News

We’ve all read the advice about the importance of learning from failure. But let’s face it, it’s an awful lot harder to own up to something that went wrong. Taking it to the next level and celebrating the learnings failure brings takes another level of cultural courage and vulnerability again. Yet from Uber’s annual Mexican team dinners to celebrate the $1.4 million campaign failure via mariachi bands and rogue promo codes on Facebook Live, to throwing a party to farewell a short-lived product line with staff at Chobani, there are examples of brands providing safe spaces for employees to take stock, own and grow through failure. As can be seen from marketing leaders from TikTok and The Bridge, taking decisive and constructive action after recognising a digital video proposition or Covid-fuelled health checker couldn’t be scaled are lessons that help them shape strategies and go-to-market approaches today.  Uber’s Andy Morley, Chobani’s Olivia Dickinson, The Bridge International’s Lewis Pullen and TikTok’s Anny Havercroft unpack hard earned – but high value – lessons from failure.

The Australian leans too right, The Guardian and ABC too left, says the Editor-in-Chief of The West Australian, Anthony De Ceglie, who’s behind the push from Perth by the Kerry Stokes-controlled Seven West Media to launch The Nightly, a national news masthead targeting the “mainstream middle”. It’s also tapped several raging readership trends where ThinkNewsBrands CEO Vanessa Lyons says evening news consumption is on the rise and circa half the audience of state-based news mastheads come from outside their traditional borders as big swathes of the population hunt more lifestyle, sport, business and political content.

Young, cashed up and ready to party, the legion of Swifties who poured into the Sydney and Melbourne CBDs for the artist's recent concert series lifted spending by 4 per cent and 6 per cent respectively in each city. And those figures are conservative, says the Commbank iQ executive who ran the analysis. Here's where the money went.

Metcash has dropped some tantalising details about its incoming retail media network. The ASX-listed retail buying group is keeping cards close to its chest, but sees "significant" revenue and margin from joining larger rivals in building out a media business. Supermarkets are first, liquor comes next – and if the numbers stack up, the rest of the business will then follow, per CEO Doug Jones. While the likes of Coles and Woolworths are powering ahead with big national plays, Metcash spies competitive advantage – and pay dirt – in localised advertising and SMEs, with a profit share for its independent retailers.

Adobe global CMO of Digital Experience, Eric Hall, wants companies to make bigger, bolder bets on their technology investments like consumers do, and break free of the incrementalism mindset they’ve been holding onto. And he’s seeing Adobe’s increasingly solid platform play and its brand-safe approach to AI as a compelling way to achieve that – provided the martech vendor can get better at elevating its own brand story with CMOs, CIOs and CEOs. During this year’s Adobe Summit, the marketing chief caught up with Mi3 to discuss the very practical AI innovations coming into the Adobe stack to drive personalisation at scale, what it’s going to take to make AI less scary for marketers, and how the vendor itself is working to improve its own marketing to marketers.

Coca-Cola has 2 billion interactions with consumers on a daily basis globally, but it didn’t know much about these customers until it started working towards a unified marketing operations approach as part of its pursuit under CMO and EVP, Manolo Arroyo, to be the best marketing team in the world – by a lot. In partnership with Adobe and WPP, the FMCG has so far built out 152m actionable consumer profiles in 129 countries. Across this, it’s applying 2,200 customer segments, with 27 data sources contributing to profile richness. And the good news is it’s paying off commercially, with known customers spending 27 per cent more. During Adobe Summit, Coca-Cola’s global head of marketing technology, Shekhar Gowda, detailed the business challenge and what it’s taken to try and harness 180 creative brand managers and thousands of people globally into one portfolio approach while retaining creativity.

Reflections Holidays CMO, Pete Chapman, has spent between $500k and $1M on an all-encompassing rebrand of the $500m NSW social enterprise and park operator. He’s confident of payback within 12 months and 10x returns in coming years. Why does he think it’ll work? Getting buy-in from its 420 employees first, building brand strategy and creative idea from the inside out, rather than handing the reins to agencies, an eye on distinctiveness, and a commitment to building mental availability over quick performance wins all have something to do with it. Marketing investment, per Chapman, "from here, is going to be 80-85 per cent brand, and 15-20 per cent performance".

A year on from debuting its family of creative AI models, Adobe has used this year’s annual Las Vegas Summit to detail the latest ways it’s extending the tentacles of generative AI capabilities into all aspects of the content supply chain and across its Experience Cloud suite for marketers. It’s a play that brings AI directly into the tools marketers are using for everyday tasks. On hand to tout the benefits of the vendor’s martech platform and growing automation and AI capabilities was giant health brand, Pfizer. The vaccine maker cited 50 per cent-plus productivity gains plus 75 per cent faster content creation and is now eyeing bigger gains – a five-fold increase in content productivity via rapid adoption of Adobe’s tools and up to $1 billion in near-term value off the back of its broader AI play.

One of the top global bosses for the Paramount+ streaming service, Marco Nobili, was in Australia this week in the lead-up to the launch of an advertising subscription tier for Paramount+ and he expects the $6.99 entry point will “take a lot of volume”. The newly minted President for Network 10, Head of Streaming and Paramount regional lead, Beverley McGarvey, acknowledged broadcaster BVOD services were never likely to replace linear’s TV’s audience erosion alone but when audiences from its SVOD, BVOD, linear and FAST – or free digital ad-supported linear TV channels – are bundled, the business is “getting closer to a one-for-one” replacement of linear TV. But both execs say that’s also less important than the business economics of a combined subscription and advertising business. Australia is in Paramount’s top tier globally for SVOD ARPU – or average revenue per user.