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Tradie marketplace Hipages, which competes in a $50bn subsegment of the $131bn trade services market, has reached an inflection point, and is now spending circa $9-10m a year developing CRM and ERP-like services for its core audience of tradespeople. In 2025, it will begin development of new capabilities for homeowners as well. It’s all part of a plan to grow profitability and market share in the notoriously fragmented tradie ecosystem. On the marketing front, Hipages is back for a sixth year sponsoring Nine’s The Block, and it has also taken a Platinum sponsorship of rival Seven’s Dream Home, due for launch mid-year.

Growing complexity of the CMO role and the realisation of the dream of having a seat at the boardroom table has brought with it a growing remit and demanding role that requires ever-more support. It’s also generating plenty of burnout and skills gaps. Enter Tumbleturn’s new fractional CMO service, capitalising on an increasingly popular construct and resource modelling approach with a specific focus on providing a 2IC to existing CMOs or a strategically-minded marketing resource to cash-strapped CEOs and executive teams.

Karen Ganschow has spent her career trying to identify customer problems then addressing them in product propositions, engagement, experiences and services. As the former customer marketing leader and first head of data sciences at Aware Super hangs up her full-time hat, she speaks to Mi3 about the urban myths around digital experiences and customer behaviours, how technology and machine learning have brought the cost of a 360-degree, data-driven customer view – and actionable capability – down by millions, and why she’s still worried marketers are seen as the colouring-in department.

An eclectic group of business founders and c-suite execs gathered in Nine’s Sydney HQ recently as part of the Compadres business mentoring initiative created by former agency boss and founding partner of poverty non-profit, Global Citizen, Clive Burcham. The lure was a dazzling macro view on geo-politics, AI, retail, marketing, advertising and media and entertainment from a career marketer, John Batistich, who now sits or advises nine company boards from Zip Co and FoodCo to Ksubi International and the $1bn Australian toy company “you’ve never heard of”, Moose Toys.     

Paramount+ is officially in market with an ad-funded streaming play but is keeping numbers tight. Initially audiences will be low, because it’s eschewing the Amazon Prime-Binge approach and building from scratch instead of rolling over streamers unless they pay more for no ads. It’s also selling streaming ads as a bundle across the broader businesses, though sales chief Rod Prosser said standalone programmatic buys will follow “this year”. Ad loads will be lower than rivals, per global global ad sales boss, Lee Sears, and he claimed that what its rivals are lacking – sales tech and infrastructure – will provide competitive advantage alongside content ownership and local variants of global integration opportunities. On measurement, Prosser’s not wedded to OzTam alone.