Mi3 Audio Edition

New ARN CEO, Michael Stephenson, has been unusually quiet for much of the year. After this week’s upfronts, we now know why. Stephenson has been rapidly redesigning ARN from an audio operator to a fully-fledged entertainment company. ARN unveiled a dozen big new content and commercial initiatives on Wednesday, and at the centre of Stephenson’s blueprint for ARN 3.0 is the iHeart digital platform. ARN has the APAC rights to iHeart, which, in its US home market, has 188 million users. In Australia, it's 3 million on the platform and 7 million when syndicated. One of the announcements this week was Ruby, iHeart’s branded content studio, which produces 30-minute podcasts for brands. “It’s a simple model: We will produce your podcast, for free, and we will distribute, amplify and monetise it for you. All we need from you is an upfront commitment in advertising dollars to co-promote your own product, to drive audience to your destination,” says Stephenson. Ruby has been a massive success in the US: “Many of the podcasts [iHeart has] produced, actually are in the top 10 per cent of downloads of podcasts within the US across the board,” per ARN’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Ben Campbell, “and that's branded content.” The barrage of new initiatives includes a move into video, new TV-style tentpole entertainment programming like Kissed at Sea and Save Our Pub. The latter involves finding and rescuing a rundown pub, bringing back the schnitty, live music and giving it national prominence post-reno.  It's also pushing into live events, like Run Club Rave, “with global DJs playing in parks,” per Stephenson. “Nightclubs are out. Mornings are in”. Across all of that, the content will include audio, video and will run on TikTok as part of a beefed-up, integrated brand platform with the social juggernaut. Campbell, meanwhile, has also supercharged ARN’s ad tech and data credentials – deals with Westpac DataX, Experian for targeting and LiveRamp on clean rooms were part of the upfront show this week. As were launching a women's sports network, a podcast deal with Are Media and its portfolio of women's brands, not to mention the complete overhaul of the radio network into two national Metro brands, KIISS and Gold. Stephenson hopes the move will make them easier to buy for national advertisers – and plans to use the revenue upside to keep funding the reinvention. He’s got an even busier 12 months ahead. Here’s the plan.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Atomic 212°’s Chief Strategy Officer, Asier Carazo and Bupa's GM of Marketing, Naomi Driver once shared a common fear that permeates much of the industry: How does a brand advance the cause for the 20 per cent of Australians with a disability – without being unintentionally tokenistic or offensive?  Driver says those concerns often stop her marketing peers from doing anything – she would know given it was also once her experience. Driver shares some personal anecdotes that are funny now but mortifying at the time: She once told Mike Rolls, who lives with a double amputation, she liked “keeping people on their toes … then realised I’d put my foot in my mouth”. Rolls “is a mate” and enjoyed making her feel uncomfortable for a few seconds. But Driver said it made her think even harder about the language used across Bupa’s creative and digital assets – and Bupa's Paralympics program around last year's event (with ads featuring Rolls, who’s humour helped shape the script) is a benchmark for what brands can and should do, according to Inclusively Made’s CEO, Paul Nunnari. Like Driver, Asier Carazo’s fears have also flipped. He cites Atomic 212° colleague, Senior Account Exec Angus McLeod as an advocate for the missing piece in media industry planning. McLeod lost his hearing after an accident and often experiences media that hasn’t taken into account people who are deaf or hard of hearing. “Working side by side with Angus is just understanding the reality of millions of Australians,” says Carazo. “Twenty per cent of Australians live with some form of disability. Are we even thinking about them when we put forward the media plan? Are we challenging publishers to include accessibility features on the ads? Are we challenging creative agencies to think about accessibility as a forethought, not as an afterthought?” Roy Morgan, the go-to source for media pros, started reporting on Australians living with disability within its database in the last quarter. That’s a win, adds Carazo, “but what I would love to see is greater genuine curiosity around understanding the reality of this country … As marketers, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on research and testing, but then you're not allocating any money to understanding how your audiences are able to consume media.” Inclusively Made has a framework for brands that do want to make inclusivity BAU. The key: “Don't let perfection get in the way of progress … just get the ball rolling,” says CEO Paul Nunnari. “It's not always going to be perfect, but at least having the conversation, seeing what are those low hanging fruits that can be achieved with minimal risk outputs is a really good place to start.” While Bupa’s Paralympics approach is the benchmark, per Nunnari, it can be as simple as having a wheelchair user in the background of an ad, having a coffee with a mate. “It doesn’t need to be highlighted, it doesn’t need to be inspirational. It’s just two blokes getting together having a coffee, right? It's the norm.