Their remits and responsibilities seem poles apart, but Guzman y Gomez global CMO, Lara Thom, and Uber CMO APAC, Andy Morley share strikingly similar views on the importance of culture, CMOs aligning personally to company values, brand-led strategy, and bold, progressive marketing that grabs attention and strikes the right cultural chord. It’s surprising really. Thom has her hands full with near-term growth, global expansion of a brand still challenging the QSR status quo and a recent IPO. Morle...
Jul 01, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 395
Cannes was heaving with influencers striking deals, but the message from top marketers, academics and consulting firms was consistent: Go back to fundamentals on brand, embed brand at the heart of business, then execute with consistent creative excellence to drive outsized financial returns. Mark Ritson landed that message most emphatically via 10 years worth of Effie data analysed by System1. In short: Do really good work, put enough money behind it, don’t change it; grow more. CEOs like Gap In...
Jun 24, 2025•46 min•Season 1Ep. 394
This year’s inaugural CMO Awards weren’t just a showcase of Australian marketing leaders doing an excellent job of marketing stewardship and effectiveness. We also introduced the Best Growth Initiative of the Year award, supported by Publicis Groupe, to single out and recognise strategic growth initiatives led by marketing teams. In this podcast episode, we bring together Jenni Dill, CMO of inaugural award winner, Arnott’s Group, with Cath Brands, CMO of highly commended Flintfox International, ...
Jun 06, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 393
Byron Sharp is a distinctive assets maximalist, suggesting how brands look and are recognised and embedded into people’s minds is more important than focusing on what they do differently to rival brands. Mark Ritson argues brands need differentiation to stand out from rivals and pull customers in. News Australia says you need both to drive growth – and that custom-made media that delivers engagement beyond reach is a critical multiplier. News Australia has just wrapped up its nationwide agency e...
Jun 05, 2025•42 min•Season 1Ep. 392
Marketing budgets are declining just as paid media costs are rising – meaning brands get less for every dollar spent, and fewer dollars to start with. But latest research commissioned by The Trade Desk into omnichannel versus multichannel media planning could provide sweet relief. In short, the difference between omnichannel and multichannel planning is that omnichannel campaigns are connected by data and technology from the get-go, whereas multichannel campaigns put ads into different channels ...
May 29, 2025•30 min•Season 1Ep. 391
While the numbers have been improving, CMOs still have the shortest tenure in the c-suite globally. Spencer Stuart data shows CMOs in Fortune 500 companies now have average tenure of 4.3 years against a c-suite average of 4.9 years. But variance is huge: Tellingly, Forrester data shows a 75% variance in average CMO tenure across the industries it tracks, with B2B CMOs recording the lowest average tenure, while B2C record the longest. Across the inaugural Australian CMOs of the Year finalists and...
May 26, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 390
The marketing funnel doesn’t exist, suggests RAA CMO, Michael Healy. He thinks “too many marketers get too ideological about how you have to do brand and then awareness and then conversion”. He has an interesting anecdote about a $329 knife, his wife, and Meta, to support the theory. Healy says “the vast majority of marketers that I talk to – from startup to enterprise – don't actually have a marketing strategy.” They just have “a plan and a budget”. He recommends reading Richard Rumelt’s Good S...
May 22, 2025•46 min•Season 1Ep. 389
Lawmakers around the world are setting their sights on ‘dark patterns’, the way consumer choice is manipulated wholesale by companies for profit – either directly by upselling and herding them into higher yielding decisions, or locking them into services, or “data grabs” that can be monetised indirectly. Australia is next off the rank, and businesses should take action now, starting with UX design, according to Chandni Gupta, Deputy CEO of influential think tank the Consumer Policy Research Cent...
May 19, 2025•30 min•Season 1Ep. 388
Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher Short CMO tenure, job complexity, unrealistic expectations of delivery – commonly driven by short-term ultimatums – plus a disconnect on the metrics that matter, are all contributing to a dangerously common misalignment between CMOs and their CEOs and CFO. And it’s a recipe for trouble for marketing leaders wanting to enact strategic growth. That’s the view of four luminaries participating in the latest CMO Awards Podcast episode. Al...
May 05, 2025•48 min•Season 1Ep. 387
Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher At its core, the job of the CMO is to deliver business growth. And if Mi3’s story on marketing jobs recently and what company CEOs want in their marketing hires in 2025 is anything to go by, there is a recalibration back to topline growth rather than just pure cost cutting and efficiency, coming our way – good news for marketers, it seems. Yet companies are increasingly favouring alternative job titles, such as chief growth officer a...
