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It’s been a big flip from performance-led marketing to global brand play, but 12 months on, the results are showing it’s paying off for Intrepid. Lifts in brand awareness, brand search and engagement across markets are on the scorecard, and there’s record revenue of $621m – the majority of which comes through owned channels – on the balance sheet. Not bad for a ‘phantom brand’ and tour operator that has been helping deliver experiences for 35 years but hasn’t always had the logoed T-shirt, branded bus or social feed recognition to prove it. While climbing that brand mountain, Intrepid chief customer officer, Leigh Barnes, has been working on his bigger, multi-year plan to firstly get to know customers better, then drive more ways for them to interact, engage and book. It’s a strategy fuelling digital and personalisation investment, as well as diversification outside tour products into accommodation – and the latest foray, book publishing.

Little did Westpac’s Executive Management Team (EMT) realise in 2019 when it ignored the advice of its own staff who told it to buy the Pega decisioning engine that five years later its choice would leave the bank trailing rivals in what has emerged as a key competitive capability — real time interaction management, often referred to as real time decisioning. Commbank now has a decade’s head start, while ANZ and NAB are bidding to catch it. Likewise Suncorp. Instead the EMT backed a management decision to accept a pitch from EY to build the bank a decisioning solution from scratch in a project code-named In the Moment. The circa $70m project failed. Much of the work was written off in 2021, buried amongst almost $344m in software impairment charges that hit the balance sheet that year. However, due to the commercial terms of its agreement with the bank, EY owned the IP and has subsequently launched EY Data Cloud IQ. Five years after In the Moment first began, and despite Westpac footing the bill for another company’s product development, there is still no real-time decisioning solution in place with capabilities comparable to its competitors’ Pega-based platforms.

A decade after launching Australian beauty brand Frank Body and going global, co-founder Bree Johnson invested in the $20.5m Series A funding round last month of New Zealand brand tracking start-up, Tracksuit, along with a star line-up of Silicon Valley VCs and high profile investors. Tracksuit is taking on the global research giants and expanding into the UK and US markets with a faster and cheaper platform that sits inside companies – not research houses. Johnson’s investment was born out of her own experience – like many start-ups, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram used to be a powerhouse for customer acquisition but that lower funnel cash cow today has less kick.

Consumers are understandably sceptical about any changes supermarkets make to pricing tickets right now. Yet Ritchies is confident it can back up a 6 per cent uplift in fresh vegetable sales by permanently bringing in what it sees as more useful per nutritional serve pricing to fresh fruit and vegetables aisles. The independent supermarket chain partnered with Monash University on a joint academia-industry program exploring the issue of fruit and vegetable affordability across Australia, plus the dire gap between the ‘two-and-five a day’ recommendations of health experts versus actual amounts consumed by Aussie adults. Pilot results were so encouraging, Ritchies has rolled out per-serve pricing across all 76 stores, directly connecting nutritional serving sizes to sticker prices for the first time. It’s no silver bullet, but a small step towards benefiting consumer health while overcoming price barriers many cash-strapped Aussies are erecting in the face of the cost-of-living crisis, Monash and Ritchies say. It should also help win over consumers increasingly wary of the pricing narrative Australia’s dominant supermarket giants put in front of them.

Tourism Australia has knocked back conjecture that its hotly anticipated creative and digital pitch had landed. Clemenger Group, Publicis Groupe and Accenture are all still in the game – their responses over the next weeks to a comprehensive and strategic brief for the next iteration of Tourism Australia’s Come and Say G’Day campaign will determine who lands one of the most prestigious – and economically critical – accounts in the country. All three runners are making strategic capability moves to bring it home.

Meta’s News Media Bargaining Code rug-pull lit up the media sector and has government, regulatory and lobbyist wheels belatedly spinning. Upwards of $70m in publisher cash is about to evaporate, leaving Google the only game in town for an already stressed news media sector. Smaller publishers fear Meta pulling news from its feeds in Australia – as it did when Canada attempted to strong-arm the social media giant into paying news publishers – will lead to potentially existential audience and revenue hits. Not to mention a “bin fire” of disinformation. And there could be widespread carnage if the Federal Treasurer ‘designates’ Meta, as is probable, forcing the tech giant into an independent arbitration process which by law means it will have to pay what the arbitrator rules between one of two fixed bids from Meta and media companies. And it would likely have to pay more media companies. Some argue Meta’s concerns for Australian designation means it will set international precedent for other countries to hunt billions more for news media – triggering a full-scale exit of Facebook and Instagram in Australia rather than pay and kick-start a costly global movement. That could cause chaos for small businesses – and the economy. News Corp chief Michael Miller, Nine publishing boss Tory Maguire, Private Media CEO Will Hayward, Capital Brief chief Chris Janz and the co-architect of the news media bargaining code, former comms minister Paul Fletcher, unpack where Australia heads next.