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A weekly wrap of the “must-know” developments in Marketing, Media, Agency and Technology for leaders and emerging leaders in the industry. Veteran industry journalist and Mi3 Executive Editor Paul McIntyre talks each week with guest marketers who are in the know on what matters at the nexus of marketing, agencies, media and technology. Powered mostly by Human Intelligence (HI).
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The B2B world is a market where you don't call customers, customers call you - although it’s the opposite of widespread B2B marketing assumptions and practice today. A B2B awakening is underway as business marketers see increasing evidence that an under-investment in B2B brand work leads to a sea of sameness and mediocre results among buyers – across most industry sectors, many feel there is little supplier differentiation, limiting the likelihood you’ll receive that all-important first call. But if the phone does ring from a buyer, the latest round of research across Asia Pacific says you’re overwhelmingly likely to land the deal, irrespective of the sales teams prowess. Sameness leads to nothingness and a B2B marketing strategy that prioritises marketing qualified leads (MQLs) over all else comes with serious limitations, according to this week’s guests. Instead, the brand signals you send out “need to align with how modern customers research and purchase, particularly in complex B2B environments where decision making often involves multiple stakeholders,” says Sophie Neate, Global Head of Digital Marketing & Content for industrial giant ABB. When making the case internally for change, however, don’t underestimate the support from sales teams, says Lara Barnet, the Head of Marketing in Australia for the global technology-managed service provider Logicalis. “Sellers face that problem more than anyone else,” she says. “They’re on the front line, they're the ones picking up the phone and talking to customers. They face this all the time.” The broader growth in influence of buying committees necessarily lessens the influence of a single C-Suite decision maker, and that influence wanes further as the size of the buying committee scales along with the value of the opportunity. An MQL led approach also fails to recognise that customers, not sellers, control the product research agenda and most of those are invisible until they choose to turn public. By then, says the boss of B2B agency Green Hat, Stuart Jaffray, it’s likely too late - they have mostly made their decision.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
SCA in March launched three big tech bets for its LiSTNR master app – a customer data platform (CDP), customer-specific data matching clean rooms and dynamic creative optimisation. The bets are paying off and SCA is no longer reliant on third party data sources. Execs say the platform and its 2.1m logged-in users already command over 40 per cent of all digital audio ad dollars, helping SCA’s $50m investment reach breakeven a year ahead of schedule. LiSTNR is now moving into the next phase of audience matching, granular targeting and attribution via its own first party data and ANZ spend data. Its first API-connection based on fuel price changes went so well – landing multiple briefs within weeks – that LiSTNR’s launching 20 more across five categories including finance, property, travel, weather and utilities. “Whatever the agency or brands want to work on, we're able to activate those APIs quite quickly,” per LiSTNR commercial boss Oliver Newton. It’s also launching ‘mood targeting’, i.e. contextual ads for brands based on what audiences are listening to, as well as audio retargeting. Next year LiSTNR will also be able to tell brands the carbon impact of their campaigns across SCA’s assets thanks to a partnership with emissions mapping platform, Scope3. Newton reckons CO2 measurement credentials will be table stakes as advertisers move into negotiation mode for 2025 – especially for larger firms newly mandated to report emissions data, of which advertising and marketing is an eye-wateringly large chunk. The advertiser adoption curve is steepening. In June, 20 per cent of LiSTNR campaigns made use of the Adtech Hub. By September that had jumped to 33 per cent. Next year LiSTNR aims for 45-50 per cent, according to head of SCAiQ Abi Wallis. She says brands are buying-in because they can target people based on where they are, what they are doing, and which brands they are buying. They can suppress existing customers and target only new potential customers based on their listening and spending habits, or likewise upsell and cross-sell to their existing customers, with sharper smarts and context, tailored dynamic creative, and with the spend and audience data enabling “a real world view of the impact” and ROI. LiSTNR’s new capabilities put it on a par with the big tech platforms, per Wallis and Newton, if not beyond – and the opportunity to harness the Adtech Hub is not limited to big brands. “Agency or direct … It’s there to be utilised by anyone looking to access digital audio,” says Newton.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
