What you need to know:

• Backed commercially by Capgemini, Coles 360, Salesforce and ThinkNewsBrands, Mi3 is launching a generative AI-powered news service, Fast News, and a dedicated CX newsletter, CustomerX.
• Fast News is Mi3’s answer to delivering high volumes of daily ‘transactional news’ updates on people and account moves, new campaigns and initiatives.
• It’s 95 per cent automated, but always overseen by editors.
• It means Mi3 journalists can keep delivering original news and analysis – which requires beat-working, in-market conversations and dot-joining – which Gen AI can’t replace. Yet.
• CustomerX is one example of that type of in-depth journalism. Delivered weekly, it focuses squarely on the customer-brand-tech nexus as marketers and the marketing supply chain grapple with a rapidly evolving landscape while increasingly tasked with linking data, functions and systems directly to customer experience and revenue growth.
• Coles 360 is a CustomerX launch partner for precisely that reason, per GM Paul Brooks – who says the retail media business is now entering growth phase in earnest.
• Capgemini APAC Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Tracy Gawthorne sees CMOs under pressure to extract value out of the tech investments made during the 2020-2022 transformation rush – and resulting big changes for the way marketing functions set themselves up.
• But she also sees major opportunities around loyalty and genuinely consistent experience – with Ikea and McDonald’s standouts.
• Salesforce APAC CMO Leandro Perez backed Mi3’s generative AI push only after assurances it would not result in any job cuts (no chance). But he says the questions he fired at Executive Editor Paul McIntyre were exactly those marketers are now asking of Salesforce.
• Likewise Perez reports major upside in efficiency from deploying AI internally, with his team no longer having to repeat admin work on cross-selling campaigns, with the AI now predicting and handling next best actions.
• ThinkNewsBrands Vanessa Lyons is on board with Fast News because it’s attempting to address some of the same challenges facing the broader news media industry: How to responsibly use AI to protect core journalism and free-up journalists to do what they do best.
• There's much more in the podcast. Get the full download here.

CustomerX: exponential transformation

At the heart of CustomerX is a central tenet, per Birmingham. “Brands believe they can discern the intent of one buyer out of a billion and a millisecond,” i.e. ‘customer x’, hence the name of Mi3’s new sector specific newsletter spanning martech, CRM, personalisation under the banner of customer experience.

“That’s the great promise – and marketers are striving not just to identify customers, but to better understand them. The reality is that in many ways, they are going backwards,” says Birmingham. But that regression is not necessarily down to things they can control.

“There is cookie deprecation, we've got new privacy rules incoming in Australia and around the world, and frankly, we've got consumers who are better educated about what's actually going on in the background,” says Birmingham.

At the same time, the martech universe has exploded. Twelve years ago, there were circa 150 martech companies per ChiefMartec. Now there are north of 11,000 all hustling for a bigger share of the budget.

“We've now arrived at a point where analysts say brands are spending more on technology than they're spending on ‘marketing’. And there's a real question about whether that's starting to get out of balance,” per Birmingham. Plus, the rush to transform digitally – particularly around ecom and CX – over Covid is now only really being fully evaluated.

Yet marketing functions are already rushing to deploy the next big thing: customer data platforms, or CDPs, in a bid to pull together all of their data and use it to drive growth via sharper analysis, targeting, segmentation and personalisation in a world where third party cookies are dead and consent is king.

Mi3’s deep dive into Australia CDP surge – which mapped north of 500 implementations – gained huge traction.

“It’s a great example of how quickly new technologies can take hold, but also a cautionary tale about whether you really need that shiny new bauble,” says Birmingham. “When we analysed the market there are very clear examples of companies who get enormous benefits out of a CDP. But there's an awful lot of other organisations who have use cases around media optimisation that can probably achieve 90 per cent of what they want to do using existing martech.”

Throw generative AI into the mix and the next few years will see marketing and its supply chain disrupted again – massively. But some firms featured in CustomerX – such as Workato, which has reignited millions of dollars of previously dead sales deals using large language models – are already using GenAI to great effect, reducing admin grunt work and getting the machines to drive personalisation. As such, personalisation is now on the cusp of delivering growth across the broader market, instead of remaining “a solution looking for a problem”, per Birmingham.

All of which CustomerX will unpack with depth, analysis and insight on a weekly basis for a senior audience. The launch edition features “big set piece CX transformation programs with transformation leaders at brands like Blackmores, Country Road, Village Roadshow and Compass Group talking about what's involved in those projects, what the customer impact is of the project, and crucially, how that customer impact translates to the bottom line,” he adds.

