Agencies & Consulting

This year’s winner of the Australian Marketing Institute’s Certified Practising Marketer award, Paper + Spark’s Paul Everson, is in plenty of conversations right now, but reports a market afraid to commit to decisions as socio-economic uncertainty and short-termism persist. It’s not helping many marketers are either struggling to draw insights from data, or lack commercial nous to connect the dots to the business bottom line, he says – a big reason why skills development programs like Certified Practising Marketer are so critical to the industry. But with the core fundamentals of marketing as solid as ever – even with more channels and sophisticated terminology at our disposal – this experienced agency leader, marketing industry mentor and Uni lecturer is keen to see the industry embrace big M marketing with more confidence.

Former GroupM stalwart and one-time Maxus Australia boss Dave Gaines has built a USD$400m-billing independent agency in New York that doesn’t make any money on media mark-ups. He thinks audience metrics may face redundancy – as do media buyers – and agrees with former UM privacy chief Arielle Garcia that the data underpinning the promise of personalisation at scale is woefully inaccurate. But marketers and their peak bodies are doing little to change the status quo. Act fast, warns Gaines, or get fleeced by machines as well.

Lee Stephens, the former boss of Australia’s first listed digital agency e-mitch – a spinoff by the late Harold Mitchell’s Mitchell & Partners – and onetime boss of Carat ANZ is back in the media agency game with a plan to do it differently. Meerkat is an unlisted public company to facilitate better equity management for execs and employees and the agency is moving to channel planning and buying based on the best “media moments” for a target audience or segment. Meerkat will also eschew sector specific targeting algorithms from the likes of The Trade Desk for custom-built versions for Meerkat clients. 

Foxtel's aiming to beat OzTam to market with its own trading currency – with the two set to land days apart. That could prove bumpy for media agencies. Foxtel Media boss Mark Frain, while piling pressure onto the incumbent currency provider, hasn't ruled out bringing everything back together. But only under a "very different operating model". In the meantime the pay TV firm turned streamer is going all-out to align new partners: Measurement firm Beatgrid, IPG's Magna and Wesfarmers are running tests on reach, frequency, incrementality and brand lift, while Amplified Intelligence and OMG are building a major video streaming attention and context amplification study for the Video Futures Collective.

Searching internal and external sources and conducting research, analysing documents and data, and creating summaries and outputs from analysis performed topped the use cases in a huge company wide generative AI rollout at Deloitte for its in-house house MyAssist agent. And the consulting firm is touting significant self-reported productivity improvements for the 10,000 staff who engaged with the service.

Ill-conceived KPIs have led marketers down the murky path of less-than-informed consent. Now regulators are mobilising and it's time to ditch old-world data sets and processes, say those in the know from Qantas, Choice and ADMA. Clinging on to business as usual will prove highly risky, they warn, and tougher enforcement is coming sooner rather than later.

There's an urgency to dealing with the world's climate crisis, but can the ad industry drive actual change? At SXSW, 42North Consulting's Kiranpreet Kaur Dhillon and B Lab Australia's Andrew Davies shared why they don't believe the compulsion for claims is a good idea for brands anymore – and what they believe is the story necessary for advertisers and agencies to tell when it comes to climate.

Omnicom Media Group’s CEO Peter Horgan announced he would leave the firm next year, after tripling the business over a decade and carving out a market position around media transparency. But he says advertisers have now lost interest – and "integrity" is no longer “a halo” for OMG’s agency brands OMD and PHD. The disclosure comes as industry rumblings have media agencies returning to the opaque practices of a decade ago that triggered a global firestorm around the digital media supply chain and undisclosed incentives, rebates, strong-arm tactics and arbitrage deals with media owners on unsold advertising inventory. Horgan accepts cooling advertiser sentiment to transparent media trading has impacted the business – but scotched rumours of his exit being partly over frustration of intensifying control and intervention by US headquarters.

Artificial intelligence makes for solid panel fodder at an event like SXSW. The playbook goes that creativity and insight will overcome a sea of machine-generated same, and that humans will be masters of the machines and their prompts while everybody will upskill and adapt. But then someone asks an unscripted question: What about London's creative industry being decimated? Accenture Song's global and APAC creative chiefs didn't duck the question – but reckon there's a rebalance incoming.