A decade after launching viewability metrics, the Media Ratings Council is moving to standardise attention metrics globally. That means buying media based on attention metrics will scale faster. But a world first out of home study into attention by QMS and Amplified Intelligence is already going global – and the findings for brands are huge. In short, out of home completely flips ratios around average active attention rates, with 85 per cent of sites studied getting at least 2.5 seconds – the baseline for memory encoding that grows brands. Some sites and formats get much more, and the rate of attention decay is slower than other media. The results have the likes of Suncorp and OMD media executives pumped, suggests QMS Chief Strategy Officer Christian Zavecz. He thinks all out of home players will benefit as a result, especially those ramping up programmatic trading of assets. That’s because the study, which mapped 1.3 million people passing large and small format outdoor ads, also finds that active attention (people looking directly at the ad) and passive attention (where the ad is in people’s peripheral vision) can be predicted by site, which means planners and buyers can reliably trade on it. Amplified Intelligence CEO, Dr Karen Nelson-Field, says the study will likely lead challenger brands to rethink out of home, because greater active attention does heavier lifting in terms of brand building, where smaller brands are traditionally disadvantaged by larger rivals whose codes and distinctive assets are already embedded in people’s brains. Bus shelters, per the study, are a particularly good bet, notching “about 7.4 seconds of active attention and about 14 seconds of passive,” per Nelson-Field. But getting the attention is only the first critical step. To drive sales, the creative and branding must cut through. “Anyone that tells you that attention and outcomes are linearly related is lying,” says Nelson-Field. “It’s the combination of the two: Media drives the opportunity for creative; creative takes it and gets the sale.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
TikTok marketing science chief Rory Dolan says performance media costs are soaring while conversions flatline. He has the data to prove it. After mapping TikTok platform activity with Tracksuit’s brand tracking data, Dolan has one key message – invest in brand to boost conversion and beat biddable auction inflation: “Advertisers with 60 per cent-plus awareness have a 2.86 times increase in their baseline conversion rate versus advertisers that are 20 per cent below,” he says, rendering brand versus performance arguments redundant, if not suicidal. Full funnel execution is king, says Dolan, because building future demand means easier, cheaper conversions at scale: “Brand is fundamentally a performance tactic.” Tracksuit co-founder James Hurman literally wrote the book on that principle. He penned Future Demand after one of his own DTC businesses, initially hockey-sticking via Facebook ads, experienced the performance media ‘Easter Island Effect’. Acquisition dried up, performance costs spiralled, the economics tanked. Without priming new customers, “brands use all of their resources, then they have nothing left, and then they die”, warns Hurman. The idea that brand campaigns have to be broad, multichannel and expensive is a myth, says TikTok’s Dolan. “Brand can be built by targeting subgroups of your target audience consistently over time. So this can actually be achieved with small amounts of investment.” The awareness sweet spot for small brands, per the research, is 37 per cent. “We see very strong business impacts as a result of that early on.” Even “big performance-focused advertisers” are hitting the same growth ceiling “which is very expensive to bypass by performance [spend]”, says Dolan. “These are businesses that maybe three years ago wouldn't have touched brand [investment] because of the inability to track their short-term ROI. They're now seeing the impact of that.” Dolan says TikTok’s research underlines that increasing performance spend will not build brand – but brand spend will boost both brand and performance outcomes. For those facing hard budget choices and sceptical CFOs, Dolan suggests leaving performance media to bots and spending more time and money on brand: “That seems to be the big sweet spot at the moment – automating the performance and focusing on driving these multipliers.” But first, get brand tracking sorted.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Six months ago conversational commerce wasn’t really on the radar of Deloitte Digital’s National Partner Lead Leon Doyle. Now Doyle is reorganising his entire content team around it – and believes it’s coming at the $200bn content industry like a freight train. AI-powered chatbots and the speed at which all major platforms are developing and deploying, particularly on messaging apps, are accelerating – ultimately they’re heading to full-funnel capabilities where in travel, for example, discovery to purchase is completed in a single conversational thread. Doyle says brands must prepare for far more content governance to clear “content debt” fast. I.e. start writing not only for humans, but commerce-enabling AI applications which will ingest forgotten, incorrect, outdated or even misleading corporate information and content lurking in digital corners that the bots will otherwise scrape to build their customer responses from. That means restructuring content architecture and taxonomies and focusing on “conversation design, not just content design”, says Doyle “This is what my team are doing. They're thinking about AI conversation strategy … rather than design just for one platform, they're actually thinking about how they structure content in modules for conversations across multiple modes - website, app, chat.” While Doyle cites a handful of brands including Commbank and Qantas aiming