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Agencies have brushed off brands in-housing threat for years, but its continued rise spells margin danger and is forcing some shops to focus on higher value projects over retainers while staffing up with more seniors and fewer juniors. Latest research from the In-House Agency Council (IHAC) suggests 78 per cent of marketers are using some kind of in-house agency, and they’re quickly siphoning work away from their external partners – now doing the bulk by volume. In 2021, agencies had 70 per cent share of the workload, but IHAC’s latest 2023 data suggests the ratios have now flipped with agencies taking just 30 per cent. That reversal should have agencies scrambling, but bosses are playing it cool. They claim IHAC is overcooking the numbers and predict reverse swing as in-house shops come under cost scrutiny and bloated workloads. Hybrid models, per both sides of the divide, retain both clients and balance. Ogilvy, Hardhat, The Media Store, Treasury Wine Estates, Half Dome, Bank of Queensland, The Hallway, Moose Toys, Today the Brave, IHAC and Tumbleturn weigh in on where next.

The quagmire of doing good: Consumers want brands to do more, but there are contradictions galore in the way they expect ‘good’ to manifest. In the latest Leo Burnett The Good Study, authenticity and operating with integrity show up as table stakes for brands. Yet overt political participation and support and advocacy around societal causes can have very different affects on an increasingly woke consumer culture. Speaking on the report findings on a panel last week, UTS Business School dean, Carl Rhodes, former Domino’s CMO, Adam Ballesty, and activist, author and brand strategist, Azure Antoinette, presented conflicting views on how ‘greed-flation’, Australian belief in getting a fair go, war, politics, economics and the hip pocket are influencing the way consumers perceive how businesses should be doing good.

45 years after first setting foot in a creative agency, Mike Thomas has managed to reach his retirement with his love for the work still in tact – and he says that might just be his greatest achievement. Having spent decades helming creative at some of Australia's best-known agencies before taking a leap to the media side (as creative director for Fairfax, and then Nine's Powered), Thomas says he's learned that's it's relationships that really make a good idea tick: "You can have a good idea and a bad relationship, and it’s not going to go anywhere". It's on that basis – the connection of people and ideas – that he thinks there's not so much different between agencies and media businesses. Since learning his craft designing biscuit packages for Sainsbury's, Thomas has made his way through some of Australia's best known agencies, created lasting work for the likes of Qantas, Pizza Hut, Kimberly-Clark, worked on two Olympic bids, and much more – but it's the people he's worked with that he remembers most fondly. 

Last week under a request from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the Federal Attorney General [AG] Mark Dreyfus dropped a privacy curveball – the new Privacy Act will be introduced into Parliament in August, well ahead of an end-of-year deadline many thought would spill into next year. More pressing for the broad church of marketing, media, CX, adtech, programmatic and ecom teams across every industry sector, it appears the rhetoric from the AG and even the new Privacy Commissioner on the definition, treatment and transparency of personal information is firming against many current and emerging industry practices – first-party customer data matching between different entities is just one. The use of website tracking pixels is also under investigation, led by a Privacy Commissioner probe into how TikTok deploys such code. “It would have significant implications for a huge number of things,” says Omnicom Media Group’s Chief Investment Officer Kristiaan Kroon on any restrictions in customer matching programs.  “From an Omnicom perspective, we would say privacy reform is one of the top things that will redefine our industry in the coming decade.”

After a 15-year absence from market, ANZ has brought back its iconic Falcon creative and brand device in a new campaign promoting its increasingly sophisticated, personalised customer protection capabilities. The campaign is the first step towards delivering what ANZ’s GM marketing, Sian Chadwick, hopes will be a new era of distinctiveness in market for the big four bank that unites heritage with modern relevance. Chadwick unpacks the mechanisms she’s using to deliver relevance to a younger generation of consumers, along with the commercial mix modelling increasingly driving decision making and more informed, whole-of-customer “investment trade-offs” for ANZ’s newly unified marketing centre of excellence.

Less than a year after it announced a $500m additional investment in AI, Qualtrics has started rolling out significant enhancements to its customer and employee experiences suites as well as research and strategy offerings. At its QualtricsX4 user conference in Salt Lake City last week, brands such as Hilton, Carsales and Porsche shared insights into their EX and CX programs, while Qualtrics execs outlined a slew of AI-infused innovations. Yet even as experience management companies push hard on the idea that CX and EX can be better integrated to deliver more powerful emotional connections to customers, analysts warn it's a hard road to hoe. Despite years of CMOs pushing hard on the need to improve customer experiences, the level of integration between martech and CX vendors remains immature.

Robert Markey, one of the pioneers of Net Promoter Score — created by his colleague Fred Reichheld at Bain — says the real power of NPS comes from the creation of a three-layered system of the kind developed by Bain at Telstra, which sat at the heart of the giant telco's digital transformation. 

On one level, this week’s IAB’s Affiliate and Partner Marketing Summit felt like an ‘emerging marketing channel is coming of age’ moment. Brands, agencies and publishers touting the benefits of affiliate and partnership marketing as an increasingly viable, full-funnel solution to customer acquisition, building brand awareness, understanding sentiment and consideration that benefits both sides. If only everyone could align on commission schemes, upfront versus post-delivery payments, measures of success, perceived versus realised value – and cut the gamble out, of course. Because the event also signalled another contest is brewing between what a media / publisher / influencer thinks their channel, content and reach is worth, and what brands are willing to pay for it. And just like the battles still present in many of our more mature media channels, there’s a lack of consistency around metrics, immature referral and attribution models, perceived rigidity / flexibility of commissions and payment models, and simple education all inhibiting perceptions of value and alignment.

Just when it appeared linear TV was finally facing its Waterloo after a decade of demise predictions, the global boss of Omnicom’s PHD media agency network, Guy Marks, says “non platform media” –  literally everyone but the six global tech-media platforms now controlling circa 60 per cent of the world’s digital advertising market – has likely bottomed out and “have now found their new level”. Even linear TV, facing double digit advertising declines in the Australian market this year, is seeing “greater consideration … because it does a different job”. And that’s the start of a candid and sweeping take from the one-time app developer turned global media agency boss who sees Omnicom Media Group’s mix-and-match “Agency as a Platform” model as the grand solution to meet rising consumer and media complexity and the pressure to integrate broader capabilities – and more specialists – into the firm. For Marks, the hottest growth tickets for PHD are scaled management of influencers as a channel, retail media and commerce.