Just how accurate is the user data being traded by advertisers, agencies and data firms in the $700bn global digital advertising system? The former Chief Privacy Officer of UM in the US, Arielle Garcia, is exasperated - it’s garbage she says and to prove it Garcia recently accessed her profile from an ad tech vendor and found she was in “500 different audience segments across seven different data brokers, and what I saw was just a bunch of contradictory, useless, garbage data.” I.e. she was both a man and a woman, worked in food service, agriculture, a defense contractor, an engineer and was simultaneously below the poverty threshold and classified as high income. “They're selling this garbage data back and forth to one another,” she says, allowing for a host of data “premiums” to be applied by various intermediaries in the process of executing digital advertising campaigns. “Marketers have been tricked into believing that precision and personalisation equals performance,” she says. "There's so much that's wrong with that, and the inaccuracy of the data is only one piece of that fallacy.” Meanwhile, she says big agency groups have lost their way. “It’s not just principle media models (aka arbitrage) that are problematic, but the fact most of them are incentivised to hit targets by the likes of Google and it distorts the market - “it's literally about their objectivity,” she says. Agencies are not the only ones. “Google has captured the trade associations … they buy their way into every room.” If trade associations are saying “nothing to see here … of course that’s going to lull marketers into a false sense of security,” she says. Garcia argues Google’s manoeuvres with PMax – it’s AI-powered “just trust us” media placement product for it’s owned media assets like YouTube – “gives Google the ability to opaquely use their black box algorithms to move money wherever they want”, which could prove handy ahead of impending antitrust trials. Meanwhile, AI Overviews in search will “massacre traffic” for publishers. She says publishers must stop forcing people to log in and refocus on quality. For marketers, Garcia urges a “reorientation around people” and “prioritising quality over the illusion of precision.” How? “Demand transparency … there cannot be a market for black box products”, she says. Plus hold agencies accountable. “No one messes with the client that audits.” For everybody else in industry, Garcia has one ask – work out if YouTube is “covertly tracking people.” How? “Let's find out what X-Goog-Visitor-Id is.” Nobody seems to know. But that may change. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hyundai is the first brand - with some bravery - to have signed on to the 36 Months campaign to lift the minimum age for social media accounts from 13 to 16, launched by Nova Radio’s Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli and Rob Galluzzo, the boss of production company Finch. 36 months is the time a teen will reclaim from social media between 13 and 16 years. Galluzzo is “100 per cent certain” more brands will follow Hyundai to help create and fund the programs that rebuild a physical social network for teens that isn’t manipulated by the anxiety-inducing algorithms that have made young teenagers the product. Which creates the perfect platform for brands to walk all the talk about ‘purpose’ and ‘showing up in the right way’. “A brand can go to its board, and ask ‘how do we want to show up for these kids, these families, the community?’ If they don't have an answer to that, they probably need to have a pretty big discussion about what they stand for as companies,” per Galluzzo. As of last Friday, Wippa and Galluzzo had landed 90,000 signatures, more than enough to have the petition head to Canberra. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already endorsed the campaign, stating “what we want is our youngest Australians spending more time outside, playing sport, engaging with each other in a normal way, and less time online”. State and territory premiers have also backed the move – and Wippa thinks the upcoming election creates an opportunity for legislation sooner rather than later. “There’s some easy votes to be picked up from parents if you made this an election promise,” he says. Now 36 Months is building out three crucial pillars to use the time reclaimed from the platforms to better prepare young Australians for physical and digital life ahead. Here’s Wippa and Galluzzo on where next, and how brands can help repair the fractured civics they have inadvertently funded.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