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Six years ago, media ecologist Jack Myers called it right on the almost total automation of media buying. Now he says extending principal trading models into retail media is the future for media agencies, as more retail media brands – the likes of Uber and United Airlines “that aren’t that interested in selling ads” – sell directly to agencies, who then arbitrage for bigger margins.   Myers thinks that presents new competitive challenges for the likes of The Trade Desk (TTD) as holdcos simultaneously acquire FAST channels and digital assets from pressured publishers and hunt TTD’s robust market cap growth versus those of the global agency owners. As media owners, he argues, holdcos are far less likely to hand over 15 cents on the dollar to DSPs when that is margin they could keep. “That doesn’t mean The Trade Desk is going to go away. I just believe they’ll find the holdcos are going to be their competitor, as opposed to their client,” per Myers. “Media consolidation will happen inside of media agencies, which I believe will increasingly become media financial services companies.” While media owners seemingly grasp that they must “come together as a single force to compete with these [big tech] monoliths instead of fighting against each other for a declining share of business”, Myers remains bleak – because most looming M&A and deal-cutting is focused on cost-cutting rather than genuine transformation.   A united media front, he says, is “not going to happen. Why? Because that's not what the leaders of those companies get paid to do. They're paid to make sure their Wall Street value remains viable, and they do that by holding on to the past until it's too late. They become the Kodak of the television business.” Across the piste, Myers thinks AI’s total disruption will force company leaders to focus less on quarterly results and more on actually leading their people “through a time when it's no longer about the answers, it's about the questions”, he suggests. “In a world where the answers are immediately available through technology, it's the quality of the questions, it's the insights that are gained, it's the use of those insights [that defines winners and losers]. “So when it comes to the advertising business and when it comes to people, I have two foundational beliefs. One is that creativity is going to be the saviour of the advertising and media business. Number two, it will only save those who invest in their human talent, and that means investing in the creativity, the ingenuity, the intuition of their human talent,” per Myers. “In order to lead that talent, the qualities that are most required are empathy and ethics… two things that modern corporations are not particularly well-versed in.” However, he sees some immediate potential wins for advertisers and streamers of all persuasions: Getting smarter about harnessing back-catalogue content that powers the bulk of viewing. How? Proactive, bespoke sponsorsh For everyone else, Myers advises getting more fluent in short-form content. “We're going to see more and more short-form, serial dramas and comedies … where every day there's a new episode, and it's going to be across social media. We're seeing that heavily in China, it's a big business. So I think we're going to see more advertising connecting up to the content and being content itself,” says Myers. “When that happens, we need new currency – based on attentiveness, based on brand equity value of the content, attention. So the fundamentals of the industry need to change.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What happens when you get a neurodivergent, a dopamine dissident and a socio demographic myth buster riding the boundaries of the media and marketing business on the mics together? We’ve done just that after The Media Federation’s (MFA) recent annual conference produced an eclectic mix of keynotes and speakers - the conversation and data should challenge long-held assumptions about what makes us tick as marketers, people and consumers. Firstly, some busted myths: Gen Z can’t get on the property ladder? Actually 40 per cent of under 30s in Australia own their own house, per Slingshot Media’s Flo Gleeson-Cook’s data deep dive, which means banks may be doing their media targeting all wrong. Luxury brands should target those with money in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs? Wrong. Sydney’s “westies” have more ready cash to spend and less debt. Meanwhile, personal care brands targeting women are missing 40 per cent of their market - blokes. Sephora and Mecca take note. But there were some myths Gleeson-Cook couldn’t bust – MAFS’ audience skew being one. OMD strategy chief Rob Frost didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD and autism until he was 33. Before then he’d been exhausted trying to keep up with social norms – preparing for social conversations in the shower, writing down jokes on his phone, telling himself in major pitches to focus on what people were saying so hard that he hadn’t taken in a word being said. Now he’s harnessing divergence – and bringing it to work. “There’s a Harvard Business Review study that shows that teams are 30 per cent more productive when they're neurodiverse,” per Frost. But it’s also critical for bosses to create