Accenture Song ANZ has split the remits of the customer “promise and delivery” firm under two new leads to replace former regional boss Mark Green, who has relocated to New York to be Droga5’s global CEO. Bronwyn van der Merwe steps up from her current role in the high-demand customer service unit to run Accenture Song’s marketing, commerce, design, digital products and service business while veteran Monkeys exec, Matt Michael, becomes CEO of Droga5, officially rebranded from The Monkeys on 1 December. He also has responsibility for Accenture Song’s foray into media planning and buying.

Job cuts, restructures, depressed spend and corporate reputation firefighting. It's hardly a surprise that free-to-air networks have toned down the upfronts razzle dazzle – and some agency execs welcome a more tailored conversation. But could the shift put TV's recovery narrative at risk just as streamers are hitting the ads accelerator? OMG's Kristiaan Kroon reckons it might. Foxtel Media's Mark Frain sees things the same way. He's still planning to go large.

Experienced talent has borne the brunt of cost cutting over the last 12 months as economic weakness translates into job cuts. For those in their mid-forties and upwards, getting another job is increasingly difficult. They are perceived as too expensive, and by younger managers, a threat. But new research by the Experience Advocacy Taskforce (EAT) and Advertising Industry Careers (AIC), as well as insight from specialist recruiters and in-house talent execs, suggests many senior staff are genuinely happy with lower pressure, mid-ranking jobs – and don’t want the stress or bucks that comes with them. Retired WPP veteran Jon Steedman, his former right hand man, Greg ‘Sparrow’ Graham, plus specialist creative recruiter Lea Walker, UM’s talent heads Monique Black and Shilpa Jayakumar and AIC’s Adam Elliot weigh-in on the ad industry’s “obsession with youth” and the missed opportunity.

Seven Network confirmed former Amazon Media ANZ and holdco agency CEO Henry Tajer has been engaged to advise the broadcaster on building out its commercial strategy following a sweeping cost-out and redundancy program in June that included the exit of long serving Chief Revenue Officer Kurt Burnette. Tajer has been meeting with media agency group executives in recent weeks.   

Two years go juniors were asking for $90k and getting it. Digital guns with all of 24 months experience were seeking $150k. Agency perk wars were running hot. But the talent pendulum has swung. Job cuts have been coming thick and fast and the power balance shift has left those on the wrong end of the shakeout short on optimism. Recruiters say it’s a return to the mean following the pandemic era’s artificial inflation, though exacerbated by “recession-y” macros and ongoing agency consolidation at the big end of town – and it’s hit senior talent hard. But there are still four key areas where jobs are to be had, and proactive, no-lose steps to take. Here’s part one of Mi3’s two-part adland jobs series.

Google's fast-tracked legal battle with the Justice Department has ended faster than anticipated, just three weeks in, with Google putting up a remarkably weak fight, according to some observers. Tactical? Maybe. Whether it decides to appeal a guilty judgement – if given – will be telling. 

The kids are alright, mostly. The percentage of Australians who have only known a digital world is edging inexorably towards a majority, yet the digital experiences of government and business are still anchored in the messy transitional world of those who also remember a world of real things. To ensure they are delivering the best experiences, brands and governments need to take much more account of the changing relationship the community has with technology according to a report from R/GA. It's a world already familiar to executives we spoke to at Kit (part of CommBank's X-15 ventures) and Bendigo and Adelaide's Up Bank.

YouTube is out to prove its breadth of niche long-form content gets audiences more engaged than they might be elsewhere. It's hired Kantar to help make a solid case that this so called 'flow state' makes audiences more receptive to new information – i.e. advertising. And it's also making some bold claims about how YouTube reduces ecom returns. But Neuro Insight's Peter Pynta queries whether such macro level observations go deep enough, and importantly, whether they can really be applied to advertising. From those deciding where spend goes, the feedback was mixed. Buyers are not yet convinced that it translates to all-important advertising effectiveness – and some say YouTube's jamming in plenty of ads that might break that flow state.

KPMG is muscling up in its own brand and marketing masterplan in a bid to distance itself from PwC’s tax leak scandal, “create a bit of space between us and our competitors” and remind the market that the big four consulting groups “are not all the same”, according to Sudeep Gohil. Taking on the broadening remit for the firm as “partner in charge of brand and marketing”, Gohil remains a partner in KPMG’s Customer unit and was a former creative agency strategy director with US-based Wieden & Kennedy and ex-CEO at Droga5 ANZ before it died and was resurrected by Accenture Song in recent weeks after its rebrand of The Monkeys.

