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Last week under a request from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the Federal Attorney General [AG] Mark Dreyfus dropped a privacy curveball – the new Privacy Act will be introduced into Parliament in August, well ahead of an end-of-year deadline many thought would spill into next year. More pressing for the broad church of marketing, media, CX, adtech, programmatic and ecom teams across every industry sector, it appears the rhetoric from the AG and even the new Privacy Commissioner on the definition, treatment and transparency of personal information is firming against many current and emerging industry practices – first-party customer data matching between different entities is just one. The use of website tracking pixels is also under investigation, led by a Privacy Commissioner probe into how TikTok deploys such code. “It would have significant implications for a huge number of things,” says Omnicom Media Group’s Chief Investment Officer Kristiaan Kroon on any restrictions in customer matching programs.  “From an Omnicom perspective, we would say privacy reform is one of the top things that will redefine our industry in the coming decade.”

After a 15-year absence from market, ANZ has brought back its iconic Falcon creative and brand device in a new campaign promoting its increasingly sophisticated, personalised customer protection capabilities. The campaign is the first step towards delivering what ANZ’s GM marketing, Sian Chadwick, hopes will be a new era of distinctiveness in market for the big four bank that unites heritage with modern relevance. Chadwick unpacks the mechanisms she’s using to deliver relevance to a younger generation of consumers, along with the commercial mix modelling increasingly driving decision making and more informed, whole-of-customer “investment trade-offs” for ANZ’s newly unified marketing centre of excellence.

The stampede by companies into CX, with massive associated investments into martech, specialists teams and organisational overhauls, is having little impact on customer experience scores – and big banks, telcos, and car brands are at best benchmarked as average, despite investing billions collectively. CSBA Managing Director, Paul van Veenendaal, has seven years of CX performance data from 12,000 annual assessments across 200 Australian firms and it’s a sobering read for those firms heralding their commitment to connecting up and improving the experience across all customer contact points. In short, all that tech investment is simply not hooked up to customer contact centres – and NPS scores, which many leadership teams have linked to performance and bonuses, are “being gamed”, he warns, for better but hollow CX benchmarks. No big brands feature in the top 10 of CSBA’s CX rankings, and only one, a superannuation company, makes the top 20. Chatbots aren’t up to scratch yet, says van Veenendaal, and companies have “pretty much parked” speech analytics. Meanwhile despite heavy investment in digital transformation, call centre volumes have not declined over the last seven years – and those call centres are focused on the wrong outcomes and metrics, he says. Hence underwhelming CX scores across CSBA’s rankings. But some sectors are nailing it: Universities and colleges, water companies and local authorities – the latter at least partially due to the policies of a one-time adman and former Victorian Premier. Here’s where van Veenendaal thinks it’s all going wrong – and how to fix it.

On one level, this week’s IAB’s Affiliate and Partner Marketing Summit felt like an ’emerging marketing channel is coming of age’ moment. Brands, agencies and publishers touting the benefits of affiliate and partnership marketing as an increasingly viable, full-funnel solution to customer acquisition, building brand awareness, understanding sentiment and consideration that benefits both sides. If only everyone could align on commission schemes, upfront versus post-delivery payments, measures of success, perceived versus realised value – and cut the gamble out, of course. Because the event also signalled another contest is brewing between what a media / publisher / influencer thinks their channel, content and reach is worth, and what brands are willing to pay for it. And just like the battles still present in many of our more mature media channels, there’s a lack of consistency around metrics, immature referral and attribution models, perceived rigidity / flexibility of commissions and payment models, and simple education all inhibiting perceptions of value and alignment.