What you need to know:

• NRMA has reappointed CHEP to its personalised marketing, covering 3 million customers
• IAG CMO Brent Smart said creative and strategic clout was more important than tech capabilities – shortlisted agencies had similar data and tech smarts
• All shortlisted agencies pitched an app – Smart says he wanted more than just an app and data and tech skills 
• “Technology alone is not the answer,” he says. “It’s not enough.”
• CHEP CEO Justin Hind: “A lot of the noise in the market is about how you buy and execute a tech stack. When everyone has the same capability, it’s a race back to parity every time.”

IAG CMO Brent Smart has been a vocal critic of companies relying on marketing automation and customer experience software as a “silver bullet” for customer and business growth and he told Mi3 NRMA’s just completed review of personalised customer marketing has only cemented his view.

“Technology alone isn’t the answer,” he said. “It’s not enough. You’ve got to have strategic thinking and you’ve especially got to have the creative. That’s what can turn technology and solutions into truly memorable experiences. The tech can’t do that. What we’re really doing is providing brand experiences to our customers.”

Although begun prior to the current review, Smart cited an initiative from CHEP as part of the NRMA’s overhaul of its customer onboarding process and communications as an example of where personalised marketing is headed. Instead of a welcome email with policy details and another asking them to pay their premium, any new or renewing customer to NRMA home insurance now receives an NRMA “Keepsafe” fire blanket as part of the NRMA’s broader “First Saturday” campaign to ready homes for risk. 

“That's the sort of thing I want to do more of – experiences that happen to be personalised,” Smart said. “There's an idea to that, which has a great link to our purpose. It's got a great brand identity. It's got a bigger idea. We joke it’s not a gift with a purchase, it's a gift with purpose, which is quite nice.”

It is understood Omnicom’s CHEP was one of four shortlisted agencies on the NRMA review – Publicis-owned Digitas, IPG’s R/GA and indie shop Hardhat were the other contenders.   

Smart would not be drawn on the final line-up but said all shortlisted firms showed a similar level of tech and data smarts but “one had brilliant strategy and a creative idea.”

Smart said it confirmed for the NRMA that technology cannot deliver competitive advantage on its own but does when coupled with strategic thinking and creative prowess. “Even if you're building a personalised experience to someone, it needs to come from a core idea that's bigger than just that personalised experience,” he said. “You need ideas and that's what we saw from CHEP. They absolutely confirmed to me they are the most strategic and most creative in this space.”

The NRMA’s personalised marketing contract covered all the communications from the NRMA to its 3 million customers but it did not cover broader customer experience (CX) design and execution across the company.

“A lot of CX is not delivered by marketing in our organisation – we’re not talking about CX,” Smart said. “This is personalised marketing. Communication to our customer base is really important. While I might say a lot of stuff about martech and personalisation not being a silver bullet, it’s a big part of what we do.” 

CHEP’s retention of the NRMA personalised marketing contract is an early win for the company’s new leadership team under CEO Justin Hind and Chief Creative Officer Gavin McLeod. They replaced Chris Howatson and Ant White respectively who left to launch Howatson + White, although an AFR report last week said the new venture had already fractured with White exiting the business. 

Justin Hind said the new team has looked hard at its business model, capabilities and talent and is reinventing the agency. 

“A lot of the noise in the market is about how you buy and execute a tech stack,” he said. “There’s no doubt that personalisation will drive the future of brands and finding value for the relationships that they have with customers. But a lot of the personalisation really forgets deeply looking at how people think and behave. I pay lots of homage to our new Chief Creative Officer Gav [MacLoud] – he's someone that comes from a deep heritage of understanding creativity and technology.

"If you only focus on one part of the personalisation equation, all you end up in is parity with everybody else who's got the same stack, who's executed the same way," said Hind.

"When everyone has the same capability it’s a race back to parity every time. The reason people choose brands is because the brand stands for something and they engage them in a way that's meaningful. So I think that's where we look at the behaviours that people have with a brand – and persuasive or compelling creative that captures their attention and gets them to do something that they may not have otherwise thought. I think that's when personalisation really comes to the fore.”