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Ditching Athena’s ‘Love us and leave us’ proposition wasn’t an option for the digital-first home loan upstart’s marketing chief, Sarah Sproule. But it appears most of the other marketing, product and customer value propositions have shaken up as the business broadens out from its price-based roots and makes a play for a diversified mix of customers. So far its working – and Sproule says the focus and KPIs are now way deeper than cost per acquisition, with marketing “on the hook all the way through to final conversion, which is settlement”. She’s firmly in “get shit done” mode – and with brokers now a key channel, B2B is next.

NIB and University of Tasmania are two Australian organisations that have begun squaring up to the sustainability reckoning coming to marketers, agency and media publishers as legislated climate reporting ratchets up a notch and Scope 3 emissions become front and centre. With media and marketing emissions estimated at a whopping 59 per cent of total group emissions at NIB, marketing this year adopted GroupM’s Project Alpha reporting tool to start accurately measuring and optimising campaigns with immediate double-digit reductions effect. At Uni of Tas meanwhile, 30 per cent-plus reductions just by tackling the low-hanging fruit of digital advertising optimisation – largely programmatic display and made for advertising sites. Meanwhile switching out clicks to conversion metrics not only won over the c-suite, it’s cementing the education provider’s global number one position for climate action with prospective students, and led to a 264 per cent increase in conversions in early campaign trials.

KPMG is muscling up in its own brand and marketing masterplan in a bid to distance itself from PwC’s tax leak scandal, “create a bit of space between us and our competitors” and remind the market that the big four consulting groups “are not all the same”, according to Sudeep Gohil. Taking on the broadening remit for the firm as “partner in charge of brand and marketing”, Gohil remains a partner in KPMG’s Customer unit and was a former creative agency strategy director with US-based Wieden & Kennedy and ex-CEO at Droga5 ANZ before it died and was resurrected by Accenture Song in recent weeks after its rebrand of The Monkeys.