environments for neurodiverse people to thrive – creative, breakthrough thinking can surge but they are way more likely to die early. “If you have ADHD, you are significantly more likely to die of suicide, to end up in prison,” says Frost. “Your life expectancy is lower than someone who smokes 20 cigarettes a day for their whole life … because your brain is constantly searching and striving and trying to find that element that gets you that little dopamine hit and that little reward.” Hearts & Science’s Peita Pacey reckons the media industry with its need for creative and lateral thinking is close to 30 per cent neurodiverse, which is why “trying to fit everyone into one box” in terms of working patterns is “a really terrible idea”. But she got a muffled, collective groan from MFA’s heaving younger contingent when she suggested as little as 30 minutes a day of scrolling short form video on social media has the same negative physical impacts as three glasses of alcohol. The average Australian under 40 is now using their phone 7 hours a day, she said, creating massive cortisol and dopamine spikes, increasing heart rates and creating “basically a hot mess that is aging us significantly”. But Pacey says phone addiction is a problem for business leaders as it is for the rank and file, because our brains are trained to be constantly reactive to the latest ping, rather than fresh thinking. “If your brain is being trained to be reactive, that means that all you're using is your experience and what you've done before. You're not actually generating new ideas. You're not being expansive in your thinking,” says Pacey. “And of course, these people are the ones who are most connected to their phones, because the expectation is that you're available at all times.” But she says there is a solution to “stopping the brain rot”: Just don’t look at your phone for the first hour of every day. “That hour period regulates your dopamine system for the next 24 hours.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last October Nine corralled a posse of market mix model (MMM) providers, co-funding a program to prove what its assets could do in hard business terms. Since then Nine has poured over three years of historical data from dozens of campaigns, along with brand tracking, consumer attitudinal research, business case studies and other inputs from the likes of Neuro Insight, getting granular on what is moving the needle for brands – and how. Now the early results are in. Some are obvious – The Block generates product trials. Other findings less so – MAFS, for instance, drives trust and credibility as a halo effect for brands like Westpac. Meanwhile, Love Island Australia has Cointreau toasting a massive 42 per cent lift in consideration. Kia signed up to Nine’s $30m program – and marketing boss Dean Norbiato says the early MMM reads now have him plotting channel reallocations: “Looking at the first cut [of MMM data], it would be commercially negligent not to,” said Norbiato, though noting that a broad mix of channels has been crucial to driving growth for Kia, and that TV advertising and tent pole sponsorships have hugely influenced performance marketing results. But Norbiato, plus Nine’s Stewart Gurney and Nikki Rooke, underline a combination of short, medium and long-term strategies, across a broad mix of channels, and layering network effects, are critical growth drivers. Overall, binary pursuit of one-dimensional metrics like ROI is likely to backfire – and MMMs have limits, which even Mutinex co-founder and global CEO, Henry Innis acknowledges. He says there is no silver bullet to give marketers a universal fix. Growth is nuanced, multi-layered and complicated – much harder than lightweight “easy sell, dollar in, dollar out” ROI metrics, per Kia’s Norbiato. But there are ways to start understanding how to put a better plan together, and optimise with sharper data more rapidly. “And that gives you a much bigger seat at the senior management table.” Now Norbiato’s moving to act on the MMM data: “We need to get further understanding, but this initial cut is definitely going to sharpen that [channel] selection.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Andrew Birmingham - Editor - CX | Martech | Ecom AI is reshaping the rules of business at breakneck speed - and likewise for marketing. Legendary tech sector analyst, founder, CEO and chairman of global analyst firm Forrester, George Colony, calls this the Seventh Wave. It’s an upheaval that will eclipse previous waves like the internet, mobile and cloud. It brings turmoil but also eventual re-ordering. For marketers, agencies, and media owners, the implications are extraordinary. Traditional SaaS pricing models are breaking down and legacy vendors are scrambling with defensive AI “upgrades” that mask deeper weakness in their systems. Colony says Agentic AI — autonomous systems that learn, adapt and act — is poised to collapse the tech stack, creating both risk and opportunity for brands. At the same time he explains why Google’s dominance in search is under existential threat - although its latest quarterly earnings results say otherwise. SEO will also fade into irrelevance, says Colony. Beyond, the open web Colony says will morph into the web’s version of AM radio and in its place, a new set of tech cartels is forming, each manoeuvring to entrench control. Colony sets out the strategic risks, the likely winners, and the moves marketers must make now. It is advice that many tech vendors will fear.