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Whether it’s getting the GST removed on sanitary products or driving legislation to tackle coercive control front-on, Are Media’s Change AREgenda social campaigns haven’t shied away from emotive, confronting issues. But they’re all examples of the things readers care about – and they provide a bellwether for government on what really matters to everyday people across Australia, says CEO, Jane Huxley. Through this year’s campaign, worth some $5 million in terms of reach, the publisher now aims to secure $700m in annual payments from government for the growing number of Australians providing unpaid care. It’s about instigating intention, Huxley says – while staying away from the politics.

Plummeting top search rankings and click through rates following suit have marketers and SEO agencies worried. Commissioned by local and international publishers, UK-based Authoritas has been running the numbers on both publisher and brand search terms and how they compare with Google’s new AI-compiled amalgamated answers for the last year. AI Overviews isn’t yet in Australia, but it’s coming. There are potential upsides for brands, per CEO Laurence O’Toole. But the hard work starts now – because search is about to change forever and the millions sunk into SEO may soon be largely stranded.

A commitment to building brand awareness coupled with running’s explosive popularity and a diversifying product portfolio have seen Hoka power 25x in under a decade: In 2015 it sold 40,000 pairs of shoes in Australia, today it sells more than 1 million. Now it's aiming to double that. Local success is indicative of rapid global growth for the running and trail shoe brand, which reported a 34 per cent increase in sales in the last quarter to 31 March 2024, bringing quarterly revenue to US$533 million and global revenue to US$1.8 billion, up 29.7 per cent year-on-year. Hot on the heels of a successful five-day experiential-led campaign in Sydney with its Hoka FlyLab cube and content program, Hoka ANZ chief, Matt Adams, and Emotive founder and CEO, Simon Joyce, unpack what it takes to balance brand investment with commercial return – and take a proactive over reactive marketing approach. Once people try the shoes, says Adams, 80 per cent of them buy.

"It's a trap", Initiative global CEO Dimitri Maex stated bluntly on a miserable Sydney morning, leaning over a cafe table with his then ANZ CEO Mel Fein. Maex wasn't predicting the bombshell defection two weeks later of Fein and her two Initiative lieutenants, Sam Geer and Chris Colter, to Accenture Song. Or was he, given the timing of his flash Australian fly by? Whatever the case, Maex in a follow-up from the conversation with Fein – before it emerged she was bolting to set up a new, rival media agency venture – was almost effusive of the talents possessed by the media agency posse. More on that later, but the trap Maex was provocatively speaking of was the marketing funnel – it never existed and adherence to its construct is wayward and distorting investment decisions, he says. Marketers need new models, fast, but most of Initiative's clients, says Maex, don't have them – and very few can clearly articulate how marketing contributes to business. So he has a short-cut – and here it comes, sans Fein, Geer and Colter.

Publicis Groupe was an early adopter of blowing up brands and collapsing silos into a reintegrated single P&L model. Now global growth is powering ahead of rivals – and other major holdcos are racing to similarly consolidate in a bid for end-to-end capability and de-duplicated overheads. Locally the firm has worked through the pain some of its transforming peers are now experiencing and practice chiefs – Dave Bowman (creative), Maurice Riley (data) and Imogen Hewitt (media) – are tasked with accelerating results. Their first full financial year as a triumvirate looks bumpy, given wider market sentiment, but they say economic pressure favours an integrated model as brands seek fewer partners and reduced overlap in a bid to do more with less – and means staff hone much broader capability amid a rapidly shifting environment.

During last week’s Ad Council breakfast to profile Effie winning entries from Arnott’s Group / Publicis Groupe, Aldi / BMF and Uber / Special, the alignment of agency and client-side marketing teams was touted as one of the most important ingredients in achieving modern creative effectiveness. In an environment where dollars are constrained, agency compensation remains a concern, and a definite skew towards in-house agency models, the trio extolled the benefits of a long-term, strategic relationship between brand and agency. And the reasons for this are about as human as they get: Number one for all is the value of creating a safe psychological space to discuss what’s worked and most importantly, what hasn’t. 

Despite massive investments in digital transformation, the quality of customer experience in industries such as banking and superannuation, government, and investment is mostly poor and getting worse. Even the best results are merely flatlines, while CX itself is rarely proving to be a differentiator, according to the last CX Index report from Forrester Research. That's a tough read for CX professionals, but probably not a surprising one. CX and programs like Voice of the Customer (VOC) are getting crunched just as much as marketing. To make matters worse, the budget headwinds are hitting at the very moment when the CX and VOC world should be investing in technologies to contemporise their approaches, as leaders from NAB, News Corp, Flight Centre, and Service Australia told their industry peers at the recent Forrester CX conference in Sydney.

Australia's banks may be spending billions on technology but that's not translating into great experiences at the customer coalface according to the latest Forrester CX Index. In fact, customer experiences are getting worse with only ING and Bendigo delivering consistently good experiences, according to the report. NAB is taking a design-led approach to improving its performance helmed by design chief Lance Thornswood, and he gave delegates at the recent Forrester CX conference in Sydney a reminder to look at problems from the customer perspective and to leave the idea that you can think like a customer at the door.

Marketing teams around the world are both leading AI adoption in their companies but are equally restraining its deployment over increasing concerns about the security and scraping of their prompts and data to keep the large language models (LLMs) of AI developers learning and getting smarter. Salesforce Marketing Cloud CMO Bobby Jania says the Scarlett Johansson furore with Open AI two weeks ago over the likeness of her voice in the unveiling of “Skye”, typifies every conversation he has with a marketing team: it starts with concerns and questions of “where their data goes, who is going to have access to it, who learns from it, who trained off it”. The opaqueness on what data LLMs are ingesting is proving a boon for Salesforce and its position on retaining no customer prompts or data on any LLM’s plugged into its various cloud products. “The reality is right now it's a differentiator for us because we're able to talk about the fact that our business is not our customer’s data at all,” says Jania. “It should be table stakes for the industry. For a lot of solutions out there, their preference would be to continue to train an LLM using the data that goes in, which could be that customer data. And from who I talk to, every customer is very concerned about where their data goes”.