Author: admin

“It’s a trap”, Initiative global CEO Dimitri Maex stated bluntly on a miserable Sydney morning, leaning over a cafe table with his then ANZ CEO Mel Fein. Maex wasn’t predicting the bombshell defection two weeks later of Fein and her two Initiative lieutenants, Sam Geer and Chris Colter, to Accenture Song. Or was he, given the timing of his flash Australian fly by? Whatever the case, Maex in a follow-up from the conversation with Fein – before it emerged she was bolting to set up a new, rival media agency venture – was almost effusive of the talents possessed by the media agency posse. More on that later, but the trap Maex was provocatively speaking of was the marketing funnel – it never existed and adherence to its construct is wayward and distorting investment decisions, he says. Marketers need new models, fast, but most of Initiative’s clients, says Maex, don’t have them – and very few can clearly articulate how marketing contributes to business. So he has a short-cut – and here it comes, sans Fein, Geer and Colter.

During last week’s Ad Council breakfast to profile Effie winning entries from Arnott’s Group / Publicis Groupe, Aldi / BMF and Uber / Special, the alignment of agency and client-side marketing teams was touted as one of the most important ingredients in achieving modern creative effectiveness. In an environment where dollars are constrained, agency compensation remains a concern, and a definite skew towards in-house agency models, the trio extolled the benefits of a long-term, strategic relationship between brand and agency. And the reasons for this are about as human as they get: Number one for all is the value of creating a safe psychological space to discuss what’s worked and most importantly, what hasn’t. 

Despite massive investments in digital transformation, the quality of customer experience in industries such as banking and superannuation, government, and investment is mostly poor and getting worse. Even the best results are merely flatlines, while CX itself is rarely proving to be a differentiator, according to the last CX Index report from Forrester Research. That’s a tough read for CX professionals, but probably not a surprising one. CX and programs like Voice of the Customer (VOC) are getting crunched just as much as marketing. To make matters worse, the budget headwinds are hitting at the very moment when the CX and VOC world should be investing in technologies to contemporise their approaches, as leaders from NAB, News Corp, Flight Centre, and Service Australia told their industry peers at the recent Forrester CX conference in Sydney.