Opinion

Today is a big day for the Mi3 team. It’s when Fast News will land in your inbox – a generative AI news project that for us is terrifying, intriguing and not without some hope. Mi3 Executive Editor Paul McIntyre unpacks what's coming, and why.

The BetterBriefs project – spanning 1,700 marketers and agencies – unearthed some sobering, if not entirely unexpected truths: Marketers are wasting a third of advertising budgets by giving agencies crap briefs with non-existent strategy. In Australia, the data shows 50 per cent of marketers have not been trained on how to write briefs, so half don't know what they are doing. Help is at hand: BetterBriefs and the Marketoonist have launched a five-part series to visualise key findings from its global research   along with some expert commentary - here's the first instalment from ad effectiveness guru Peter Field, and fellow marketing consultant, Wiemer Snijders of The Commercial Works.

The rumblings out of Nine have senior execs a little spooked by the arrival of a new VC-backed media venture, Scire, hatched by Chris Janz, the former publishing boss at Fairfax and later Nine. Janz lost out to Mike Sneesby two years ago in the fire dance to replace Hugh Marks as Nine’s CEO  - and there’s likelihood that some of what was proposed to Nine’s board in his tilt for the CEO gig is playing out at Scire. The official launch is slated for later this year. It comes as a 23-year longitutinal public sentiment study warns societal distrust is turning feral on the institution of media – for journalists, the tone is harsher. Janz appears to be tapping that undercurrent, even among the business community.

From the outside, the Japanese-controlled Dentsu ANZ looks like it’s going somewhere most of its rivals haven’t been before as it races to reinvent an agency network holding company model that emerged when Sir Martin Sorrell left the infamous Saatchi brothers as their finance boss in 1985 to set-up WPP. Sorrell has admitted he couldn’t bend WPP to a new operating structure and so started S4 Capital. Dentsu, however, is neck deep in a radical rewiring – enter “teaming models”, “orchestration” and “activation layers”, “integrated client leads” and so-on. The local business has been entirely up-ended and there’s been plenty of pain for people and profits. But the firm is not retreating – a new boss from Accenture and PwC, Patricio de Matteis, lands in January to advance the new agenda. Another 12-18 months will likely decide the fate of an ambitious and prickly reinvention. 

You’ll see some changes to your Mi3 experience today and over the coming weeks. Here's why.

Yeah. Guilty, Your Honour. I thought Gary “Vee” Vaynerchuk was an American meathead. The mouthy, evangelical apologist for social media and pin-up for the anti-marketing establishment set (with a terribly impressive global following), intuitively sensed a dash of humility, candour and self-deprecation might go down well with an Australian crowd. He nearly had me at his altar. Nearly.