Deep Dive

So concerned was Google’s top brass that publishers had found a way around Google’s control of the $600bn global digital ad market with a technology called header bidding that the tech giant struck a secret deal with Meta to destroy the initiative before it devoured margins. That’s just one of scores of competitively strangling examples that are emerging through various court cases against Google around the world – with advertisers paying billions over the odds as a result. Australia is now lining up too with law firm Maurice Blackburn pushing to launch a class action to give any website owner or app publisher that sold ads via programmatic channels over the last six years a compensation cheque. It’s a strikingly similar action to that being taken on in Canada, funded by ASX-listed Omni Bridgeway – and US publisher association chief Jason Kint predicts “a bloodbath of lawsuits being filed” globally, especially if Google loses its adtech antitrust trial brought by the US Justice Department. That outcome could come next month. He predicts a break-up is on the cards – with the Trump administration behind the law suits in the first place.

Some B2B firms are realising Byron Sharp was right on distinctive assets versus differentiation all along. A slew of recent research underlines that buying committees are increasingly buying on brand, not product features – and they've usually made up their minds before the first marketing qualified lead (MQL) lands with sales, rendering MQLs increasingly redundant. IT firm Logicalis ran the numbers on its own campaigns and found only 21 per cent of its potential customers were even aware of it – and that a single percentage point awareness gain would drive massive revenue growth. Moreover, six in ten of its potential customers couldn't recall a single ad from any of its competitors in the last 12 months – presenting a major opportunity to start optimising to awareness and driving conversion via bolder comms. "Funnily enough, I didn't find much resistance," says head of marketing, Lara Barnett. ABB global digital marketing and content chief Sophie Neate says the engineering giant has dropped MQLs as a KPI altogether and is now getting more joy out of other metrics while creating and personalising content across a much broader range of buying committee stakeholders. Stuart Jaffray, MD of B2B specialist agency Green Hat, urges brands to go all out on distinctive brand assets, brand awareness, mental availability and recall. Plus, forget the answers you wrote in your last ten RFPs and instead look at the questions – and develop content around them. Then the buyers will come to you.

Machine-to-machine CX and an explosion of conversational commerce is set to bring $200bn of brand content contracts into play, forcing a total rethink for corporates, content firms and creators of all creeds for how they structure and deliver content for bots to read, process and action commerce and broader customer experience. Deloitte Digital is already retooling its entire content team to do just that. National Lead Partner Leon Doyle and global marketing and commerce boss Nick Garrett say brand-owned content and marketing is taking a swing to risk management and governance and brands must clear "content debt" fast or gamble on commerce-enabling AI applications scraping and ingesting forgotten, incorrect, outdated or even misleading corporate information and content lurking in digital corners. Garrett says conversational commerce is “exploding in every market” globally and thinks the impact on content economics is seismic – with everything that existed pre-AI at risk of obsolescence. That reality is likely also driving the next classic re-invention of consulting services and advisory practices.