Apr 28, 2025•52 min•Season 1Ep. 386
Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher Being able to convince others is the most critical skill marketers need to possess – the whole job of marketing is to influence consumers to consider then purchase your brand, after all. But as marketers progress into senior management positions, they also need to get better at getting team members as well as executive leadership and internal stakeholders onside. In episode 2 of The CMO Awards podcast series, powered by Mi3, three le...
Apr 22, 2025•52 min•Season 1Ep. 385
Oxford University Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz was a runaway Mi3 hit last year with a peer-reviewed paper that smashes the economics and relevance of audience reach. His analysis – based on 1,000 campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and Wavemaker data – finds blunt use of reach will not deliver business outcomes, because not all reach is equal. Business outcomes was all the talk at the Future of TV Advertising last week, with industry backing the build of a real-time dashboa...
Apr 14, 2025•49 min•Season 1Ep. 384
It was the sudden declines in footy audiences that did it for Suncorp Executive Manager of Media, Greg Kearney and OMD Chief Media Partnerships Officer, Marelle Salib. They knew that diehard sports fans don’t just ditch their teams overnight. But Kearney and Salib had years’ worth of market mix model (MMM) data that countered the volatile numbers coming from OzTAM back in 2023. Those zero ratings, or “doughnuts” per Foxtel Media boss Mark Frain, preceded the split between the pay TV provider and...
Apr 10, 2025•33 min•Season 1Ep. 383
Four’N Twenty pies are literally baked-in to footy and Patties Food Group marketing boss Anand Surujpal gets a related proposition across his desk every week. But his challenge is to grow share through new buyers beyond “diehard footy fans” and tradies. So when the prop for the Paris Olympics landed, Surujpal saw an opportunity for a bigger demographic slice of the action by mashing live Olympics content with ads in real-time via QMS’ digital out of home network. The results were meaty: “When th...
Apr 03, 2025•27 min•Season 1Ep. 382
Host: Nadia Cameron, Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher Amid all the hype, excitement and trepidation around digital, marketing automation, data utilisation and now AI coming into marketing, is the very real need to build team capability and empowerment to actually use the tools effectively – and in a way that delivers business outcomes. As Infosys global CMO, Sumit Virmani, told Mi3 recently: “As AI is a very new technology, it can be a big challenge for teams at large to embrace because ...
Mar 31, 2025•53 min•Season 1Ep. 381
SCA has spent four years building its uber-app LiSTNR from idea to the fulcrum of its audio business. It’s got 2.25m logged-in users, knows their postcodes – handy ahead of the federal election – what they listen to and what they might want to hear next. Kelly says acquisition is no longer core focus – “we’ve got the base we wanted to get” – and SCA is moving to kill churn, now at a record low. “We’re approaching 70 per cent retention per month,” says Kelly. “For every percentage point of reduct...
Mar 27, 2025•28 min•Season 1Ep. 380
Host: Paul McIntyre | Executive Editor Media agency holding company CEOs are openly acknowledging the importance of arbitrage-based principal trading to their business models – and it’s spreading rapidly out of digital display into TV, audio, digital out of home, connected TVs and beyond. Former UM Global Chief Media Officer Joshua Lowcock, who left the IPG-owned media agency network last year to head up media at US group Quad, is bleak on the distorting market effects of holding companies buyin...
Mar 24, 2025•48 min•Season 1Ep. 379
Four years ago, Flight Centre’s global CMO Megan Henderson was tasked with leading a sweeping restructure of Flight Centre’s worldwide marketing operation – centralising five teams into one while overhauling its martech stack and contracts and simultaneously finding efficiencies and growth. Daunting. But Henderson knew that Fight Centre’s 60 million annual unique online visitors, broad customer comms channels yielding rich first party data plus circa 400 physical stores could help drive the busi...
Mar 20, 2025•30 min•Season 1Ep. 378
Mi3’s most read story of 2024 came via an Oxford University marketing scientist’s peer-reviewed paper underlining precisely why not all reach is equal. Based off analysis of 1,000-plus campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and Wavemaker, the data shows optimising for reach alone rarely tallies with business growth. In fact, in almost all cases, per Saïd Business School Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz, it delivers “really mediocre outcomes”. That’s the collective market failure N...
Mar 13, 2025•31 min
Welcome to the first in our CMO Awards podcast series, powered by Mi3. This limited-episode series dives into the key topics and issues making up how marketing as a function, and its leaders, contribute to growth. To do this, we’re engaging in a select number of conversations with industry luminaries, CMO Awards judges, former CMO50 winners, current and former marketing and customer leaders and more as we lead into, then recognise the winners of our inaugural CMO Awards on 7 May. This podcast is...