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Just when you thought the bulging TV, BVOD, streaming and video sector had peaked with too many consumer and advertiser choices, along comes the no-subscription, ad-supported international streamer Tubi with 100 million global  viewers dominated by a younger set binging TV shows like the 30 year-old Friends and creating new genre “rabbit holes” like horror and Bollywood ‘vertical fandoms’. To boot, half of Tubi’s 1.3 million younger skewing monthly Australian viewers are regularly missing on most of the international streaming and local BVOD services. Seventy per cent of Tubi’s local viewers, for instance, don’t watch 10Play; 59 per cent are not clocking 7Plus and 53 per cent are avoiding Amazon’s Prime juggernaut. Although it’s commissioning originals globally, mostly to top-up the voracious appetite of the younger set diving into the back catalogues of horror, true crime and old hit shows like Friends, Grey’s Anatomy and Lost, Tubi International’s Executive Vice President and Managing Director, David Salmon, says TV and video are on an “interesting parallel” to music consumption – old is still good and big. “This idea of recency [new titles] not being the only thing that drives value in a viewer’s mind is similar to music not being defined by the latest album being released,” Salmon says. “Yes, people are viewing new releases but it is not actually driving the bulk of engagement on streaming platforms. Instead it’s evergreen, comfort viewing, nostalgic viewing and deep and narrow interests.” And it’s a global phenomenon – Salmon cites Digital i’s top 10 most streamed titles across the major global platforms in the second half of 2024 – six of the top ten were “actually more than 20 years old and rather staggeringly it also includes Friends, now more than 30 years old. Consumers are going deeper and going further back and that’s where they’re choosing to spend their time.” For Pippa Leary, News Australia’s Managing Director & Publisher for Free News and Lifestyle, Tubi completes an  “All Screens, All Day” line-up blending news and lifestyle publishing with video across all day parts and demographics. Before Tubi’s arrival, the rapidly reinventing news publisher had already created a “small and medium-sized video ecosystem” which topped 1 billion video views from 5 million users – in the past 12 months video views have surged 85 per cent as the publisher cracked how to bring stories across its news and magazine titles together with video to the same user via vertical and shoppable video formats. News’ massive investment in data and segmentation capabilities for full funnel targeting credentials – it has 3000 audience segments across the portfolio – still needed the big TV screen to round it out.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Employment Hero and Salesforce are at opposite ends of the B2B spectrum. One’s a rapidly scaling $2bn platform, the other a $260bn behemoth. But both have adopted a consumer marketing playbook, applied it to B2B and are watching growth power. Employment Hero’s Tasman Page says the approach is notching 700 per cent gains. Lifting B2C’s distinctive assets, emotional, humorous playbook and deploying brand characters – while swapping out whitepapers and rational content for 30 second video ads – are netting leads and acquiring customers at much lower cost, per Page, because the brand investment is fuelling cheaper leads and customer acquisition, up to 70 per cent cheaper. That’s linked to a generational shift within B2B buying groups – of which 71 per cent are now Gen Z and millennials, per LinkedIn ANZ Head of Enterprise, Andrea Rule. Video natives, busy and human, they want something that both strikes an emotional chord, quickly tells them something interesting without boring them, and gives them a reason to go deeper if they are in market, or lands a memory if they are not yet buying. Video consumption is soaring across the platform locally, per Rule, who unpacks the types of content that is getting best traction. Cat Bowe, Salesforce’s Senior Director, Marketing, has likewise seen big improvements in results using video over static ad formats. But she’s also leaning heavily on LinkedIn to own agentic AI amid an arms race. It’s working. AI is enabling Employment Hero’s 30 person in-house agency team to move even faster – speed to market is critical per Page. Which is why he says external agencies just can’t deliver the turnaround times he needs without hoovering up all of Employment Hero’s budget. Salesforce’s Bowe says a hybrid approach is currently working for her team – the agency can work on what is immediately in front of them, giving the in-house team time to think a little further out. But both are fully aligned that there is a “fundamental technology shift going on”, per Bowe, and a fundamental shift in B2B marketing approaches that are massively moving the needle.