News

It’s been a big flip from performance-led marketing to global brand play, but 12 months on, the results are showing it’s paying off for Intrepid. Lifts in brand awareness, brand search and engagement across markets are on the scorecard, and there’s record revenue of $621m – the majority of which comes through owned channels – on the balance sheet. Not bad for a ‘phantom brand’ and tour operator that has been helping deliver experiences for 35 years but hasn’t always had the logoed T-shirt, branded bus or social feed recognition to prove it. While climbing that brand mountain, Intrepid chief customer officer, Leigh Barnes, has been working on his bigger, multi-year plan to firstly get to know customers better, then drive more ways for them to interact, engage and book. It’s a strategy fuelling digital and personalisation investment, as well as diversification outside tour products into accommodation – and the latest foray, book publishing.

Socially conscious social platform Weare8 is unsurprisingly finding scale a challenge in a market dominated by big tech. The app locally has "hundreds of thousands" of downloads and 2.5 million globally but is well off "conservative" targets outlined back in 2022. Global Chief Growth Officer, APAC boss and former Nine Entertainment MD, Lizzie Young, has called time at the business. But despite low numbers, global chief marketing officer, Luke Robinson said the platform is providing partners like BBC Studios with comparable levels of engagement from 6,000 followers to circa 11m on Instagram.

Consumers are understandably sceptical about any changes supermarkets make to pricing tickets right now. Yet Ritchies is confident it can back up a 6 per cent uplift in fresh vegetable sales by permanently bringing in what it sees as more useful per nutritional serve pricing to fresh fruit and vegetables aisles. The independent supermarket chain partnered with Monash University on a joint academia-industry program exploring the issue of fruit and vegetable affordability across Australia, plus the dire gap between the ‘two-and-five a day’ recommendations of health experts versus actual amounts consumed by Aussie adults. Pilot results were so encouraging, Ritchies has rolled out per-serve pricing across all 76 stores, directly connecting nutritional serving sizes to sticker prices for the first time. It’s no silver bullet, but a small step towards benefiting consumer health while overcoming price barriers many cash-strapped Aussies are erecting in the face of the cost-of-living crisis, Monash and Ritchies say. It should also help win over consumers increasingly wary of the pricing narrative Australia’s dominant supermarket giants put in front of them.

Foxtel’s Hubbl is the third platform-based new brand the media group has launched in Australia in the past six years and is “bigger’ than Kayo and Binge, says executive director Dani Simpson, a former expat CMO and agency boss who returned from the US last December after 16 years. Simpson is in a big hurry to create a mass-market brand for the entertainment gateway which so far aggregates 18 SVOD and BVOD apps including Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Stan and Paramount+. And Simpson needs to create consideration for Hubbl ahead of rivals like Amazon’s Firestick, Google Chromecast and Telstra-owned Fetch, which also has a 35 per cent stake in Foxtel. But Hubbl represents new territory for Foxtel – its hardware via a Hubbl “puck” or premium Glass TV set are selling via retail in Harvey Norman and JB Hi-Fi as well as a direct-to-consumer offer.

Tourism Australia has knocked back conjecture that its hotly anticipated creative and digital pitch had landed. Clemenger Group, Publicis Groupe and Accenture are all still in the game – their responses over the next weeks to a comprehensive and strategic brief for the next iteration of Tourism Australia’s Come and Say G’Day campaign will determine who lands one of the most prestigious – and economically critical – accounts in the country. All three runners are making strategic capability moves to bring it home.

Imagine this challenge: You need to deliver world-class experiences but you don't control many of the crucial aspects of that experience and there's no make-good if you stuff it up. Then imagine your customers are a massive stadium full of Swifties who have been sweating for weeks on what feels to them like a major life event. It's the first of four back-to-back concerts, and the Thunder Gods decide to pay a visit at exactly wrong moment. Venues NSW general manager for Members and CX, Matt Baker, describes what happens next and what he's learned about CX in the world of real things, beyond the clicks and keyboards. The lesson, he says, is focus on the complete experience, and don't underestimate the customers' good sense and goodwill.

NAB this month launched the latest iteration of its ‘More Than Money’ platform, dubbed ‘Wrangle Your Money’, in partnership with TBWA\Melbourne and Mindshare. Around since 2016 as a marketing line, the campaign platform has proven itself to be a usefully flexible brand tool for adapting to the changing needs of customers, says head of group brand, Sue Brailsford. That’s particularly important given Australia’s explosive interest rate rise and cost-of-living conditions over the last 18 months. But the proposition’s longevity is also paying off in terms of record levels of brand consideration, 20 per cent media efficiency gains and stronger consideration across Gen Z consumers..

Domain CMO, Rebecca Darley, is bullish about the property marketplace’s commercial performance against its larger rival, REA Group, and she has the figures to back her up. While overall category audience growth hit 5 per cent according to Ipsos’ Spring 2023 figures, Domain more than doubled performance against its major competitor, chalking up 10.3 per cent audience growth versus its rival’s 4 per cent. Meanwhile its media business is up 30 per cent this financial year – and Darley's targeting greater gains across utilities, finance and insurance. All of which adds directly to the bottom line for a marketer with an acute commercial focus. From building a proprietary market mix model and trebling internal data, tech and advertising team headcount, to driving dynamic AI-powered personalisation at scale, investing in a big brand platform, and emphasising internal capability, Darley believes she’s found the smarts that deliver results now resonating in the boardroom.

Ernst & Young Oceania chief economist, Cherelle Murphy, is predicting a year of two halves for sentiment and spending as consumers with a mortgage or rental agreement trudge through months more of tougher cost-of-living conditions before getting a minor reprieve through real wage growth and tax cuts. She’s not alone – latest Roy Morgan consumer confidence figures tell a similar story of the early parts of 2024. Yet while retailers continue discount heavily after the slowest year for retail sales growth in a generation, according to Deloitte Access Economics, market indicators suggest retailers think the worst is behind for shoppers.