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Customer obsession to attain product market fit, stronger team talent management, fostering singular creative vision that spurs brand growth – they’re all critical for marketers, media executives and agency leaders right now. And they’re all things Giles Pearman has a firm opinion on thanks to a raft of practical experience in the field. The current co-founder of MyBrandTruth and startup coach, who earned his stripes as group marketing chief of Global Radio UK and ice-cream product manager from the school of Unilever brand management, is now a mentor for the Global Mentorship program and is keen to coach others through the challenges they face through his own unique storytelling approach.

The way B2B customers purchase products and services has evolved but the way brands sell to them has not necessarily kept pace according to a new study by Arktic Fox which finds too much reliance still on traditional outbound sales approaches. The most successful methods these days involve a stronger alignment with marketing and the use of techniques like account-based marketing (ABM). However, there's still a lack of trust between Venus and Mars, which can lead sales to go off on their own tangent, even to the extent of creating their own content marketing assets. Sales leaders who have more direct relationships – and are usually the 'one throat to choke' for the B2B buyer – often feel marketers have an inadequate understanding of customer needs. But among marketers Mi3 spoke with, there's a recognition of the pressures on marketing, the value of brand, and the benefits of alignment. The good news: half of sales leaders give their marketing colleagues top marks on the quality of the working relationship. Of course, that means half don't, and indeed 50 per cent of those surveyed by Arktic Fox gave the relationship a neutral rating or worse.

A year on from rolling out a brand tracking tool and adopting aided awareness as its business-wide guiding light for measuring improvement, Intrepid’s global GM of brand, Natalie Placko, couldn’t be happier with the significant role the insights have in demonstrating the value of brand investment. From earning more time in front of the board to a significant positioning strategy project as well as differentiation plan, insights are informing decision-making that she’s confident can ensure the travel company meets its ambitious 2030 strategy of $1.3bn in revenue via 600,000 customers in the next six years. Here, the brand chief talks through the dos and don’ts of building data literacy and avoiding “blow ups” around the insights such tools can uncover.

Historically agencies have started out with founders escaping the confines of a larger firm, launching their own shops and scaling before more often than not selling it to one of the global holding companies and ending up back where they started – except with the clock ticking on a two-year earn out.  But some say they are in it for life. Howatson+Company’s Chris Howatson, Avenue C’s Hugo Cutrone and Emotive’s Simon Joyce unpack headcount caps, flat structures, culture versus margin and why they are never going back to work for anyone else.

Well that was quick. The last few years delivered a Covid-induced digital transformation boom, then a vicious tech-job-killing retreat as brands sought to bring spending under control. But it looks like spending by CMOs on martech is set to boom over the next five years, growing from 19 per cent of marketing budgets to 30 per cent, at least according to the latest biannual The CMO Survey from Duke University and Deloitte, and the American Marketing Association. Overall, marketers are a little more optimistic about the economy and growth than last year. And they will need all the optimism they can muster to sign off on that extra martech spending given they also indicate current investments are under-utilised and under-delivering on ROI, and that they don't have the skills in-house to solve the problem. Albert Einstein would have made a great CMO, since he once famously observed that "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." 

Despite great in-house analytics capabilities and the will to bring insight to marketing planning, channel optimisation and reporting, designer retail brand Michael Kors has struggled to get past outdated last-touch attribution modelling. Which is why VP of global analytics, Manuel Neto, was keen to be one of five brands trialling a platform combining market mix modelling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution (MTA). "It’s been one of the most transformational, reassuring journeys we have been on," per Neto, with teams now modelling a hundred scenarios in 20 minutes versus two in 40 hours, and better able to make seasonal product calls, faster. "For me, efficiency is money. If you’re able to act faster you’re able to get competitive advantage faster. As a consequence, KPIs will improve." He wants to make the trial permanent.

Kenny Hill’s Akkomplice is merging into Howatson+Company, securing a new home for clients and talent in the face of a market moving headlong into consolidation as CMOs demand more services from fewer partners (usually for less margin). Howatson said acquisition was never part of the roadmap, but there is always an exception to the rule, even as AI in the medium term puts pressure on headcount across the board. He thinks the upshot is agencies may end up with fewer junior staff and more seniors. In the meantime, Howatson believes full-service integration enables agencies to take more slices of a shrinking pie at the expense of niche specialists – which means most will have to start “doing more things”, i.e. fuller service, to navigate incoming turbulence.

After 16 months as CEO of the troubled Dentsu ANZ operation, former Accenture and PwC consulting operative, Patricio De Matteis, has emerged and fronted another restructuring and more rounds of layoffs. Dentsu agency CEOs are out – media boss Danny Bass and Merkle CEO Steve Yurisich included – as a new power posse of three ANZ executives reporting to De Matteis was announced to staff yesterday. Market rumblings already have Bass set to join the expansionist Australian market mix modelling firm Mutinex. Bass and Mutinex CEO Henry Innis would not be drawn, "I don't confirm active or inactive processes we are in," Innis said. Dentsu briefed staff yesterday that Bass and Yurisich would leave the business, along with another 50 jobs at Merkle and iProspect that have been cut in recent weeks.

Tradie marketplace Hipages, which competes in a $50bn subsegment of the $131bn trade services market, has reached an inflection point, and is now spending circa $9-10m a year developing CRM and ERP-like services for its core audience of tradespeople. In 2025, it will begin development of new capabilities for homeowners as well. It's all part of a plan to grow profitability and market share in the notoriously fragmented tradie ecosystem. On the marketing front, Hipages is back for a sixth year sponsoring Nine's The Block, and it has also taken a Platinum sponsorship of rival Seven's Dream Home, due for launch mid-year.