Mi3 Audio Edition

AI’s impact is rapidly eroding public trust in content, including the vast volumes originated by brands.Gen Z is leading the public concern, typified by confusion over what is real and what has been blurred, blended and bent by nefarious AI operatives with hot prompts.At stake for marketers and corporate affairs in an independently commissioned study called News Nation, is escalating consumer doubt over the provenance and authenticity of the content they consume – and around the brands linked to it. It holds as much for brand-produced content and owned channels as the content from others they pay to place their ads around.The impact for brands is seismic – VaynerMedia’s Gary “Vee” Vaynerchuk predicts in as little as two years, “we're not going to believe a single video on the internet, not one”. (It’s a pressing problem for a content house and media buyer like Vaynerchuk who invests big client ad dollars in social video.)The war in Iran offers the latest example, where graphics from a video game have been shared as real footage and viewed 70 million times.The Gulf conflict has triggered a new flight to trusted sources – people seeking out truth from news sites. Audiences are spiking – particularly younger Australians, according to the latest ThinkNewsBrands data, which suggests one of the biggest shifts in behaviour and sentiment since Covid is now underway.Yet advertisers are largely absent on the soft assets they say matter most – reputation and trust. Already they’re missing Gen Z’s return to selective news environments, in part because they deploy blunt brand safety tools that suppress and blacklist content and environments considered unsafe for their brands to be alongside. Their customers, particularly the younger set, meanwhile, pile into content they feel safer to trust.Case in point? Major brands blocked adverts on Time Magazine’s Taylor Swift cover story because suppression lists detected the word “feminist”; likewise, the same kill switch was deployed for a Time article on the James Webb telescope – because it mentioned the “violent death of a star”. Advertisers also missed out on surging Wimbledon and Olympics audiences because of blocked words like ‘shot’, ‘smash’ and ‘killer technique’. The Trade Desk’s VP – ANZ James Bayes, News Corp Australia’s Laura Maxwell and Nine’s Ashleigh Thomas suggest marketers and media buyers align with real, in-market customers and audience behaviour – and challenge the commercial incentives of brand safety firms whose fees and revenues on these products are linked to volume and the appearance of good governance. Brands also need to question whether they can afford to keep pouring money into walled gardens dominated by AI-created content. Especially when nobody believes it is real, nobody trusts it, and ultimately, if nobody worth targeting watches.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing Last year, one of the world’s leading minds on attention, Amplified founder Dr Karen Nelson-Field, set out to put a figure on the eye-watering cost of dull media. The job followed on from the esteemed Dr Peter Field and Eatbigfish consultancy lead, Adam Morgan’s original work ascertaining the cost associated with dull creative. The media work was based on attention volume – a metric that compares how much attention an ad actually gets versus how much is theoretically possible (the total time in view). Globally, the tariff exposed was huge: US$198bn per year is being spent to make up for shortfall of dull media choices as attention collapses tenfold and the mental availability opportunity is lost. That’s an average of $0.43 in every dollar spent. And it’s even higher than the $189bn wasted on dull creative per the former research. Now for the first time, the true cost of dull media has been revealed in Australia, and yep, it’s equally shocking: $6bn in annual wasted media budget. That’s over 20% of the nearly $30 billion Australian marketers reportedly spent on advertising in 2025. The numbers behind the dollar headline are stark: Very dull media makes advertising up to 12× less efficient, meaning every dollar has to work dramatically harder to generate the same outcome. Only 38 per cent of viewers are reaching the crucial 2.5-second memory threshold – the point when advertising is encoding in memory, per Dr Nelson-Field – from the media choices brands are marketing right now. That means brand impact falls 35%, weakening brand growth – something marketers cannot afford to do. “These are sticker shock moments for people because … we're not codifying the value, we're codifying the loss. And it makes people really gasp, quite frankly, because they don't really realise it at an aggregate level,” Dr Field says. “What that technically means is you need the same amount of money again, Australia, to get the same outcomes in non-dull if you continue to advertise in extremely or very dull media.” An underlying conundrum is too many are chasing the cheapest CPM and reach, thinking that’s both efficient and effective, when in fact it’s an illusion: Too often the brand is sacrificing being seen to simply being served, says Dr Nelson-Field. For Peita Pacey, chief strategy and behaviour change officer, Hearts & Science Australia, part of the Omnicom Media Group, Dr Field’s data finally puts a price on something many planners, strategists and marketers have felt intuitively. “This is not about vilifying different channels, just to be really clear, it’s actually about understanding the role very specifically of channels in order delivering to specific objectives,” she says. “It’s also not about necessarily chasing a new metric. We have a number of different metrics we use when we're planning and when we're negotiating, and maybe some of them aren't as fit for purpose as they used to be, because we have more data now. But it's really about giving us the tools in our armour so we can go and more effectively plan to cognition and think about human processing, rather than just exposure or opportunity to see.” Val Morgan MD, Guy Burbidge, goes further, arguing obsession with reach and CPMs has led too many down the garden path to media choices that do not pay off. “I don't think it's any secret that something like $0.75 cents or $0.80, and the dollar is going into the big platforms. That's really what the problem is,” he says. “What we see is proxies like reach and CPM overtaking some of the other more important and more valuable proxies, like outcomes, windows of time – what we're all trying to actually deliver as marketers. An awful lot of channels, ours included, are being debased to those two very simple things.” Listen to the full conversation here. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large 95 per cent of St Kilda Football Club’s marketing budget goes into its owned assets. Chief Customer and Commercial Officer, Michael Scott, has worked across some of the world’s biggest and best consumer marketing companies. Now he’s packaging up “rich reach” and “mind-blowing” engagement rates to woo advertisers. The likes of Chery are buying in: Across two years working with the Chinese car brand, “we've increased their awareness by 17 percentage points, consideration by eight percentage points, and trust by 14 percentage points,” says Scott. “For a new entrant brand that had almost no awareness … that's an incredible result, which we've been able to deliver through our owned media channels.” Engagement rates among St Kilda’s fans and members eclipse anything Scott’s seen at the likes of Rip Curl and Nike. Email open rates are 60-70 per cent; TikTok engagement rates between 9-10.5 per cent. Instagram? “Our engagement rate is four to five times that of Nike.” He’s betting advertisers will pay a premium for “rich reach” versus bigger audiences touted by media rivals. Scott sees Netflix, Paramount and Stan as competitors. “I've always been an advocate of having a quality conversation with a small number of people on the street, rather than walking through the middle of the road with a megaphone. I’m not sure yelling at the top of your voice achieves much,” per Scott. St Kilda’s is simultaneous stretching its own base beyond middle-aged male heartlands. Tweenage girls are a key growth target; the club sees major upside within the women’s game. Scott has monetised owned media with the likes of Myer and Virgin Australia – and says functional silos are the biggest blockers, particularly for retail media networks. “It just becomes far more powerful and easier to execute when the egos are dropped, the paradigms are put to the side, and everyone just recognises the incredible value which [owned media] offers the organisation.” He suggests underlining the financial upside concentrates minds. “I think the value creation – on a dollars and cents level – was the thing that probably captured most people's attention. You can talk to acquisition of data, personalisation and marketing sharpness and they are all nice to hear. But the CEO or CFO are the ultimate arbiters on where resource is placed. So you need to present a value creation story. That's probably the thing that allows organisations to shift gear.” Jonathan Hopkins and Angus Frazer, founders of owned media consultancy Sonder, back that view to the hilt.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large Merging two massive holdco structures after the global Omnicom-IPG merger and culling 100 brands is not for the faint hearted. Overhauling the local operating model entirely at the same time? Fraught with risk. But Nick Garrett’s master plan has the blessing of Omnicom chairman John Wren, and Garrett says he wouldn’t have taken the job without licence to radically recut the ANZ business.  If it works, “I think the US and other markets are all looking at this with support and optimism, hoping that this is a great test case”, says Garrett. The new model puts a three-pronged upstream advisory layer at the top of its structure, supported by six ‘centres of excellence’, pooling and centralising resources to concentrate firepower as Omnicom heads “upstream”. It’s going head-to-head in “transformation” and business strategy through brand with the likes of Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey and Bain while taking marketers and customer chiefs upstream with them.  