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ASX-listed privacy-focused baby pic sharing app Tinybeans spent years languishing under $0.08 a share. But it got a kick last month when James Warburton joined as a NED. The former Seven chief’s arrival was followed by Fatherly’s US-based co-founder and investor, Mike Rothman. The two “operators” are seen as category-connected muscle that’ll help the app find a viable way forward to profitability. But it must get marketing, product, team, strategy and operational efficiencies right – and avoid falling into the trap of relying on ad revenue. No small feat. But a year into the gig CEO Zsofi Paterson has made some major calls on business model, strategy and flipped performance for brand  investment while replacing the sales team wholesale and bringing on micro – or tiny – influencers. Paterson, Warburton and Rothman see growing pain relief ahead.

Chris Minns might be trying to get NSW public sector workers to return to the office, but don’t expect millennials who’ve migrated in droves to Australia’s regional areas for their forever homes to comply, says Bernard Salt. Even as unemployment figures inch up, and the cost-of-living crisis and softer economic climate give employers more power in the employer-to-employee dynamic, business, social and market commentator and speaker says millennials will “die before they submit to going back to the way things were”. During an exclusive interview with Mi3 off the back of Boomtown’s recent Sydney breakfast discussing the surprising spending power of Australia’s 9.8m regional consumers, Salt shared his insights – and a bunch of census and market data – on the high-income, lifestyle loving, remote working regional resident of 2024 and the opportunity they represent brands.

One of the great ironies (and frustrations) for Mikayla Hopkins, head of marketing and employee number two at brand tracking platform Tracksuit, is that as a B2B marketer, she can’t use her own platform, which is tailored to B2C brands. Hopkins and her team, however, have developed a different superpower: The ability to attribute content to conversions and storytelling into sales. For instance, a clever piece of Guerilla Marketing aligned with the launch of the Barbie Movie pulled in $300k. The trick is patience, says Hopkins, who urges her peers in B2B to extend the attribution window to really understand the impact of content marketing. It’s also about recognising content isn’t just case studies and whitepapers. One of Tracksuit’s top content marketing performers is a calculator that helps brands determine the best split between brand and performance.

Part Two: After last week’s instalment with S4 Capital’s founder and former WPP boss, Sir Martin Sorrell – in which he explained why the market cap of his next generation marketing services firm had plummeted from £5 billion to £300 million in the past three years – he’s back for part two. We cover the consolidation of the $700 billion global digital ad market down to a handful of global tech media players. Is that dangerous for brands and the broader marketing supply chain? Maybe, but Sir Martin thinks they’re only going to get bigger. Plus, we go deeper into AI and mass personalisation – Netflix style – along with the dodgy, inaccurate, but thriving online user data trade that was revealed a month or so ago by UM’s former chief privacy officer, Arielle Garcia (which is now Mi3’s top podcast and story so far this year). For the record, Sorrell agrees with Garcia: “Garbage in, garbage out … There are some murky parts of the market, but that’s our role to expose that, not to be a part of it.” Either way, he thinks the platforms will only get closer to marketers at the expense of intermediaries – and there is little agencies can do to stop it. Plus, he says OpenAI chief Sam Altman, who reckons AI will displace 95 per cent of advertising jobs, is “directionally right”. The timeframe? “Three years,” per Sorrell. “It’s going to be uncomfortable.” Conversely, Sorrell says the big platforms won’t be shrinking any time soon. On a GDP basis, “these are countries, they are not companies anymore.” He thinks that means regulation, unless co-ordinated globally, is ultimately powerless.