News

Seek cofounder Paul Bassat has tapped funding from Commbank, Myer founder Sidney Myer’s philanthropic fund and tipped in his own money in a bid to break the algorithmic grip fracturing public discourse and narrowing policy-making. To re-link community engagement with Australia’s rule-makers he’s launching open membership platform Amplify. Former Secretary of the NSW Department of Education Georgina Harrisson is at the helm, backed by a who’s who of business and politics on the board. “The level of division in Australia has got a lot worse over the last few years. There are very clear warning signs that things will get worse if we don’t do something about it,” he tells Mi3. “And so that's ultimately the starting point for Amplify.” Now they have to get it to land with people blinkered by algorithms and with a jaundiced outlook on whether institutions can be re-engineered.

Dentsu has slashed another 50 roles at Merkle. There's now been around 100 roles made redundant from the CX unit since April. Merkle's new boss Kim Douglas – a month into the job – said clients are mothballing big projects and scrambling for short-term wins. Hence cutting roles the firm claims had some duplication following the holdco's previous acquisition spree, taking in the likes of WiTH Collective, Accordant, Divanti, Aware Services, and Amicus Digital. Some speculate the move is indicative of a broader strategic shift, doubling down on the firm's end-to-end digital heritage and pulling back from what was seen as skew towards systems integrator services. But beyond the short-term squeeze, Douglas said the focus remains on building Merkle's positioning as "an experience-led transformation business". 

Retail brands are facing no less than a complete reimagining of what it means to be a consumer by 2030, according to a fresh report from The Future Laboratory in partnership with Afterpay. It’s a near future requiring commerce to not only recalibrate around community, values and experience, but necessitates empathetic technologies and systems that operate in the service of people, not transactions or zealous CFOs, according to E&S customer experience chief, Barry Mowszowski, plus futurist and academic, Dr Catherine Ball, speaking at an Afterpay event last week. It’s also going to mean rewiring outdated financial systems and processes that are increasingly shutting down access to credit to ensure they can deliver solutions rather than create more problems for consumers, agreed fellow panellist, Mark Bouris, the founder of Wizard Home Loans, executive chair of Yellow Brick Road, and recognised financial and business commentator.

Over the last decade, Medibank has completely flipped the story on its CX from one of serious failure, with negative double-digital net promoter scores, to one where CX is not only beating customer experience metrics but is helping to drive product differentiation and pull the organisation along for the ride. Now the private healthcare leader wants to extend the idea of service NPS into customer journey NPS, according to its latest investor pack.

Publicis Groupe's CX specialist is no longer just that. Six months into the gig as Digitas' new boss – and with a consolidated remit that spans commerce-focused Balance – Davy Rennie says the agency touches both sides of the "growth loop" and is delivering end-to-end on connected experiences. A structural overhaul in May has created five core service lines between the two shops – and Rennie bats back suggestions the shift has come with any significant headcount cuts. What it does means is bringing together working and non-working media under one roof, he says. That's made paid media a new growth lever for Digitas, which doubled its billings in 2023. It's yet another sign of the end-to-end shift underway as marketers look to streamline an increasingly complex customer journey and agencies aim as ever to carve out a bigger slice. That will be even more important as customer experience and commerce melds with the metaverse, which Rennie says is expanding faster than most people realise.

ASX-listed privacy-focused baby pic sharing app Tinybeans spent years languishing under $0.08 a share. But it got a kick last month when James Warburton joined as a NED. The former Seven chief's arrival was followed by Fatherly's US-based co-founder and investor, Mike Rothman. The two "operators" are seen as category-connected muscle that’ll help the app find a viable way forward to profitability. But it must get marketing, product, team, strategy and operational efficiencies right – and avoid falling into the trap of relying on ad revenue. No small feat. But a year into the gig CEO Zsofi Paterson has made some major calls on business model, strategy and flipped performance for brand  investment while replacing the sales team wholesale and bringing on micro – or tiny – influencers. Paterson, Warburton and Rothman see growing pain relief ahead.

Artificially constructed Australian YouTube viewers, known as synthetic audiences, have provided the breakthrough for YouTube to finally subject itself to an independent research currency, joining OzTAM's VPM data for BVOD in the digital audience currency run by the IAB and Ipsos. Although still based on log level data supplied by YouTube across its self-selected top 100 viewed channels, Australia is the first market outside the US where the video giant is muscling up against broadcaster digital audiences and potentially other streaming services for a single view on connected TV viewing. Ipsos also flagged its interest in cross-media measurement, a long-held ambition of advertisers globally who see efficiency gains by eradicating duplicated reach and frequency of audiences across different publishers and channels. Emerging measurement players like Adgile and Beatgrid are gaining momentum here via their cross-media measurement capabilities – Beatgrid, for instance, has been working with the likes of UM and Kmart and Virgin and PHD to develop custom cross-media measurement reporting with a methodology that captures viewing data on the walled gardens and platforms independent of their self-reported figures. 

Chris Minns might be trying to get NSW public sector workers to return to the office, but don’t expect millennials who’ve migrated in droves to Australia’s regional areas for their forever homes to comply, says Bernard Salt. Even as unemployment figures inch up, and the cost-of-living crisis and softer economic climate give employers more power in the employer-to-employee dynamic, business, social and market commentator and speaker says millennials will “die before they submit to going back to the way things were”. During an exclusive interview with Mi3 off the back of Boomtown’s recent Sydney breakfast discussing the surprising spending power of Australia’s 9.8m regional consumers, Salt shared his insights – and a bunch of census and market data – on the high-income, lifestyle loving, remote working regional resident of 2024 and the opportunity they represent brands.

One of the great ironies (and frustrations) for Mikayla Hopkins, head of marketing and employee number two at brand tracking platform Tracksuit, is that as a B2B marketer, she can't use her own platform, which is tailored to B2C brands. Hopkins and her team, however, have developed a different superpower: The ability to attribute content to conversions and storytelling into sales. For instance, a clever piece of Guerilla Marketing aligned with the launch of the Barbie Movie pulled in $300k. The trick is patience, says Hopkins, who urges her peers in B2B to extend the attribution window to really understand the impact of content marketing. It's also about recognising content isn't just case studies and whitepapers. One of Tracksuit's top content marketing performers is a calculator that helps brands determine the best split between brand and performance.