A year ago Ariel Kelman boomeranged back to Salesforce after a decade helming global marketing for the likes of Amazon Web Services and Oracle. As global President and CMO of the $200bn+ customer tech giant, he’s wasted little time shaking things up – and Kelman’s view that Salesforce had “lost our focus on sales pipeline and on marketing really being a vehicle for driving business results” now appears prescient. Last week Salesforce’s stock price crashed circa 20 per cent after missing revenue guidance for the first time in decades. Ironically, most analysts still have a ‘buy rating’ on the stock – citing a “very healthy” pipeline and backing its new AI tools to power renewed growth. Kelman has driven a forensic effort unpacking marketing’s contribution to sales – from a brand investment perspective and more tactical, performance-based campaigns. He’s also reset KPIs and marketing metrics and re-engineered the firm’s attribution model – not for the fainthearted, given “you can provoke very angry religious fights” amongst attribution’s fractured tribes. Either way, Salesforce has ditched last touch for a “deep learning” model that blends and weights sales’ and marketing’s contribution to pipeline growth and revenue.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
A year ago programmatic sales were just 2 per cent of QMS’ business. By the year-end, says Head of Programmatic, Laura Wall, it will be double digits. She says the market is starting to move, and latest SMI data, with pDOOH up 100 per cent in Q1, underlines that trend. Kinesso’s Chief Media Activations Officer, Michael Whiteside, thinks even that rise is “undercooked”. He sees programmatic out of home – or pDOOH – making up 20 per cent of the market within two years. That’s partly because advertisers are seeking increased efficiency and trying to stretch budgets; partly because programmatic buying brings in a new cohort of advertisers that might have been priced out of traditional out of home; and partly because pDOOH delivers both brand and demand. But Whiteside thinks there needs to be a better understanding of the value that programmatic out of home brings. CPMs, he says, are not the only factor – and advertisers with weak attribution models cannot correctly value the flexibility and targeting afforded by pDOOH – especially if they are comparing it to other programmatic media. Understanding out of home’s nuance from a planning and buying perspective remains imperative – and it cannot be lumped in with broader programmatic channels. Hence QMS’ teams selling on a “total out of home basis”. Creating sales silos, says Wall, played out badly in publishing’s early programmatic days. Either way, some of Essencemediacom’s early adopter clients are now pushing 100 per cent of OOH budgets into programmatic, says Group Director Katherine ‘KP’ Pochroj, who suggests “remnant inventory … is simply not a thing any more”. Entertainment and ecom brands, she says, are making major gains from mapping stores and high value audiences through mobile data – and are able to directly attribute sales increases to their programmatic buys. But better measurement, says Pochroj, is required to keep pDOOH’s momentum moving. Kinesso’s Whiteside thinks the launch of MOVE 2.0 will provide sharper answers – and “highlight the value of each panel”.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
It’s not sexy but like AI, it’s going to affect your job – and your company. Another salvo in the fast approaching privacy regime set for tabling in parliament in August was fired last week by the ACCC around how personal information is collected and used by data firms – Experian, Nielsen, Publicis-owned Epsilon and Woolworths-owned Quantium were among those flagged by the competition regulator last week in its eighth interim report as part of the multi year Digital Platforms Inquiry. And to be blunt, any professional working in ecom, marketing, customer experience, digital advertising and data and analytics is going to have a rude shock for what they can do now versus what is likely in a year or perhaps a bit longer. But UNSW Business School’s Professor of Practice, Peter Leonard, says last week’s release by the ACCC of its Data Products and Services interim report makes “every firm in this economy a data firm.” And in the short-term, that’s not good news for most companies because their data readiness and maturity is not matched by the “fundamental change” which will force everyone to “rethink their understanding” of what even defines personal information” according to ADMA’s Director of Legal and Advocacy, Sarla Fernando. Leonard and Fernando are joined by Capital Brief’s Legal and Regulatory Affairs Correspondent, Laurel Henning and Civic Data’s founder, Chris Brinkworth. And for a tantalising teaser, Future Media’s Ricky Sutton lays out the changes Google is making to its search engine which is already seeing organic referral traffic to publishers abroad drop 40 per cent – brands, he says, are facing similar declines. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
