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“I didn’t know a lot about B2B – I’m fully aware of that. I didn’t know anything about the infrastructure industry,” says Steffen Daleng, ex-Booktopia marketing chief turned CMO of private equity backed Australian B2B infrastructure company Jaybro. But making a cross-category leap has not slowed him down. Tasked with transforming the digital and marketing capabilities of a complex portfolio of brands and businesses as Jaybro works towards an IPO, Daleng has promptly tabled productivity wins and soothed staff heebie-jeebies as he rewires marketing and digital. He hasn’t been shy in kicking off a swathe of transformation programs, from a martech and ecommerce overhaul to a marketing and digital team restructure, brand auditing, getting a handle on out-of-hand merchandising and extending the customer lens. But within all of that – and amid a remit to centralise – its long-term agency partners appear safe: “Either you build the best in the industry; or you accept when something else is better.”

A year ago, ecommerce hit the skids at Coles and Woolies as shoppers hit the streets and left the memories of lockdowns and rapacious online consumption behind. But ecommerce is back, and not just for the grocers. After years of investment, online revenues are finally starting to attain some scale at the huge Wesfarmers Group, which includes brands like Bunnings, Kmart and Target, and online marketplace Catch. The ingredients: Loyalty, retail media, and investment in distribution and in-store experiences.

We interrogate the H1 financial results for each business and read the digital tea leaves so you don't have to.

Misplaced brand safety concerns are robbing advertisers of a million listeners a month, with a stickiness in true crime podcasts that most media channels would kill for, according to IAB and Neuro-Insight. Agencies are seemingly behind the contextual curve, per their latest research, and are yet to put the clues together – despite new evidence staring them in the face. It's a mystery Neuro-Insight boss Peter Pynta is determined to get to the bottom of. 

Legend has reduced customer service workloads by 1000 hours annually, gone from 100 per cent manual touch to 65 per cent order automation, unified its customer data into a single view and generated $1 million in ecommerce sales from a base of $30,000 in one year, after braving a Salesforce Cloud and Mulesoft technology overhaul. Yet the three-year project, delivered in two years to everyone’s pleasant surprise – and thankfully within budget – wasn’t without its hiccups, including a dire implementation partner swap at a critical juncture.

However, with automation and data insights capabilities firmly in place, and some solid business and customer wins under her belt, Legend’s head of marketing and digital, Alison Murphy and her team are now working to uncover and solve a greater number of internal and customer pain points. She’s confidently planning to tackle next-best action recommendations and more personalised customer experiences capabilities next too.

And, the combined IT, digital and marketing leader says, the whole project and buy-in to change will help Legend, historically a late adopter of technology and digital, introduce “AI in a gentler way, rather than overusing AI in our business” in the near future.

Ever wanted to design your own personal board? Talk under the cone of silence to someone who’s already been a CMO or CEO in the same industry or agency landscape and who actually relates to your struggles without the commercial rivalry? Share high-performance team or startup strategies, transformation plans or simply nut out your next career move with someone who has been there, done that? Or provide your talent with a way to develop and grow so you retain them for longer, and have a happier, more productive workforce? Maybe you've just been fired and need help mapping out the next strategic move. That's what GroupM chief and McDonald's and ANZ CMO, Mark Lollback, believes he can fix through his new venture, Global Mentorship – with some big names on board. Here's the plan.

NAB sent more than 100 of its executive team to Salesforce's World Tour in Sydney yesterday. Woolworths sent double that as 15,000 delegates descended on Sydney's ICC to gather intel on the likes of AFL, Barbeques Galore, Mecca, Spotify, Decathlon and BizCover's advancing forays into AI – and the intel was good. AFL reckons it has taken "hundreds of hours" out of every club while powering "hyper personalisation" and double digit member growth. Barbeques Galore said it has seen some sales double. Mecca's AI chatbot has cut cart abandonment by 75 per cent. But while AI promises a new generation of riches for Salesforce, there's still the matter of dealing with some immediate challenges, such as a move away from massive, all-encompassing monolithic tech stacks toward more agile composable kit. Meanwhile Salesforce's Australian EVP reckons its Data Cloud is the most important product in the company's history – and told Mi3 why, while lifting the lid on its own AI-powered gains, and where next.

It sounds like the holy grail of media spend: More efficiency, more effectiveness, more strategic thinking and more brand benefits. And that's what Asahi believes it's getting through its new investment into a marketing intelligence platform. During this week's Salesforce World Tour in Sydney, the FMCG giant was touting KPIs including a 46 per cent drop in cost per click, 20 per cent CPM reduction, 33 per cent lift in 3-second view rates, 17 per cent higher engagement rates on media assets and 50 per cent click through rate in the first few months of having a unified marketing intelligence platform in place across three brands. In the next month, it's expecting even more as all 23 brands in the Asahi portfolio benefit from the new approach to paid media investment and reporting. 

A line-up of big name entrepreneurs, investors and Australian and Silicon Valley VC firms have piled into the second, $20.5m funding round of three-year-old New Zealand SAS start-up Tracksuit, with ambitions of “creating the world’s best brand tracker”. The Series A funding, which values the firm at $142.9m, has eyes on disrupting global incumbents including Qualtrics, Kantar, Ipsos, Nielsen and YouGov. An intriguing competitive tussle between a new, automated and materially cheaper SAS-based brand tracking firm and the research establishment is in play – private equity firms control Qualtrics (Silver Lake), Kantar (Bain, WPP) and Nielsen (Elliott Investment Management).