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Andrew Birmingham, Editor - CX | Martech | Ecom Mi3’s tech editor Andrew Birmingham is joined by global Martech doyenne and Chief Martec's editor-in-chief Scott Brinker to dissect the 2025 Martech Landscape, his famed spaghetti-styled industry maps, now at 15,000 different tech solutions, and what it really means for marketers. From the prolific number of martech vendors and AI-powered tools to the dawn of agentic AI and the quest for a universal data layer to unify fractured data feeds, they unpack the pace, the promise - and the peril - of martech’s accelerating complexity. Brinker explains why martech consolidation is finally underway, why agentic AI may be as transformative as the internet, and what needs to happen before we hit a truly interoperable, multi-agent future. Along the way: data chaos, consumption pricing, cybersecurity blind spots—and why marketers must learn to ride the wave, not be crushed by it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s less than a year since Salesforce launched autonomous AI agents into the wild. But the bots are already reshaping business functions. In the US, online accounting platform 1-800 Accountants, which handles payroll and book keeping for circa 100,000 firms, has slashed the time staff spend on customer service by 70 per cent. Open Table and Singapore Air are deploying the agents to similar effect. But what are they doing with all that freed human capital? And what are the broader implications for everyone as ‘agentics’ move rapidly through the digital supply chain? Salesforce global CMO Ariel Kelman and his say we will all soon have our own agentics buying – and negotiating prices – for us in online shopping and services. Which has significant implications for business structures and marketing functions and capability in particular. Kelman says we are now looking at a step change in marketing automation beyond content, where the agentic labour force will generate campaign briefs, launch campaigns off those briefs, and self-optimise the creative messaging and channels to deliver on the brief it crafted in the first place. Outside of agentics, Kelman says Salesforce’s new multi-touch attribution model is powering, telling the firm which marketing investments are driving sales and how cost-efficient they are. But not for brand – Kelman thinks it’s pointless trying to attach a dollar value to brand investments in B2B. “It’s just so disconnected from the purchase.” Those attempting to do so, he suggests, are “operating at a false level of precision.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Their remits and responsibilities seem poles apart, but Guzman y Gomez global CMO, Lara Thom, and Uber CMO APAC, Andy Morley share strikingly similar views on the importance of culture, CMOs aligning personally to company values, brand-led strategy, and bold, progressive marketing that grabs attention and strikes the right cultural chord. It’s surprising really. Thom has her hands full with near-term growth, global expansion of a brand still challenging the QSR status quo and a recent IPO. Morley meanwhile, has his sights set on the longer-term brand horizon and reframing two mature businesses for what’s next. These very different marketing operators were in the studio for the latest CMO Awards winners podcast episode after being unilaterally recognised by judges for demonstrating marketing effectiveness in spades. Morley came in #6th in this year’s CMOs of the Year rankings (the highest ranked male this year, both joked), while Thom was the inaugural CMO Awards #1. The dynamic, sometimes combative but respectful conversation centres around what it takes to make marketing effective, drawing from Thom and Morley’s winning CMO Awards submissions plus career learnings. What both also share is a very timely reminder that the role of marketing has to adapt if it’s to achieve the same outcome every CMO is ultimately looking for: Delivering growth and market share through effective marketing.  Both firmly hold themselves to commercial account. “At some stage, marketers got hold of a whole bunch of metrics and were able to kind of put some twinkly stars in the sky and go and say, Look, reach impressions, brand awareness graphs that don't mean anything,” Thom says. “But the real accountability and the real effectiveness of an awesome and great marketer is actually in sales.” That by no means impinges brand and creative aspirations. “I've always said and believed that you can build brand and revenue at the same time,” Thom continues. “Anyone that says this is a brand campaign that's not designed to drive sales, is wrong and lying, and it's not working. All brand campaigns should elevate brand awareness, and that equates to sales. End of.” How marketers maintain an offensive, not defensive, position is another priority for both CMOs. “There are a number of brands that have more restaurants than us, so we're still in an offensive position, where that hunger and we're striving to get there,” Thom says.  By contrast, Morley and the Uber team are in a very different space where the business is now well established, and in a market leadership position looking at what is next. It’s come after three years of successful work to transform and evolve what Uber Eats brand stands for and the power of its ‘Order almost anything’ brand positioning and creative platform. Morley is now thinking about Uber’s core rideshare business and where it goes next. “I think the reframing of what your category is, is the most important thing for our position,” Morley says. “We're not just trying to maintain our share or just defend what we've got within rideshare or through delivery. We're saying actually, what's the bigger picture that we can go on? In the mobility space, it's the private car. We are going harder on how we build more use cases away from the private car. It's generally better for the consumer’s wallet, and that is a much bigger fish for us to go after.