News

For the first time in its history, dentsu's B2B marketing study finds that brand awareness is now more important to future strategy than performance marketing – which is sliding quickly into reverse. As corporate buying committees expand, and millennials and digital natives gradually replace Gen X as key decision-makers, another tipping point has been reached, per the study: Personal decision drivers have overtaken professional ones – and they have a very different set of buying criteria. Dentsu execs, B2B marketers and other agency bosses weigh in on the new B2B dynamic and where next from here for both marketing and sales.

Alternaleaf, a provider of medical cannabis, almost saw its ecommerce plans scuppered as payment and commerce platforms struggled with regulations. Now everyone is singing from the same song sheet, but not without a lot of hard work and goodwill on both sides, as parties had to cooperate closely to find a way to navigate both Australian regulations and the operating rules that govern Stripe and Shopify.

Kmart is kicking goals, and the work done in the retail brand around digital transformation is likely to be reflected in Target's operations now that the two have been better integrated. On the ecommerce front, total online sales now exceed $3 billion, although Officeworks saw online sales slow, and Catch is still struggling against the rising tide of intensifying competition. But the good news is that OnePass, Wesfarmers' group-wide loyalty program, is increasingly delivering the goods. And the firm still has a huge untapped potential in retail media, especially at Bunnings where results of early retail media trial are encouraging.

Co-founder of The Monkeys and current lead of Accenture Song ANZ after its $63m acquisition of the creative agency, Mark Green, is heading to New York to run Droga5, Accenture Song’s global creative brand founded by Green’s former colleague at Saatchi & Saatchi, David Droga. Today’s announcement of Green’s move coincides with The Monkey’s brand being mothballed for the global creative unit, Droga5, and comes days before Green’s hire of top Initiative media execs start at Accenture Song to build a media buying and planning operation.

In the lead up to Christmas last year, Kayo and Binge CEO Julian Ogrin noticed the cost of living crisis was having a peculiar impact on consumer behaviour toward sport and his sports streaming service – paused subscribers from a base of more than 5 million since launching five years ago were coming back in bigger numbers and new subscribers were rising. After commissioning consumer research to figure out the forces behind the sports streaming uptick, Ogrin says Kayo was emerging as a third utility platform alongside the likes of Netflix and Spotify. A new AI-based hyper-personalisation initiative was also starting to produce “top of funnel” results converting prospects at higher rates to subscribers once they landed on Kayo’s owned assets. 

Ecommerce revenues at Australia's two giant grocery chains Coles and Woolworths are roaring back into life, barely 18 months after pandemic-fuelled growth went into sharp reverse. Big long-term investments across retail media, loyalty, digital transformation, supply chain, and fulfilment upgrades are paying off. They say timing is everything and new Coles CEO Leah Weckert and incoming Woolies counterpart Amanda Bardwell have landed just as the sun has started shining again on online sales. But there's still a lot of work to do. Outgoing Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci for instance flagged slowing growth at Cartology which grew 'just' 9 per cent – although that's after half a decade of robust growth (and a 34 per cent CAGR over five years). Its younger, smaller retail media rival, Coles 360, grew north of 20 per cent. Both of the retail giants also flagged the growing importance of AI within their operations – but their strategies are divergent. 

A swathe of B2B firms sceptical of the new crowd arguing for B2B marketing to invest more in brand and reputation building face a second wave of compelling evidence challenging the effectiveness of conventional B2B tactics, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and the impact of the sales function in influencing the “dark funnel” of hidden executives in corporate buying groups who influence half the buying process – but don’t show up on sales team radars, CRM systems and focus on risk and reputation over features and specs. Killer stats? B2B buyers don’t reach out to sellers until they’re 73 per cent through the buying journey and 82 per cent of the time the first vendor contacted by the buyer lands the deal. “So it’s not sales calling you, it’s you calling sales,” says former BMW marketer Stuart Jaffray, now Managing Director of B2B agency Green Hat, which co-commissioned the latest B2B buying study across Australia and APAC markets.  

With the release of Carsales CAPI (Conversion API), the company now lays claim to being able to offer the best of two usually competing adtech worlds by marrying the first party certainties of a walled garden with the extensibility of the open web. Perhaps most importantly, it also says it has the ability to connect and measure the two. At its upfront in Melbourne yesterday executives claimed its tech stack update closes the loop on years of development in anticipation of a cookie-less world fuelled by first-party data, and developed to privacy by design principles. It also arguably reinforces Carsales' differentiation as a data and technology business that enables media, compared to its traditional rivals who are typically media businesses that deploy technology. And Carsales claims the early experience of clients beta testing the solution delivered 3X better conversion rates... though it declined to name the client.