Mattresses selling for circa $3,000 are not typically a signal for how consumer spending is bending historical patterns but Tony Pearson, CEO at mattress maker AH Beard, is seeing two distinct consumer groups going in opposite directions. Sales of his premium lines in the $2-3,000 tier are holding strong just as his cheaper lines - from $600 - fell off a cliff in April. Meanwhile, mattress sales to hotels are soaring as even the cash-strapped masses keep spending on holidays and experiences – fi...
Jun 13, 2023•46 min•Season 1Ep. 276
If Nine’s former publishing boss Chris Janz and The Guardian’s Managing Director Dan Stinton are right, there’s a storm brewing for the media establishment as frustration rises among the business, tech and innovation elite – and even the broader public – over what and how mastheads and journalists produce content. Chris Janz did the “deal of a career” when brokering the 2017 ‘unholy’ alliance with Google to sell Fairfax’s premium ads and audiences programmatically, reportedly for guaranteed annu...
Jun 05, 2023•58 min•Season 1Ep. 275
With Voz in market and the TV networks seemingly moving forward with a BVOD marketplace, agencies and broadcasters have renewed impetus to converge TV trading and buying and flick legacy systems. But ditching decades of behaviour is never easy. Perhaps the best example is what has been dubbed the Unilever trial, where the FMCG giant, agency PHD and Seven West Media used early Voz data to boost reach by 20 per cent while cutting audience duplication to four per cent by combining linear and BVOD. ...
Jun 01, 2023•40 min•Season 1Ep. 274
During Covid, the big Hollywood studios played hardball with cinemas – rushing to take-on Netflix and Prime, feeding their own direct streaming plays, shortening releases windows, or cutting them out altogether. Sony was the streaming holdout. ‘We’re either going to look like the smartest person in the room, or the dumbest,” Sony Pictures local boss Stephen Basil-Jones told Hoyts CEO Damian Keogh. But facing spiralling losses on their streaming businesses, stars and directors in revolt and boomi...
May 29, 2023•29 min•Season 1Ep. 273
NRMA’s data crunching suggested the brand would get more bang for buck by putting some of its sports marketing budget into entertainment. So it pulled out of The Broncos, unwound its Collingwood sponsorship and, flipping from a local club to national strategy, “made the biggest bet we’ve ever made on Cricket Australia,” per IAG Acting CMO, Zara Curtis. She recycled the remainder into cinema, last year “owning the top ten films” via Val Morgan category exclusivity, and using cinema first on the p...
May 25, 2023•31 min•Season 1Ep. 272
Debate on whether brand campaigns can drive short term sales performance and vice versa – aka ‘double duty’ – is running as hot as the budget knives pressed to the CFO’s whetstone. News Corp’s Pippa Leary says market-wide short-termism is fuelling demand for performance ads to drive immediate results but double duty works – results for Moet has LVMH marketers popping their corks. Brand strategist James Hurman says brand campaigns can drive short-term sales, but that trying to make one ad to do b...
May 22, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 271
Search and SEO is facing major disruption – with implications for brands across both performance media and mid-to-upper funnel content marketing. Google is countering the threat from Bing and ChatGPT with Magi, set to soft launch later this month. Billed as a “hyper-personalisation engine”, it will change how search works and the way content on websites needs to be written and structured, per Stephen Downward, Head of SEO at Atomic 212°. That’s on top of Google algorithm changes that call time o...
May 18, 2023•37 min•Season 1Ep. 270
Three years ago Jenni Dill put a multiyear strategy plan to Arnott’s to management and board. The former McDonald’s CMO had been in the CMO gig at Arnott’s for 13 days. But Dill had just completed The Marketing Academy’s Fellowship course, which she says provided the clarity and confidence to speak business, not marketing – and to deliver a growth agenda at pace. It’s paying off. Despite the biggest spending squeeze in a generation, Arnott’s brands are powering. Tim Tams, Shapes and Vita-Weats s...
May 15, 2023•38 min•Season 1Ep. 269
Mel Hopkins says she hasn’t gone to Seven “to put lipstick on a pig”. The former Optus CMO says CEO James Warburton wants “total transformation” – and not just across ratings – so she’s hatched a four-point plan. Hopkins has also committed to linking Seven’s marketing activity and investment directly to earnings and the P&L “in real time”. Anything less, she says, “and I am failing to do my job”. That means growing both the brand and its equity as well the number of eyeballs tuning in as a d...
May 08, 2023•48 min•Season 1Ep. 268
Here’s how two firms in different parts of the supply chain are upending legacy marketing practices. Tracksuit, a two year-old New Zealand-based brand tracking platform has slashed the cost, turnaround time, cred, and the role of brand – historically considered fluffy by the business community. The rapidly growing start-up has caught the eye of VC Blackbird, with Mark Ritson and Ascential, the firm behind Warc and Cannes Lions, also investors. Now it’s bidding to carve out a major slice of a mar...
