Author: admin

Marketing remits are expanding faster than most professions but unlike accounting or engineering, it remains splintered and without common professional capabilities, standards and accreditation. Indeed, marketing, agency, media and customer tech professionals across the entire customer and marketing supply chain risk career irrelevance because they’re simultaneously losing sight of marketing’s fundamentals – like strategy and commercial nous –  and the diverse new capabilities they need to join-up marketing and customer functions to drive business growth. Senior marketers at ANZ, Deloitte and Destination New South Wales are trying to bridge that gap. But even the likes of ANZ’s Kate Young, who launched a major upskilling program for the bank’s 300-plus marketers in 2019, says the pace of change means a refresh is already required and the program – and ANZ’s marketers – must operate in a two-speed environment: Core capabilities for today plus anticipating what’s coming down the track as personalisation shifts to “anticipation”, plus rapid advances in automation and generative AI. Destination NSW Marketing GM Kathryn Illy is upskilling her team away from pure ROI-focused performance marketing to better understand what makes people want to visit NSW in the first place. As well as putting skills programs in place she’s hiring from ad agencies – and says the numbers show it’s working. Deloitte CMO Rochelle Tognetti is upskilling her 270 marketing staff around commercial acumen and the collapsing walls between client and employer brand, along with organisational capabilities and governance. All three marketing bosses are backing the Australian Marketing Institute’s re-fuelled drive to future-proof marketing’s skill set across 25 essential competencies. AMI CEO Bronwyn Powell says accreditation, in the same way that accountants and engineers achieve chartered status, gives marketers a far broader appreciation of business fundamentals while mapping a path to the c-suite. Perhaps worryingly for the top end of town, Powell thinks younger marketers are hungrier to upskill than mid and senior-level pros. She’s urging the entire market – agency and media bosses included – to identify skills gaps, personal and team-wide, and join the AMI’s push to plug them along with a revamped path for professional credentials which peak at an AMI Certified Practising Marketer and AMI Fellow.

Owned media in Australia – brands' own websites, email, apps, instore and social assets – now has $4.3bn in commercial potential. It could reach $5bn in as little as 12 months as brands, eyeing the growth of retail media, start to realise the value of their own media channels. Valuation firm Sonder has just released its annual Owned Media Market Report & Rankings for the '24 financial year and it again contextualises the retail media boom – retailers might be making all the noise around retailer media networks but they represent just one third of the commercial value that brands across any sector can derive from their own media channels.          Mike Connaghan, MD of News Corp's Commercial Content division, says his business is booming as the likes of Coles, Bunnings, Officeworks, David Jones and Chemist Warehouse make media revenue from suppliers and use it to fund their own paid marketing efforts as well as turn a healthy margin. Owned media specialist Sonder is seeing the same thing. The likes of ANZ have reorganised operations to put owned channels first – and co-founder Angus Frazer thinks more will follow, especially as pressure on marketing budgets intensifies. Sonder has run the rule over Australia's owned media sector and drops some  hints on which brands and businesses might come to market next based on commercial potential. In retail media, Sonder says the ones to watch are Bunnings, Accent Group, JB-Hi-Fi, Mecca and Kmart. In grocery and liquor it's First Choice and Vintage Cellars, while in finance it's Visa and Mastercard. Sonder co-founder Jonathan Hopkins says the broader market is now "at a tipping point" as brands realise they can better engage, upsell and cross-sell to existing customers, and use the income from selling or trading space with their suppliers to fund acquisition bucket filling.