Agencies & Consulting

GroupM is making a major play for commerce revenues as retail media continues to rise. Ex-Amazon and IPG Mediabrands' Cadreon boss, Marc Lomas, is spearheading the play – along with former Goodman Fielder marketer Leah Jackson, who in her previous gig played a key role in handing trade marketing budgets as well as media to Initiative. Now at GroupM Commerce, the duo will be aiming to convince more brands to take a similar approach. But that requires proving incrementality – i.e. that media investments are leading to new sales and hard growth outcomes and linking measurement across all digital channels directly to the in-store shop floor. No mean feat, but Lomas, Jackson and Mindshare CEO Maria Grivas say they can do it.  First port of call? Busting measurement mind-sets away from “dumb” ROAS metrics, per Lomas. Then convincing more brands that an integrated operating model that aligns sales, marketing, brand, ecom and retail media should no longer be an outlier.

Virtual professor Mark Ritson reckons key strategic marketing planning functions face automation within five years or so. Marketing and its supply chain should prepare accordingly, though Ritson thinks creative agencies may survive a cull coming faster than many realise. With a hard swing to the right globally, he suggests sustainability and purpose are being rapidly downgraded – and only the "naive" now position the latter as a revenue driver. Big platforms have likewise pivoted to mass reach over pure personalisation – hoovering up what the virtual professor sees as an investment swing back to brand. Hence TV, especially locally, being overlooked despite continuing to deliver the goods, per Ritson: "I've never seen a bigger delta or disparity between how the tool [TV] continues to work very well for brands and how marketers look at it ... It's still a very strong medium."

Dentsu Creative ECD Sarah McGregor has parted ways with the business, meanwhile Kmart might be ending its on-again-off-again relationship with the agency as a creative pitch looms.

Suncorp’s CMO Mim Haysom confirmed the now insurance pureplay had consolidated its nine insurance brands with Publicis-owned Leo Burnett after a sweeping review of its creative and production partners in a strategic overhaul following the sale of Suncorp Bank to ANZ. 

More than 3,500 media agency professionals can’t be wrong: They all voted for the best media sales execs and teams in Australia – with the top guns awarded last night at a sold out Ivy Ballroom in Sydney. Here’s the full list of winners.

Cummins & Partners is without a CEO after Michael McConville's departure from the indie creative shop. It is not yet clear whether his role will be replaced. The former Adam&EveDDB boss had attempted to put creative effectiveness and econometric modelling at the heart of the agency's model, arguing it could reset fee structures based on results. How far McConville managed to implement that change is open to question – but at least he tried.

Expect more structural upheaval in the $14bn ad market in the next 12-18 months as more corporates like Commonwealth Bank’s move this week to monetise owned media assets join retailers in carving out new touchpoints to customers, says Coles360 boss Paul Brooks. Broad consensus has retailer media growing 10-20 per cent at present and will exceed forecasts of a $1.6bn to $1.9bn pool by 2025.

Tech investment advisor Terry Kawaja – the man behind the adtech Lumascape – thinks adtech’s lean M&A period might be about to turn, driven by an incoming wave of what he calls “creative tech” start-ups. Canva's $370m acquisition of Leonardo.AI is an early example and Luma Partners, he says, is “one hundred per cent” eyeing potential deals. Meanwhile, he thinks agency arbitrage via principal-based media buying is anything but nefarious. “It’s fine,” per Kawaja. But he doubts it will prop up business models under “encroachment” from all quarters. The holdcos, he suggests, are going to need a bigger tool belt. Kawaja’s also spoiling to fight Apple CEO Tim Cook, at the very least verbally, for hobbling the digital ad industry in the name of privacy while, he claims, using the same data to fuel its own ad business. Apple, per Kawaja, is putting itself in antitrust crosshairs – he hopes it’s next.

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. 

When Mike Napolitano landed at DDB Group Melbourne the once mighty agency had withered to 15 employees. Four years later, more than 100 people make up the integrated structure that has delivered three-fold revenue growth for the Melbourne business and a conga line of new clients. The Omnicom group win at Coles was the big one – but now in the hot seat at CEO, the challenge for Napolitano is to keep the growth coming, as the comps get harder. But he has a highly complex plan: Hire really good people; let them do their best work – and keep senior leaders on the tools.

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.