Deep Dive

Part one: Tectonic movement is reshaping blue chip marketing with remits expanding by the day. Coles and IAG replaced the CMO role with Chief Customer officers. ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra was last month promoted to Managing Director of ANZ’s Everyday Banking business. But Lion’s latest move tops the lot for adventure. Anubha Sahasrabuddhe in February became Chief Growth Officer at the $3bn drinks firm. The former Mars global marketing chief has responsibility for marketing, strategy plus enterprise-wide transformational innovation beyond new product development. Just to make things more interesting she’s also been handed responsibility for IT and technology. Which means the CMO is now effectively CTO, CIO and CDO to boot. Lion CEO Sam Fischer, former APAC chief at Diageo, is backing Sahasrabuddhe to deliver. She’s given herself and her team 500 days to move the needle and reengineer the company’s culture, including IT, entirely around the customer. “If we can't demonstrate sufficient progress, then we can't justify our existence,” says Sahasrabuddhe. “The days are ticking.” 

Uber launched at South by Southwest, as did Twitter, Pinterest and Foursquare. Billie Eilish was discovered as an unsigned 14-year old. Mumford & Sons first made their name at the creative-tech-culture jamboree in Austin, Texas. In three months time the world will learn whether the powerhouse event can replicate itself outside of the Lone Star State. SXSW Sydney MD, Colin Daniels, is backing Sin City to deliver – with the likes of futurist Amy Webb, Coachella co-founder Paul Tollet and Slack co-founder Cal Henderson joining “titans of every industry” across tech and innovation, music, games and screens. He says every one of its 70 featured speakers would likely be the keynote at any other event. No wonder that circa 500 brands are keen to get involved – which is one of the reasons Seven West Media is going large, partnering with SXSW Sydney and planning to spring a very different kind of upfront during the week-long festival. Chief Revenue Officer, Kurt Burnette, said getting the investment over the line was a “difficult conversation”, but he’s backing the play to position the network at the heart of the creative-tech nexus and change perceptions. CMO Mel Hopkins will have a big hand in shaping what that looks like. No pressure then.

Tightening privacy regimes around the world are forcing Google to change the way it tracks and measures traffic across most of the 100 million websites globally that use analytics software to make sense of their user behaviour and purchases. Google’s near-ubiquitous Universal Analytics product was officially meant to switch off to website owners around the world on July 1 – bar those large enterprise and corporate customers who pay for Google’s top end 360 software suite; they have another year. Three weeks on from its long-announced shutdown, Universal is still being used by website owners. Ultimately it will give way to a new and already troubled successor, known as GA4. The problem? For most GA4 is a mess and a likely marker for what might hit Australian businesses. European and even US companies are exiting Google's analytics platform as ecom and marketing teams fumble with new tools, unable to quickly pull key reports, historical comparisons or insights. To boot, many are realising they don't fully own their data while it's in the Google machine. Those issues along with concerns over GDPR compliance are sending risk departments into overdrive. In France, about 80 per cent of large firms have reviewed their analytics as a result, per Piano’s global analytics chief Marie Fenner, and “about 60 per cent” have "switched". That scenario may soon repeat in Australia as data privacy rules are beefed-up. A blue chip performance marketer Jason Elk, who's worked for Nine and Westfield parent Scentre Group, thinks the shake-up threatens Google’s analytics dominance and by proxy its broader business. Matomo CRO Dion Blair, agrees. “Right now, unlike any time in the past 15 years, we're seeing the choice [businesses are making for analytics] is potentially not the big behemoth.” He thinks Google "sampling" website owner audience data is also a major issue. Here’s what marketers locally and globally are likely to face. 

