News

Amid heated conversation around Australia’s gender pay gap and women’s progress, Reckitt Benckiser brand, Nurofen, debuted its new campaign, ‘See my pain’ and first-ever Australian Gender Pain Gap Index Report. It reveals a 7 per cent gap existing between women and men nationally when it comes to pain diagnosis and management, and takes its cues from the debut of similar benchmark UK research kicked off by Nurofen last year. Beyond the supporting campaign, Nurofen is backing up its commitment to change by helping train 9,000-plus pharmacists on how to avoid unconscious bias when dealing with female consumers. It's no commercial ploy to sell another packet of Zavance, says Reckitt marketing director health ANZ, Holly McCarthy, but a multi-year effort to wield brand power to progress action and advocacy against an all too real bias.

There’s ever-growing consumer concern around the way personal information is handled off the back of Australia’s high-profile data breaches at Optus, Medibank and Latitude as well as AI use, says former privacy and now information Commissioner, Angelene Falk – and brands should be worried. Prevention is better than cure when it comes to meeting consumer demands and forthcoming privacy legislative change, and Falk is urging businesses to ensure data breach plans are not gathering dust but are operationally ready. Where businesses also need to do better is around the human intersection with systems and information, Falk says. That’s especially the case with more AI on its way, consuming more and more data sets, often without the ethics of human oversight, from all edges of the internet.  

Faced with under-industry average ecommerce sales, a desire to win back lapsed customers, along with ambitions to increase replenishment and frequency rates, luxury beauty brand posterchild, Aesop, has embarked on a digital and martech strategic plan and personalisation journey. Now owned by industry giant L’Oreal, plans are underway to discover which tech stacks and capabilities can be leveraged to further Aesop’s omnichannel customer experience quest. Through all of it, Aesop’s digital strategy leader Richard Lindmark is only too well aware of the need to obtain zero and first-party data to drive its personalisation and experience ambitions. And that means putting customer trust before everything else.

Digital audio has been on a tear of late. It's the fastest-growing media category, according to recent IAB figures. Perhaps more importantly, with the emergence in recent years of podcasts as a success category, traditional radio companies now have a powerful new tool - first-party data - to help rake in those highly competitive advertising bucks. SCA, publisher of the popular Listnr app, last week announced increased personalisation and targeting, extensive dynamic creative optimisation, and an Australian-based CDP plus first-party data clean room solutions and services. Ultimately, the media company wants to extend to its partners and customers the same benefits it has realised by implementing a CDP, stronger customer acquisition and retention, and much greater media efficiency.

Ahead of International Women’s Day (IWD), government pay gap data shows media, marketing, agency and tech industries are some way off gender equality. Release of the WGEA figures has women resetting their position on “lacklustre” programs designed to support fellow females in the workforce, but that aren’t in reality delivering. The accountability WGEA provides also has women in leadership questioning company policies that should be helping empower women, such as flexible work, as well as those that could hinder – they see promotion through meritocracy as one. Senior female leaders from Innocean, EssenceMediacom, Amaysim and Rackspace fear IWD is increasingly a tokenistic gesture instead of what is really required: Discussion – and action – that drives demonstrable change.

Medibank’s four-day working week trial has slashed sick and carers leave across frontline teams by two-thirds. Unilever’s NZ pilot saw work stress decrease by 33 per cent, work/life conflict fall by 67 per cent and meetings reduce by 3.5 hours per week. House of Brand is successfully recruiting talent and seeing energy levels rise thanks to its 100 per cent pay, 80 per cent time, 100 per cent approach. Inventium’s ‘gift of the fifth’ combined with efficiency training saw financial goals achieved two months early and gave workers a new sense of empowerment. The concept of a four-day working week is one of a swathe of evolving work models gaining popularity. But how does it work? Can staff really deliver the same volume of work to the same standard in less time? Do you just end up working a compressed work week? Can you still win and service clients? And is this a model that cuts the mustard long term? We speak to four companies trialling or well-entrenched in a four-day working week to find out.

MadeComfy, a platform that helps real estate agents break into the short term bookings market is delivering significantly above-market return on booking revenues that to superior customer experiences. The Service Cloud which has enabled this provides another important benefit - eliminating scale costs. That's especially important as the business seeks to raise $20M and head offshore.

Coca-Cola, the original TV alpha advertiser, has flipped to digital first, now spending 60 per cent of its circa $4bn media budget on digital. But its digital transformation runs much deeper than media – and it appears to be paying off big time. Revenue in 2023 was up 6.39 per cent and CFO and President John Murphy said its marketing reorganisation is boosting agility and productivity, with marketing “not a cost, but an investment”. CEO James Quincey said its in-house Studio X, delivered by WPP with output underpinned by Hogarth, is powering, “bringing it all together,” per Quincey, with the firm balancing digital and massive experiential events to put cans in hands, build brand and scoop up first party data along the way. It’s now also using AI to help reformulate product. So far it seems to be working.

Accenture Song boss Mark Green said the deal for the 80-staffer martech consultancy The Lumery is about adding firepower, not plugging gaps as demand for end-to-end service capability soars – and the top end of town consolidates CIO, CTO and CMO remits under all-powerful chief customer officers. While some question whether any holdco or consulting firm is truly delivering integrated brand, strategy, tech, CX and data analytics, Green insists accenture Song is walking the talk – and delivering “high double digit” growth as a “standout” performer within the broader Accenture group. Green and the Lumery co-founder and CEO Raj Kumar see that boom accelerating as brands get serious about slicing tech stacks and services that are underperforming and asking much pointier questions both internally and externally in a bid to drive growth through customer experience.