Too many marketers have been relegated to execution, per Garrett. He thinks Omnicom Oceania’s new approach can help both parties regain strategic high ground. Corporate and government relations firm GRACosway may play an outsized role in opening up that pathway. A major content and creative automation play for the group is also imminent – but it’s not Ted Horton’s BRX.  Garrett says not to undertake radical surgery poses the greatest risk for comms holding companies – they’ve become too narrow and communications focused and lost the strategic high ground across industries and inside corporate executive leadership teams. With IPG absorbed, he thinks widespread industry speculation that at least one, perhaps two fewer direct holdco competitors by year’s end is plausible - a WPP break-up and piecemeal sell-off being one of them. But it’s telling that while eyeing consulting firms’ turf and moving away from a media and creative-led holdco into marketing transformation services, Garrett, when pushed, reckons Publicis is a bigger threat to Omnicom’s new growth model than Accenture Song. Despite the seismic overhaul, Garrett claims Omnicom Oceania is six months ahead of where the market thinks it is. But the proof is in the pudding – there’s a lot riding on whether Omnicom’s people can actually stretch to the new model’s intent. Garrett’s confident. Here’s what’s coming next. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing Live shopping, a blend of live video, real-time interaction and in-stream checkouts, is becoming a significant incremental ecommerce growth lever. Global figures suggest living shopping will tip an eye-watering US$2 trillion by 2030 and hit $1 trillion this year. It’s already revolutionising retail in Asian markets: Live shopping in China represents 80 per cent of the incremental growth in the ecommerce sector. A big driver for this gamified commerce phenomenon? FOMO. Per eBay research, almost half of Australians (48%) are driven by fear of missing out in their shopping habits, and one in two say they’ve missed out on coveted limited edition or rare items they would have liked to have purchase. With such insights to hand, eBay Live launched in Australia just in time for Christmas, coupling the livestream broadcasting format with its goods marketplace. First port of call: The growing collectables audience of buyers and sellers on its platform (30 per cent of Australians are collectors). Over the last 3-4 years, eBay took a position that it wasn’t going to be a marketplace for everyone and everything, says eBay head of marketing and communications, Zannie Abbott. Core categories for eBay include car parts and accessories, pre-loved fashion and the ballooning category of collectibles and trading cards.  “There are other places where you can buy your tissues and your nappies, but we really are the place to go for the things you love, and we have really doubled down in specific focus categories where we know we have a right to win here locally in Australia,” she says. “There is a perfect synergy around community, commerce and culture as an opportunity that really is ripe for us.” eBay Live has been natively built into the marketplace and app. Users can go straight into a live stream and start bidding and buying, participating in short auction bursts running for just seconds. The local rollout took a snappy six weeks thanks to learnings from US and UK launches, cross-functional collaboration and an “agile” all-in approach to innovation fuelled by a low-ego culture, says Abbott. Trust is at the heart of the offering, continues eBay Live category manager, Eric Chen. Every seller is vetted, handpicked as much for personality and broadcast potential as they are for their selling prowess. Tapping directly into FOMO and culture, eBay chose to make its first Aussie livestream secret, featuring AFL superstar, Buddy Franklin, who auctioned rare, signed AFL trading cards for just $0.01. The global trading card games market is forecast to grow to $18bn in the next five years. “It's incredibly exciting for everyone tuning in at the moment, but that also then turns into content afterwards that reaches a much bigger audience,” Chen says. “We just had a stream last week with Veronica Taylor, who was the original voice of Ash Ketchum for the Pokémon 30th anniversary event. These moments are something we’re able to build through eBay Live, which previously we didn't have a platform for, and create these special moments.” To grow awareness and education, eBay Live’s marketing strategy emphasises owned channels and grassroots connection. It’s leveraged five collectible toy events, undertaking live activations on stage to build momentum, interest and excitement in the entertainment-with-commerce proposition. Using the starting point of behaviour, iProspect national managing director, Marcelle Hoyek, says the agency worked with eBay to identify two audiences: Those ready for Live now, and those who will be ready sometime in future. Live wasn’t an unfamiliar concept, but the habit wasn’t ingrained, she points out. “It all starts with audience and that’s the biggest role we play with eBay when they’re launching something new into market,” she says. “Who's the audience? What are they into? What are their drivers? And what's the opportunity for us? Commercial data is indicating eBay is onto a winner. In the US, one seller sold $1M USD of watches in 3 hours. A livestream in Australia featuring Pokémon cards clicked over $100,000 AUD in one night. “There are a number of metrics we're monitoring as a business to understand whether we're getting traction or not, and that's everything from number of sellers to number of live streams to sales,” comments Abbott, adding a fine balance of new buyers coming to site, content density and number of sellers is critical to success.