McDonald’s has unveiled a new out-of-home campaign in Sydney’s central business district, enticing office workers to take a break from their routines for a McDonald’s visit.
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‘Almost a guarantee for setting money on fire’: 1,000 marketers, agencies and BetterBriefs on broken creative ideation-evaluation, its crippling impact on effectiveness – and how to fix it
Four years after unleashing global research into the woeful lack of briefing expertise across the marketing and advertising industry, the co-founders of BetterBriefs, Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler, have taken a plunge into creative ideation and found yet another whopping industry capability gap. Having canvassed more than 1,000 senior marketers and creative agency leaders across Australia, the UK and US – plus luminaries from the IPA, WFA, Saatchi & Saatchi, Beiersdorf, Nissan, Mastercard, AMV BBDO and others – the latest findings show a creative process that is flawed, stifling creative, failing to gain attention and costing marketers and agencies time, money, commercial effectiveness and a trusted relationship.
CommBank and M&C Saatchi launch NYC-themed campaign for travel booking feature
CommBank, in partnership with M&C Saatchi Group Australia, has unveiled an experiential campaign to promote its Travel Booking feature available through the CommBank app. The campaign was staged at Melbourne’s Flinders Street, featuring an immersive walk-through billboard with a New York City theme. This initiative ran from 28 February to 2 March 2025.
Australian ad spend declines as digital media shows resilience
Guideline SMI’s media agency data for January 2025 indicates a 5% decline in Australian advertising expenditure compared to the same period last year. This downturn is reflected across various media channels, although certain digital segments aligned with traditional media content have demonstrated growth.
Intrepid Travel bumps UK marketing lead Hazel McGuire to global CMO
Intrepid Travel has named Hazel McGuire as its new chief marketing officer, succeeding chief customer officer Leigh Barnes as he prepares to relocate to Seattle to take up his new role as the Australian travel company’s president of Americas.
‘It’s employee engagement, not marketing’: Optus’ Cam Luby on why telco chose dancing in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade over diversity rollback, and the brand trust rebuild
Trump may see diversity as a “dangerous, demeaning and immoral” practice, but it’s the opposite for the team at Optus. While Meta and Google purportedly either pulled – or were ousted – out of parading at the 2025 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Australia’s second-largest telco and 80 of its staff proudly made a second appearance at last weekend’s event. Perceived as an employee and grassroots community engagement exercise first and foremost, the Sydney World Pride partnership is one of the fewer, bigger alliances VP of consumer marketing, Cam Luby, sees as positively contributing to efforts to rebuild brand and reputation after being crowned Australia’s most distrusted brand last year. It’s also blessedly “not seen as a marketing program” internally, says Luby, even as the activation plays a key role on the journey to rebuilding trust and consideration.
Freedom Furniture finds AI search pays early dividend with an uplift of 5.5% in average order value
After years of digital transformation, Freedom Furniture has hit the accelerator. With a fivefold increase in SKUs and a renewed focus on omnichannel strategy, the retailer needed a search solution that could keep up. Enter Coveo’s AI-powered search, a tool designed to serve up fast, relevant results in real time—without overwhelming customers with choice paralysis. The system only went live for customers just before Christmas, but early data is promising: return visits are climbing, and average order values are up. Now, as Freedom preps for the next phase—an overhaul of its marketing tech stack—Digital GM Paula Mitchell is deep in the trenches of an RFP process that could complete a five-year transformation journey. So, what’s driving this shift? And what’s next for one of Australia’s biggest home retailers? Let’s unpack it.
Under Armour extends partnership with Mark Nawaqanitawase as he flips rugby codes to Sydney Roosters
Under Armour has renewed its partnership with Australian athlete Mark Nawaqanitawase for an additional two years as he transitions into his first full National Rugby League (NRL) season with the Sydney Roosters from rugby union.
Medibank profits lift 14% in H1, health insurer to pay back $160m to customers
Medibank has reported a robust financial performance for the first half of 2025, with underlying net profit after tax up 13.8% to $298.7 million.
‘The hippies were mostly right’: Sir John Hegarty says societal unrest will trigger ‘another creative revolution’ to challenge ‘left brain, rational thinking’ in business, marketing, media; Influencers a clue – ‘inspire’ don’t ‘interrupt’
The British adman who packed Brad Pitt into a Levi’s ad campaign before he stormed Hollywood and created Audi’s tagline ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’, thinks the global state of business, media and communications is so dominated by “left brain rationalists” that another 60s-style creative revolution is brewing. “That’s got to happen. We are genuinely losing [public] support,” he told delegates in his Business of Creativity program in Sydney and Melbourne this week. Data was important, he ceded, but was only “knowledge, not inspiration”, pointing to his iPhone on stage: “Absolutely no data went into the creation of this product, none at all.” Telstra’s CMO Brent Smart and Publicis Groupe Chief Media Officer Imogen Hewitt were in eclectic solidarity on a panel in Sydney after Hegarty’s keynote although all three stopped short of welcoming the next “creative revolution” if it rebirthed hippy fashion.