for early mover advantage locally, Deloitte Digital's Global Marketing and Commerce Lead, Nick Garrett, says conversational commerce is “exploding in every market”. He thinks the impact on content economics is seismic – with everything that existed pre-AI at risk of obsolescence. “If $200 billion is moving into play …. no client, no organisation, could not be looking at this at a forensic level.” As Doyle puts it: “If you're not thinking actively about your content debt, your content supply chain, start right now. Because the machines are here, they're learning from your content, and we need to be good teachers to them.” What does it mean for the broader content supply chain? Disruption for all but absolute tier one providers, per Garrett. “If your bread and butter was making [content at] scale and you’re dependent on bums and seats, a little bit of automation and a bit of offshore, you’re probably staring into a pretty uncomfortable place right now.” For pretty much everyone on the brand-side, it means content creation is moving into a risk management business. Doyle’s advice for CX’s next big overhaul? Keep it “simple, human and trustworthy”.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz, of University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, suggests Professor Byron Sharp’s best known book, How Brands Grow, is a misnomer – it’s actually about how big brands keep big marketshare, not how they got there. He also says it’s based on flaws within Andrew Ehrenberg’s earlier work, primarily static markets and a requirement not to differentiate. Thomaz suggests that’s why big FMCG firms adhering to those rules were caught napping by more nimble differentiated start-ups. Reach “sufficiency”, or optimising media for reach, no longer works, he suggests, because all reach is not equal – and reach alone doesn’t deliver business outcomes. “There is a missing dimension,” per Thomaz. He’s out to prove it with a peer-reviewed paper that analyses 1,000 campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and WPP. The upshot? “None of it holds … I'm seeing that 1 per cent of campaigns are actually getting exceptional money, while the vast majority are choosing to get some really mediocre outcomes.” That’s partly because audience reach doesn’t account for their ability to be influenced - and different media, different categories and consumer types have varying degrees of impact in different moments. Reach, he says, is proving a misleading media proxy for business impact - the variances of consumer receptivity to switching is different by category. Personal care, for instance, has less consumer preparedness to trial alternatives once they’ve established their preference - they’re harder to “manipulate”, Thomas posits, but some media channel characteristics stand a better chance. TV versus influencers in lower funnel strategies will likely surprise many. Which has knock-on impacts on channel effectiveness and weighting. Thomaz says that’s good news for media owners – if they can stop selling on impressions and start selling on functionality. “For some categories, there might be a premium they can charge.” The need to reach all potential buyers in the category, he says, “has not changed in the least … Reach is important, and you still need that scale. However, you also need [to optimise to] the business outcome. But he still thinks it’s “really bad to waste your money on people who will never buy you”. In short: “If you're managing your company's marketing on simplistic and reductive laws, you might want to revisit those, because you're leaving money on the table or leaving yourself open to very simple counter-plays. It's dangerous.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind was “surprised” – read underwhelmed – by the first tranche of Privacy Act legislation laid before parliament last month. But she says the hard stuff is still coming after the election, which means businesses now diverting budgets away from compliance to other activities may regret it, especially as the regulator has sharper teeth. Kind says firms are failing under the current Privacy Act – and they are in the regulator’s crosshairs. Tracking pixels are under serious scrutiny across the piste, as are companies using data beyond what it was collected for and potentially passing it to third parties. In that vein, Kind has “existing concerns” about loyalty programs, customer data enrichment businesses and data broking: “It's something I'd like to look at again under the current framework,” she says, suggesting those operators “make sure that they're watertight”. Likewise firms targeting via geolocation: “We’re looking at a case at the moment … We have some real concerns about how it's being used.” Lookalikes, customer audiences, hashed emails and data clean rooms appear to be in the clear. But under the next wave of reforms “the changing definition of personal information could certainly have an impact,” she says, though for now it’s not clear-cut. In the meantime, Kind says there are four areas for businesses to laser in on – including small firms who will no longer be exempt from regulation. First, “know what data you hold and who you’re giving it to.” Second, “make sure you've got a retention and destruction regime in place – anything that’s old, you don’t need to hold it any more.” Next, get into the weeds on contracts with third party service providers and be sure to have a data breach response plan in place. “It's an area of vulnerability we're seeing a lot at the moment,” says Kind. In short: “Don't take your foot off the gas, because we're looking to take a more enforcement-based approach to regulation in the interim.