NAB CMO Suzana Ristevski is a touch emphatic after just completing a three-year, $45m grinding overhaul of the bank's marketing technology systems that has seen 95 per cent of the tools used by the marketing team switched out – a Pega decisioning engine and Tealium's customer data platform are among the new line-up. Now NAB is ready for the AI stuff.  Ristevski acknowledges “inflicting a lot of pain” on the bank’s marketing team in the tech transformation and there’s more to come but it's "more exciting" as NAB works to embed machine learning and generative AI to deliver personalisation at scale that isn’t just “sending out rubbish”. She’s already sent out 10x more comms, now circling at 500m. But the bank is acutely aware of the risks posed by AI – and the strategy goes all the way up to the top. Tabcorp is onto its third in-house generative AI program and the creation of a centralised unit, Next Labs, to experiment – the problem with the other two was that they lied, or suffered “hallucinations”, per Chief Data & Analytics Officer Amy Shi-Nash. But Tabcorp can’t risk plugging into things like ChatGPT. The Monkeys and Accenture Song ANZ boss Mark Green, meanwhile, is back from Cannes where the AI banter was redlining on a "moral crisis" crisis for creativity, not dissimilar to the previous metaverse hype cycle. Green’s not worried. He reckons he’s slipped Accenture Song Global Creative Chair Nick Law an idea “that’s as good as any we’ve ever created” with generative AI at its core – and he says the client briefs are coming in from all angles. New York-based Law thinks there are new AI risks which will undermine the fascination and effectiveness of personalisation – namely, tonnes of mediocre messaging that will be created under the guise of 'right person, right time', unleashing a sea of sameness. NAB's Ristevski agrees.

When Elsa Beaumont was tapped last year by Treasury Wine Estates – home of the mighty Penfolds – the former exec at global hot shops like Mother and Big Spaceship, and her colleague Ben Oliver, who’s running Treasury’s internal media unit at Splash, were worried. Could they beat the warnings from agencies when brands try to go in-house with capabilities all previously outsourced: talent is hard to attract and keep stimulated; burnout is a high risk and any cost benefits would surely be short-lived. Burnout risk turned out to be true. But the talent, quality and volume of work is rocking, they say – and now Splash is preparing for a global rollout across Treasury Wines’ international markets. The upside is faster turnarounds, tighter links with marketing teams and better output than what was possible by just using agencies. Plus, bringing media and creative together has proven a boon. In the case of media lead Ben Oliver, he’s also chasing down transparent digital media buys and practices that he never quite got in life before Splash.

Coles and IAG have joined the march to install Chief Customer Officers into roles that were either previously at least partly the domain of CMOs or now have marketing as a reporting line. But what does a CCO do? Is it job title semantics or is the mission sweep broader? And where does this new executive species come from? Three Chief Customer Officers from Inghams Group, Hipages and MyCar, the overhauled Kmart Tyre & Auto, breakdown their agenda and why their firms opted for the role – and in Inghams case, why everything starts with “balancing the bird”.

Forrester took out plenty of headlines this week from Cannes with its 2030 forecast that 7.5 per cent of US agency jobs will disappear thanks to automation but two new surveys of Australian marketers on their use of AI, and a panel debate on jobs, ethics and early deployments of AI in marketing, customer service and experience has Australian execs adamant the inverse is true. They’ll need more up-skilled and re-skilled humans than ever to oversee and guide a surge in their volumes of messaging, content and automated personalisation that the machines are set to unleash. They’re also steadfast AI will not be a repeat of the wide-eyed embrace of social media which for more than a decade promised a better society and communities for all. Here’s how a handful of organisations, “cautiously” sold on the merits of AI, are moving fast to deploy and liberate their teams from the “menial”.

Consumers are behaving strangely in the current economic crunch – the generalised commentary of a hard spending pullback across the economy masks a mixed and messy reality. We're in a two-speed consumer economy in which a quarter of the population is driving upwards of half of current discretionary spending – and this group remains bullish. In Roy Morgan parlance, they're called the New Economic Order, or Neos, and their free-spending disposition is less about socio-economics, more how they're psychologically wired and Morgan is not alone on identifying these contrarian spenders. For the 7 million account holders in Commbank's iQ data pool, it's a similar message with different descriptors emerging from actual spending patterns among Commbank customers: a large chunk of the population is in retreat although they are cutting back in markedly different ways to previous downturns while another group is spending up. It's a conundrum for brands only chasing value-orientated customers. Here's how brands should  tackle the stranger days in consumerland – and engage two vastly different customer types, simultaneously.