Author: admin

There’s a tonne of people with customer in their title, but Telstra CMO Brent Smart says marketing is the only function that can actually deliver new customers. Kia’s top marketer Dean Norbiato is KPI-ing staff on being cross-function and cross-discipline, or they don’t get their bonus. Mailchimp CMO Michelle Taite is making her teams play golf with dumplings using a mouse. The three unpacked AI use cases, creative effectiveness strategies, selling brand and distinctiveness to the CFO – and why nothing in marketing can be binary.

Freedom Furniture GM of marketing, Jason Piggott, sees it as a see-saw: “Adjusting the now, while still keeping an eye on the future”. Marketers from across industry sectors are all too aware of the impact ongoing economic uncertainty and cost-of-living woes are having on customers’ hip pockets, sales and salience. But marketers at Freedom, ING, SPC and Menulog are largely sticking to their guns when it comes to the way they plan out their FY25 budgets, key initiatives and how they manage agency partnerships.

Four years in, Google has officially pulled the rug on cookie deprecation. Consensus is Google read the runes on the upcoming report from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) report in the UK and factored in the DOJ’s anti-trust case that kicks off in September. Mi3 spoke to brand, media, agency, and regulatory leads to gauge the impact for marketers and the supply chain – and they see deprecation happening by default, and trouble brewing for Google either way. Meanwhile, the market has already moved on to first-party approaches because cookies were “leaving money on the table”. But there are questions about how Google implements consent opt-ins or opt-outs, and risks of marketers getting caught out by ignorance of where cookies operate as local privacy laws change.

Regional media spend is holding up amid broader market grind – and a new trade campaign is landing, challenging marketer bias and opening doors for Boomtown’s publisher-TV-audio collective. Now sales teams from Southern Cross Austereo, WIN Television, Seven Network, ACM, ARN, Nine, News Corp Australia and Imparja Television need to show what they’re made of and extract best bang from marketing buck, says Boomtown chair Brian Gallagher.

As Optus has suffered the effects of massive data breaches and network failures, Amaysim has flourished. It’s delivered 25 per cent growth since being acquired by the larger telco in 2021, and was behind 108,000 of its parent company’s 116,000 new mobile customers in the year to 31 March 2024. Now the value brand, which has 1.5m customers and is recommended by nine in 10 of them, has its sights on becoming a full-service telco with NBN services incoming. It’s part of a clear growth strategy around the core business of connecting, says recently installed VP, Vir Inder Nath. It’s also arguably a decision reflecting learnings from a previous misstep into utility services. Supporting the challenger mindset and growing product line is a commitment to dialling creativity and effectiveness in parallel, says CMO, Peter MacGregor. Latest examples under his rein include Amaysim’s first in-house created stop animation campaign (yes, another telco going there) as well as personalisation focused firmly on delivering existing customers more value and relevant content.

It’s show time for the industry-shifting partnership between IAG’s unified marketing, customer experience and transformation team and its all-singing, all-dancing agency partner, Accenture Song. The pair have taken the wrappers off their first combined work: A fully integrated, trademarked brand positioning for NRMA, A Help Company. It’s positioning work that incorporates everything from marketing programs – kicking off with Nine and the Paris 2024 Olympics later this year – to new technology-led experiences for existing customers and employees. For chief customer and marketing officer, Michelle Klein, putting the emphasis on practical value-adds in creative and comms is a sure way to get the right “signal to noise” ratio with consumers suffering through uncertain economic conditions and growing several weather phenomena and build brand loyalty. It’s also a position and experience play Klein says will be tested and retested to ensure the near 100-year-old brand’s relevance into its next century.