May 01, 2023•54 min•Season 1Ep. 267
It’s not often Australian and New Zealanders can teach the giant US market a thing or two but hear this one out: If you're one of those hard-nosed types who think all this marketing science and advertising effectiveness stuff is too rubbery – ESOV, mental availability, investing in brand to drive long-term demand over short-term sales – here’s some contrarian proof that might just change your mind. It’s a textbook case from a CMO who took a giant leap and deployed a whole suite of marketing's ne...
Apr 17, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 266
Volvo Car Australia boss Stephen Connor has hit the accelerator on the carmaker’s plan to ditch combustion engines. He’s going all-in on electric vehicles (EVs) by 2026 – faster than any of its global markets. Volvo has deep sustainability commitments, pledging to become climate neutral across its supply chain by 2040. But Connor’s gone for first mover advantage for profit just as much as purpose, because by 2030 “every manufacturer in Australia will be standing on the mountain beating their che...
Apr 03, 2023•37 min•Season 1Ep. 265
There’s been just a little happening inside the $8 billion Yahoo business globally - and in Australia. The digital content and advertising business announced last month it would reduce its total workforce by 20 per cent but global CEO Jim Lanzone told Axios recently the layoffs were not about financial challenges. Rather it was an important strategic change. No longer is Yahoo pushing a “unified tech stack” to compete with Google or Meta. “We really had to take a hard look at the business and ma...
Mar 30, 2023•50 min•Season 1Ep. 264
Ask any marketer with CX and martech in their remit to prove the return on those investments and it can get a little awkward. But CFOs are increasingly asking the same question. Here’s a full and frank download from a marketer doing exactly that: assessing ROI on its customer experience strategy - on and offline - after going all in on Salesforce, just before the pandemic hit. Rob Lopez, GM of CX, Brand and Innovation at Norths Collective – which operates eight venues and clubs and two fitness c...
Mar 27, 2023•46 min•Season 1Ep. 263
Australia will escape a recession this year but not a downturn, per Sky News Business editor, Ross Greenwood. But the impact of rate rises means the average mortgage payer is now $20k out of pocket. If fewer people move home, fewer white goods and consumer electronics get bought – creating a negative cycle and something of a two-speed economy as the squeezed middle and lower income households cut back. But the third of Australians with no mortgage cash in the bank are still spending, and luxury ...
Mar 23, 2023•39 min•Season 1Ep. 262
The killer combination of Covid and voluntary administration decimated Virgin Australia’s marketing team to a handful but under its new private equity owners, Bain Capital, Virgin’s head of paid media, Ben Will, finally got to deploy a massively scaled and personalised programmatic ad campaign that he had been dreaming about for years – but it nearly cracked the Virgin team and its media and dynamic creative partners at PHD and Adylic in the process. It took months after launch to fine tune but ...
Mar 20, 2023•42 min•Season 1Ep. 261
There’s an easy way to cut carbon emissions from digital advertising. Stop buying “crap” ads that “no human sees”, ditch “gamed” viewability metrics and instead buy on attention, never buy another outstream video ad, and cull the bloated programmatic supply chain, per Brian O’Kelley. The CEO of Scope 3, a global emissions measurement firm focusing on decarbonising digital media and advertising, knows how much waste lurks within that supply chain – the sprawling Lumascape – because he was in deep...
Mar 13, 2023•48 min•Season 1Ep. 260
Katrina Barry is Deloitte Tech's Fast 50 female leadership winner for 2022 and CEO of the globally ambitious Australian restaurant and pubs ordering app me&u, backed by a Hollywood style list of Australian names including Merrivale’s Justin Hemmes, Rockpool's Neil Perry, Uber Australia co-founder Mike Abbott and former Google ANZ and current Domain boss Jason Pellegrino. She's about a year into the role – me&u already controls about 70 per cent of large format hospitality venues in Austr...
Mar 06, 2023•52 min•Season 1Ep. 259
Southern Cross Austereo Chief Sales Officer Brian Gallagher has some contrarian views on the big push from agency groups to have media owners meet ESG and carbon neutral benchmarks as part of their annual ad deal negotiations. He also argues media buyers might be a little lost in the haze of numbers when audio platforms like Spotify bundle overall podcast audience numbers, which include SCA shows that Spotify can't commercialise. Gallagher says there's widespread misconception that they can. On ...
Mar 02, 2023•41 min•Season 1Ep. 258
After five years of mergers and acquisitions, Nine’s first Group CMO Liana Dubois has hinted at an incoming major brand offensive as the former boss of the media group’s Powered division says the network will walk the talk on creativity. Seven months into the role, Dubois says Nine has de-siloed its marketing operation and the next surgical intervention is a major review of its disparate tech stack. While Nine’s latest results suggest cost efficiency is the name of the game across the business, ...
