Deep Dive

Volvo Car Australia boss Stephen Connor has hit the accelerator on the carmaker’s plan to ditch combustion engines. He’s going all-in on electric vehicles (EVs) by 2026 – faster than any of its global markets. Volvo has deep sustainability commitments, pledging to become climate neutral across its supply chain by 2040. But Connor’s gone for first mover advantage for profit just as much as purpose, because by 2030 “every manufacturer in Australia will be standing on the mountain beating their chests about EVs”. By then, the market will be awash with technologically advanced electric cars. Hence Connor thinks brand will become the key differentiator – and he’s backing Marketing Director Julie Hutchinson to ensure Volvo builds a greater share of mind. "The race is already on," she says, with EV ad spend tripling last year. But the sprint to all-electric cars means major change ahead for dealers and retail operations (Volvo is about to launch an online sales play) while a rapid rollout of new electric models requires new business models – including subscriptions – to scoop a new cohort of younger buyers. Here’s the plan. 

Ask any marketer with CX and martech in their remit to prove the return on those investments and it can get a little awkward. But CFOs are increasingly asking the same question. Here’s a full and frank download from a marketer doing exactly that: assessing ROI on its customer experience strategy – on and offline – after going all in on Salesforce, just before the pandemic hit. Rob Lopez, GM of CX, Brand and Innovation at Norths Collective, which operates eight venues and clubs and two fitness centres across Sydney, has embarked on "Project ROI" to quantify its contribution to profit. Lopez already knows the transformation is working: engagement rates are through the roof thanks to what he calls “ethical personalisation” and the firm is able to attribute comms output to member action, digitally at least. Now it is digitising memberships to better understand offline – or in-venue – activity. The kind of insights it is delivering to the likes of Lion has the drinks giant smacking its lips to get inside the new app. Meanwhile, smarter data and analytics capability means Norths is de-risking its next phase of growth – because it knows the dollar value existing members can bring to new venues “before we even open the door”. Lopez has five tips for marketers embarking on (or rethinking) their digital transformation strategies. 

The killer combination of Covid and voluntary administration decimated Virgin Australia’s marketing team to a handful. However, under its new private equity owners, Bain Capital, Virgin’s head of paid media, Ben Will, was finally able to deploy a massively scaled and personalised programmatic ad campaign that he had been dreaming about for years, though he seriously stretched the Virgin team and its media and dynamic creative partners at PHD and Adylic in the process. After launch, it took months to fine tune but they survived. The team ultimately lifted revenues 30 per cent and won the MFA’s top award for real-time marketing for their efforts. But Will is worried new privacy laws will hand much of the control he currently has to "test and learn" to the walled gardens like Google and Meta, where their unknown tools and AI do all the optimisation without any visibility for advertisers.   

There’s an easy way to cut carbon emissions from digital advertising. Stop buying “crap” ads that “no human sees”, ditch “gamed” viewability metrics and instead buy on attention, never buy another outstream video ad, and cull the bloated programmatic supply chain, per Brian O’Kelley. The CEO of Scope3, a global emissions measurement firm focusing on decarbonising digital media and advertising, knows how much waste lurks within that supply chain – the sprawling Lumascape – because he was in deep and early, founding AppNexus, which ultimately sold to ATT&T for $1.7bn. Even “turning off five to seven per cent of inventory gets you a 29 or 30 per cent reduction in carbon,” says O’Kelley. Publishers feeling the heat to decarbonise – GroupM and Mediabrands are talking about money moving next year – needn’t fear. He reckons they will see more cents in the ad dollar as the bad actors get punted. Marketers will also stop wasting billions of ad dollars while saving millions of tonnes of carbon. But marketers have to lead, because everyone else will follow the money. Suncorp CMO Mim Haysom, NAB’s Operations, Planning & Partnerships lead, Tom Dobson, and Australian Marketing Institute CEO, Bronwyn Powell join Mi3 to ask the pointy questions on where next – and how fast. 

