What you need to know:

• Tabcorp Chief Customer Officer Jenni Barnett steps up major strategic and marketing overhaul. Bid for growth underpinned by sharper digital-data smarts and owned channels.
• Hiring 40 data and digital design experts into marketing department, though circa 20 net headcount gain signals reshuffling of “more traditional” marketing capability. Narrow single channel specialists and project managers may be less relevant.
• Bidding to stitch together owned channels: 4,000 rebranded venues, 50,000 screens, Sky Racing and sports properties with new app as front end for personalisation.
• Won’t match rivals on TV spend: “I’m just not interested”, per former Telstra, Commbank exec.
• Seeks greater CX firepower in new agency pitch.
• Harnessing AI to underpin ethical data approach.

Smart money

Tabcorp Chief Customer Officer Jenni Barnett is moving fast and fixing things. Five months into her new role she’s brought together product and digital teams, created a new Head of Voice of Customer role, is in market for a new head of data and analytics and is aiming to hire 40 people. “Another 15 people in data and data science and about 25 in digital design and product,” per the former Telstra digital supremo. “Though it's not all incremental [headcount], because we'll need to dial down certain skill sets. We may need less of some particular types of traditional marketer." 

Barnett wouldn't be drawn on which types of roles may be outdated. But if she's following the Telstra style sheet, it could be the broader digital remit potentially displaces single channel marketer capability, i.e TV and performance specialists, as well as middle layers in favour of broader digital and data skill-sets, with templates and automation where viable.

"Like most companies, we have to ensure that we're leveraging data and analytics as well as digital design,” said Barnett. “That tells you a bit about where we are headed.”

Meanwhile, she’s overhauled brand and marketing strategy, restructured her leadership group, launched a pitch for a new agency – which needs to combine CX and creative – and last week launched a new app, the betting giant’s first in a few years as a distracted, unwieldy behemoth lost market share to nimbler, free spending offshore rivals.

Next, Barnett is tasked with overseeing a rebrand of 4,000 pubs, clubs and venues and tying together the 50,000 screens within those venues with its radio and broader Sky Racing media businesses and sports properties. Meanwhile, she’s also been asked to “win the Spring Carnival and the Soccer World Cup”, commercially, if not literally, with two further product launches before the year-end.

Heavy messing

Before starting, Barnett told Mi3 that she “liked a bit of a mess”. Now on the payroll and in the trenches, she takes a more diplomatic line. “Everything needs a good shake.”

“It’s not so much messy, it’s just that there is so much to do,” said Barnett. “But we’ve got so much to work with. It’s a really interesting business.”

She’s not wrong, with investors over the last two years forcing top-level resignations and ultimately a spin-off of the lotteries and Keno business. Now newly demerged and with a full CEO mandate to go hell for leather to rein-in digitally savvy rivals, Barnett is fully licensed to ring the changes, with a C-suite remit spanning product, data and data science, omnichannel customer experience and personalisation, brand, marketing and sponsorship.

Tasked with total transformation, the only thing she has definitely ruled out is betting the farm on big ads.

“The competitors go really hard on free-to-air television … I have no intention of significantly boosting our advertising spend to compete with that, I’m just not interested,” said Barnett. “What I’m interested is really understanding our customers and focusing on the stuff we can control.”

“We're quite a different business to the online competitors. We've already got a billion dollar digital business, but we've also got the venues, the race courses, the sports properties and the jewel in the crown is our Sky media business. I want us to be completely obsessed about winning in our business and making the most of our business assets – and that’s where we are fully focused.”

Digital dash

Barnett said the entire business now has an overriding KPI: “digital revenue market share”.

“We’ve been a bit slow in the past. We were digitally disrupted and just didn’t move fast enough. But we've got all the elements to absolutely make up ground really quickly,” said Barnett, with the new board and leadership team “absolutely aligned”.

Combining key digital functions is core to moving at pace, she said.

“I'm really confident we can now move quickly, because we're blowing up the way we work, bringing product and tech teams together as one. I’ve had some experience there [at Telstra and previously a 16-year veteran of digital integration at Commbank], I have seen what great looks like. So it’s really getting that set up by the end of the year, getting that way of working rolling and then focusing on quality execution. We have a really good strategy; we know what we need to do.”

Some of that is going back to basics, “actually designing where are customers are – and we haven’t been doing that,” said Barnett. “It’s not sexy, but it’s the foundation for customer experience … understanding the business problems we are trying to solve”.

Which means “the team will probably look quite different in a year, but they will be empowered, we'll be executing at pace and I’ve got no doubt you'll start to see that market share kicking upwards”.

Cardigans off

The brand and front-end modernisation is centred on a need to “rip off the brown cardigan”, per Barnett, hence the new app and push to attract a more balanced demographic, i.e. not just older blokes.

“I want our brand to be more inclusive and modernise in a way that matters to our customers and we can do that in a number of areas. We need to grow in the sport category. We're not that well known for sport and through the heritage of our brand we have probably skewed a little bit older,” said Barnett. “I do believe there's a market for a broader audience. So, I'm looking at all of those.”

Which is why Tabcorp is shaking up its agency arrangements with a CX and data-driven focus. Incumbent M&C Saatchi has ruled itself out of the running, leaving the turf clear for a different set-up. Barnett said she is open to multiple providers: “I’m just after the best outcomes, so I’m really open to how all that plays out,” though a hybrid in-house arrangement may be too early at this point. “I’ve not got that far yet,” said Barnett. “We work closely with OMD as our media partner. I haven’t yet got a firm view on that.”

As it stands, “the pitch is for combined creative and CX. I'm not looking for an advertising agency as such, I'm looking for a partner that can stretch across creative and customer experience, because it's all so interlinked. We need to make sure that customer experience strategy is stitched across the seams … and bring some best practice thinking into that”.

Owned media

While sluggish digitally, Barnett thinks owned assets could ultimately put daylight between Tabcorp and its rivals.

“It’s a very competitive space with all the foreign online bookies, but what people probably don’t realise is that we have 4,000 retail venues exclusively, which we are rebranding to a sea of green called Tab Turf. Within those venues there are 50,000 screens, and we’ve been building out personalisation capability,” said Barnett, who in the past has indicted a preference for contextual relevance over "retargeted spam".

“You can imagine how you can create some pretty good customer experiences in a venue, not to mention within the app, and we’ve made some enhancements so anyone that walks in we will geo ring-fence and can provide contextual, personalised offers. We have food vouchers as part of that venue experience and the customers love that,” Barnett added.

“We've also got all the on course partnerships with racing and we've got some amazing sports properties. So in terms of our owned assets, we've got this huge footprint which we just haven't connected. We're doing reasonably well in paid and other channels but we just haven't connected and sweated our own assets. So that's going to be the core focus.”

Could it take more brand dollars across those assets, as retailers and others are attempting to do with screen networks?

“I’m not thinking about that yet. We need to get our own house in order. If other opportunities come down the track and it makes sense for our business, then absolutely.”

Ethical AI?

Barnett also has responsibility for data ethics, no small role in an industry under intense scrutiny. Has she made inroads on that remit?

“We're highly regulated, as we should be. What I can say is I'm looking at a number of ways to augment using AI to predict customers that might need help. Business and customer care is paramount, as it should be.”

So using AI to do the heavy data lifting in informing ethical decisions?

“Well, even just understanding customer behaviour and then putting customer care at the centre,” said Barnett. “People expect us to do that, we take it very seriously.”