News Corp’s first party tech build is now at point where the publisher will match spend from customers using its new platform and run it in parallel with a standard cookie-based approach to prove it delivers much bigger reach and more sales. Via a “privacy compliant” approach using its first party data and data matching via the likes of Google, LiveRamp, Adobe, InfoSum and AdFixus alongside its more commerce-focused websites, News can find buyers who are ready to buy specific products. Hence calling the new stack Intent Connect. Director of Commercial Data, Video & Product, Paul Blackburn, says one “large supermarket” – flip a coin – has increased spend “3,000 per cent” after trialling Intent Connect. GM of Digital Revenue, Mark Brownie, cites tests with “a major insurance company” that used News’ “self-learning, self-optimising segments” to boost acquisition by 199 per cent versus cookies. “We’re not talking about vanity media metrics, we’re talking about hard sales,” per Blackburn. Plus, log-level attribution benchmarking, says National Head of Digital, Jess Gilby, “shows 197 per cent increase in reported reach, which is huge, and 10 per cent higher conversion rates - and we're just getting started”. Those reach gains are because News’ can now measure across browsers that have already killed off cookies – basically the other half of the internet. Meanwhile, offsite targeting is growing rapidly after News launched vertical video products – AKA shorts – basically the same formats as social media, which means buyers can use the same ads across both social and News’ sites to extend reach without having to do everything twice. Buyers are buying in. “Our total video stream number is around the 4 billion mark – and 3 billion of those are happening outside of our owned and operated environments,” says Brownie. Plus, it’s going hyper local – using the log-ins from 100 local mastheads to enable stores to “upload lists of their outlets and automatically generated audiences based on that data,“ says Brownie. “That's really powerful from a pure addressability standpoint, but it also tells a retailer a tonne of stuff about their existing or future customers in those areas, and the nuances between the different locations.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In most B2B businesses lead generation, or individual qualified "lead gen” more accurately, is at the core of business marketing - certainly for the tech sector. The merits of focusing on groups of buyers influential in a large corporate purchase over an individual executive is not new, but what is has a veteranB2B marketing analyst warning that almost every sector in B2B is still “focused on completely the wrong thing”. And the required shift that Kerry Cunningham, a former Forrester Principal Analyst now at US-based 6Sense, says is needed from B2B marketers has the backing of the Global VP and Head of Marketing at engineering giant ABB, Jo Woo, who agrees “traditional lead metrics are outdated”. B2B marketers must ditch their “obsession with counting leads”, she says, justas sales teams too must rethink their approach. For Andrew Haussegger, CEO at specialist B2B agency Green Hat, part of the fix is to “free the content”. That is, stop putting content behind a gate in order to capture leads – because brands need to influence a much broader set of people much earlier. Here’s the conversation that puts the hard data on lead generation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The likes of CommBank, Westpac, Suncorp, McDonald’s and KFC are showing the rest of the market how to do women’s sports beyond just slapping on a logo – and it’s paying off in spades, according to GroupM Chief Investment Officer Mel Hey and Foxtel Media Head of Sport NSW, Caitlin O’Meara. But while existing men’s code sponsors are migrating spend into women’s sport, the broader market remains behind the curve – despite significant growth in both female and male audiences. According to O’Meara, audience numbers for AFL W and NRL W last year climbed 28 per cent and 43 per cent respectively when measured via Kantar versus OzTam’s panel (which “probably wasn’t a true representation,” per O’Meara). The average audience for NRL W is now 55,000 she adds, with the higher audience figure helping women’s codes attract greater sponsor funding as a result. Interestingly, consumption of the women’s codes on Foxtel is more linear than streamed – up to 60 per cent linear versus an average of 25 per cent in men’s sport. “There is still a big opportunity for more brands to get involved,” says O’Meara, especially as the women’s codes are adding more rounds each season. She says it’s still a relatively low-cost entry point for brands increasingly keen to be part of cultural moments that sport provides – and bring those stories to life, from the top teams down to the grass roots, building mutual brand, code and audience growth along the way. For brands now weighing up women’s sport sponsorship, Hey says they could do worse than lift the templates built by the likes of CommBank, Westpac and Suncorp. “They have to make sure they're showing up with authenticity and going beyond just taking a sponsorship and a logo. They should be looking at how they can actually integrate and grow the sport and the players within the sport beyond just the game.” Hey sees a shift now underway as brands aim for new growth opportunities outside more “cluttered” environments – and suggests women’s sport is one of the safer bets amid current market flux. “From a pure numbers perspective, sport actually provides consistency and reach. It's actually the one area, whether you’re talking linear or streaming, that provides a consistent and engaged audience.