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Part One: Seven companies now account for a third of the total value of the US S&P 500 – and the bulk of their collective trillions in market value happens to come from marketers and advertising. It’s a crazy number, but Terry Kawaja, the fast talking banker, considered by some the ‘godfather’ of adtech start-up investment, says another wave of advertising and marketing related tech spin offs are incoming that’s making him a little more bullish than the cooling of the past 18 months. Kawaja’s New York firm Luma Partners is behind the Lumascape spaghetti maps that try to make sense of the sprawling, connected pipes of the adtech industry. Kawaja thinks consolidation has to happen for the industry to shake the cowboys – “the environment is highly fragmented and that allows people to hide,” he says. That’s code for nefarious market behaviour which undermines adtech’s credibility - and Kawaja argues a clean digital ad system is more important now than ever if open web players are to compete with big tech, especially as he sees retail media quickly eating a third of open web ad dollars. But there’s little sign of that consolidation right now and Kawaja admits adtech is still notoriously opportunistic and has played a starring role in the creation of some of the problems the market is struggling to address with junk digital data, fake people and opaque trading practices that nobody seems able to solve. Regardless, Kawaja says another wave of tech investment is coming and for good measure and says Google’s pervasive global advertising trading system being broken up would have huge financial upside for Alphabet shareholders – and the industry at large. The US Department of Justice has been landing punches over the past three weeks in its current US Federal District Court adtech "monopoly” trial against Google. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Paramount went early on both converged trading and a streaming ad tier in the US. Now it’s doing likewise in Australia and Lee Sears, Paramount’s international ad sales chief, thinks both plays will pay off for the media and entertainment conglomerate, its advertisers and crucially – viewers. Unlike some rivals, Paramount didn’t push subscribers automatically onto the streaming ad tier. Sears says it didn’t need to, because “we have a huge audience elsewhere, so don’t have to be reliant on just the SVOD ad tier”. He suggests forcing ads onto subscribers that signed up for an ad free service wouldn’t be right. Either way, the strategy appears to be paying off. Locally, sales chief Rod Prosser won’t divulge numbers, though analysts Telsyte estimate Paramount SVOD subscribers at 1.8m, with sign-ups outstripping its competitive set. Prosser said the reality is much higher than the Telsyte estimate and, confirmed “We are still the fastest growing [SVOD]”. Moreover, Sears suggests Paramount’s subscribers are actually using the service amid some “wild” numbers being touted in market, per OMG investment chief Kristiaan Kroon, “because it's not an add-on to something else, or it's not a byproduct of a bill that you're paying elsewhere within your household”. On converged trading across BVOD, SVOD, AVOD and FAST (linear TV’s set to follow locally in H2 next year), Sears says the approach is now driving a “major” chunk of revenue in the US and other global markets. He anticipates Australia will follow that playbook: “It is now part of everything we do … Converged trading, connecting everything together, is how we lead with our conversation. I think that’s the way everybody will try to lead conversations in the future, unless you only have a one-dimensional play.” Part of the converged approach is a “blended CPM”, i.e. a bundled price that factors in the different channels the ads run across. Prosser said how that pricing works has been the biggest question from agencies in recent weeks, alongside bringing linear TV into the converged mix.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Salesforce reckons it’s the end of the DIY AI era – and global CMO Ariel Kelman is tasked with addressing what his CEO, Marc Benioff said last week is Salesforce's biggest marketing challenge: convincing global markets to think less about Open AI, Microsoft copilots and other generative AI companies that require businesses to custom-bake the tech into their organisations to make it work – and more about the deployment of low code, no code, autonomous AI agents that can be built and tested and live within weeks, if not days. The difference is that Salesforce is pointing these agents directly at existing customer systems and data, rather than brands spending “literally tens of millions of dollars with cloud providers to train these models” from scratch. “There are lots of use cases where you do need to train and fine-tune your models. But absolutely not sales, service, marketing and commerce – the models are smart enough that they can go and grab information,” says Kelman. “It can just scale the work that our customers have already done.” It’s working for the likes of Saks, Gucci and Wiley – and some local firms like Fisher & Paykel and Queensland University of Technology are now likewise plugged into what Benioff reckons is “AI’s third wave”. Kelman says AI agents “blur the lines” between sales, service and marketing functionality – and coming next is a variant for sales lead development, where the agent will develop the leads until they are warm enough for a human to take over.