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Mentorship rewired: Why ex-GroupM chief, McDonald’s and ANZ CMO Mark Lollback is creating a ‘global village’ to build more successful modern execs – big hitters on board

Ever wanted to design your own personal board? Talk under the cone of silence to someone who’s already been a CMO or CEO in the same industry or agency landscape and who actually relates to your struggles without the commercial rivalry? Share high-performance team or startup strategies, transformation plans or simply nut out your next career move with someone who has been there, done that? Or provide your talent with a way to develop and grow so you retain them for longer, and have a happier, more productive workforce? Maybe you’ve just been fired and need help mapping out the next strategic move. That’s what GroupM chief and McDonald’s and ANZ CMO, Mark Lollback, believes he can fix through his new venture, Global Mentorship – with some big names on board. Here’s the plan.

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Ritson-backed NZ brand tracking start-up Tracksuit lands $20.5m Series A funding round for US, UK expansion, hits $142m valuation – sights on Qualtrics, Ipsos, Kantar, Nielsen, YouGov

A line-up of big name entrepreneurs, investors and Australian and Silicon Valley VC firms have piled into the second, $20.5m funding round of three-year-old New Zealand SAS start-up Tracksuit, with ambitions of “creating the world’s best brand tracker”. The Series A funding, which values the firm at $142.9m, has eyes on disrupting global incumbents including Qualtrics, Kantar, Ipsos, Nielsen and YouGov. An intriguing competitive tussle between a new, automated and materially cheaper SAS-based brand tracking firm and the research establishment is in play – private equity firms control Qualtrics (Silver Lake), Kantar (Bain, WPP) and Nielsen (Elliott Investment Management).

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ACCC hits Grays with $10m penalty for misleading car descriptions

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has initiated legal proceedings against Grays eCommerce Group and is pushing for a $10 million penalty over allegations the Australia-wide online auction business provided false or misleading descriptions of hundreds of cars on its site.

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Marketers ‘prefer arbitrage’ as Publicis, Omnicom power ahead of holdco posse; Dentsu ‘shrinking pains’ persist as dividing lines sharpen on agency network brands versus integrated offers, IT services and data M&A: Madison and Wall’s Brian Wieser

When it comes to principal-based media trading, AKA arbitrage, “we can argue about the pros and cons but collectively [marketers] are saying that they kind of accept, if not sometimes prefer, that model,” says Madison and Wall founder and one-time WPP global business intelligence chief Brian Wieser. It’s no coincidence that two of the “most aggressive” proponents of buying ad inventory from media owners and on-selling it to clients with handsome markups saw their respective media businesses notch double-digit growth in 2023. Publicis and Omnicom also have the most bullish growth forecasts for 2024. Yet their broader business strategies and models are almost polar opposites and Wieser sees a structural fault line widening across the major holdcos – unified businesses that sideline individual agency brands like Publicis and Dentsu versus the traditional multi-brand model at WPP, IPG and Omnicom. Both can work, says Wieser, but he thinks those with fewer silos are “more likely to thrive” and suggests very few marketers still care about conflict, one of the original reasons for holdcos running lots of similar agencies. Dentsu is tracking closer to Publicis on agency brand consolidation but the Japanese firm hasn’t executed like the French. One positive for Dentsu, per Wieser, is “it’s hard to imagine it getting any worse”. Regardless of the  model, he sees a single key differentiator in determining holdco winners and losers as IT services firms streak ahead and the big platforms use generative AI to eat further into agency turf: Investment ambition, or lack thereof.

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Look at what you made me do: 13 brands getting on the Taylor Swift Eras Tour cultural bandwagon

Marketers, media players and agencies will never knowingly pass up an opportunity to tap the cultural zeitgeist. And the arrival of Taylor Swift and her ‘The Eras’ tour in Australia proved irresistible for plenty. From rebranding a private island in North Queensland to creating a special Tay Tam line of Tim Tams, greetings from Vegemite and Tooheys plus tributes from Twisties to Taylor and her football-playing boyfriend, Travis Kelce, we’ve had a flurry of activations and campaigns pop up, most notably in out-of-home. Here’s 13 of the most memorable fired across Mi3’s desk.

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Marketers ‘prefer arbitrage’ as Publicis, Omnicom power ahead of holdco posse; Dentsu ‘shrinking pains’ persist as fault lines sharpen on agency networks versus integrated master brand, IT services and data M&A: Madison and Wall’s Brian Wieser

When it comes to principal-based media trading, AKA arbitrage, “we can argue about the pros and cons but collectively [marketers] are saying that they kind of accept, if not sometimes prefer, that model,” says Madison and Wall founder and one-time WPP global business intelligence chief Brian Wieser. It’s no coincidence that two of the “most aggressive” proponents of buying ad inventory from media owners and on-selling it to clients with handsome markups saw their respective media businesses notch double-digit growth in 2023. Publicis and Omnicom also have the most bullish growth forecasts for 2024. Yet their broader business strategies and models are almost polar opposites and Wieser sees a structural fault line widening across the major holdcos – unified businesses that sideline individual agency brands at Publicis and Dentsu versus traditional multi-brand models at WPP, IPG and Omnicom. Both can work, says Wieser, but he thinks those with fewer silos are “more likely to thrive” and suggests very few marketers still care about conflict, one of the original reasons for holdcos running lots of agencies. Dentsu is tracking closer to Publicis on consolidation but the Japanese firm hasn’t executed like the French. One positive for Dentsu, per Wieser, is “it’s hard to imagine it getting any worse”. Regardless of model, he sees a single key differentiator in determining holdco winners as IT services firms streak ahead and the big platforms use generative AI to eat further into agency turf: Investment ambition, or lack thereof.

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Categorized as Articles