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This conversation is about getting marketers, agencies, media and tech to become more like chartered accountants – in a good way. That is, have letters after their name that mark them out to employers, peers and recruiters as the most horizontally skilled and relevant in the business – and be required to continue learning every year to keep them. Which is precisely why Mi3 and the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) have partnered. Log-in and read Mi3’s articles and earn continuous professional development (CPD) points that count towards retaining the AMI’s Certified Practising Marketer (CPM) status. CPMs need 100 points every year to keep their status. So get reading. But first, listen to why chartered status, continuous learning and breadth of skills are critical for marketers and those in the supply chain that want to a) remain relevant and b) progress to the top and beyond. Menulog CMO Simon Cheng is using the AMI framework of 25 competencies to create “horizontal” marketers. “Don’t be afraid to swim in other lanes, and become best mates with the CFO” is his advice to marketers – and amass financial acumen much earlier in your career. For AFL marketing boss, Anthony Voyage, harnessing the framework is all about “marketing fitness” and gaining incremental advantage through it. Chelsea Wymer knows exactly the value of chartered status – because she’s CMO at Chartered Accounts Australia and New Zealand, which accredits 136,000 chartered accountants. Her advice? “Take control of your own learning” – and sign up with the AMI: “It really does tell the organisations we work for that we're more than just ‘the colouring in department’; that we're experts with serious tech and digital skills – and commercial acumen.” AMI CEO Bronwyn Heys says businesses need “bench-ready talent” if they are to promote from within – which requires more horizontal and “more adaptable” talent given accelerating flux. Hence developing the AMI’s 25 competencies with counterparts in the UK, Europe and the US. But she says there is one constant: “If you do not have commercial acumen as a marketer, you are going to fail.” AMI Board Chair Andrew Thornton says recruiters are exasperated at the lack of “broader, non-marketing expertise” in those applying for CMO roles. “It is really hindering where they are going,” he suggests. If recruiters are telling you what’s closing off your job options… it’s probably worth listening.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
‘Virtual professor’ Mark Ritson says advertisers should be allocating circa 11 per cent of media budgets to total audio. Problem is, the market’s not buying Ritson’s line. Audio’s dollar share is sitting just over half of that and static, despite broadcast audiences increasing 6 per cent since Covid and time spent on total audio surging 49 per cent. SCA thinks media planners may be behind the curve – and aims to change that by hammering home both the audience growth message and the fact it now has the tech firepower and user data to compete with the likes of Meta, Amazon and Google on performance-led conversion. Via audio platform LiSTNR, approaching 2 million logged-in users, SCA is armed with personalisation smarts and first party data matching via data cleanrooms that enable highly efficient and effective audience targeting via dynamic creative messaging. That means it can deliver both sharper behavioural and contextual targeting as well as broadcast reach – and some major QSR and cosmetics brands are piling in for a deeper read on where key audiences are, and what they are consuming. But you need to cover both bases, per National Head of Audio Sales Luke Minto, because SCA uses the tech stack in its own marketing efforts – and watched conversion plummet 30 per cent when broad reach was wound down for targeted performance alone. While advertisers need a deeper understanding of what audio can now deliver, Head of Digital Ad Product and Operations, Kim Loasby, says her key message to advertisers is “you don’t have to be an expert.” SCA will walk buyers though the layers. Loasby says SCA has just done that for a certain mattress brand – where buyers are in market every five years at best. By ingesting the brand’s data, SCA found its high value customers “significantly over-indexed in listening to Abbie Chatfield … So then we could definitively say ‘people who are lookalikes to your highest value customers are likely to be entertained by this piece of content’.” It worked. “They immediately pushed some more data.” Other brands, she says, are using SCA’s new data capabilities and dynamic creative optimisation to re-engage lapsed buyers while suppressing others – making the budget go further. “So we are seeing our ad tech pay dividends for brands already.