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Before launching its first-ever brand campaign, Virgin Velocity had to convince finance and commercial teams that investing in brand would drive long-term demand, re-engage its 10m members – and ultimately power growth. So it tapped Beatgrid, the same cross-media measurement platform used by Virgin Australia when relaunching its airline brand.Beatgrid’s audience measurement system uses a passive, single source panel – via an opt-in mobile phone-based app – that uses subtle audio pitch shifts to the ad creative to determine which channel the audience was exposed to. That means it can detect if an ad has been seen and how many times per user across different screens and channels – with total recall because it’s not relying on humans to remember what they saw, when and how accurately. It also enables an accurate read on cross-channel incremental reach.For Velocity’s GM of Member Engagement, Emma King, demonstrating the panel’s robustness via control groups meant she could prove incrementality and unlock the media budget. It’s also given Velocity and their media partner PHD, a sharper insight on which channels deliver the highest growth per campaign and cumulatively across campaigns – and where the best balance of effectiveness and efficiency lies.Beatgrid’s data also threw up some surprises. “In one example, we saw total TV drive a lift of 11 points. And when we tease out the impact of BVOD, we can see it drives an incremental result of three points above TV,” says PHD Head of Research, Lillian Zrim – counter to the narrative of declining audiences and effectiveness.Velocity’s King says Beatgrid’s data also enabled her to justify investing in other brand channels. “We saw television work really well with out-of-home to drive incremental KPI results. If you have a lot of overlap in reach, sometimes you’re thinking - maybe we don’t need to cover both; then you see results like this that say [if someone’s exposed to both channels], they’re going to get a much higher lift.”While King and Zrim acknowledge that nothing happens in a vacuum, “In April, our CEO confirmed that member growth trend was 35 per cent above the growth trend the previous year,” says King. “So that's an example of the kind of commercial impact that these kinds of campaigns can have.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The proposed ban on social media for teens has polarised industry and academia with warnings aplenty it could backfire. Ex-Facebook ANZ MD Liam Walsh argues rather than a ban, dumbing down the algorithms, forcing algorithmic transparency through regulation or removing them altogether – could actually be the solution if fears of the effects of algorithmically-generated dopamine addiction and attention-hogging dark patterns on teenage mental health are the primary problem.“If we took that out, how many problems do we have with social?” he says. Walsh warns society has no structures in place to deal with fallout that could land in nine months’ time when the Albanese government proposes a new age limit on social media use. “If you take away kids’ whole network, how they commune with others, that’s kind of a big deal.” Walsh doubts teens will “suddenly start hanging out in the park and helping old ladies paint the fence.”Erica Thomas, Principal at private girls school Kincoppal in Sydney's Rose Bay, agrees teenagers will “seek other things” to fill the void “and that is one concern” but warns there is no time to wait for a protracted legal battle with tech giants in attempts to curtail or open up the algorithms. She sees daily, first-hand, how badly action is required. Across a 30-year career in education, she says social media is “the most damaging influence I have ever seen”.Concentration levels are plummeting with teachers struggling to find a fix, girls are being conditioned to perfectionism from a young age, boys exposed to increasingly extreme violence, toxic influencers and highly sexualised images and bots of girls and young women – and in the last five years, “it’s got worse”.Brands have long championed ESG and purpose. But they’ve been strangely silent on the proposed ban. Katie Palmer-Rose, a social media marketer who has worked with the likes of L'Oreal, PepsiCo and Aldi and now runs influence agency Kindred, thinks many are waiting to see how it plays out. But she says they face a “moment in time where they tend to think very differently about how they show up in social media, how they build communities and connectedness in a digital world that doesn't live in social media,”Production company Finch’s Rob Galluzzo and Greg Attwells fully expect legal challenges from tech platforms – who they claim have told staff to “stonewall” 36 Months, the campaign they founded with Nova’s Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli to push for a social media ban for under 16s. Dumbing down algorithms won’t cut it, says Attwells. Keeping regulation about health, not tech, and moving fast is key, they suggest – with more backer brands about to be announced. The next phase is designing the massive educational and societal infrastructure required to fill the looming gap.