Katrina Barry is Deloitte Tech's Fast 50 female leadership winner for 2022 and CEO of the globally ambitious Australian restaurant and pubs ordering app Me&u, backed by a Hollywood-style list of Australian names including Merivale’s Justin Hemmes, Rockpool's Neil Perry, Uber Australia co-founder Mike Abbott and former Google ANZ and current Domain boss Jason Pellegrino. After successful stints at McKinsey, Virgin Group and Contiki – and a less than enjoyable "straighty one-eighty" corporate gig in financial services – Barry's about a year into the role. Me&u already controls about 70 per cent of large format hospitality venues in Australia and is now going global. Barry argues the little round device on bar and food tables is actually about business transformation, customer experience and, for venues, at least 30 per cent more business per bill if they don't have to wait for a negroni or a kale infused pheasant at the counter – or for a host. Hence, many venues are now creating 'dark bars' as one tactic to improve customer experience and sales. Here’s why a little bit of tech in a pub or restaurant is transforming the economics of the hospitality sector – and customer happiness. 

After five years of mergers and acquisitions, Nine’s first Group CMO Liana Dubois has hinted at an incoming major brand offensive as the former boss of the media group’s Powered division says the network will walk the talk on creativity. Seven months into the role, Dubois says Nine has de-siloed its marketing operation. The next surgical intervention is a major review of its disparate tech stack. While Nine’s latest results suggest cost efficiency is the name of the game across the business, Dubois says CEO Mike Sneesby is a "big believer in marketing-led growth". Perhaps her budget is safe for now. Either way, she says Nine has plenty of scale to harness across its vast owned assets, though how Australia’s data-privacy overhaul ultimately crimps those plans remains to be seen. Meanwhile, with former Optus CMO Mel Hopkins now Dubois’ opposite number at Seven, a new competitive tension is brewing as the networks battle shifting audience consumption and buyers holding out to see which way the chips fall. Dubois says it will be good for the category. 

Seismic change? Here's Mi3’s first sweep of responses to the Federal Attorney General’s drop last Friday of a 300-page document outlining the biggest overhaul to Australia’s privacy regime in two decades. The marketing, tech and media sectors are broadly bracing for fundamental change to how they do digital marketing, advertising, targeting and personal data collection – among the most aggressive proposals are explicit consent requirements for geo-location tracking and for the trading of personal data, which have been expanded widely versus current privacy law. Targeting for advertising purposes, for the first time, falls under the proposed Privacy Act overhaul and will set off huge compliance burdens and require new skills and capabilities for firms which will need to explain in the language of a person with “below average intelligence” how their data is being used. If not, they can't use it. Industry will also have to deal with an “unqualified right” for individuals to opt out.  

Here’s an award-winning tale of how Amazon and Whiskas reinvented the ecom giant's cardboard delivery boxes as media – and a play centre for cats – in a bid to woo younger cat owners away from upstart challenger brands nibbling away at market share. They turned every medium and large size Amazon delivery box for two months (“low hundreds of thousands”) into branded cat castles, offices and… rollercoasters. They also wrapped in targeted ads across Amazon’s ad network, plus a branded DTC storefront. It worked, sending sales soaring 70 per cent, with afterburners for the rest of the year while flipping branded search declines into reverse. But there’s more meat in this can: Whiskas will this year launch a major brand overhaul designed to woo the under 45s amid a share war Mars Petcare Portfolio Marketing Director, Camille Shepherd, says has are distinct parallels with craft beer. She’s joined on the mics by EssenceMediacom’s Sophie Price and Michelle O’Brien.

During a recent high-level pitch to the CEO of a leading but unnamed global consumer packaged goods firm hunting 25 per cent growth in a mature category, “the eyes lit up” at the combined code, creative and culture components being proposed by the “cold, hard analytical” consulting firm Deloitte Digital, as Global CEO Sam Roddick recounts. The pitch involved a top Deloitte Digital team unveiling the blueprint for a new direct-to-consumer (DTC) business unit to deliver on the CEO’s ambitious growth remit. Roddick hopes it’s a benchmark-in-the-making as his firm accelerates to “mimic” Apple-like design and creative capabilities with engineering and systems prowess. The new ‘X’ factor for Deloitte Digital though is the nod to creativity and the business contribution it makes as a “value multiplier” for its industrial-grade customers. Part of Roddick’s global plan to help institutionalise creative thinking within the $16bn firm involves a former BBDO ad agency network CEO in Australia and New Zealand, Nick Garrett. But can the cold, hard, analytical firm really pull this off?