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The stampede by companies into CX, with massive associated investments into martech, specialists teams and organisational overhauls, is having little impact on customer experience scores – and big banks, telcos, and car brands are at best benchmarked as average, despite investing billions collectively. CSBA Managing Director, Paul van Veenendaal, has seven years of CX performance data from 12,000 annual assessments across 200 Australian firms and it’s a sobering read for those firms heralding their commitment to connecting up and improving the experience across all customer contact points. In short, all that tech investment is simply not hooked up to customer contact centres – and NPS scores, which many leadership teams have linked to performance and bonuses, are “being gamed”, he warns, for better but hollow CX benchmarks. No big brands feature in the top 10 of CSBA’s CX rankings, and only one, a superannuation company, makes the top 20. Chatbots aren’t up to scratch yet, says van Veenendaal, and companies have “pretty much parked” speech analytics. Meanwhile despite heavy investment in digital transformation, call centre volumes have not declined over the last seven years – and those call centres are focused on the wrong outcomes and metrics, he says. Hence underwhelming CX scores across CSBA’s rankings. But some sectors are nailing it: Universities and colleges, utility companies and local authorities – the latter at least partially due to the policies of a one-time adman and former Victorian Premier. Here’s where van Veenendaal thinks it’s all going wrong – and how to fix it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Tourism NT has always scored its biggest wins targeting the over 50s. Problem is, every other brand has twigged they’re the only one still spending. Cutting through is harder because other tourism bodies are going large on media to carve out their own slice. Plus, it’s already tricky for tourism operators to differentiate. Atomic 212°’s Asier Carazo plays a game of “hide the logo” with Tourism NT’s team every time he visits Darwin, showing other tourism body ads without their branding, and usually catches them out. “I can’t deny that we all get tripped occasionally,” admits Tourism NT marketing boss Tony Quarmby. “Unless you have the Opera House in your shot or Uluru … then it's really only the cityscapes that are going to make any difference. And to most consumers, a city is a city.” Problem is, most of the over 50s have “done” Uluru – so how to convince them that the NT is more than the iconic rock? At the same time, over 50s mindsets have shifted. They are far more safety conscious than even two years ago, says Quarmby, more anxious and more price focused – and that flux is ongoing. So Tourism NT needs to hit consumers with relevant, personalised content that speaks to those shifting mindsets, calms consumer nerves and gets them spending. Meanwhile, for the under 50s market, Quarmby needs to sell the NT as an experience and adventure that rivals overseas travel – without the expense of leaving the country. Hence Tourism NT going through a massive media, martech and process overhaul. At the heart sits a customer data platform, or CDP, to enable deeper understanding of key demo mindsets and more effective “real-time” personalised comms. Plus, it should help media budgets go further – i.e. by supressing ads to less relevant prospects, “and making sure we are seeking new people,” per Atomic’s Ashleigh Carter. Quarmby expects the new stack and approach to “make a big difference” in about six months time. In the meantime, he’s backing Atomic to deliver best bang for buck with smarter tactical campaigns to keep visitors incoming. He cites NT’s hijacking of the Adelaide AFL Gather Round last month, reaching millions with Uluru-themed billboards and then retargeting them with discount vouchers – delivering “370 per cent plus in ROI” – as the kind of approach it needs to take. Atomic’s Carazo thinks brands need to embrace the current chaotic environment and accept having to work harder on media campaigns to move the needle. “More craft, more high-touch media activity is definitely going to pay off,” he says. “Set and forget” won’t cut it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
There’s so much happening on the regulatory front it’s dizzying, so Mi3 called in the experts for an update - and it’s proven rather revealing: Despite intensive lobbying from loyalty scheme operators and beyond, Australia’s sweeping privacy law overhaul remains on course to land this year – with massive implications for just about every business. “It's now clear that we will see a substantial broadening of what is regulated as personal information,” according to Data Synergies Principal, Peter Leonard. “That will include use of online tracking codes and techniques such as fingerprinting, which enable the targeting of individual consumers – and I think we will see that regulation encompassing not only online targeted advertising, but also targeting of content.” Which gives publishers something to ponder – especially those making major martech investments, says Civic Data’s Chris Brinkworth. Across all sectors, Brinkworth warns companies are leaking data on a wholesale basis “in a way that contravenes current Australian Privacy Principles let alone future Australian Privacy Principles”. The broadening of personal information