Coles 360: Brand-customer nexus

That brand-tech-customer nexus is why retail media business Coles 360 is backing CustomerX – because those challenges are exactly what GM Paul Brooks and his rapidly expanding team have been working through since launching 12 months ago.

“It's fair to say we've been we've been pretty busy. A lot of the things [Birmingham] has touched on have been our world – and will continue to be,” says Brooks.

The supermarket’s retail arm has expanded its team 10x – from seven to 75 people; embedded Redworks, which handles sales and operations; built out the platforms and tech stacks required to drive “sustainable growth” and avoid a 'Frankenstack' technological monster; and launched post campaign reporting and sales uplift with analytics partner IRI. It’s also built out a storefront screen network while delivering “1,000 omnichannel campaigns – and 15,000 campaigns in total – across 2,000 suppliers, per Brooks.

Year two, he says, is about scale-up – which will only come if Coles 360 can put “personalised and relevant messages” from its supplier brands to its supermarket customers that improves customer experience for both parties and can be tied back directly to growth. If it can, “that should be a win-win situation,” per Brooks. “But it’s really easy to say and really hard to do,” he acknowledges.

With FMCG brands consistently challenging the likes of Coles and Woolworths to prove their media ROI, closed loop attribution capability – i.e. a through line from retail media ad to ultimate sale via Coles’ shopper and loyalty data – is set to launch before Christmas, says Brooks.

Next year, Coles 360 is eyeing greater growth from ‘off network’ retail media, i.e. as well as brands advertising on Coles’ own ‘on network’ assets, such as its website, app and screens, also using Coles’ transaction data to target buyers across non-owned channels like CTV, or social media. “We’re already doing that to an extent, but technology will be a real enabler and accelerator in that as we move into next year.”

Capgemini: Loyalty bonus

Brands are piling into loyalty programs as a way to improve customer experience – and amass first party data that can be harnessed through customer channels as other avenues narrow.

Capgemini's APAC Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Tracy Gawthorne cites Ikea and McDonald’s as standout brands in moving beyond the transactional aspect of loyalty programs – an approach experts believe will determine the immediate future of loyalty programs.

“Ikea has more than 170 million people in its loyalty program. That’s five times the size of the Australian population, and what you can do with that – if you turn it into a customer experience opportunity rather than a transactional opportunity – is huge,” says Gawthorne. “So we've been doing some work with Ikea around the world looking at how to be more relevant through the journeys people take in their buying decisions … and in some markets, there's been up to 37 per cent increase in ROI just focusing on loyalty.”

McDonald’s meanwhile is doubling down on “consistency of experience, no matter where you order, no matter where you pick up, or who delivers your food, they want that experience to be similar,” says Gawthorne. “Whether it's a kiosk, a drive thru, the web, whether it's home delivery – all those technologies are now starting to talk to each other properly. Which means that experience can be mapped throughout the journey so the feedback loop starts to build an experience that's much more relevant and personalised.”

More broadly, Gawthorne sees CMOs now under pressure to extract value out of the tech investments made during the 2020-2022 transformation rush – hence aligning the consulting firm, which has acquired significant creative and design capability in recent years in a bid to better link CRM with CX and brand, with CustomerX.

“There's a big opportunity we're seeing around driving more value from the assets you've got. That includes your brand, your technology, and also your talent – because all of this means big changes for the way marketing functions set themselves up, the way they operate, the way they build capability, and also how they see themselves across an organisation as an integrator across a business as opposed to a siloed function. So we're seeing all of that,” says Gawthorne.

“We're also seeing a real focus on consistency across customer journeys. How do we make sure the digital and physical are actually aligned so we get more consistency and relevance across that experience? Having one really good experience through one channel can be great, but it can be deteriorated through something in another space that actually dilutes the feeling and the customer sentiment. So the consistency across channels is really important.”

AI-powered news incoming

Generative AI brings the next major wave of disruption – with deep economic impacts. Hence Mi3 next week launching a news service overseen by editors but written almost entirely by large language models. Fast News aims to tap the efficiencies Gen AI can deliver, enabling journalists to focus on higher value contacts-driven original stories that, for now, the machines can’t replace.

When Mi3 launched in 2019, “we wanted to contribute to meaningful industry debate about the massive changes that are coming at marketing and the broader business agenda for growth – with high level original content” across marketing, media, agencies, consulting and tech, says co-founder and Executive Editor, Paul McIntyre.

“On the flip side, it’s human to want to know what someone else is doing, where someone else is going, a new campaign or initiative – what we call ‘transactional news’. But it's hard to do both. Diverting editorial resource to cover the basics takes time and energy – and I've resisted diluting the important work we're trying to do to stay with the market on the big stuff,” he adds.

