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B Lab has put its foot down on fossil fuels, stripping four Havas agencies of their B Corp status over the group's global relationship with Shell – with more agencies now being probed. Climate advocates say it's the shape of things to come, arguing that the economics of fossil fuel clients don't stack up, and could cost agencies as clients shun the risk of guilt by association. Nick Hunter, founder of B Corp-certified Paper Moose, suggest that presents an opportunity for indies with the autonomy to take a stand. 

As Optus has suffered the effects of massive data breaches and network failures, Amaysim has flourished. It's delivered 25 per cent growth since being acquired by the larger telco in 2021, and was behind 108,000 of its parent company's 116,000 new mobile customers in the year to 31 March 2024. Now the value brand, which has 1.5m customers and is recommended by nine in 10 of them, has its sights on becoming a full-service telco with NBN services incoming. It’s part of a clear growth strategy around the core business of connecting, says recently installed VP, Vir Inder Nath. It’s also arguably a decision reflecting learnings from a previous misstep into utility services. Supporting the challenger mindset and growing product line is a commitment to dialling creativity and effectiveness in parallel, says CMO, Peter MacGregor. Latest examples under his rein include Amaysim’s first in-house created stop animation campaign (yes, another telco going there) as well as personalisation focused firmly on delivering existing customers more value and relevant content.

Regional media spend is holding up amid broader market grind – and a new trade campaign is landing, challenging marketer bias and opening doors for Boomtown's publisher-TV-audio collective. Now sales teams from Southern Cross Austereo, WIN Television, Seven Network, ACM, ARN, Nine, News Corp Australia and Imparja Television need to show what they're made of and extract best bang from marketing buck, says Boomtown chair Brian Gallagher.

It’s show time for the industry-shifting partnership between IAG’s unified marketing, customer experience and transformation team and its all-singing, all-dancing agency partner, Accenture Song. The pair have taken the wrappers off their first combined work: A fully integrated, trademarked brand positioning for NRMA, A Help Company. It’s positioning work that incorporates everything from marketing programs – kicking off with Nine and the Paris 2024 Olympics later this year – to new technology-led experiences for existing customers and employees. For chief customer and marketing officer, Michelle Klein, putting the emphasis on practical value-adds in creative and comms is a sure way to get the right “signal to noise” ratio with consumers suffering through uncertain economic conditions and growing several weather phenomena and build brand loyalty. It’s also a position and experience play Klein says will be tested and retested to ensure the near 100-year-old brand’s relevance into its next century.

Giant French industrial firm Schneider Electric wants to transform its award-winning sustainability-based pitch from personas to personal, courtesy of a new Customer Data Platform (CDP) implementation that it will roll out across the world. CDPs are more typically found in B2C markets but the use cases are maturing. 

The fragmentation our industry has witnessed across media channels and audiences thanks to digital is now happening in the commerce space, Arktic Fox’s latest report makes plain. Yet without a clear commitment to commerce as a business strategy, brands are failing to invest in the skills and platforms they need to find growth in the next 3-5 years, warns the consulting firm's founder and chief, Teresa Sperti. And they're missing a trick on capability building around tailored product, price and content propositions for each emerging channel as a result.

As marketplaces, social and quick commerce channels proliferate, and Amazon and Temu rise to dominate the Australian retail market, brands need to be able to “fish where the fish are”, Sperti says – a view echoed by LÓreal’s chief digital officer, Ryan Clark and Adolfo Dominguez Australia’s Kris Garrett, and a situation Are Media is aiming to capitalise on through its branded marketplaces. Yet just as marketers and agencies grapple to truly attribute the impact of media, owned and earned channels across the funnel, they’re also going to need to recognise ecommerce channels are doing a lot more than just deliver transactions – they’re critical to omnichannel experiences and conversion as well as brand discovery, mental availability, salience and all those other very marketing jobs that need to be done.

The same search on ChatGPT uses 10x the energy of a traditional search, while generating a single image with AI uses more energy than recharging your iPhone from scratch. And other forms of AI such as that used for automated decisioning are chewing up increasingly huge amounts of energy and spitting out greenhouse gases as firms scale their 'nudge' systems to tens of millions of 'next best actions daily'. If the programmatic ad tech supply chain is a carbon emissions train wreck, generative AI is an order of magnitude worse. Yet marketers, many of whom want to embed sustainability into their brand values are rushing in with little understanding of the implications for things like their company's 2030 goals, or annual carbon reporting. Ironically the digital supply chain has started to improve thanks to work by associations like GARM. Now Scope3 and its founder Brian O'Kelley a key player in educating the market and who swapped from carbon poacher at AppNexus to now a leading carbon gamekeeper has set his sights on the emissions impact of the creative side of marketing.

After a year's worth of hustling, it's go time for Nine. A $305 million bet to secure a cross-platform broadcast for the next five Olympic games looks like it might just pay off, with chief investment officer Michael Stephenson telling Mi3 the network "could not be in a better position". That follows CEO Mike Sneesby's claim that that Nine has already booked $135m in Olympics and Paralympics revenue. Telstra and Qantas round out the sponsor and partner package holders for Paris, joining Toyota, Woolworths, Harvey Norman and NRMA Insurance, with the likes of Chemist Warehouse, Booking.com, Light and Easy, Hungry Jack's, Bupa, IKEA and RM Williams fleshing out the middle order. Buyers say there's been strong appetite from clients looking to get in on the action – but they're not convinced that total audience will exceed that of Olympics gone by, even with the added audio and publishing inventory. Looking ahead to Brisbane in 2032, digital will play an increasing role in Nine's Olympic strategy, but it will have to contend with seismic changes to privacy legislation – which put personalisation and targeting in doubt. Ahead of that, Nine's big new tech bet – its CDP – faces a major test.

Auckland-based B2B SaaS platform Stickybeak is bidding to disrupt FMCG consumer testing – saving crunched marketers and exasperated agencies from product and creative fails in the process. Giants like Unilever, Dole and Fonterra are customers. But the mid-market is where Les Mills CMO turned Stickybeak CEO Anna Henwood sees greatest need and fastest growth – because their marketing teams have neither testing resource nor know-how. Which is why so many FMCG product launches and market expansions fail. The platform recruits from TikTok, Meta and YouTube to fill the demo gaps that panels fail to reach – and has learnt which performs best, where. Co-founder and former Edelman chief David Brain claims it makes consumer research "drag and drop ... as easy as ordering an Uber Eats". Henwood says it can be "done in 60-seconds" with results in 48 hours max – and she isn't unduly concerned by the rise of AI-powered synthetic audience platforms promising similar capability.