News

Australian brands will spend more than a billion dollars on advertising inside gaming environments this year, according to latest PwC figures, overtaking the combined advertising of digital and print media for the first time. By 2028, the firm suggests Australia’s in-game ad market will eat $2bn in local ad dollars. Engagement is massive – and younger audiences are spending more time gaming than on social media. Which provides an indication of how big the market will become.

There's some light at the end of a brutal tunnel for parts of Australian media, according to PwC's Australian Entertainment and Media Outlook report, released this morning. Retail media – particularly Coles and Woolworths – will take a bigger chunk of search revenues. Consumers will keep spending billions of dollars on content, though much will be soaked up by telcos. Broadcasters are managing the transition to streaming better than newsmedia went digital – but are currently in the transition danger zone. Digital out of home is on a tear although the network growth which has underpinned revenue growth may have reached equilibrium according to capex spend analysis by the consultancy. Gaming is finally benefiting from the immutable law of advertising - money follows the eyeballs, whether that's all those eyeballs down in the basement playing League of Legends, Call of Duty, and Halo, or on the train to work playing Monopoly Go, Roblox or Candy Crush. Either way, next year looks likely to be the best revenue wise from here to 2028.

REA Group has made the Paris Olympics the launchpad for realestate.com.au's big new campaign, 'Keep Moving'. General managing of audience and marketing, Sarah Myers, is hoping to open up its market share lead ahead of the crucial spring selling season. It's a play for scale both in messaging and in strategy – the next six months will see executions rollout across TV, BVOD, YouTube, OOH, cinema, radio, digital display, digital audio and social, with a suite of iterations to tackle both brand and product across both buyer-seller and rental segments. It's a big push, but Myers maintains that REA isn't worried about it's biggest rival's claims of playing catch up. "Our audience position and our brand position has actually never been stronger" she claims. 

Tourism NT is looking to boost capabilities around personalisation, experimentation and media optimisation by further investing in its martech capabilities. That's a shift from the previous two years where there was more focus on adtech. The organisation also has a new partner, CHEP Network, to help it on its journey which includes anchoring the tech stack around a customer data platform NT Tourism' head of digital and data Kristie Beattie calls the centralised brain.

Meta's Pay or Consent model has run aground on the regulatory rocks in Europe. It's the latest digital giant to fall foul of an increasingly robust and coordinated response to the power of the platforms by national traffic cops around the world. That includes Australia where the ACCC, AOIC, ACMA, and eSafety Commissioner have formalised the process of cooperation under the Digital Platform Regulators Forum, which met last week.

Freedom Furniture GM of marketing, Jason Piggott, sees it as a see-saw: “Adjusting the now, while still keeping an eye on the future”. Marketers from across industry sectors are all too aware of the impact ongoing economic uncertainty and cost-of-living woes are having on customers’ hip pockets, sales and salience. But marketers at Freedom, ING, SPC and Menulog are largely sticking to their guns when it comes to the way they plan out their FY25 budgets, key initiatives and how they manage agency partnerships.

There’s a tonne of people with customer in their title, but Telstra CMO Brent Smart says marketing is the only function that can actually deliver new customers. Kia’s top marketer Dean Norbiato is KPI-ing staff on being cross-function and cross-discipline, or they don’t get their bonus. Mailchimp CMO Michelle Taite is making her teams play golf with dumplings using a mouse. The three unpacked AI use cases, creative effectiveness strategies, selling brand and distinctiveness to the CFO – and why nothing in marketing can be binary.

Six years in the making, total TV currency VOZ is finally set to make its trading debut – on 29 December. OzTam chief Karen Halligan insists the TV currency is 'ready to go', but the new timeline gives agencies time to prepare for a fresh start in 2025. The new era of TV measurement should be a boon for advertisers and agencies, but with a rival currency for Foxtel Media looking inevitable, OMG's Kristiaan Kroon says things are going to get complex. Magna's Lucy Formosa-Morgan urges collaboration between TV industry rivals, because the market is not yet ready for multiple currencies.

Four years in, Google has officially pulled the rug on cookie deprecation. Consensus is Google read the runes on the upcoming report from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) report in the UK and factored in the DOJ's anti-trust case that kicks off in September. Mi3 spoke to brand, media, agency, and regulatory leads to gauge the impact for marketers and the supply chain – and they see deprecation happening by default, and trouble brewing for Google either way. Meanwhile, the market has already moved on to first-party approaches because cookies were "leaving money on the table". But there are questions about how Google implements consent opt-ins or opt-outs, and risks of marketers getting caught out by ignorance of where cookies operate as local privacy laws change.