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The 24^th edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer shows a 4 percentage point lift in trust sentiment across Australia, bringing us out of negative and into neutral territory. But underneath the topline figure is a bubbling pot of fear and scepticism, particularly with regards to new innovations such as AI and the way they’re being managed by government and business. Existential concerns prompted by technology – specifically cybersecurity and information wars – are also now superseding personal economic fears around inflation. This is despite the fact Australia’s wealth gap is playing a direct role in how we view and embrace innovation. For Edelman Australia CEO, Tom Robinson, increasingly politicised views plus the echo chamber of relying on peers and ‘people like me’ as trusted sources of information over and above government, business leaders, scientists and technical experts, is another worry. The message for brands and businesses? It’s time to reset thinking on business-government partnerships, spokespeople and messaging and turn up the dial on listening and nuance.

Archies Footwear's big bet on high quality content pays off as six times Golden Foot champion Yanderas Janderas proves a social media super star, driving higher sales and strong brand engagement. 35 million views later, the brand has achieved an average post-engagement increase of over 30 per cent. It's a second time collaboration for Archies Footwear head of marketing Ruben Thompson and the team at ODV. They first worked together on a campaign for NZ bathroom products brand Two Dudes.

Hello Social has broken cover on plans to step beyond social and into full service. MD Sam Kelly thinks there's a gap in the market for effective end-to-end agencies – and said the firm has already been filling it, using social media as a “Trojan horse” to sneak onto rosters and into agency villages to pick up wider work and build out its capability. The Surry Hills agency is now officially rolling out Hello Talent, Hello Media, Hello PR and Hello Create, alongside an expanded creative, studio and production division. MD Sam Kelly reckons there’s huge demand from brands for agencies that can drive campaigns in between big brand moments – but “don’t want to spend $2 million bucks just to play”. Now he’s eyeing more rosters.

Almost 18 months on from its belated official move into the bustling retailer media sector – and widespread calls from brands and suppliers for retail media networks to ‘close the loop’ on advertising’s ‘causality’ to customer purchases – Coles 360 briefed 250 suppliers last week on a measurement platform it has custom-built with global retail data specialist, Circana. The launch of 360Impact, led by former Meta marketing science boss Andy Ford, outlined ambitious plans for the scaled use of control groups in physical and online stores to prove advertising across Coles owned media assets directly stimulates demand at the checkout. 

The Formula One Australian Grand Prix is fresh off another record breaking year of attendance that Australian Grand Prix CEO Travis Auld hopes signals the event's endurance in the Australian sporting landscape. But he says evolving off-track entertainment – and working out how to get more people into the event without ruining it – are key to putting it into the same league as the Australian Open. Paramount ANZ's GM of ad sales, Nick Bower, says local brands are queueing for sponsorships despite restrictions. He's hoping Paramount still holds the rights in three years time.

Legacy martech is not delivering the kinds of returns organisations want, and boards are reticent to keep filling the funding budget at a time of significant market constraint, according to a new study by technology research firm Forrester. Getting the balance right is an even tougher assignment for APAC marketers who face even greater challenges than their North American and European peers. Martech can no longer stand alone as self-service capabilities that CMOs license from multiple SaaS vendors using their operating budgets, say the analysts who warn that even the most well-thought-out independent martech stack is no match for a well-integrated technology ecosystem that includes martech capabilities as core components.

Nine is the latest media major to go large on a customer data platform (CDP), selecting Adobe over Tealium and Salesforce in a project that has just started its implementation phase. The move will help the media giant orchestrate its 20 million signed in users across its publishing ecosystem, and improve experiences for those consumers and commercial opportunities for clients. It also means Nine it better placed to deal with Chrome's cookie deprecation, new privacy rules out of Canberra, while also building capabilities on one of the fastest growing advertising sectors in Australia: Retail media.

A decade after launching Australian beauty brand Frank Body and going global, co-founder Bree Johnson invested in the $20.5m Series A funding round last month of New Zealand brand tracking start-up, Tracksuit, along with a star line-up of Silicon Valley VCs and high profile investors. Tracksuit is taking on the global research giants and expanding into the UK and US markets with a faster and cheaper platform that sits inside companies – not research houses. Johnson’s investment was born out of her own experience – like many start-ups, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram used to be a powerhouse for customer acquisition but that lower funnel cash cow today has less kick.

Little did Westpac's Executive Management Team (EMT) realise in 2019 when it ignored the advice of its own staff who told it to buy the Pega decisioning engine that five years later its choice would leave the bank trailing rivals in what has emerged as a key competitive capability — real time interaction management, often referred to as real time decisioning. Commbank now has a decade's head start, while ANZ and NAB are bidding to catch it. Likewise Suncorp. Instead the EMT backed a management decision to accept a pitch from EY to build the bank a decisioning solution from scratch in a project code-named In the Moment. The circa $70m project failed. Much of the work was written off in 2021, buried amongst almost $344m in software impairment charges that hit the balance sheet that year. However, due to the commercial terms of its agreement with the bank, EY owned the IP and has subsequently launched EY Data Cloud IQ. Five years after In the Moment first began, and despite Westpac footing the bill for another company's product development, there is still no real-time decisioning solution in place with capabilities comparable to its competitors' Pega-based platforms.