Urban Rest started out with five serviced apartments in Sydney. Now it has 1,300 globally and counts Apple, KPMG, media holdcos and entertainment companies among those using its units. It’s also moved into the hotel management business – but digitally doing away with the front desk and physical customer service. Chief Commercial Officer Jeff Baars rebuilt the tech stack three years ago to enable that growth – its units are now “doubling every four months” – via a self-serve digital business model. Now he’s shifting gears into agentic AI, with agents telling guests everything from how to work the oven to booking the best places to stay – and pushing service agents into every channel bar voice, which Baars thinks is not yet up to scratch. Next is AI-based revenue management.
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The martech delusion: CMOs can’t quantify martech investment ROI, but plan to spend billions more – Australian execs on what’s going wrong, how to fix it
Marketing technology was supposed to make marketing measurable; instead, it’s delivered a multi billion-dollar blind spot, according to a new McKinsey report. Not one of the fifty Fortune 500 CMOs interviewed could clearly articulate the return on their martech investments. Marketers and agency execs Mi3 spoke with say it’s because there is too much focus on the tech toolkit, and not enough on the use cases and the business objectives those use cases will meet. Yet McKinsey predicts martech budgets will jump another 25 per cent over the next two years – and a lot of people are pinning hopes on AI to solve mounting problems. Maybe, but hiring and keeping the right people might be a better bet.
Red Rooster marketing chief digs new professional roots and joins Yates
Former Red Rooster marketing chief, Ashley Hughes, has become the new director of marketing for Yates, part of the DuluxGroup portfolio of products.
Deloitte report reveals drop in engagement on media, enterainment and social platforms, while audio grows
Spend on media and entertainment subscriptions has grown in the last year, despite a fall in consumption according to Deloitte’s 14th annual Media & Entertainment Consumer Insights report.
Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) – Welcomes New Chair and New Directors
“We’re really lucky that we’re competing against a lot of ways of getting this [customer] information that are both incredibly expensive and incredibly inaccurate,” says co-founder and CEO of Aussie customer intelligence startup, Heatseeker, Kate O’Keeffe. Buoyed by US$1.5 million in pre-seed funding, and a swathe of ASX-listed and Fortune 500 clients including ServiceNow, Medibank and Tyro, and with former Uber and eBay CMO Steve Brennen as chief evangelist in tow, the three-year-old tech platform aims to disrupt the US$110bn market and customer research space by tapping large-scale behavioural experimentation with advanced AI and synthetic person avatars. The initial game plan was to give marketers a faster, more accurate way of tuning into what their customers really think to help validate campaign launches, value propositions and offers. Now it wants to redefine how companies understand the voice of customers to derisk business decision making with tech that delivers outcomes within two weeks. Can social-based experimentation and data collection with synthetic avatars work well enough to do away with the longstanding survey, focus group or consumer panel?
‘Nobody should be doing surveys, let alone synthesising surveys’: Heatseeker co-founders tout 95 per cent predictive confidence with synthetic customer avatars, score ServiceNow contracts
“We’re really lucky that we’re competing against a lot of ways of getting this [customer] information that are both incredibly expensive and incredibly inaccurate,” says co-founder and CEO of Aussie customer intelligence startup, Heatseeker, Kate O’Keeffe. Buoyed by US$1.5 million in pre-seed funding, and a swathe of ASX-listed and Fortune 500 clients including ServiceNow, Medibank and Tyro, and with former Uber and eBay CMO Steve Brennen as chief evangelist in tow, the three-year-old tech platform aims to disrupt the US$110bn market and customer research space by tapping large-scale behavioural experimentation with advanced AI and synthetic person avatars. The initial game plan was to give marketers a faster, more accurate way of tuning into what their customers really think to help validate campaign launches, value propositions and offers. Now it wants to redefine how companies understand the voice of customers to derisk business decision making with tech that delivers outcomes within two weeks. Can social-based experimentation and data collection with synthetic avatars work well enough to do away with the longstanding survey, focus group or consumer panel?
Webjet CEO and CMO near double marketing spend in $3.2bn growth push, overhaul brand, tech, marketing model, plot loyalty play in bid to blow away US and Euro rivals
Just over 12 months on from becoming a standalone B2C travel business, and equipped with a five-year strategy that aims to double transactions by 2030 to +$3.2bn, ASX-listed Webjet group this week unleashed its new brand positioning and plans to market. Not satisfied with just being Australia’s number one online travel agency (OTA) for domestic flights, the new brand campaign, ‘Go Somewhere’, reflects an ambition to become the first-choice travel companion for Australian and New Zealand consumers on all their travel needs. Mi3 speaks to Webjet’s group MD, Katrina Barry, and first-ever CMO, Oonagh Flanagan, on the customer and commercial insights it’s taken to up marketing spend by 82 per cent – and completely flip brand to performance ratios – in support of the biggest brand shake-up in the group’s 27-year history.
Education leaders to be briefed on role of schools in social media law implementation
The State and Territory Education Ministers will be briefed today about the implementation of the new social media laws for under 16s by the Minister for Communications and the eSafety Commissioner.
‘More familiar, more human,’ Škoda and DDB seek to challenge EV stereotypes
Škoda has launched a new campaign titled ‘Surprisingly EV’ to promote its latest electric vehicle models, the Elroq and Enyaq.
ANZ partners with Everyday Rewards for enhanced loyalty benefits
ANZ has announced a new loyalty partnership with Everyday Rewards, allowing ANZ Rewards credit cardholders to convert their points into Everyday Rewards points.