Australia's marketing academics are leading the world, punching far above their weight on the global stage according to US-based research and development leads at the B2B Institute, Jon Lombardo and Pete Weinberg. They think the Professors at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute along with Professor Mark Ritson are delivering "the most cutting-edge thinking within marketing right now". While the Institution and Ritson are decidedly different in approach, they both had a role (of sorts) in hitting upon the LinkedIn-backed think-tank's most successful piece of research to date, the 95:5 brand-to-demand rule.

L’Oreal is making a push for early commercial advantage from web3. Chief Digital & Marketing Officer Asmita Dubey said the cosmetics giant is already seeing a shift to blockchain-based commerce and is investing to seed decentralised beauty communities. In the meantime, AI-powered personalisation is paying off: more than a billion try-ons via ModiFace are keeping customers engaged, acquiring new ones – and driving ecommerce sales. Dubey said the move to O+O+O – offline, online and on-chain commerce – is on.

P&G’s top marketer Marc Pritchard thinks the packaged goods giant went too far in its pursuit of purpose before profit. Now it’s flipping back to growth first in order to then fund societal good. As brands face increasing expectation to weigh in on complex social issues, he thinks marketers must avoid being pulled in all directions.

Brand budgets are usually the first casualty of recession. But lead generation or performance budgets should actually be cut, argue Jon Lombardo and Pete Weinberg, respective heads of research and development at The B2B Institute, because nobody is buying. To escape the axe, they say brand marketers need to stop talking about brand purpose, and start talking growth metrics.

Jen Chase used to be a performance maximalist. Now SAS’ Chief Marketer and EVP is swinging hard for brand, ploughing millions into its first brand campaign for 20 years. It’s paying off to the extent that the once-sceptical CFO now tells the CEO why marketing needs more money – giving Chase the firepower to go deeper. “We lifted the effectiveness of our performance marketing, we lifted the effectiveness of sales, and we lifted the effectiveness of talent acquisition,” said Chase."We tied everything together ... Now finance is an extension of my leadership team.” She thinks 'performance brand' spend fuels the entire funnel – and pushes sales, marketing and finance toward the greater growth good.

Salesforce’s brand chief is waging war on vanity metrics – i.e. measuring quantity of output over quality of result. Hence the firm is no longer worrying about the number of blog posts produced or open rates, instead focusing for actual outcomes: “It’s all about moving things down the funnel”, per Chief Brand Officer, Colin Fleming. For better or worse, he’s acting like a publisher: “We’ll cut the pilot because it didn’t work”. Meanwhile, brand personification is paying off big time. But the firm is still working to close the gap between brand awareness and people actually knowing what Salesforce does.

Brands, platforms and regulators have completely failed to tackle the challenges of the current web – ad fraud is set to be a $120bn problem in 2022, per the ANA, and nobody seems to care. Predatory behaviour is rife, data security and data privacy are oxymorons. Lego global Chief Marketing & Product Officer, Julia Goldin wants brands and platforms to adopt its metaverse safety framework and join the World Economic Forum's effort to avoid a repeat.

Fierce headwinds are gathering across the global economy. Mi3 asked marketers, creative thinkers and platforms at Cannes what that means for advertising. Suncorp CMO Mim Haysom says she won't be pulling out of brand and into performance. But LinkedIn's Matt Tindale says there's "nervousness" around the traps. It might not land this year, but both think it’s "a 2023 problem". Thinkerbell's Adam Ferrier and Yahoo's Rachel Page suggest any recession will now roll in off a higher base – there's more money and resilience in the system, and marketers have learned the lessons of Covid. Time will tell. Either way,  brands are coming around to the fact that post-pandemic purpose has to actually deliver. Action first, talk later, and glib stunts are out. Meanwhile, the 'techification' of advertising continues, with new data showing just how far the pendulum has swung. 

Suncorp CMO Mim Haysom has added a Gold Media Lion to the Innovation Grand Prix scooped this week in Cannes. She said it illustrates the trend toward “pragmatic purpose” prevalent at this year’s festival, a sentiment echoed by the likes of P&G CMO Marc Pritchard and Diageo CMO Cristina Diezhandino. 

Media buying “is WPP’s single biggest carbon output”, per GroupM Global Chief Innovation Officer Krystal Olivieri. If the holdco cannot decarbonise its media supply chain, it can’t hit ambitious net zero targets. “We have to push partners for net zero emissions”, she said – and that means publishers and the media supply chain. But the “arms race” to build carbon calculators all throwing up different numbers risks confusing advertisers – and offsets won’t cut it. Rapid emissions reduction is required, which may ultimately lead to a digital ad supply chain purge. AppNexus founder and Scope 3 CEO Brian O'Kelley thinks that would deliver rapid gains.

Suncorp and its creative agency Leo Burnett stormed the Innovation Lions at Cannes overnight, picking up the highest accolade - the Grand Prix - for a long-range marketing program designed to show Queenslanders how to build disaster-proof homes in the face of climate change. The "One House" and "Resilience Road" housing prototypes and associated campaigns started out as an activation idea from Leo Burnetts in 2019 before Suncorp and the agency realised it could become a much bigger program to help home-owners, ravaged by fire and flood events, be better prepared. Three years in the making, the Innovation jury at Cannes clocked it as world-leading.       

The ad industry is missing the biggest opportunity in front of its nose. B2B brands are quickly outgrowing mature consumer brands, with the likes of ServiceNow way bigger than the likes of Ford and Ferrari combined. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky told Cannes agency types to start learning how to sell to businesses instead of households. In five years time creative directors will be begging to work on process automation, accounting software and fintech accounts, he suggested, and those currently uncool mega brands need agency smarts. “It’s where the money is going to be.”

At Cannes, Peter Field, Karen Nelson-Field and Orlando Wood spearheaded a three-pronged, data-driven counteroffensive on overweight performance budgets at the expense of brand. Presenting 20 years of IPA and five years of Amplified Intelligence data, the three outlined a 10-15 year decline in brands building mental availability and advertising effectiveness and the erosion of marketing laws that used to reliably help brands grow. Marketer heads have been simultaneously turned by metrics such as viewability, yet the vast majority deliver "zero human attention", per Nelson-Field. Meanwhile, compound data errors – mistaking device data for human data – have flow on effects that risk blowing holes in media mix modelling. But they also presented some simple solutions.

Paul Hirsch is the Jury President overseeing the first ever Creative B2B Lions at this year’s Cannes Festival and part of the mission is to overhaul B2B as "B 2 Boring". The stereotypes of B2B marketing being heavily centred on demand generation are “fairly true”, says Hirsch, but in reality, a lot of advertising in general is “boring shit” at the moment. Rewarding great creative in B2B is a step in the right direction – incremental change isn’t going to cut it. He breaks down the weighting for the awards, and despite ‘results’ accounting for just 20 per cent, he says “the creativity has to be in service of something that helps the business”.

The global ad industry faces a three-pronged threat to its stated ability to drive growth, warn ad effectiveness, attention and creative cut-through luminaries Peter Field, Karen Nelson-Field and Orlando Wood. Long-standing marketing rules such as ESOV and mental availability are being undermined by the mistaken collective belief that left-brain, short range techniques - read performance marketing - will drive growth and encode memory structures, and that all channels are equal in delivering attention. "The mental availability fuel supply is being drained," warns Field. But there are fixes, and the three are heading to Cannes next week to unpack them. Here's a sneak preview.