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Three years after taking on the daunting challenge of rebuilding respect for the AMP brand, Renee Howie has been lured by the appeal of a group-level executive role to join Insignia Financial as chief customer officer. It’s a mega remit, spanning all traditional marketing functions through to digital, data, analytics, marketing, brand, customer analytics, government relations, media, public relations – and, overseeing the advice business, she’s also picking up a P&L. All of which comes under the watch of a recently installed CEO who’s future focused and chasing growth for an ASX-listed group that now managed $311bn in funds. As Howie tells Mi3, it was too rare an opportunity to pass up.

Using a physical newspaper to convince young blokes to stop driving while under the influence of alcohol isn’t necessarily the first thing that springs to mind when plotting out a new drink driving awareness campaign. But the combination of print, then online, satire – in the form of the Betoota Advocate – and two years of persistence by the Queensland Department of Transport team paid off, triggering millions in reach and a +10.5 per cent baseline increase in belief in the consequences of drink driving. It’s an effort that’s now won four awards and counting, most recently the Australian Marketing Institute’s Marketing Excellence Award for Content Marketing.

This year’s winner of the Australian Marketing Institute’s Certified Practising Marketer award, Paper + Spark’s Paul Everson, is in plenty of conversations right now, but reports a market afraid to commit to decisions as socio-economic uncertainty and short-termism persist. It’s not helping many marketers are either struggling to draw insights from data, or lack commercial nous to connect the dots to the business bottom line, he says – a big reason why skills development programs like Certified Practising Marketer are so critical to the industry. But with the core fundamentals of marketing as solid as ever – even with more channels and sophisticated terminology at our disposal – this experienced agency leader, marketing industry mentor and Uni lecturer is keen to see the industry embrace big M marketing with more confidence.