Feb 27, 2023•34 min•Season 1Ep. 257
Two pointy questions everyone is asking: Is the economic crunch going to flip marketing plans and budgets this year? And what impact will budget cuts or a shift to performance marketing have on revenues and the P&L? Hard questions to answer. But Youi CMO Angela Greenwood and PointsBet digital strategy chief Calvin Cain are armed with better data not just to shield budgets from the axe – but to identify which cuts will have least revenue impact. Mutinex CEO Henry Innis says the SaaS platform’...
Feb 23, 2023•39 min•Season 1Ep. 256
Here’s an award-winning tale of how Amazon and Whiskas reinvented the ecom giant's cardboard delivery boxes as media – and a play centre for cats – in a bid to woo younger cat owners away from upstart challenger brands nibbling away at market share. They turned every medium and large size Amazon delivery box for two months (“low hundreds of thousands”) into branded cat castles, offices and… rollercoasters. They also wrapped in targeted ads across Amazon’s ad network, plus a branded DTC storefron...
Feb 20, 2023•26 min•Season 1Ep. 255
During a recent high-level pitch to the CEO of a leading but unnamed global consumer packaged goods firm hunting 25 per cent growth in a mature category, “the eyes lit up” at the combined code, creative and culture components being proposed by the “cold, hard analytical” consulting firm Deloitte Digital, as Global CEO Sam Roddick recounts. The pitch involved a top Deloitte Digital team unveiling the blueprint for a new direct-to-consumer (DTC) business unit to deliver on the CEO’s ambitious grow...
Feb 13, 2023•51 min•Season 1Ep. 254
Hipages Chief Customer Officer Stuart Tucker and VP of Marketing Nick Ellery say growing an online marketplace requires an entirely new suite of marketing and media capabilities to create and match demand and supply between households needing a tradesperson and tradies needing work - and it’s loaded with tension. They’ve got to build a B2C and B2B brand simultaneously and mange short-term demand volumes for two completely different customer sets in real time down to postcode level. That means mo...
Feb 06, 2023•47 min•Season 1Ep. 253
A former Wesfarmers CFO, of all people, led the cull of the Kmart Tyre & Auto brand after 50 years in market but took on the challenge to rebuild as mycar's Chief Customer Officer, tasking a creative agency, TBWA, with full service CX, media and brand transformation. It worked: sales are up 23 per cent, at least since 2020. Now under Adele Coswello mycar is positioning for another major transition – electric vehicles – while bidding to steal share from free-spending pure-play rivals such as ...
Jan 30, 2023•56 min•Season 1Ep. 252
Attention measurement has captured much of the ad industry’s focus in the past two years just as the out-of-home industry body, OMA, was well into its roadmap to apply a “Neuro Impact Factor” to thousands of individual digital and static screens. Neuro-Insight, the firm behind the measurement system, has among the most robust, academically peer-reviewed advertising science worldwide – initially developed by Professor Richard Silberstein and neuroscientists at Swinburne University’s Brain Science...
Jan 23, 2023•39 min•Season 1Ep. 251
Three months ago, The Guardian launched its first Australian brand campaign in a bid for double-digit audience increases – and ploughed its entire budget into one media partner. JCDecaux won the brief because it could deliver scale and the tech capability to enable real-time API feeds direct from the Guardian’s editors without any human intervention. But critically, because JCDecaux is also aligned on environmental, social and corporate governance, or ESG. Now both The Guardian and JCDecaux say ...
Dec 15, 2022•44 min•Season 1Ep. 250
Personalisation is possibly “the worst idea we have come across in digital marketing,” per B2B Institute’s John Lombardo – even Amazon can’t do it properly. “Find the biggest things that matter to the biggest group of buyers – that's the real commercial opportunity,” per Lombardo. He thinks 1:1 personalisation ultimately leads to a surveillance state. The downturn-induced swing back to performance over brand is another big mistake. “It’s survival, I get it … But you can't just keep on adding up ...
Dec 01, 2022•55 min•Season 1Ep. 249
The intense heat and conjecture coming on the subscription models of Netflix, Stan, Paramount+, Disney+ and beyond may, ironically, not cut so deep for battle-weary publishers if they keep moving fast with new bundled products, content, AI and UX. That’s Mark Reinke’s view, who moved from financial services to the media industry in 2019 and admits plunging into a baptism of fire – publishing is tough, News Corp to many even tougher. Under Reinke, News Corp has launched subscription puzzles, mind...
Nov 28, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 248
QMS has carried out a world first outdoor attention pilot with Amplified Intelligence, aiming to train Artificial Intelligence to recognise audiences – not dogs – viewing assets like street furniture. After a feasibility study with Amplified Intelligence CEO Karen Nelson-Field last year, her team put cameras around assets to track gaze, recognise faces and even “pose estimation” to measure humans as opposed to cars, prams and dogs. “It is literally world first in this space,” says Nelson-Field. ...
Nov 28, 2022•26 min•Season 1Ep. 247