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cannes was heaving with influencers striking deals, but the message from top marketers, academics and consulting firms was consistent: Go back to fundamentals on brand, embed brand at the heart of business, then execute with consistent creative excellence to drive outsized financial returns.Mark Ritson landed that message most emphatically via 10 years worth of Effie data analysed by System1. In short: Do really good work, put enough money behind it, don’t change it; grow more.CEOs like Gap Inc’s Richard Dickson are codifying brand to drive business decision-making – and it’s working. Other business leaders remain unconvinced. Hence EY Parthenon’s Karen Crum putting brand and creative investment on the corporate risk register, just like plant, equipment and supply chains. She’s mapped 20 years worth of Fortune 500 filings that show brands looking beyond negative brand risk and investing to maintain brand relevance and value are “more profitable and stayed in the Fortune 500 longer”. Crum’s new paper unpacks how marketers can help articulate that risk in language that will land with the C-suite.Tassal Chief Commercial Officer Matt Vince – also the firm’s Chief Risk Officer –said it maintains corporate risk registers for both brand and marketing after 20-years as an ASX-listed business prior to acquisition by Canada’s Cooke Inc. Crum’s paper, he says, resonates deeply, while Tassal’s rigour in building brand –doubling marketing ROI on a flat budget – has seen Cooke’s global CEO fly into town: “The opportunity for us is to start leading [marketing] from a global perspective.” Next, he’s mulling how to embed a creative measurement system, as cited at Cannes by the likes of Nestlé as key to enabling creative growth gains and Grand Prix wins. But Vince is also thinking about influencers after meeting Seal at a TikTok event – and says TikTok “has some amazing things coming in their pipeline”.Amid divergence on whether marketing’s fundamentals still apply within a platform-dominated world, Suncorp’s Mim Haysom backed the call to return to basics on distinctive assets – because they resonate in all channels. “We can get obsessed about single channels. But nobody builds brand and marketing plans like that. You look at the whole ecosystem of your brand.”But Haysom acknowledged influencers are having a “profound impact” within that ecosystem. “If brands are thinking that it's a flash in the pan they're greatly mistaken.” Which means working through another set of risk management: relinquishing full control of content.Here’s their take-outs and take-homes from Cannes 2025.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This year’s inaugural CMO Awards weren’t just a showcase of Australian marketing leaders doing an excellent job of marketing stewardship and effectiveness. We also introduced the Best Growth Initiative of the Year award, supported by Publicis Groupe, to single out and recognise strategic growth initiatives led by marketing teams. In this podcast episode, we bring together Jenni Dill, CMO of inaugural award winner, Arnott’s Group, with Cath Brands, CMO of highly commended Flintfox International, plus inaugural judge Ty Hayes, former Curtin Uni CMO and founder of Growth Generators, to delve into what it takes to unlock growth that delivers business-grade impact. From first identifying the opportunity, to how they freed up capacity and gained cross-functional buy-in to make it happen, these marketing leaders from very different B2C and B2B worlds shed light on the programs of work that led to success – and importantly, where they had to rethink and pivot. For judges, Arnott’s Gluten Free was a clear winner for Best Growth Initiative of the Year award for its gluten free effort – the most incremental launch the FMCG has had to date. Today, gluten-free biscuits make up approximately 10 per cent of the total biscuit market, with an impressive annual growth rate of 40 per cent. Remarkably, Arnott’s has driven 82 per cent of this growth in the past year alone, chalking up $40 million in sales. “When we got into it, what people really wanted was our biggest, known, loved icons, but gluten-free versions with no taste trade off. So that pretty quickly set our true north,” says Jenni Dill. “That meant a multi-year journey to invest in new bakeries, establish new ways of working, new methods of baking, new ways of going to market, new locations on shelf. It really was a concerted effort, but we also wanted to make sure we weren't waiting two or three years to do something. So we had to get an MVP in the market. We had to start with our simpler products that were easier to get taste equivalent matches to in a gluten-free version. And then everything we did from a marketing perspective, had to make sure that everything was as incremental as it could possibly be.” At Flintfox, meanwhile, the growth opportunity was to take an Australian-made pricing solutions offering into the German, Austrian and Swiss markets. “The team and I had two goes at this,” Cath Brands admits. “In the first attempt, we did it the lazy way – we put a translate button on the website, did some contextual translation of what we did and decided to buy some LinkedIn media. Turns out