Telstra CMO Brent Smart says going all-in on brand building and spending big on creative isn't about "awards or ego", but because it's the safest commercial choice. Marketers making over-researched vanilla ads are "the brave" ones, because many of Australia's big brands all look the same in market, have little distinctiveness and carry a higher risk of being ignored. That means business growth is crimped and those marketers are more likely to "get sacked" because of underperformance. Smart's advice is start building your own brand metrics, with marketing science fundamentals at the core, that can be correlated to growth, base sales and incremental improvement. Marketing mix modelling can help – and can turn a $10m budget cut into a $10m budget boost, per Smart. But it won't solve the fundamental issue most brands currently face – i.e. chasing conversions is easier and faster than building demand longer-term via brand investment. But if the ad is a safe, indistinct dud, even the best media planning, optimisation and MMM can't save it, or the CMO.

Domino's Pizza Enterprises has a goal to become the dominant, sustainable delivery QSR in every market by 2030, according to CEO Don Meij. His track record after merging Silvio's Pizza into a thrice-failed Domino's brand over two decades ago, then building a global pizza success story, suggests he should be taken seriously. A data junkie – and apparently Domino's number one Power-BI power user, Meij also credits the company's shift to econometrics with helping to tame spending and attribution complexity in the increasingly fragmented media market. He says risk-taking and the ability to move quickly drive success – as does recognising Domino's strengths in product innovation and delivery. And for the record, he strongly recommends the Crispy Pepperoni with Jalapenos. "That's my go-to."

Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) platforms are enabling marketers to get more involved in strategic business decision-making than they have been for years. But with that comes more responsibility, say marketing and divisional leaders from Bank of Queensland and Samsung during last week’s Mutinex Marketers & Money event. There’s a lot more data with which to ascertain value and choose what to invest in, versus what to ruthlessly de-prioritise in, for one. You also have a toolkit that can help tip the see-saw of brand versus performance back towards brand as a recognised contributor to growth. Just don’t be fooled you can deploy tech and run – upskilling teams and stakeholders, data quality, the financial literacy of humans and transparency are all vital to achieving marketing efficiency, effectiveness and commercial-grade stature in the organisation, both marketing chiefs warn.

Marketing mix modelling has given advertisers direct visibility over how media spend impacts business outcomes, so does it have a bigger role to play at the negotiating table? Mutinex's recently joined APAC chief Mat Baxter suggests as much but buyers aren't sold on the pitch. For now, they say that while MMM has a big role to play in the media planning process, audience is the best currency available to trade on. And for IPG Mediabrand's Mark Coad, too much emphasis on the outcomes could see advertisers and agencies paying more if media owners know how effective their inventory is for certain clients. Meanwhile, Baxter poses that the annual rate and marketshare deals struck by media buying groups with media on behalf of their pooled advertiser budgets up to a year out could be stifling MMM by preventing advertisers from shifting budgets based on channel performance. Still, UM's Anathea Ruys says it's not so binary. She argues that the deals "unlock so much more than price", and that there are "ways of being flexible" if ROI isn't up to scratch.

Mutinex chief Henry Innis has laid down the gauntlet to marketers and rival econometrics firms to prove their market mix models (MMMs) are delivering trustworthy insight by testing them against data they haven’t seen, AKA holdout testing. He's also called for the MMM industry to be far more transparent – and to align on model governance standards. Meanwhile Meta and Google state they have no plans to "cannibalise" MMM pure-players. But Google's MMM tool will launch before the year-end and both firms reckon marketers should try more than one model. Mutinex's Will Marks thinks marketers are better off first working out if the model they do use is actually any good.

Six weeks ago Mel Hopkins was rolled out of Seven amid a clinical round of cuts that added further fuel to the narrative that TV is in trouble as audiences bleed and revenue follows suit. But Hopkins, who as Optus CMO dumped the lion’s share of her media budget into Meta and Google, remains convinced TV is undervalued and undersold, says BVOD metrics and reporting are as good as anything the platforms can provide, and that the global streamers are likewise racing to “manage out cost”. Revenue challenges should therefore not be conflated with audiences, which Hopkins and Nine CMO Liana Dubois insist remain healthy – Dubois said TV reached 24.2m Australians last month. While media buyers last year said 2022 had marked “the biggest audience decline in the history of TV” and correctly forecast a 10 per cent revenue hit for linear TV as a result, Dubois said industry needs to get its terminology straight – literally – because TV delivered over the internet can still be linear TV. However it is delivered and consumed, “television today is reaching the same amount of people that it did 10 years ago,” per Dubois – and those numbers “are holding”. She warns marketers pulling out of TV for digital platforms and their dashboards are “dangerously” risking marketing effectiveness and should instead look beyond the shallow metrics they are being fed.