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The latest analysis of SVOD growth rates from tech and telco analyst Telsyte proves one thing: fear of streaming services losing subscribers by pivoting to ads is overblown: They’re growing – though some more than others. MD Foad Fadaghi says ads, plus AI personalisation, integration and format innovation, will power the next growth cycle but streaming growth has peaked. Omnicom investment chief Kristiaan Kroon suggests Stan, Nine’s ad-free SVOD holdout, should heed that lesson because Nine has something globals like Netflix and others do not: “A really sophisticated, at scale, sales infrastructure, which means they could make really good money from an ad tier.” There’s more competition incoming from HBO and Disney. But Kroon reiterates that the best sales wins because unlike the US and UK, Australia’s premium end of town doesn’t operate on fully automated systems and open exchanges. “They are still very much handheld markets.” Who’s winning right now? “Amazon Prime and then Binge and Kayo. Why? They have come to market with scale, both have sales teams, both have sophisticated data infrastructure,” per Kroon. He thinks streamer ad tiers will eclipse his earlier predictions of $75-$100m take in 2024 with Amazon, Kayo and Binge taking most of the pie. Next year, he thinks SVOD ad tiers could beat $200m, but there’s debate about how big ad-streamers like Amazon and Netflix actually are. Fadaghi suggests 80 per cent Telstye’s estimated 4.8m Amazon Prime subscribers could technically receive ads. Kroon puts the active Prime user base around 2-2.5m, broadly on a par with Nine and Seven. There’s also an effectiveness debate, with data from Adgile suggesting streamers can’t yet match TV’s results. Kroon says the MMM-effectiveness-ROI debate has become “very finger pointy in recent months”, but agrees there’s a gap to close. Ultimately, he thinks local content integration could prove decisive in determining winners and losers – and for some of the globals, Australia may prove too small. “I don't see how we can support that many BVOD, SVOD [players] – and we haven't really even talked about YouTube and the amount of ads that are served on CTV now,” says Kroon. “There's only going to be a certain number that can be supported.” Fadaghi predicts the streamers will triple in size to 10m subscribers in the next four years, “with more than a third on ad tiers.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
For anyone in ecom or performance marketing, this podcast is a must listen. Forget ROI and ROAS, think unit economics, says former investment banker (her last big deal was the Myer float) turned entrepreneur Carla Penn-Kahn. She was early into ecom and left Credit Suisse to launch four of her own –Kitchenware Australia, A Gift Worth Giving, Everten and Buy My Thing. But she sold her last venture last year when she realised it had hit peak profitability. With performance ad prices doubling in four years, and Amazon reaching full speed, the unit economics weren’t going to get any better. Penn-Kahn thinks direct-to-consumer trailblazers have likewise lost their mojo – and their moats – and face the same dilemma, because they can no longer sustainably scale through advertising and VCs are sharpening their bottom line focus as much as the top. Meanwhile, Amazon has just signed an exclusive deal with Australia Post to deliver on weekends. “I can’t see other brands like Myer and DJs getting Aus Post to do the same for them … which 100 per cent gives Amazon an edge in this market over Australian businesses.” Hence she’s cool on the outlook for many, but particularly the likes of The Iconic, Temple and Webster, Adore Beauty and Australian marketplaces like Woolworths-owned Catch, which last week put a $96m dent in Wesfarmers’ balance sheet. Loyalty programs and retail media offers a lifeline for some, per Penn-Kahn, but most DTC brands don’t have the latter option. But Amazon might not have it all it’s own way. She suggests Microsoft might be gearing up to buy Shopify (which in Australia lays claim to controlling 25 per cent of all ecom transactions). If it happens “they will own the space”, suggests Penn-Kahn. “You will be advertising on Bing through the Shopify network as an ecom brand and leveraging Microsoft's AI to build your website, build the content. It could be a full ecosystem roll up if it happens. It's very possible.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The effectiveness “revolution” is colliding with the AI-spawned efficiency uprising and it’s leaping the early consensus AI use cases in marketing around automating personalised content and communications. So much so Mark Ritson choked on his Wellfleet oysters when Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg told him they were leaving top jobs at the LinkedIn-backed thinktank, the B2B Institute. Then they told him why. Ritson promptly joined their venture, along with what Weinberg calls “the advisory board to end all advisory boards”. Thus the synthetically-enhanced AI marketing outfit Evidenza was born. The founders argue their new piece of “synthetic customer” tech, which starts with creating AI copies of target customers, can create an annual marketing strategy, category entry points, messaging and positioning at a fraction of the cost of traditional market research and in a fraction of the time it takes for a marketing team to do the same. They claim it completes major research projects in minutes – and have proven their digitally synthetic customers match real customer responses it took some of the world’s biggest brands long cycles to gather. “It can imitate essentially anyone by gathering and synthesizing massive amounts of data,” per Weinberg, including almost impossible-to-reach professionals, like airline chiefs, or the bosses of mining