that that's not how you go to business in Germany. That's not how the Germans play the game.” Take two required an all-encompassing approach: Native product extension, translation and new integrations with SAP, identifying nuanced user and macro conditions, building a market presence from scratch and a go-to-market approach. The result was winning two really big customers in Germany last year worth millions. For Ty Hayes, however different this year’s winner and highly commended brands may be, each identified strategic, innovative, approaches to drive significant net new revenue. “That was either attacking a new category or creating a new category, or entering a new market,” he says. They also demonstrate what Hayes sees as the top three things every growth initiative of substance needs: “Insight, foresight and experimentation”.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Byron Sharp is a distinctive assets maximalist, suggesting how brands look and are recognised and embedded into people’s minds is more important than focusing on what they do differently to rival brands. Mark Ritson argues brands need differentiation to stand out from rivals and pull customers in. News Australia says you need both to drive growth – and that custom-made media that delivers engagement beyond reach is a critical multiplier.News Australia has just wrapped up its nationwide agency engagement roadshow, Frontiers, diving deep with hundreds of agency execs across dozens of workshops to unpack how to cut through and deliver much sharper results amid a comms sea of sameness. The key is moving beyond old-school approaches of tonnage-based reach and the legacy constructs of ‘paid, owned and earned’ media. Case studies for CommBank, NRMA Insurance, Subway and Toblerone strongly suggest the approach is working: Subway notched 3 per cent sales gains; NRMA Insurance and News Australia’s positive influence helped secure $7.2bn in government funding to fix Queensland’s Bruce Highway. Unsurprisingly, more Queenslanders now like NRMA Insurance than before.Now News Australia wants to work with agencies and brands to build better campaigns and more case studies. But that requires a shift in approach to planning and content creation. It’s harder work, says GM of Client Growth & Experience, Renee Sycamore, but powerful results prove “the effort definitely pays off”. The key to achieving “distinctively different” campaigns says Head of Growth Intelligence, Leigh Lavery, is to focus on three critical elements: Making content magnetic (i.e. it gets attention); momentous (i.e. contextually relevant, capturing the zeitgeist) and meaningful (i.e. saying and doing something that adds value to customers). But going against conventional wisdom on mass reach may also be required. As National Head of Digital Strategy and Streaming Dianna Molinaro puts it: “Everyone’s got reach … but what our agency partners and marketers really care about is the impact.” Likewise, everyone has data: “It’s about what we do with it.” Now News Australia is powering custom-made media with behavioural audience signals across the network to connect intent and content. Molinaro says data-driven relevance is where the growth gold lies.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Marketing budgets are declining just as paid media costs are rising – meaning brands get less for every dollar spent, and fewer dollars to start with. But latest research commissioned by The Trade Desk into omnichannel versus multichannel media planning could provide sweet relief. In short, the difference between omnichannel and multichannel planning is that omnichannel campaigns are connected by data and technology from the get-go, whereas multichannel campaigns put ads into different channels one by one. The distinction is subtle – but the disparity in results can be massive. Across UK, US and Australian markets, the research found omnichannel ad campaigns outperform multichannel campaigns on nearly every metric by up to 90 per cent, delivering steep upside for marketing teams in improving the ROI performance of their paid media schedules. It also found that properly linking campaigns across channels significantly reduces the mental load on consumers, and therefore ad fatigue, and drives more conversions, faster. Versus “disconnected” multichannel campaigns, omnichannel campaigns were “one and a half times more persuasive, 50 per cent better at building emotional connection with audiences and 70 per cent better at encoding messages in long-term memory”, according to The Trade Desk Director of Marketing Research and Insights, Sara Picazo. Brands switching to omnichannel approaches also report massive performance gains: Picazo said working with The Trade Desk, IKEA boosted conversions by 339 per cent and cut time to conversion by 10 per cent.Likewise, Nunn Media Head of Digital and Data Lee Foster said brands taking an omnichannel approach are making lasting reductions in performance media costs – one client has cut cost per acquisition by 24 per cent, sustained over a nine-month period. Picazo and Foster urge brands not already harnessing omnichannel approaches to test the theory themselves. But the research also has implications for the way brand and agency planning teams are set up.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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”.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.