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing For Expedia Group country director and marketing activation lead, Philippa Durant, completing an MBA culminated in three leadership pillars reflecting her own personal brand: Kindness, passion and creativity. For Monash IVF head of marketing, Stuart Matthewman, securing a new formal tertiary qualification meant being uncomfortable – especially when squaring up to financial acumen – but also turned into growth and ultimately, compounding learning. And for Fitness and Lifestyle Group EGM of marketing and PR, Sara Dunseath, time at Harvard studying corporate revitalisation – “after a kick up the bum from my CEO” – fostered adaptability, confidence and relevance. These three marketing executives join Mi3 Publisher and CMO Awards program leader, Nadia Cameron in the first of our new series of CMO Awards podcasts for 2026 to explore how formal knowledge is power, and why these mid-career learning experiences have proven of such benefit professionally and personally. There’s no doubt the pressure is piling on marketing executives to be constantly learning and adapting their skill sets to suit rapidly changing marketing, business and customer environments. And it can be exhausting, all three agree – especially when there is such scrutiny of marketing ROI and an onus to know how to always deliver success. But surprisingly, taking the time to tackle formal learning in courses that first appeared to be outside the boundaries of the marketing function gave them renewed energy to tackle tasks at hand. Even more significantly, it elevated their own respect for the very discipline of marketing itself in organisations today. Tune into the conversation here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large Despite a multi-year boom, there’s an abundance of retail executive teams around the world disappointed with their retail media network initiatives - largely because of a misleading valuation method influencing what retailers think they can extract in advertising terms from their physical and digital store media assets. That’s one key finding in the first global report from Sonder on the owned media sector – that is, companies and brands with large customer bases which commercialise their publishing, retail and digital assets with suppliers, and increasingly advertisers beyond.  Sonder estimates owned media has a commercial potential of $573 billion – the global advertising business (paid media) is forecast to hit 1 trillion by 2028 or sooner.  But the bullish performance of retailers operating as media networks, partly fuelled by Amazon’s digital advertising romp, is masking some big challenges and a few open field revenue opportunities for some in commerce media, a derivative of retail media for telcos, airlines, financial services and others, says the Sonder 2026 Global Report on Owned Media. Andrew Lipsman is a former e-marketer analyst and currently a founding advisor and strategist at Colosseum, a specialist commerce and media advisory founded by the former president of Best Buy Ads, Media & CRM, Keith Ryan, in the US. Lipsman joins Sonder co-founders and report authors Jonathan Hopkins and Angus Frazer to unpack some wayward market developments slowly correcting and some new players shaking up the owned media model: ”There does seem to be a significant misconception here that e-commerce is way bigger than it actually is,” says Lipsman on one of the report’s findings that retail media networks and advertisers are locked on retailer digital assets - dwarfed in spending and customer volume by physical retail. Marketers are not following the money, say Lipsman and Sonder. Listen here for the full lowdown. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large When Jo Boundy greenlighted the second series of CommBank's financial wellbeing series The Brighter Side on Paramount 10, she expected good things but maybe not as good as the audience engagement levels turned out. The bank’s The Brighter Side  TV series garnered 2 million viewers. Tailored social content, which was  “double stacked” in production with the TV series, reached another 8 million in social media and Boundy says 80 per cent of people who watched the show “took an action to improve their finances … so we're seeing when the content is relevant, when it's utility, when it connects with people, it's really making a difference.” And Boundy is tantalisingly close to tagging her brand content program as a full funnel silver bullet. “It is such a critical piece in the full funnel tool kit,” she says. “It’s a really cluttered market so we have used our content to help build that consideration and then it ultimately goes through to conversion with customers.” It’s the latter