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A step change in experience and effectiveness, not just efficiency, is what’s key to ensuring marketing departments harness AI to elevate their business impact and drive growth. Yet without better team empowerment and experimentation, that ability to match the disruptive power of AI with a rethink of how marketing gets done is at risk, argues Infosys global CMO, Sumit Virmani. In a wide-ranging interview with Mi3, the experienced B2B marketing leader talks about how he’s working to unleash AI’s potential by building team confidence, and finding ways of introducing new experience and effectiveness into strategy brand plays for the IT services giant including this year’s Australian Open.

Melbourne Business School Associate Professor Nico Neumann’s original paper showed that targeting men or women via data brokers was less accurate than spray and pray, yet cost more. Last year he ran tests with IT giant HP that sharply contests most B2B marketing plans and particularly so for tech sector practitioners. “No matter what we used, it was either equal to random targeting, or even worse,” per Neumann, at least for probabilistic data. While first party data is better, there are caveats – and Neumann urges marketers to test out clean room matching systems by deliberately tainting some the hashed emails they feed into them. Next he’s planning to run the rule over the main market mix modelling platforms in market. In the meantime, he suggests marketers keep questioning what those models are telling them – particularly if everything seems to be working. If that’s the case, “you’re probably being lied to.”

Former ABC director of audiences and marketer, Leisa Bacon, is following up a decade-long stint with the public broadcaster by taking up the reins as Creative Australia’s executive director of development and partnerships. It’s a job uniting her passion for arts and culture with her extensive – and highly necessary skillset in stakeholder management – plus a willingness to take on transformative challenges. Because the appointment comes a juncture when the government body, which dishes out more than $250m a year to support Australia’s arts and culture community, reshapes its approach to funding and supporting one of the nation’s most persistently challenged industries post-pandemic.