NIB and University of Tasmania are two Australian organisations that have begun squaring up to the sustainability reckoning coming to marketers, agency and media publishers as legislated climate reporting ratchets up a notch and Scope 3 emissions become front and centre. With media and marketing emissions estimated at a whopping 59 per cent of total group emissions at NIB, marketing this year adopted GroupM’s Project Alpha reporting tool to start accurately measuring and optimising campaigns with immediate double-digit reductions effect. At Uni of Tas meanwhile, 30 per cent-plus reductions just by tackling the low-hanging fruit of digital advertising optimisation – largely programmatic display and made for advertising sites. Meanwhile switching out clicks to conversion metrics not only won over the c-suite, it’s cementing the education provider’s global number one position for climate action with prospective students, and led to a 264 per cent increase in conversions in early campaign trials.

Seven's new structure raised more than a few eyebrows when it landed in June, as did the big name cuts that came with it. But despite new Television and Digital divisions appearing to erect silos, national TV sales boss Katie Finney says Seven's commitment to converged trading remains unchanged. In fact, she says little has tangibly changed across the sales structure, aside from PNLs and reporting lines – intended to streamline delivery for partners. She’s in market tasked with assuring advertisers and agencies that Seven is now better set to manage shifting market dynamics. But the restructure isn't all Seven has to address, in what has been a year marred by controversies and murky allegations. Finney says the business is taking on "the good, the bad and the ugly" from partners and staffers alike, while CEO Jeff Howard is taking a zero tolerance stance on bad behaviour.

The race is on to crack AI search before brand and publisher rankings slide. The latest version of Google's AI Overviews has Resolution Digital's David Castle optimistic that the SEO wheel won't need to be completely be remade when it lands in Australia within the next six months, with Google already testing AI Overviews ads in the US – but Castle fears deciphering chatbots will prove more difficult. Hotwire CEO Heather Kernahan claims the firm has managed to reverse engineer where AIs are pulling from and what’s influencing them – but it’s early days and only in testing with a handful of clients. Meanwhile, a new generation of search upstarts are eschewing the ad-funded model entirely: Andi Search CEO Angela Hoover suggest ads would lead to her platform's "ultimate destruction". But that’s what Sergey Brin and Larry Page once said. Perhaps they were wrong on the timing.

Mamamia wants to bust out of its media for mums silo and it's put together an "Avengers" style squad of big name media recruits to make it happen. Former Seven national sales chief Natalie Harvey is at the helm with ex-IAG marketer Zara Curtis and Carat's Danni Wright now in the fold and Harvey's one-time Seven Network comrade Georgie Nichols clocking-in next month. Harvey says the number one job is for the team to drive awareness of Mamamia's jam-packed offering. Luckily, that's just what upfronts are for. Taking the stage to address Sydney-based marketers and buyers, the new recruits pitched four new content verticals, a vodcast format, and an expanded first party data play that Wright reckons will give Roy Morgan a run for its money while handing Mamamia's "secret sauce" to clients via a propriety content planning tool. 

The digital transformation sprint left everybody with “bland” customer experiences, per Fjord founder turned Accenture Song’s global design and product chief Olof Schybergson. After the Covid hangover, he thinks the next wave is incoming, driven by ‘fluid experiences’ that cut through templated attempts at personalisation, where design leads technology, not vice versa, and creates new products, income streams and business models while delivering actual customer value. He reels off case studies for Fortune 500, beauty firm Shiseido and Saudi Arabia’s flagship airline as needle movers. Sydney-based APAC design and digital products boss Cristiano Dencker was shocked at the high penetration of recommendation engines in Australia when he landed last year. Problem is, he reckons, they are not being properly harnessed and personalisation as a differentiator “is BS” pushed by vendors and agencies. ANZ design lead, Fabio Buresti, thinks local airlines and streaming services are standout examples of ‘cut and paste’ homogeneity when it comes to UX and UI. But he says blue chips like NRMA, Qantas and Tourism Australia are busting to break the mould.