Deep Dive

The battleground for multi-billion dollar defence contracts building high-speed weapons, armoured vehicles and submarines was once a classified world. But over the past decade, something curious has happened: Defence contractors increasingly need to build brand campaigns and must reach very public audiences to do so. Two very big and expensive projects over the past decade – the now shelved French submarines contract and the ‘future frigates’ project – illustrate the change. Former BAE Systems exec and Chandran Thinc founder Chandran Vigneswaran and Tory Shepherd, a journalist at The Guardian, explore how recent bids have lured top marketers, and leveraged social media, journalists and mainstream ads to reach the right audiences.

Digital "pureplayers won the online battle, omni retailers with an online-first mindset will win the retail war", says the The Iconic’s just departed CMO Alexander Meyer, born in Communist East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Few have been as deeply involved as a marketing practitioner through the digital marketing boom of the past 20 years as Meyer. But the targeting tools digital marketers have been using are fast hitting walls – think the mass harvesting of online user intent signals and cookies. Data and tech are now just standard tools today – the biggest business differentiator, says Meyer, is a swing back to creativity. He has just landed in Canada with The Bay, the new digital-first retail play by The Hudson’s Bay Company, which also owns Saks Fifth Avenue. It's the most exciting retail tech platform opportunity in the world right now, he reckons. He also says marketing can "save the world" – but it needs a radical rewiring.

It was an eclectic mix of writing from industry contributors that made the most-read list of 2021. The Arnott’s Group’s Kate Wright unpacked what she learned on maternity leave during Covid - sans social media - while Australia Post CMO Amber Collins reflected on the heady years of “tit cricket” and booze in 1990s London advertising. Sonder’s Jonathan Hopkins covered the new revenue streams for brands from their owned media channels, Anna Whitlam declared corporate affairs was back for CEOs and The Brand Institute’s Karl Treacher took a jab or two at Simon Sinek devotees. These are the op-eds, market voices and contributor pieces that the industry read. Jargon, by and large, was out and genuine, sometimes enlightening, perspectives and observations were in.

2021 was rich pickings for tech stories. Google and Facebook held Australia to ransom and for a time, Bing was going to enter the vernacular. Sadly for Microsoft execs, Defcon One was de-escalated. As Apple hobbled half the mobile market - and kneecapped Facebook - Google then punted its third party cookie cull into 2023. Programmatic guns cracked the champagne and retrieved the cookie bombing handbook from the bin. But Big Tech's turf wars are already spilling over – and the smart marketers are preparing fundamental post-privacy shifts in strategy. Mi3's top 10 tech stories feature: The Iconic's Alexander Myer, Beem-It's Pat Darcy, Amplified Intelligence's Karen Nelson-Field, Aware Super's Nick Barnett, OMG's Kristiaan Kroon, a CommBank gatekeeper and 16 narratively brilliant US Attorneys General.

Mi3 produced hundreds of stories this year and these were the top 20 around marketers and marketing. There’s a tonne of collective wisdom, thinking, key trends and developments. Get your cheat sheet here, featuring: ANZ's Sweta Mehra, IAG's Brent Smart, Ampol's Jenny O’Regan, UM's Joshua Lowcock, Nestle's Antonia Farquhar, Catch's Ryan Gracie, Telstra's Jenni Barnett, Menulog's Simon Cheng, Lion's Anubha Sahasrabuddhe, Sparro's Morris Bryant, BoQ's Martine Jager, Myer's Geoff Ikin, Tourism Australia's Susan Coghill, Pieter-Paul von Weiler, Coles' Lisa Ronson, plus Matt Farrugia, Karen Nelson-Field, Henry Innis, Louise Ardagh, Peter Field, Anna Samkova, Joey Nguyen, Chris Brinkworth, Nick Barnett, Rob Brittain and more. Bookmark it.

Part One: Aldi has been one of the advertising industry darlings for a decade with its snappy, sometimes witty and mostly engaging ad campaigns - that’s rare for most modern advertisers, let alone a high-volume, value-obsessed supermarket chain. Marketing Director Mark Richardson, in a rare media interview, is brutally pragmatic about creativity – it works and it beats bigger rivals, Coles and Woolworths, by up to 50 per cent on key advertising-influenced brand metrics and, critically, it drives people into stores. So Aldi keeps doing creativity. And to boot, it delegates and entrusts the task entirely to its creative partner, BMF. 

The founder of Noma, the world’s best restaurant, hired the man behind the $700m MasterChef juggernaut – and hand-picked by Elizabeth Murdoch to run Shine360 – to scale his world renowned Copenhagen fine dining establishment and brand. But René Redzepi and Australian expat Ben Liebmann didn't want to take the same TV show, steak knife and pans approach as proven TV cooking formats, nor the path trodden by the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver. Instead scale would come through 'restrained creativity'. The number crunchers shook their heads. Liebmann delivered the pop-up sensation, Noma Sydney – which sold out 5,500 seats in three minutes. The team renegotiated the commercial contracts that underpin fine dining’s wafer thin margins, launched spin-off – but entirely different – restaurants with Noma’s top talent. And Noma is about to launch its first series via a global streaming platform, with a slate to follow. Just as it starts, Liebmann’s leaving, heading back to Sydney without a gig yet.

In 2018 Australian carmakers were collectively rattled. The consumer and competition regulator, the ACCC, dropped a bombshell on the auto industry in the form of the biggest mandatory product recall ever in Australia – 4.1 million faulty and potentially deadly Takata airbags in more than 3 million vehicles had to be replaced. The problem? Car owners were apathetic and entirely disinterested. Here’s how 23 car brands joined forces to head-off hefty ACCC penalties and deployed a media strategy that got spooked automakers to a 99.9% success rate. And a happy ACCC.