harder, grappling simultaneously with how to drive profitable growth without harming customer experience. Expect a wholesale to push into loyalty and retail media, per Accenture Song MD and ANZ Commerce Lead Peter Davias. Meanwhile, he thinks Amazon may finally present the threat that everyone feared a decade ago, with headwinds for Kogan and Catch potential auguries. Which means more...

While Telstra’s massive CX overhaul has powered net promoter scores through the roof – with NPS linked directly to executive bonuses – CMO Brent Smart says that’s only half the job. To grow, Telstra needs to go harder on brand to woo those that don’t even know about its sweeping digital overhaul, including aggrieved former customers. As such Telstra’s 80:20 performance to brand investment ratios won’t stay that way, but Smart says competing with the likes of JB HiFi and Harvey Norman plus...

News Corp Australia had more than 4 billion short form video views last financial year across its own assets and social feeds and it’s changing the way the Murdoch empire delivers content. Vertical video is the big play as audiences and advertisers pile in. Even boss Michael Miller is getting in on the act. Now News has launched a master plan – dubbed News Shorts – to siphon those social audiences off the likes of TikTok (1.2bn of those streams), back to its owned assets and into its commerce...

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...

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

 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...

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...

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...