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If you’re looking for a revolution, look elsewhere. At Australia Post and creative production agency BRX, AI isn’t rewriting the rules of marketing;  it’s finally enforcing them. The two organisations have embedded generative tools not to invent campaigns, but to systematise them. That means codifying brand guidelines, automating asset production, and auditing every prompt. At Aus Post, that’s led to bottom-of-funnel automation at scale and a 30 per cent efficiency dividend – and the firm, rather than cutting fees, is using those gains to do more. 

When Anchorage Capital bought David Jones in 2023 for circa 5 per cent paid by Woolworths Holdings less than a decade earlier, it was a $100m bet on customer data as much as flagship stores. The private equity firm’s thesis was simple but radical: get smarter, use the customer data trove to unlock buried value. That meant stripping back legacy systems and federating intelligence across the business. Two and a half years later, David Jones is on a path towards a business that looks more like a data platform with a luxury retail layer on top, though rooted in brand and curated customer experiences. If Anchorage’s bet pays off, the strategy could rewrite the playbook for how private equity values – and acquires and ultimately sells – old brands.

Two singing and dancing kiwifruit characters have helped Zespri International more than double sales in Australia over the past five years and lifted penetration of its SunGold kiwifruit products to 22.9 per cent. It’s the power of compounding creative, investing in distinctive assets, understanding your target audience and importantly, knowing when it’s time to trade up on health benefits to taste as an underlying communications platform, says the group’s local marketing leader, Janice Byrnes. Having received multiple gongs for its ‘Crazy Tasty’ fruit and the recent ‘Healthier Way’s pilot including at the recent Australian Marketing Institute Excellence Awards, she shares what’s it taken to bring the creative to life.

The marketing technology machine is being torn apart at the joints. According to legendary tech analyst and Forrester founder George Colony, we’ve just entered technology’s Seventh Wave. Its arrival presages an AI-led upheaval that renders the internet, mobile, and cloud revolutions warm-up acts. Colony says this isn’t just another tech cycle. It’s a structural reset. One that brings chaos first, then a new order. And marketers, agencies, and media owners are standing right in the blast zone. Traditional SaaS pricing? Breaking down. Legacy vendors? Scrambling to slap AI lipstick on an increasingly wobbly pig. Beneath it all, a deeper reckoning is underway: Agentic AI underpinning autonomous systems that learn, adapt and act is poised to flatten the marketing stack entirely. That’s a direct threat to platforms, but it’s also a moment of generational opportunity for brands ready to play offense. His contrarian advice, though, keep your powder dry. Meanwhile, Google’s monopoly on search is fraying, (despite its latest financial results). SEO as a channel is dying. The open web? It’s morphing into something like AM radio, he says, still there, but barely relevant. In its place: a new set of cartels forming around large language models, or whatever they spawn. Colony warns that these players are moving fast to capture territory, lock in advantage, and rewrite the terms of engagement. For marketers, the implications are existential. The decisions they make now will define who wins the next decade, and beyond.