Author: admin

“Powering a commercial playbook” – that’s the job Treasury Wine Estates digital, data and technology chief and former CMO, Kate Whitney, sees her technology team needing to play. And that means helping the marketers not just build brand stories, but demand power. With more than half of marketing leaders still struggling to forge a relationship with their technology counterparts, here’s how Whitney and Penfolds CMO, Kristy Keyte, have found a way to get their teams not only collaborating, but aligned on business and customer outcomes.  

It’s been seven years since the University of NSW first dipped its toe into martech waters, a move its marketing and digital experience director, Sofia Lloyd-Jones compares to going from dial-up broadband to full fibre. Thanks to solid progress in the first wave of martech innovation, plus concerted efforts to unite the tertiary education behind ‘lifelong learning’ as the next growth opportunity, she’s now cracked open a whole-of-organisation master data platform investment anticipated to help UNSW navigate the snakes and ladders game of international student recruitment caps and restrictions – as well as AI’s disruptive impact on what it means to even learn and build capability in the near term.

Coles and Woolworths are among a growing and diverse set of retailers injecting hundreds of millions into private-label range expansion – not just for revenue growth, but customer stickiness, trust and loyalty. They’re no longer just chasing price-conscious consumers: Today’s own brand strategies are leveraging every lesson from the brand playbook to win from value to premium tier, utilising quality product credentials, growing first-party data insights, category diversification and co-brand partnerships while also tapping into future-forward trends such as health and wellbeing, blurred work/home lifestyles, sustainable sourcing, changing consumer behaviours and preferences to innovate. It’s working. Circana figures show 4.8 per cent year-on-year growth across CPG/FMCG to $46bn in annual private-label sales last year. Complementary research shows 95 per cent of Aussie consumers are now open to buying private-label brands, and exclusive research supplied to Mi3 reveals broad familiarity and emerging motivators for own brand purchases. Even more significantly, Gen Z and Millennials are increasingly being swayed to consider private-label products. Here’s the lowdown on why and how retailers are making private-label the next big brand success story, and what name brands should attempt to fight back.

It’s less than a year since Salesforce launched autonomous AI agents into the wild. But the bots are already reshaping business functions. In the US, online accounting platform 1-800 Accountants, which handles payroll and book keeping for circa 100,000 firms, has slashed the time staff spend on customer service by 70 per cent. Open Table and Singapore Air are deploying the agents to similar effect. But what are they doing with all that freed human capital? And what are the broader implications for everyone as ‘agentics’ move rapidly through the digital supply chain?  Salesforce global CMO Ariel Kelman and colleagues say we will all soon have our own agentics buying – and negotiating prices – for us in online shopping and services. Which has significant implications for business structures and marketing functions and capability in particular. Kelman says we are now looking at a step change in marketing automation beyond content, where the agentic labour force will generate campaign briefs, launch campaigns off those briefs, and self-optimise the creative messaging and channels to deliver on the brief it crafted in the first place. Outside of agentics, Kelman says Salesforce’s new multi-touch attribution model is powering, telling the firm which marketing investments are driving sales and how cost-efficient they are. But not for brand – Kelman thinks it’s pointless trying to attach a dollar value to brand investments in B2B. “It’s just so disconnected from the purchase.” Those attempting to do so, he suggests, are “operating at a false level of precision.”

Prudential’s story of adopting AI to improve brand creative and the content supply chain approach came from a place many marketing teams will be familiar with: How to do more than less while retaining brand consistency and strategic effectiveness. The results, 18 months in, show it’s working, with nine in 10 marketers gaining back 25 per cent of their time thanks to AI adoption. But VP of brand and creative, Bridget Esposito, doesn’t want leaders and companies to believe in the “misleading, terrible” narrative or the “magic marketing” underpinned by the idea people can simply be replaced by AI. That’s unrealistic, she says, and it’s detrimental to getting teams to experiment and invest their time in AI learning. Instead, Esposito is claiming she’s actually increasing creative headcount as the quality of content and what the creative team does improves thanks to more strategic adoption of AI for the short and long.