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“A baptism of fire, start to finish, and a much broader role than I anticipated going in.” Funlabs CMO Oonagh Flanagan isn’t kidding. She has driven a booking system rebuild, with online bookings at the leisure operator more than doubling as a result. She has replatformed the websites, implemented four Salesforce clouds, digitally rewired the phone system and has just completed the first phases of a customer resegmentation program, shifting from bucketing people by demographics to attitudes. Now she’s planning to do something a little less technical: Spend money on free-to-air TV.

Distinctive creative is key for marketers looking to cut through the digital noise, but with “most people not looking at the ads in the first place”, per Amplified Intelligence’s Dr Karen Nelson-Field, landing your message with consumers keeps getting harder. NAB marketer Michelle Martinis says that those willing to take creative risks will be rewarded, but that getting the boardroom to sign off requires some rigour – which so far has been paying off for the bank. Getting it right means understanding how attention plays out between platforms, and adjusting brand and creative accordingly, but with 85 per cent of ads copping less than 2.5 seconds of attention – and many much less, if any – that’s easier said than done. And if the brand doesn’t immediately land, there’s a risk of accidentally funding competitors’ growth.

Landing on attribution models to determine what marketing activities are working for a business – or if they’re useful business metrics at all – can quickly turn to angry religious-type fights but after a decade away helming marketing at AWS, Oracle and start-ups, global President and CMO Ariel Kelman boomeranged back to Salesforce last year and found some challenges around all of that at the $200bn customer-tech giant. “We lost our focus on sales pipeline, and on marketing really being a vehicle for driving business results as the prime directive,” he told Mi3. One year in Kelman has reset KPIs, overhauled metrics and re-engineered attribution away from last click to a “deep learning” model he thinks the rest of the B2B world is likewise adopting – while navigating those “angry religious fights” that attribution shifts can kick-off. It’s come too late for Salesforce’s share price, which last week plunged circa 20 per cent after the firm missed revenue guidance for the first time in two decades. But the rebound is already on and AI is playing a key role – and powering profit and productivity – for some firms jumping early. The hotels and resort portfolio of private equity giant Blackstone (which now includes Australia’s Crown Casinos), as well as Gucci and Sonos are among them. Kelman sees competitive advantage from AI that is plugged in across disparate customer systems versus rivals with “rando” co-pilots that may end up causing trouble.