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Nine months into debuting a much-needed brand repositioning, Crown Melbourne has debuted a unique restaurant experience onsite manned by Alumni chefs of TV reality program, MasterChef. It’s a unique partnership all parties behind it say required skin in the game, trust and belief in possibility to realise. It’s seen thousands of consumers join the waitlist for leading chefs – and foodies coming back for second helpings.

Weeks of industry banter was confirmed officially today with the expansionist Australian marketing analytics firm Mutinex appointing Mat Baxter, former global boss of IPG’s Initiative and Huge media, tech and design agency networks, as its new APAC CEO. The punchy and provocative expat, who returned to Australia last year, admits he’s met his match in the 31-year-old Birkenstock-wearing Mutinex co-founder and coder, Henry Innis, who like Baxter is reliably frank and polarising. The two firebrands are already repositioning and banking the company’s future as a “foundational” AI company and becoming the “world’s leading growth decisions platform”. They argue the marketing orange has been “fully juiced” for material single hit, market gains - today it's about predicting multiple, incremental or margin growth opportunities from processing and connecting unstructured business data. Still, the fast-growing, US-expanding SaaS firm, which the execs say is tracking now at a circa $120m valuation, is facing real challenges – Innis admits “there’s no doubt we have to improve our account management” as it locks-on a disruption rocket to the global research sector and slower, “less granular" market mix modelling alternatives. 

She’s retuned the language of the in-house agency team from campaigns to content supply, embraced measurement and utilisation, brought in new senior creative talent, killed off a bunch of meetings and stopped the automatic response to ticking every box in a brief. And more transformation is inevitable, says SVP and head of Lego’s internal agency, Nicole Taylor, as the world of media and consumer engagement continues to fragment and brands pursue owned and earned content – along with shared spaces – with even more vigour.

The In House Agency Council has suggested that marketers have flipped from mostly outsourcing work to agencies to mostly in-sourcing – at least in terms of volume. But Trinity P3's Nathan Hodges claims IHAC's "speculative" research overcooks the in-housing trend. He's not the only one questioning the data but IHAC chair Chris Maxwell is standing by the research, brushing off Hodge's comments as "disrespectful" to marketers and IHAC's research partner, Kantar. 

Economic pressures still weigh heavily on customer experience professionals, but that only makes the need to prove ROI even more compelling, says Forrester principal analyst Riccardo Pasto, who will host this year's Forrester CX Summit APAC 2024 event in Sydney and also dive deeply into the impact of generative AI.

Digital giants are packaging up responsible AI as if it's just another product feature but Gen AI leader OpenAI no longer has a dedicated team studying what its CTO Mira Murati admits are "catastrophic risks". Former Super Alignment team lead Jan Leike quit last week, slamming the leadership's commitment to AI safety. "Nothing to see here" say founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, both previously fired by their own hand-picked board allegedly over concerns about their commitment to OpenAI's altruistic mission. Investors subsequently fired the board and reinstated the pair. Everything is totally normal.

Wavemaker global boss Toby Jenner sees Alphabet and Meta eating half of all ad dollars, not just digital, by 2030 latest. Amazon and maybe TikTok will take that up to two thirds, leaving everyone else fighting over the rump. Cue consolidation. But Jenner, a one time MediaCom Australia CEO, thinks that makes life more sustainable for those left standing – and while some analysts may disagree, doesn't see wholesale consolidation of agency brands and functions as a result. But offshoring and automation is rising and Jenner thinks privacy reforms will reward those that get precision contextual targeting right at a local level. Production house Hogarth, he suggests, will play a major role.

UPDATE: Mi3 understands that Initiative staff  have been formally informed at an all staff meeting on Friday morning that Accenture Song ANZ has raided the agency's top three executives, poaching CEO Melissa Fein, managing director Sam Geer, and chief strategy and product officer Chris Colter. Accenture Song has confirmed that the trio will drive the full-service expansion of the firm's media planning and buying unit, with ANZ boss Mark Green explaining that the move reflected a "global strategy to deliver future facing media and integrated solutions" for clients . It's a signal Green is making good on his commitment to expand the media unit that first launched under former EssenceMedia boss James Graver in 2022. It's also a shift in Green's original strategy, which would have seen the firm steer clear of traditional media buying in an interview last year with Mi3.

It’s not just third-party cookies that will cause signal loss for brands. With privacy law reforms speeding towards the marketing and media industry, pretty much every identifier used for ad targeting is under threat. During this week’s D_Coded News Corp event, panellists from Journey Beyond, Omnicom, Adfixus and LiveRamp predicted chaos ahead but some emerging opportunities – including a 150 per cent lift in performance for Journey Beyond off its News Corp partnership – if consented first party data is harnessed right.