“But the way that we can do both transactional news and quality, original content – where we've got to be in market, talking to people, making the calls, asking the questions, joining the dots – is to bring in the machines. So we’ve have built something that is 95 per cent automated, where our team doesn’t have to spend too much time on that volume.”

After six months scoping and developing the project technically, McIntyre then approached Salesforce and ThinkNewsBrands to support Fast News commercially – because both organisations are grappling with similar challenges, and taking steps to safely unlock the upside. They bought in – but took some convincing.

Salesforce: pointy questions

Leandro Perez, APAC CMO at Salesforce, wouldn’t back the project if it had involved job losses (it doesn’t, and won’t; Mi3 has a resource-demand imbalance even with AI). But in doing due diligence on the commercial partnership, Perez got to experience first hand the joys of being a journalist.

“I definitely did enjoy grilling you as you grilled me on all these topics in the past,” he admits in today's podcast on the early conversations with McIntyre for Fast News . “But it’s exactly how we’re thinking at Salesforce. We have a campaign in market now called ‘Ask more of AI’.”

As the tagline suggests, the Matthew McConaughey-fronted push is designed to prompt people to get to grips with AI’s incoming impacts.

“Right now AI is a little bit of the Wild West, where you don't know what you don't know about what you're putting into these LLMs [large language models],” says Perez. “For us, it starts with understanding, which is why I asked you all the questions around how you were deploying it.  So is it just the tech? Are you thinking about the privacy of the data that you're getting? Do you own this data? Can you use it? Is there a human in the middle? And so those were the questions I was asking you – but they're the questions that our customers are asking us as well.”

Salesforce made AI the central theme of last month’s Dreamforce event in LA – a non too subtle clue the company is going all-in. But Perez says the company is treading cautiously both using internally for its own campaigns – and externally with the products it is building for customers. Ultimately, Perez sees the same end state: greater efficiency that frees-up overstretched marketing functions from jobs that were never really marketing in the first place. “Fifteen versions of creative for multiple platforms is not marketing… it's just operations,” as he told Mi3 last month. “So where I get most excited about AI is I'm trying [to use it] to make sure that I give my marketers the more interesting bits to do and automate some of those other bits … so we can be more efficient and scale.”

One example of internal deployment is using AI to determine next best actions in order to cross sell product to existing Salesforce customers.

“Historically, that was someone sitting there building campaigns for all those different variations and permutations, whereas now we have the marketer set up the journeys – and have the AI actually make that next best action based on a prediction. That is game changing for us: The end consumer gets the most relevant product information about something they might actually use. And the marketer isn’t redoing the small thing every month or every quarter. We just need to make sure we do it well, once – and let AI automate it.”

Externally, he cites Gucci as an example of implementing AI in a bid to improve CX.

“They wanted to ‘Gucci-fy’ the brand voice. So we partnered with them to put some AI into the customer service centre. They fed in reams of all their branded materials and also all of their customer service transcripts of how they talk to a customer. The end goal was to have AI deflect or automate some of the initial interactions, but make sure it comes off in the brand voice of Gucci – in a safe way, making sure that whatever they were training into our LLMs was not then going to [feeding] all the other premium brands.”

ThinkNewsBrands: Trust or bust

The news media world is grappling with how to use AI to boost efficiency – but without undermining journalism or the journalists which produce authoritative insight and inspiration. Which is why ThinkNewsBrands is backing Fast News as a launch partner, according to CEO, Vanessa Lyons.

“Just like Mi3 is doing now with Fast News, the whole industry of news media is looking for ways to leverage AI in certain points of the news production cycle, not all points, but in certain points", but crucially, says Lyons, "making sure that even with Generative AI, we’re still a trusted advisor – it’s just [facilitating] more seamless distribution."

While Mi3's Fast News is effectively recycling press releases more efficiently than other trade press, Generative AI poses serious questions for the future of news and the distribution of information in a world already struggling to contain the dark side of social media. But Lyons believes that is where news media companies  have an inbuilt protection mechanism: journalists. 

“We need to remember that the core component of journalism is a human element … You need the human oversight that commits to making sure things are analysed, reported, impartial, accurate – it’s a pretty crucial role that humans and journalists play. So while there’s a baseline of AI to streamline activity and content the responsible fact-checking, framing and authorising of content has to remain,” she adds.

“The introduction of Fast News is about improving the distribution chain ... so it’s nice to see people finding the right avenue in a responsible way.”

CustomerX launched this week (see the first edition here). Fast News launches next week. Both are available only to Mi3 members. Not a member? Sign up here.