companies. Which is exactly what Evidenza did in a head-to-head test with EY Americas CMO Toni Clayton-Hine’s actual survey data – and “reached 95 per cent of the same conclusions,” per Weinberg. EY “has been a fantastic client ever since.” But as well as synthesizing customers, the system also synthesizes marketing strategy and science: Imagine on one side a synthetic combination of Mark Ritson, Professor Byron Sharp teamed with ad effectiveness maestros Peter Field and Les Binet. Then on the other side, hundreds of synthetic CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CIOs, CMOs and each of those functions linked to the nuances of different industries and categories. Put them all into an AI blender, and you get what Lombardo and Weinberg think is an efficiency revolution in marketing fused with the effectiveness revolution from the marketing academics. The upshot for marketers? “A finance-friendly marketing plan that used to take months now takes maybe minutes, but more likely, a day,” per Weinberg. According to Lombardo that’s good news even for traditional market researchers. “Everyone is going to get better. Average is over.” So what’s left for the humans? The synthetic duo say the smart stuff - experience, strategic frameworks and brand and category nuance, for instance - that makes the machines do better. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Marketing mix modelling (MMM) only works if brands grant their agencies access to critical business data – and many don’t in a perplexing and decades-long challenge. But equally, agencies can be guilty of slowing media pricing and audience data into their client MMM models, rounding out the two-way data conundrum. It’s ironic given all the talk of partnerships and outcome-based incentives, per Mutinex APAC CEO, Mat Baxter. Bupa and Atomic 212°, says Baxter, are standout examples of genuine client-agency transparency – and it’s powering not just “marginal gain theory” in which lots of small, incremental components are optimised to drive growth, but hard, 28 per cent ROI gains in specific incidences. Bupa plugged into the platform in 2022 and performance lead Angas Hill says without a free flow of business data to Atomic 212° – sales, revenue, pricing and competitiveness data included - “there's not much point in standing up an MMM model.” Bupa does and now the CFO sees the MMM outputs as “the most trusted source we have in terms of attribution and forecasting”. Bupa uses those monthly ROI insights to shape the quarterly media plan – with Atomic 212° already plugged-in across what’s working and what’s not at a business level. “It’s just speeding up that whole process,” says Hill. “We are seeing long-term growth in our effectiveness for what is essentially flat media budgets.” Plus, he says, on-off testing via MMM, e.g. testing one region and channel against another, “is where we are seeing much more drastic changes.” Atomic 212°’s Tom Sheppard underlines broader benefits from using MMM outputs to inform trading strategy: “If we understand what the ROI is, we can negotiate. If [as a result] we can decrease that cost base of certain channels, all of a sudden we can automatically improve the return that the client is getting,” per Sheppard. “The MMM is fantastic at telling us what's worked in the past and to give us the next best decision,” he adds. Now he says Atomic 212° and Bupa are adding new inputs and channels “to get even better signals – so as a result, everyone wins.” Next step is making automatic media transaction feeds via API the norm, per Baxter. “That is the future of where we are going.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Part Two: After last week's instalment with S4 Capital's founder and former WPP boss, Sir Martin Sorrell – in which he explained why the market cap of his next generation marketing services firm had plummeted from £5 billion to £300 million in the past three years – he's back for part two. We cover the consolidation of the $700 billion global digital ad market down to a handful of global tech media players. Is that dangerous for brands and the broader marketing supply chain? Maybe, but Sir Martin thinks they're only going to get bigger. Plus, we go deeper into AI and mass personalisation – Netflix style – along with the dodgy, inaccurate, but thriving online user data trade that was revealed a month or so ago by UM's former chief privacy officer, Arielle Garcia (which is now Mi3’s top podcast and story so far this year). For the record, Sorrell agrees with Garcia: “Garbage in, garbage out ... There are some murky parts of the market, but that's our role to expose that, not to be a part of it.” Either way, he thinks the platforms will only get closer to marketers at the expense of intermediaries – and there is little agencies can do to stop it. Plus, he says OpenAI chief Sam Altman, who reckons AI will displace 95 per cent of advertising jobs, is “directionally right”. The timeframe? “Three years,” per Sorrell. “It’s going to be uncomfortable.” Conversely, Sorrell says the big platforms won’t be shrinking any time soon. On a GDP basis, “these are countries, they are not companies anymore.” He thinks that means regulation, unless co-ordinated globally, is ultimately powerless.