point around creating compelling, relevant brand-originated content across rapidly changing formats and distribution channels that Nick Smith, Managing Director of content agency Medium Rare, says has spawned a “nuanced shift” from in-house “content ecosystems”, often led by corporate affairs teams or viewed through the lense of performance marketing. "That’s a company-centric approach,” says Smith on how corporate content ecosystems are typically run. “We’ve got to get particular messages out on our own channels and it’s lined up with the calendar of business objectives and all the things we want to tell the customer.” “Brand worlds” flip the content model to start with what “a consumer is doing in the real world,” says Smith. “It’s a different content approach than just talking about products.” Boundy says it’s a welcome shift – content starts with designing first for a customer problem or need. All of this new thinking and brand content trends has been captured in News Australia’s recent 2026 Future of Brand Content report – among the headline statistics is that brand content consumption is up 11 per cent. Trust and the relevance of brand-originated content among consumers increased by double digits. The former adman and CEO of WPP ANZ, Mike Connaghan, jumped from advertising to content when he was appointed to run News Australia’s commercial content division, which includes Medium Rare, Storyation, Suddenly and Visual Domain. Connaghan says the likes of CommBank, Qantas, Chemist Warehouse, Coles and Bunnings are all firing with their brand content programs. He agrees with Boundy that they drive results through the funnel to purchase, rather than just mid. “They’re creating mini publishing businesses for themselves,” says Connaghan. “We also work with Chemist Warehouse on the House of Wellness. It’s a media conglomerate. They have a huge print presence, they advertise very heavily through News Corp newspapers, they've got their own radio, they've got their own podcasts, they've got their own TV shows, all of which we are helping them with. It's a really powerful platform for them. So the sector is in high demand and high interest. Having people like Jo and Commonwealth Bank step into the breach in financial services has only really stirred more interest.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-LargeGary ‘Vee’ Vaynerchuk says his pithy pro-social media views to circa 50 million followers are far more nuanced than the vast volumes of “Jersey boy competitive” social media sound bites let on.  Is two seconds of social media attention enough to work for a brand? No - he agrees with Amplified Intelligence founder Karen Nelson-Field, with a couple of caveats, of course. “Every brand listening right now can waste $10m on social media in five seconds,” he says on this week’s particularly fast-paced Mi3 Audio Edition. “I would buy unlimited television ads in Australia tomorrow, not the Super Bowl. You know what my problem is? I want to pay 20 cents in the dollar that the market is charging because I think that’s the actual value of the actual reach I’m getting, not the potential reach…” The founder of New York-based VaynerX and CEO of VaynerMedia, Vaynerchuk has more than 2000 staff plotted across the globe and a monstrous social media following built on sharp takedowns on everything and anything linked to legacy media and classic marketing theory and practice.  Equally, Vaynerchuk says there’s a fair chance he’ll be using the same mincer on social media in possibly five years. “When the attention veers away from social networks on mobile devices, which it will at some point, I will be the first person to make fun of people overspending on social media, including myself if I’m still doing it,” he says. “I'm aware that I love the Super Bowl ad, which is a classic ad. And I'm aware that in your setup that I that I do struggle with a programmatic ad, classic television spots, things of that nature. Let me break this down because it's a very smart audience that listens to your show.” As much as 45 minutes will allow, Vaynerchuk darts rapidly across themes but gets some way into the weeds on industry debate around: media and advertising’s long and short impacts for building brands attention and attribution metrics how blockchains will emerge as authenticity ledgers in the age of AI deep fakes why blue-chip companies have to be spending 20 per cent of their entire marketing budget on organic social production now - not media budgets to underwrite largely ineffective creative campaigns that don’t resonate with the public Take a listen to Gary Vee riffing at marketing’s deep end.