definitions will also govern use of CX data within martech stacks, effectively limiting what banks and retailers, for example, can do with customer data unless they can explain it to “someone of below average intelligence,” per Leonard - and provided it passes a test of ‘fair and reasonable’ use. If not, prepare to fall foul of the Privacy Act, face class action lawsuits and massive fines. The Feds, warns Leonard, are getting firmer on their position, and industry is not being heard “at the same level that privacy advocates and a number of the consumer organisations are being heard in Canberra”. Meanwhile, the ACCC’s probe of data brokers is expected back from Treasury as early as this week, with fallout likely for Australia’s marketing supply chain. “We’re all talking about Meta and Google hoovering up data, but I think the biggest operator in terms of data brokerage in Australia is Woolworths’ Quantium,” per Laurel Henning, Legal and Regulatory Affairs Correspondent at Capital Brief. But across the pond, Google now faces genuinely existential challenges, says Future Media’s Ricky Sutton, as the US Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission “have both said that what they're seeking is a breakup of Google. So there are big changes ahead.” Governments, he says, have decided enough is enough, big tech is about to cop it – and the impacts will market-wide.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Uber’s ads business is starting to scale and its New York-based boss Michael Akkerman says Australia – one of its best performing markets, with a rapidly growing sales operation – will see the next wave of new formats first. He’s touting retail media meets “mobility media” and a collapsed funnel “brand-formance” model - brand and performance marketing in a single execution. A younger, richer set exposed to an Uber Ride brand ad is driving hard sales via Uber Eats with verified "closed loop” attribution. Akkerman was in Sydney last week wooing “hundreds” of agency execs and rattling off big numbers. Coke’s gamified ads in the ride business got a tonne of new customers and orders via Eats. Absolute Vodka got a 28 per cent sales increase, HSBC likewise a major uplift – and they are coming back for more. Akkerman says the delineation of brand and performance is a false construct. The purpose of brand is ultimately to drive longer-term sales, but put a call to action – a performance element on a brand ad – and a percentage of people will immediately go and buy. People don’t think ‘brand versus demand’, he says, only marketers. But Akkerman reckons that is shifting rapidly in a fast fulfilment world. Just don’t ask Uber for “cheap eyeballs” and rock-bottom rates: “We can seek affordability … but to me it is about return on ad spend.” Whether procurement departments agree remains to be seen. But Akkerman suggests advertisers get what they pay for. He’s claiming Uber ads deliver much higher click through rates, circa 3 per cent versus the “0.000x per cent” brands would be “lucky” to get on other platforms, and is fraud free, because “bots don’t hail cars”. Meanwhile it’s privacy compliant – because everyone has signed up and linked their credit cards. Plus advertisers are connected with “actual humans, not digital representations.” Hence why Uber’s bullish on hitting a billion dollar ad business very soon – if it hasn’t already.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Marketing effectiveness is getting worse. Dan Krigstein, Director of think tank The Growth Distillery and Ogilvy Chief Strategy Officer and Innovation Lead, Toby Harrison, have spent the last six months working out why – and building a framework they are now bringing to market in a bid to reverse the effectiveness slump. Their findings literally flip industry-wide assumptions on their head – and expose deep misunderstanding on the power of influence (not influencers) in decision-making. If you take nothing else out of this podcast, it’s that our brains are overloaded, the signals that help us make decisions are missing and “active cynicism” is the baseline. “A world of doubt creates a chasm which influence can fill,” says Harrison. But most brands are missing that trick, mistakenly thinking that consumers trust brands and their message. We don’t. We trust those with whom we have affinity – our influences – much more. For that reason, as Harrison puts it: “People down the pub are doing a way better job in merchandising brands than any of us have been.” Crucially, say Krigstein and Harrison, the assumption that optimal effectiveness is achieved by hitting people in their restive, least-distracted state is entirely wrong. Hit us when our brains are most stressed, they suggest. “If you can take an affinity-lead message at a time where cognitive load is highest, it's actually most potent,” per Krigstein. But don’t hit people with more information. “The Midas touch in this is to remove the difficulty that already exists and give a simple, easy, definitive processing answer – because we cannot rationalise this stuff anymore,” says Harrison. “There has never been a richer or better opportunity for brands to actually start providing the type of influence that people are seeking to help them make the decisions that they need to. And that is a tremendously exciting opportunity.” Welcome to the world of real influence.