News Analysis

CustomerX: It’s never a great feeling, adding that ‘Deal Lost’ flag against a previously hopeful prospect in the CRM. But B2B marketer Michael Fan, the marketing operations lead at low code/no code technology vendor Workato – and an engineer by trade – built a reactivation campaign on Open AI’s large language model, breathing life back into $6 million worth of sales pipeline. Just as importantly, it released account executives from their desks – and drove home just how critical effective marketing is to sales.

Ad effectiveness and attention luminaries Peter Field, Karen Nelson-Field and Orlando Wood last year warned long-standing marketing rules such as ESOV and mental availability are being undermined by a collective hallucination that left-brain, short range techniques – i.e. performance marketing – will drive growth and encode memory structures, and that all channels are equal in delivering attention. Now, alongside marketing effectiveness consultant Rob Brittain, they’ve turned that “triple jeopardy” threat into a "triple opportunity" after diving deep into the data and outlining just how the right mix of quality creative, quality media channel and enough investment can send ROI – and business impacts – soaring.

Harvard Business Review identifies three non-exclusive scenarios around the impact of generative AI on the creative process: think of these as 'everyone gets out alive', 'no one gets out alive', and 'only the very best of us get out alive.' Either way, marketing chiefs are already piling in. Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar told Mi3 the firm is saving masses of time by taking away the work that creatives and ops people hate – like managing creative assets – while deploying the tech on both ad and email creative is driving “meaningful improvements to conversion rates.” Meta is seeing the same thing, per Creative Strategist Carmela Soares. But AI-fuelled hyper personalisation also risks unwinding the kinds of powerful shared experiences brands need to build affinity says Harvard Business Review. And generative AI "is not designed for brilliance yet we have to engineer for brilliance", per DDB Group Sydney CEO Sheryl Marjoram who says she's never met a client who demanded a 'small idea.'

McDonald’s is aiming for a bigger bite of Australia’s chicken obsession, pulling out all the stops to promote its McCrispy burger with The Kid Laroi spearheading a multi-million dollar campaign – its next big marketing push for 2023. Chief Customer Officer Chris Brown says "magnetic marketing" isn’t just about tapping into the cultural zeitgeist of the day, but matching brand to demand across channels – and personalising at scale to bring home the bacon. Amid the cost of living crisis, Maccas loyalty program is enabling delivery of value and user numbers have climbed nearly 40 per cent in the past year, meaning the firm can better tie brand to sales via personalised messages to keep people coming back to stores. It's working: In the last 12 months circa 14 million McDonald's products were redeemed through the app. In tandem with the McCrispy push, Brown and Maccas are also backing industry initiatives – namely Dylan Alcott’s Shift 20 – to better represent people with disability in advertising.

The CMO of Arnott's has heaped praise on the evolution of Ad Standards and how complaints are being policed but warns exploitable grey areas remain, specifically around influencer marketing. Nestlé Oceania CMO and AANA Chair Martin Brown wants more guidance on greenwashing so that companies can promote sustainability credentials without fear of facing an ACCC probe. The two were speaking at an industry gathering to celebrate 25 years of Ad Standards, where creative director Dee Madigan stole the show with an expletive-laden and acerbic take down of “digital charlatans”. Listen to the lot below – and note the most complained ads of all time.

ChatGPT can lift capabilities of worst performers and narrow the gap with high achievers according to a study by Harvard Business School but training is crucial. The study, based on tests at management consulting giant Boston Consulting Group, determined that on every task, staff using GPT significantly outperformed their peers, no matter how performance was measured. The AI-powered group completed 12.2 per cent more tasks on average than their peers, while completing tasks 25.1 per cent faster with 40 per cent higher quality results than those without, per one of the study's authors. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT seem to particularly outperform on tasks requiring creativity or innovation – sometimes at the expense of accuracy – but underperform on some simple mathematical or logical exercises. 

Brands, advertising and media should reflect the diverse world we live in. But they don't. Now FMCG giant Procter & Gamble and underwear brand Bonds aim to start walking the DE&I talk, joining the Dylan Alcott Foundation and Special Group’s Shift 20 Initiative to better represent people with disability in advertising. Launched on Sunday, P&G brands Pantene and Oral B featured a former international pole champion and Paralympic swimmer, while Bond’s spot starred a deaf actor signing in Auslan. P&G’s Company Accessibility Leader Sumaira Latif told Mi3 talent with disability not only represents 20 per cent of their products’ customer base – the actors are an “untapped strength'' that improve the creative process, drum up customer loyalty and build the morale of P&G teams internally. Bonds Marketing Manager Kedda Ghazarian agrees; the fashion brand has been on a journey to become disability confident in recent years and casting a deaf actor was a “natural next step”. Senior marketers argue there's a $13 trillion business case – with only 1 per cent of ads representing this audience.

Sunil Desai, Hubspot's VP brand marketing outlined to a packed session at the company's Inbound customer event in Boston last week the kinds of metrics that will make head office sit and listen if you want more budget for your B2B brand and more control over local and regional brand spending. Kat Warboys, the company's APAC marketing director brought the receipts – including evidence from a localisation experiment that delivered a double digit improvement in conversion rates, with even stronger impact when it came to influencing leads. And she only spent $1,000. It wasn't really an internecine corporate smackdown, instead both were reflecting on the kind of sentiment described in research conducted by Hubspot and LinkedIn late last year on the frustrations facing Australian B2B marketers.

Huge global CEO Mat Baxter reckons advances in AI will accelerate the demise of the media agency remuneration model – and give client procurement teams all the ammo they need to turn the screw, eating margin as billable hours become less relevant. But some agency bosses told Mi3 the opposite may be true, while others said they are already flipping how they get paid – and in some cases making better money. Publicis boss Michael Rebelo, Atomic 212 chief Claire Fenner, This is Flow CEo Jimmy Hyett, Media.Monks co-founder Wesley ter Haar and Thinkerbell's Jaime Morgan weigh in.