The Black Box of Media

What will define the next generation of marketing leaders? In a changing marketing landscape, leaders need to understand how the whole business creates growth, connect brand and performance, build commercial credibility and make investment decisions when attribution is imperfect.In Season 4, Episode 17 of The Black Box of Media, Aleisha McCall speaks with Gonçalo Pinto da Costa, a senior marketing and business leader with more than 20 years of experience across Europe and Australia, including leadership roles with Samsung and Swarovski.Gonçalo shares why the brand versus performance debate may be the wrong question, how marketers can identify valuable media opportunities competitors overlook, and what Swarovski’s partnership with Ariana Grande revealed about influencer marketing and commercial impact. He also explores the changing customer journey as AI influences how consumers discover, evaluate and choose brands.The conversation looks beyond campaigns and channels to explore commercial thinking, cross functional leadership, long term growth and what it takes to become a business leader, not just a marketing leader.Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.

Every marketer wants to build a famous brand. But what happens when almost everyone already knows who you are? The challenge changes, and it becomes about staying relevant, increasing purchase frequency and making every marketing dollar work harder.In Season 4 Episode 16 of The Black Box of Media, Aleisha McCall sits down with Jodi Murray-Freedman, Chief Marketing Officer at Bakers Delight, one of Australia's most recognised retail brands with more than 500 bakeries across the country.The conversation covers how Jodi turns "latent love" for the brand into visits, why the business moved to Keep It Real, how a smaller media budget can still punch above its weight against the supermarkets, and the planning system behind every campaign, from a single shared spreadsheet to the cross-functional group that keeps product, operations, marketing and supply chain aligned.Jodi also shares the BCNA campaign that generated over $5 million in free PR, what a failed Martech roadmap taught her about marketing leading and technology enabling, why she says "don't let FOMO drive your AI strategy", and the "how we roll" exercise that helped her team define what they expect from each other.Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Tanya Marler runs marketing across Taylors Wines, a brand selling close to 8 million bottles globally and one of Australia's most recognisable family-owned wineries. She has held executive roles at Lion, Nestlé and Colgate-Palmolive, with the kind of commercial literacy most CMOs were never taught.In Episode 15, host Aleisha McCall sits down with Tanya to take apart the boardroom dynamic that has cost senior marketing teams more credibility than almost any other. The moment marketing gets treated as the first thing to cut when the budget tightens, the conversation is already lost. Tanya makes the case for what to do instead.She walks through the CFO conflict that nearly broke a campaign strategy, the self-funding curve that compounds investment instead of depleting it, and the sequencing decisions that buy executive confidence early so the work gets the time it needs.The conversation also covers the 18-month Taylors Wines e-commerce overhaul, why heritage brands have to choose what to fiercely protect before they evolve, the architecture between master and sub-brands, and the AI and martech investment decisions defining the next three to five years for senior marketers.For any CMO, marketing manager or operator working the duality of in-business and on-business delivery whilst still hitting the 12-month P&L, this episode names the tension and tells you what to do with it.

Eight out of ten times when a store underperforms and operations calls for more marketing spend, the problem is not footfall.That's the diagnostic reality Yvette Costi works from as CMO of Bloom's The Chemist, and it reframes the entire conversation about what marketing leadership is actually responsible for.In Season 3 Episode 14 of The Black Box of Media, Aleisha McCall sits down with Yvette Costi, Chief Marketing Officer at Bloom's The Chemist, a network of 130 independent pharmacy stores across Australia. Yvette operates inside one of the most complex marketing environments in retail: balancing national brand strategy with hyper-local store needs, running B2B and B2C campaigns simultaneously, presenting attribution data to a board and 150 franchise stakeholders, and diagnosing store-level performance issues before anyone calls for more spend.The conversation covers: the two-speed B2B and B2C strategy that saw a campaign expected to generate 50 leads deliver 180. How de-identified dispensing data combined with census information reveals store-level gaps that standard marketing reports miss entirely. The attribution approach that holds up in a boardroom full of franchise store owners. And the statement Yvette makes near the end that should be the starting point for every marketing conversation: marketing exists to make businesses more money.Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

96% of CMOs say they're transforming with AI. Fewer than a third have actually rebuilt how marketing operates. That gap is the whole subject of this episode.Katrina Campbell led AI and data transformation across some of the most complex recruitment funnels in the market, inside a highly regulated healthcare environment. Her starting point was the part most teams skip past. You can't switch AI on. The foundation comes first, and the foundation takes the longest. Roughly three months unifying fragmented systems into a single customer view through Salesforce Data Cloud, before a single agent went live.Once the foundation held, the numbers followed. Contact centre time on qualification reduced by up to 50%. Conversion lifted by up to 20%. The same team, moving far more through the funnel, because the system underneath them finally worked.This episode covers the full picture. Why marketing has to lead the data decision rather than inherit it, where AI agents create real commercial value versus where they introduce cost risk, and how marketing moves from cost centre to the growth seat alongside the CFO and CEO.The Black Box of Media is brought to you by Ultimate Edge Communications. Hosted by Aleisha McCall.