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Five years ago media ecologist Jack Myers made a prediction in the second ever edition of Mi3: By 2025 media would be largely automated and almost totally AI-informed and just a quarter of sales would remain with people and ideas. It happened faster than even he thought. Now Myers predicts that within 12-18 months max, most media planning will be entirely machine-led. By 2030, he reckons “80 per cent or more of all media planning and buying will be done without human intervention or without the necessity of humans”, with major implications for jobs. Meanwhile, AI is already being turned in on itself to spotlight where the money is being wasted amid a “programmatic backlash”. The “machines are actually checking on machines,” says Myers, “increasingly, humans are out of the mix.” He forecasts an incoming wave of consolidation across major media companies and a “collapse of the programmatic marketplace”. For agencies, “the re-emergence of consolidated agencies”, i.e. creative and media back together, “is the big story of 2025-26”. Myers thinks generative AI will force that toothpaste back into the tube. “So I believe in 2024-25, we're going to see massive consolidation, massive contraction, and then in 2025, 26, 27 a rebirth of the advertising business.” But 2025, he warns, will be tough, with a “reasonably massive cutback in spending as marketers work out what is working, and what is not”. Plus Myers – who likewise called out retail media’s impact early – sees a “can of worms” for the sector as journalists and analysts uncover instances of arbitrage of non-retail inventory within some retail media networks. He also has reservations on the surge by media owners into data clean rooms – Disney alone is operating 100-plus – “Who is cleaning the data? Who is validating that it is clean?” Meanwhile, Myers thinks Accenture’s “quiet” ascendance to become a top tier digital media buyer likewise warrants greater scrutiny.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
IAG Chief Customer & Marketing Officer Michelle Klein returned to Australia last May after more than a decade abroad and embarked on arguably one of the most ambitious – and interesting - corporate customer experience transformation programs in this market for a long time. Such was the complexity and need for top tech and creative talent across every customer touchpoint for NRMA Insurance – think digital channels, apps and websites, retail customers, communities large and small, mass and personalised communications and customer acquisition and retention – that Klein opted for one external partner to work on everything with her team. It’s what Accenture Song’s ANZ boss Mark Green says is a ‘lighthouse project’ globally for the firm – backed up by New York-based Global CEO David Droga and Creative Chairman Nick Law. Droga says his firm has spent the past decade bringing global tech and creative capabilities together and he says NRMA Insurance will be an international proof point on why end-to-end CX programs need more creative thinking and execution, not just an off-the-shelf tech template, particularly as AI continues its march into commerce and society. “Like all these new technologies, it sets new horizons where everyone gets so excited about what the technology allows us to do that we put aside our creativity for a bit of awe in what that technology allows. Then when we realise that everybody can do exactly the same thing with that technology, everyone's like, ‘oh, we need to innovate with that, where's the tech, where's the creativity?’” Klein agrees the killer combo is tech with creativity and innovation, done differently. Some of the new program will be ready for the Paris Olympics in July when NRMA Insurance will make much of heading into its 100th year. But like her broader mantra on reinventing CX across every touchpoint for NRMA Insurance, the Olympics will do likewise. “It's not just linear TV, this is a fully integrated…program,” she says. “What I love about this partnership with Nine is that it will reach almost the entire population in a way that they've thought through every channel, every touch point.” So here’s how Klein, Droga, Law and Green see the grand plan unfolding and how they’re measuring success.