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This year’s winner of the Australian Marketing Institute’s Certified Practising Marketer award, Paper + Spark’s Paul Everson, is in plenty of conversations right now, but reports a market afraid to commit to decisions as socio-economic uncertainty and short-termism persist. It’s not helping many marketers are either struggling to draw insights from data, or lack commercial nous to connect the dots to the business bottom line, he says – a big reason why skills development programs like Certified Practising Marketer are so critical to the industry. But with the core fundamentals of marketing as solid as ever – even with more channels and sophisticated terminology at our disposal – this experienced agency leader, marketing industry mentor and Uni lecturer is keen to see the industry embrace big M marketing with more confidence.

Australian accounting software powerhouse MYOB was a pioneer in the use of customer data platforms (CDPs) in Australia. Even a decade later, the technology is still delivering new and impressive benefits, and equipping the brand for a new stage of technology innovation: Personalisation at scale.

There were audible gasps when the Treasury Wine Estates board saw the first non-red Penfolds Grange gift box designed by creative collaborator, Japanese artist, Nigo, earmarked for the ever-younger luxury market. But as chief data and technology officer, Kate Whitney, points out, all the consumer insights, demand zone mapping, consumption occasion trends, moments and retail markers make it plain: Disrupting the wine category by building cultural credibility and meeting changing retail experience expectations is critical if Penfolds is to win against declining wine preferences. The former CMO joined Mad Paws CEO, Justus Hammer, plus FiftyFive5 head of cultural forecasting, Michelle Newton, to debate the facets of future retail and changing consumer views of value on a panel at the recent SXSW Sydney event.

It is a mistake to pit the priorities of online safety against those of online privacy, and many of the people who do so represent the interests of giant digital platforms that promote the idea of a decentralised open web, despite having enclosed and centralised control of that same global infrastructure. That was a key message from Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, lawyer and human rights activist Lizzie O’Shea, and UNSW Criminology Professor Michael Salter at SXSW last week. The “data extractive business models” of digital giants came under heavy fire and limiting those models was described as the best way to limit privacy and safety harms by removing the economic incentives that underpin “surveillance capitalism.”