Mar 10, 2025•58 min
Mim Haysom’s world-beating, Cannes-winning One House initiative at Suncorp in 2022 was a big bold bet on innovative, mould-breaking marketing that Suncorp’s executive leadership and board only saw days before a documentary on the initiative was set to broadcast on Nine. “The first time the board saw One House, I took them into the auditorium and played them the 26-minute documentary three nights before it was going live on Channel Nine,” says Suncorp’s Executive GM, Brand & Customer Experien...
Mar 06, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 375
A world first creative benchmarking study from System1 and JCDecaux has run stacks of Australian Out-of-Home ads through its globally-renowned effectiveness scoring system and drawn a stark conclusion: 70 per cent of outdoor ads fail to move the needle. Andrew Tindall, SVP – Global Partnerships at System1, goes even further: “No-one understands how Out-of-Home works,” he says, particularly the critical need to land the brand within two seconds. At face value, not a wholly positive headline for t...
Feb 27, 2025•41 min•Season 1Ep. 374
Host: Andrew Birmingham, Editor - CX | Martech | Ecom Two years after a Mi3 published a comprehensive analysis of the customer data market in Australia, we revisited many of the brands we spoke with to assess their progress and measure their return. Companies that have persevered are realising strong returns and extending beyond their early use cases. But it has often been a hard road to hoe. There are integration and organisational challenges to overcome - and unexpected problems such as bill s...
Feb 24, 2025•47 min•Season 1Ep. 373
Rival radio networks are transplanting big talent from Sydney and trying to make it work in Melbourne. SCA Chief Content Officer, Dave Cameron, is taking the opposite strategy. Local talent that “speaks the language of the city” and gets the “fabric” of its suburbs is particularly crucial for breakfast audiences, he says. Plus, as platforms and content globalise, localism becomes a competitive advantage: “Anti-globalism will pay dividends for us … otherwise we’re playing the same game as everyon...
Feb 20, 2025•33 min•Season 1Ep. 372
Nico Neumann is deep in the weeds on digital marketing attribution, market mix modelling [MMM] and incrementality testing – likewise the dangers of narrow audience targeting and junk user data - the latter a $20bn market in the US alone. The Melbourne Business School Associate Professor in 2019 published research proving that closing your eyes and randomly selecting male or female audience targets was more accurate than the data brokers and DSPs many advertisers buy from. Neumann claims a senior...
Feb 03, 2025•46 min•Season 1Ep. 371
Four Pillars Gin is now four times the size of the entire Australian premium gin category when it started in 2013. Much of the category’s explosive growth is down to three cofounders having a crack, while seeing off the cops, who thought they were making meth. Now under Lion’s ownership, itself part of Japanese drinks giant Kirin, two of the founders – ex-Olympian Cameron Mackenzie and PR man Stuart Gregor – have “gracefully” exited. But the third founding partner, former global strategy boss at...
Jan 20, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 370
When experienced B2B marketer and former agency planner Taz Bareham decided to take on the title of 'Fractional CMO' three years ago, there were a handful of people on LinkedIn using the moniker. Fast forward to today, and the supply pipeline has grown to thousands, even outpacing solidly growing demand for these forms of executives. Why? Better work / life balance, avoiding burnout, a desire to stick with the craft of marketing instead of moving into non-exec or CEO roles, plus more opportunity...
Dec 09, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 369
The upside of market mix modelling (MMM) is it “certainly helps with credibility,” when proving marketing’s return on investment, per Optus consumer marketing boss Cam Luby. The downside is that it spits out a shedload of data. Hence Mutinex combining its real-time MMM platform with an AI-powered co-pilot called Hendren to hep marketers more easily interrogate and interpret the data with prompts – and shortcuts next best actions. Optus’ marketing team is already putting it to work. “The MMM give...
Nov 28, 2024•42 min•Season 1Ep. 368
Australian law firm Maurice Blackburn is investigating a publisher class action against Google in a strikingly similar $8 billion lawsuit already underway in Canada – led by a tiny regional community publishing boss, Lisa Sygutek, who won’t be cowed. “Find your inner warrior, sign-up, go for it,” she urges Australian media owners. Miranda Nagy, the lawyer leading the Australian class action investigation, likewise calls on publishers large and small to join the proposed action. She’s aiming to s...
Nov 25, 2024•44 min•Season 1Ep. 367
The B2B world is a market where you don't call customers, customers call you - although it’s the opposite of widespread B2B marketing assumptions and practice today. A B2B awakening is underway as business marketers see increasing evidence that an under-investment in B2B brand work leads to a sea of sameness and mediocre results among buyers – across most industry sectors, many feel there is little supplier differentiation, limiting the likelihood you’ll receive that all-important first call. Bu...
Nov 11, 2024•27 min•Season 1Ep. 366