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Redundancy is rife across the marketing and agency ecosystem right now. And whether you have an inkling your job could be on the line, as Liana Dubois did when management consultants entered the Nine building, or it's a complete shock – such as Josh Slighting experienced when he left a growing REA Group, or Katie Dally felt after surviving a first round of cuts at Endeavour Group only to be hit in the second set – it often triggers a professional and personal crisis of confidence and identity. Even experienced marketer Amy De Groot, who’s been made redundant twice, nearly 20 years apart, still felt the shock, upset and grief of this occupational hazard. It’s hard to get a precise handle on the exact volume of redundancies, but cuts can be found in every pocket of the industry. A clue is in the Advertising Council of Australia’s 2025 Salary Survey, which revealed a redundancy rate of 11%, compared to the usual range of 5–7%, in the 12 months to 31 March 2025. More overtly, Omnicom’s global CEO last week said 4000 jobs are likely to be shed by end of the year as the merged Omnicom-IPG structure is bolted into place. Up to 120 people are also being made redundant as Menulog shuts up shop in Australia. Endeavour Group is another that made marketing, experience, digital and CX redundancies this year. Dentsu flagged 8% global headcount reduction in Q2. Nine, Seven, News Corp have made hundreds of cuts. The Australian HR Institute quarterly outlook for September 25 shows redundancies are on the rise, with 27 per cent of employers planning cuts, up 3 percentage points since the June 2025 quarter. Those are the numbers and an attempt at hard facts. But the reality is there are a bunch of marketing and advertising industry colleagues having the cope with the fallout and impact of being made redundant. In Mi3’s latest podcast, we’re focusing on exploring the impact of the redundancy crisis through the lens of four senior marketers who have been there: Former Nine group CMO, Liana Dubois; former REA Group media lead, Josh Slighting, former Endeavour Group GM of brand, creative and operations, Katie Dally, and former Cars24 head of brand marketing, Amy de Groot. In this very personal conversation, we humanise the experience of being made redundant to help others out there that have, or are experiencing, the repercussions of redundancy directly and indirectly. We also explore the lateral career paths that have opened up for our guests, as we share learnings and advice on how we can all make more progressive career choices.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Marketing effectiveness: How we all strive to achieve it. In today’s episode, two very distinctive takes on successful work, from the verticals and business objectives in play, to audience targeting, messaging and channels used – traditional media through to gaming streaming – are in the spotlight. And both landed their brand leaders and agencies coveted Gold Effies at this year’s Advertising Council Australia Awards. Scoring two Gold gongs was Australian Red Cross Lifeblood and Clemenger BBDO for ‘Lifeblood Blood Supply: How a media first, elevated blood donation into a national news story, saving up to 28,848 lives’ . The pair leveraged a well-established idea – the emergency warning system and media ticker – plus a partnership with the Seven Network to create a mechanism showing the blood supply in a real-time way via the nightly news bulletin, with state-based tailoring, supported through TVCs, integrations with AFL broadcasts and ambassadors and digital capabilities. Lifeblood CMO, Jeremy Weiss says the “behaviour changing” campaign led to a 120% boost in blood donation appointments, along with new donor registrations signing up, were tentpole results. As each new donor saves up to three lives with their first donation, they more than quadrupled the number of intended lives saved. In contrast, Nestle Australia and VML Australia were honoured with their Gold Effie for their work on extending the iconic ‘Have a break, have a Kitkat’ creative platform into the edgier, decidedly younger media platform, Twitch and streaming. The aim of the ‘Break Chair’ was to connect with Gen Zers aged 18-27, 80% of which engage in gaming – many doing it often. Forging that sense of connection, emotion and engagement on the consumer’s terms played a big part here. The “boundary pushing” mix of tapping influencers, livestreaming, a killer consumer insight on needing regular breaks, and an already distinctive creative platform further compounded impact and results including brand and penetration gains to sales lift, says Nestle head of marketing confectionery, Shannon Wright. Joined by Alison Tilling, chief strategy officer, VML Australia, and Frank Curcio, national head of product, Clemenger BBDO, our guests unpack their work and the surprising similarities behind their distinctively different but seriously impactful work.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