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Most attribution analysis by digital marketing and analytics teams is too narrow to base marketing investment decisions on – and it’s leading to a chronic over-investment in paid search and under-investment in digital video according to Analytic Partners. The firm conducted a major study to unravel the gaps between digital attribution reporting for brands and market mix modelling – and there's a big difference between the two. Analytic Partners MD, Paul Sinkinson said on average, 59 per cent of the data is missing, and it can be “as high as 80 per cent”, yet attribution models mask this, because they pick up “the clicky stuff”, i.e. last click – but miss swathes of what’s happening in between, particularly within-app activity. Privacy changes and iOS-driven signal loss mean the gaps are getting bigger, making it much harder to run even a half-decent attribution model, which “is driving you to allocate activity to the wrong channels, purely because of how much data is missing,” says Sinkinson. “And it's the unequalness of those losses that then made us really concerned.” Social, the study found, is massively under-represented in those attribution models, which try to cram everything into a seven or 30-day window, favouring short-term hits above all else. Per Sinkinson: “Display – 364 per cent overvalued in an attribution model. Search – 336 per cent overvalued in an attribution model. Social – 44 per cent under measured in terms of the ROI and an attribution model. Video – 30 per cent underrepresented from an ROI perspective. So that means that we're starting to put our money into the wrong channels.” The upshot – which applies globally – is that “35 cents is wasted from every dollar invested, because you’re allocating on siloed metrics.” Those findings landed with Meta, which commissioned Analytic Partners to produce a white paper on the key research findings – and the platform’s ANZ marketing science lead, Carl McLean, says there are “very real implications” for marketing spend, especially in a soft market. How big is the problem? “It’s widespread,” per McLean. “A lot of the time it’s because there is a sense that there isn’t a better alternative.” There is – it just requires a bit more work. But the rewards are massive.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Part One: It's been three years since Sir Martin Sorrell was last on the Mi3 podcast - he declared then a mea culpa of sorts that he didn't - and couldn't - transform WPP, the giant marketing services holding company he founded in the 1970s, fast enough because it was listed. At the time (2021), Sir Martin’s next generation digital holding company, S4Capital, was firing with a market cap of circa £5 billion (AUD $9.6bn), just three years after a street fight with WPP’s board saw him exit and start the new business. He was bleak on the future of his old British firm at the time along with WPP’s French and US-based global holding company rivals. But since then, S4Capital’s market cap has plunged more than 90 per cent to £300 million (AUD $582m) as the tech sector, representing upwards of 45 per cent of S4’s revenues, slashed their own marketing budgets globally. But there’s more to it – the basics actually, like pricing S4Capital’s business services appropriately to clients. Sir Martin almost acknowledges some rookie errors at S4 in managing the business, which operates as .Monks today globally in-market across technology and content. Aside from his typically robust macro views, Sir Martin also appears to have developed a new and begrudging respect in building S4Capital for businesses that can break down business silos - and lashings of enthusiasm to hire people “who are sharers”, he says. “If ever I was to write a book, which I will never do, about our business, clients and agencies, I would say the biggest impediment is the political structure, or the structure of the companies - they are organised basically into silos,” he told Mi3 last week during a visit to Australia. “Good people tend to put their arms around things. There are exceptional people who are good, who are sharers. Those are the jewels…find good people who are good by definition, but also who share, and we do have them inside our company, but to be frank there are not as many as there should be.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Six weeks ago Mel Hopkins was rolled out of Seven amid a clinical round of cuts that added further fuel to the narrative that TV is in trouble as audiences bleed and revenue follows suit. But Hopkins, who as Optus CMO dumped the lion’s share of her media budget into Meta and Google, remains convinced TV is undervalued and undersold, says BVOD metrics and reporting are as good as anything the platforms can provide, and that the global streamers are likewise racing to “manage out cost”. Revenue challenges should therefore not be conflated with audiences, which Hopkins and Nine CMO Liana Dubois insist remain healthy – Dubois said TV reached 24.2m Australians last month. While media buyers last year said 2022 had marked “the biggest audience decline in the history of TV” and correctly forecast a 10 per cent revenue hit for linear TV as a result, Dubois said industry needs to get its terminology straight – literally – because TV delivered over the internet can still be linear TV. However it is delivered and consumed, “television today is reaching the same amount of people that it did 10 years ago,” per Dubois – and those numbers “are holding”. She warns marketers pulling out of TV for digital platforms and their dashboards are “dangerously” risking marketing effectiveness and should instead look beyond the shallow metrics – and narrative – they are being fed.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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