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Julie Nestor was one of the earliest Australian marketers to leverage owned media at scale, first at Optus and American Express and now – via Hilton Hotels and eBay – at Mastercard. The APAC marketing chief says owned media helped Optus get beyond mobile and into broader media and communications – and moved the needle for Amex, both in bringing on more merchant partners and driving customer loyalty, retention and spend through personalised offers. Now she says it is “by far” Mastercard’s most efficient channel via the ‘Priceless’ platform, with priceless.com both monetised and serving as the engine room for Mastercard and its main business partners – i.e. the big banks and their customers. Hence the firm continuing to invest heavily in owned media – everything from offsetting paid investment into its Australian Open partnership to building gaming platforms for banks and fintechs in Asia, to helping Ukrainian refugees find homes. But while owned media strategies today are increasingly sophisticated, the fundamentals remain the same as at Optus 20 years ago – which back then leveraged analogue customer bills to cross-sell. “Be where your customers are and where you are going to get most attention,” says Nestor. Likewise, understanding the value of owned channels is key. Nestor worked with specialist owned media consultancy Sonder at Amex and again at Mastercard. Quantifying “real dollar figures” with “measurable numbers” both internally and externally to partners, she says, is critical in maximising leverage and underlining “how marketing supports a business to grow revenue”. Sonder ran an owned media valuation audit for Mastercard across 10 markets, benchmarking metrics such as “click-throughs, time on site, sell-through” against “our $10 billion rate pool, which gives us a single source of truth” for owned asset value, per co-founder Angus Frazer. Having worked with the likes of ANZ, Amex and Mastercard, Sonder’s Jonathan Hopkins thinks the finance sector is about to show the retail media sector just how powerful owned media can be – given its “unparalleled data” and massive footprint. “It’s the tip of the iceberg,” says Hopkins. “They are already way ahead of other companies.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Marketers and media companies had just about got to grips with audience fragmentation brought about by social media and online video. Now the next big wave is coming fast from global streamers piling into TV’s heartland with ad plays because their subscriber growth has maxed out. They’re targeting the young with localised reality shows, comedy and romantic dramas, and the old with documentaries and crime while taking aim at live TV’s biggest bastion by bidding for sports rights. That hasn’t always worked out for the likes of Amazon, which has pulled back from Premier League rights acquisition in the UK. But it has Disney and Fox Sports worried enough to try to get a combined sports platform off the ground in the US and over regulatory hurdles. Ampere Analysis veteran analyst Guy Bisson thinks similar collaboration from broadcasters locally may be required – and could be good for audiences. Across the piste, Bisson breaks down where audiences are going, how much time they are spending on each channel, and where the money’s headed – with Australia ahead of the global tipping point on streaming versus TV consumption, but not yet in terms of TV-video ad dollar reallocation. For broadcasters, the push by Amazon, Netflix and others into ads kills the old TV versus online video debate and removes the moat around ad-funded quality long form video. “It's no longer about ‘should I do TV, or should I do online?’ It's, ‘I can do everything I can do on TV on streaming’, says Bisson. He thinks broadcasters can compete on reach, targeting and content but need to accelerate streaming-first pivots to regain and retain audiences that definitely want free streamed TV versus the new pay TV – and strategically steal what they can.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Meta’s News Media Bargaining Code rug-pull lit up the media sector and has government, regulatory and lobbyist wheels spinning – some would say belatedly, given all the warning signals. Circa $70m in publisher cash - some argue it could be $100m - from Meta will no longer be on the table later this year, leaving Google the only game in town for a newsmedia sector already seriously pressured. Smaller publishers fear Meta pulling news from its feeds in Australia – as it did when Canada attempted to strong-arm the social media giant into paying news publishers – will lead to potentially existential audience and revenue hits. And there could bewidespread carnage if the Federal Treasurer ‘designates’ Meta, as is probable, forcing the tech giant into an independent arbitration process which by law means it will have to pay what thearbitrator rules between one of two fixed bids from Meta and media companies. Many argue Meta’s concerns for Australian designation means it will set international precedent for other countries to hunt billions more for newsmedia and lead to a full-scale exit of Facebook and Instagram in Australia rather than pay and trigger a costly global movement. Here’s everything you need to know on a delicate power game in which a sovereign government can't blink against a global tech giant, leaving Meta few options but to exit Australia entirely if it chooses to break Australian law and not pay. The world’s eyes are back on Australia - for bloodsport and money. And that’s before the podcast panel gets to AI and IP rights and remuneration. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
James Mulvey
6y weekly Yeti re is saw is it we t you we 66