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Tough cost-of-living conditions have put brand trust on a par with free shipping and promotions with consumers, Mailchimp’s global CMO, Michelle Taite admits. Speaking to Mi3 at the martech vendor’s Sydney conference last week, the self-professed “design for data” marketing leader says finding a way to connect as a brand that simultaneously encourages data sharing is critical at a time where consumers are questioning concepts of value against decisions they’re making about their finances. And the only way to do that is through hyper-personalisation and B2B creative that “makes you feel uncomfortable”, she says. Which is why Taite and her team are bringing the vendor’s ‘Email is Dead’ exhibition, which ran at the London Design Museum last year, to Australia for the second edition of South by Southwest Sydney this October. More cost-effective than a TVC, she says, the exhibit attracted 25,000 attendees and 5.7 million social media impressions. It’s just one example of how Taite is striving to unite a creative B2B brand approach with first-party data acquisition enabling Mailchimp to harness insights it then uses to fuel hyper-personalised experiences, connection and commercial outcomes for marketers.

Australian brands will spend more than a billion dollars on advertising inside gaming environments this year, according to latest PwC figures, overtaking the combined advertising of digital and print media for the first time. By 2028, the firm suggests Australia’s in-game ad market will eat $2bn in local ad dollars. Engagement is massive – and younger audiences are spending more time gaming than on social media. Which provides an indication of how big the market will become.

REA Group has made the Paris Olympics the launchpad for realestate.com.au’s big new campaign, ‘Keep Moving’. General managing of audience and marketing, Sarah Myers, is hoping to open up its market share lead ahead of the crucial spring selling season. It’s a play for scale both in messaging and in strategy – the next six months will see executions rollout across TV, BVOD, YouTube, OOH, cinema, radio, digital display, digital audio and social, with a suite of iterations to tackle both brand and product across both buyer-seller and rental segments. It’s a big push, but Myers maintains that REA isn’t worried about it’s biggest rival’s claims of playing catch up. “Our audience position and our brand position has actually never been stronger” she claims. 

There’s some light at the end of a brutal tunnel for parts of Australian media, according to PwC’s Australian Entertainment and Media Outlook report, released this morning. Retail media – particularly Coles and Woolworths – will take a bigger chunk of search revenues. Consumers will keep spending billions of dollars on content, though much will be soaked up by telcos. Broadcasters are managing the transition to streaming better than newsmedia went digital – but are currently in the transition danger zone. Digital out of home is on a tear although the network growth which has underpinned revenue growth may have reached equilibrium according to capex spend analysis by the consultancy. Gaming is finally benefiting from the immutable law of advertising – money follows the eyeballs, whether that’s all those eyeballs down in the basement playing League of Legends, Call of Duty, and Halo, or on the train to work playing Monopoly Go, Roblox or Candy Crush. Either way, next year looks likely to be the best revenue wise from here to 2028.

B2B buyers across 515 brands – including Tesla, PepsiCo, Delta, Pfizer, Hyatt and Comcast – add heft to a growing body of evidence that B2B marketing is literally missing half of decision-makers and losing trillions of dollars in deals annually as a result. The Bain-backed study, by LinkedIn-funded think tank The B2B Institute, suggests “hidden buyers” influence half of the buying process and have very different requirements from target buyers. They don’t care about features, it’s all about downside risk management, AKA backside covering. It means lead generation, measurement, KPIs and fundamentally, brand-performance strategies are all wrong. Those that flip the model and think of B2B marketing as “buyer group marketing” and brand as “deal risk insurance” will unlock massive upside, fast, say B2B Institute founder Jann Martin Schwarz and EMEA and LatAm lead, Mimi Turner. Schwarz is staking his reputation on it.