British luxury department store Selfridges has just launched a Christmas campaign co-created with Disney across almost the entire Selfridges portfolio of in-store and digital media assets. Now it’s pushing harder into retail media – and looking for similarly deep relationships with select brands aiming to tap its 36 million annual customers. Selfridges head of brand partnerships Kate Eastop is driving that agenda – and bringing in more non-endemic brands, i.e. those it doesn’t stock in stores – into the retail media business. “I see this as a significant growth area for the business over the next few years”, says Eastop. So, she commissioned owned media advisor Sonder to develop a rate card for its physical and digital assets – and ensure everything is properly valued. The new rates will be live for 2026 and Eastop says the process has helped “establish Selfridges as a serious player in retail media” while bringing internal stakeholders together on the kind of assets and partnerships the luxury retailer will build – and what remains off limits. Sonder’s Jonathan Hopkins and Angus Frazer see momentum in the luxury retail media market as the supermarket and grocery sector matures. They say brands are willing to pay a higher premium to tap audiences that are more immersed in “retail theatre” experiences versus the transactional hit of the grocery aisle. “If you’re walking into a theatre of brands in a store like Selfridges, then there is immense dwell time,” per Hopkins. “You’re there to enjoy the shopping experience, not get out as quickly as possible – so those factors are considered in the valuation.” Sonder has benchmarked a global owned media asset pool of circa $12bn – and Frazer says the market is “approaching an inflection point” with in-store static and digital assets now presenting “the next wave of opportunity” for retail media networks versus commoditised low hanging fruit, like sponsored search and website product tiles. He says the department stores Sonder has worked with on owned media “typically top out at around 25 per cent of revenues being derived from non-endemic brands”. Key to netting that upside is not being too greedy and eroding both the customer experience, the value of the brand, and thereby undermining the sustainability of the retail media business. Their advice? Partner wisely.  “Deep with a few can be better than light with many,” says Hopkins. “Find brands that are a really good fit with your customers and go deep in terms of those brand partnerships across the year. Find those mutually beneficial activations that are going to add value to your customers that you could never have achieved without that partnership. “If you manage to achieve that, it’s going to create a proven use case within the business, start to normalise behaviour for stakeholders who might have been resistant to it, and then make it easier for future growth.” Which is precisely the playbook that Selfridges is following – and carving out a deeper niche within the UK’s increasingly crowded retail media market.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Australian brand marketers and their UK counterparts came up with very different views on where they see their biggest challenges, according to a study by QMS that was aligned to research by Ocean Outdoor UK. Marketers from the UK cited attention as their key challenge, while Australian marketers flagged sustainable growth and unified measurement. When it came to top marketing investment priorities, the top two criteria for both markets were the same things. Number one: reach. Number two: ROI. But they diverged on the third, which for the UK was cost (CPM), whereas for Australian marketers it was attention. “So the question [for Australian marketers] is not ‘how much?’ but ‘how well?’, per global advisor to QMS and ad industry veteran, Anne Parsons. “It's a real shift that says that Australian brand marketers are thinking about effectiveness much more than they're thinking about efficiency.” She says that chimes with peer-reviewed research by Oxford University Professor Felipe Thomaz that found optimising media for reach alone no longer works because all reach is not equal – and used bluntly won't deliver business outcomes. “It's attentive reach, the quality of the reach,” that matters, per Parsons. Netflix ANZ marketing boss Tony Broderick is 100 per cent aligned. “As a business, the only metric that really counts is revenue. But the one that marketing is chiefly tasked with is to drive outsized conversation – and reach for the sake of reach won't generate conversation. You need to capture attention. You need to build creative that stops someone scrolling through a feed – phone stopping content,” he says. “We make great stories … our job is to create the conversation around it. If we do that, we're supporting acquisition, retention, engagement. We have an ad service – engagement drives that as well.” He says Netflix analyses what people are watching, the conversations about it (Netflix has a billion social media followers globally) and then aims to rapidly launch campaigns based on those insights. “How can we bring those proof points in and get it live within digital out of home, targeted at the right people, a couple of days later? That's something we now do each and every week, working with partners like QMS.” While Australian marketers flagged cross-media measurement as their biggest challenge, Broderick thinks focusing too hard on measurement creates its own problems. “A big challenge and an ongoing discussion I have with my team, with my agencies, is ensuring that we try to pursue a plan that is best versus what's easiest to measure. What I'm most focused on is really just the right set of signals, rather than the absolute best report card for every campaign,” says Broderick. “If you're just following what has always delivered the best results in the past, you're naturally steering away from innovation as well.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.