Brands need suppliers and consumers to rapidly decarbonise to hit 2030 sustainability targets. While marketing alone can’t solve a looming existential crisis, there are practical steps that brands, retailers and their supply chains can take now, starting with supply chain mandates, product and packaging, ecom deliveries and returns, and giving consumers carbon choices. Telstra CMO Jeremy Nicholas, Microsoft Australia Chief Sustainability Officer Brett Shoemaker and Gloster Advisory principal Sunita Gloster unpacked how marketing can start to move the needle at the Mi3-LinkedIn B2B Next conference.

For the first time at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the spotlight was thrown on B2B creativity and prowess this year. So what worked? Creative B2B jury member Rob Omodiagbe joined Brand Traction’s Jon Bradshaw and The B2B Institute’s Tiya Lee to break down the Grand Prix winner, Sherwin-Williams, and two finalists, Yellow and D’ieteren’s Husk. "Creativity is king" at Cannes, Omodiagbe said, but Bradshaw disagreed - campaigns need to demonstrably move the needle, especially in B2B. One of these campaigns "worked its nuts off", one resulted in a government contract, and the other "redefined a category". 

When radio and TV identity-turned influencer marketing supremo at Tribe, Jules Lund, printed his new contract from Nine Network to a Qantas Club printer, a spectacular fail saw it broadcast print to every Qantas lounge in the country, complete with Lund’s financials. Fast forward a few years and the story of Lund’s printing prowess ended up helping DocuSign grow 40 per cent YOY in Australia as it took its first risky leap away from lower funnel demand generation advertising to a brand building campaign in what APAC marketing boss Andrea Dixon called “an investment in sales tomorrow”. With an initial budget of just 100k, the Australian project is now going global - Singapore and Japan are the next markets to follow the Australian hit. Here's how Dixon and Hardhat’s Dan Monheit cracked the code for “Next time DocuSign” in their keynote to the Mi3-LinkedIn B2B Next summit last week. 

Professor Byron Sharp delivered a broadside last week at the Mi3-LinkedIn B2B Next Summit in a bid to bring marketers back to the fundamentals of advertising, brand building and growth. Marketers adhering to Les Binet and Peter Field’s formula around brand to performance budget ratios are basing investment decisions on questionable data, according to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute marketing science supremo. He also said advertisers piling into attention metrics risk being “suckered” and implied that multiple iterations of ads – dynamic creative or otherwise – can weaken memory structures and hinder growth prospects. Going for a full house takedown, Sharp suggested proponents of cross-channel network effects are peddling a “myth” before lauding Professor Mark Ritson… for admitting he was wrong about the nuances of “sophisticated targeting”.

What do Australia’s top marketers with B2B remits see ahead? Ex-Qantas CMO Jo Boundy, now at Commbank, Salesforce’s Leandro Perez and ServiceNow’s Caroline Raj debate how the talent crunch may be set to flip, why B2B marketing has the data and analytics skills B2C marketers want and how they’re resisting more demand generation activity as the economy slows – for now.

Creative eats targeting for breakfast, along with optimisation and every other factor marketers can control. Yet the vast majority of B2B ads are effectively a waste of space because they follow a tired formula – voiceovers, heavy on text, logo at the end – per a study of 600 ads by the B2B Institute. It found 71 per cent were highly unlikely to deliver any growth. To stop brands wasting money on "boring Power Point" ads, Partnerships Lead Derek Yueh unpacks some simple creative guidelines to help marketers stand a far better chance of delivering growth.