Deep Dive

Marketing is a dirty word for some – look no further than the ‘Scotty from Marketing’ jab. But Suncorp has spent three years building, quite literally, a powerful response to that. Its One House launch last year and recent Resilience Road project are entirely marketing-funded and led research projects with universities and architects that are changing the way Queenslanders build disaster-proof homes. Moreover, the campaign is flowing through to Suncorp’s bottom line, driving a 38 per cent rise in enquiries and more than 100,000, four-minute-long website reads. As CMO Mim Haysom and Leo Burnett Chief Client Partner Amanda Wheeler explain, there’s more to come.

Brands and agency holdcos are restructuring for efficiency. But WPP says it’s done with post-Sorrell surgery and out the other side, proving the former CEO wrong in the process. Its “open source” integrated set-up landed the $4bn global Coca-Cola account and means other agency groups can feed-in. It could prove a template for consolidation plays to come, per global Chief Growth and Marketing Officer Laurent Ezekiel. WPP ANZ’s Rose Herceg is equally bullish on the holdco’s growth prospects after leadership overhaul and smashing an unwieldy list of business units into nine networks; she says both staff and clients are “loving” a story simple enough to articulate. Ezekiel meanwhile reckons the marketing industry is past “peak complexity”… until the “untapped” metaverse arrives. But he’s unapologetic for the daunting privacy challenges industry faces, and shrugs off concerns around Big Tech’s dominance, given the growth he suggests the platforms are driving.

Adam Ballesty has just returned from Las Vegas and his global pizza peers; the marketing conversation was dominated by media mix modelling, media ROI, linear versus connected TV and franchisee angst over the universal challenges of rising prices, crunched supply chains and staff shortages. Ballesty spent most of his career building big brands at spirits business Diageo, with the luxury of time. Now he leads a team of 60 through the tail end of the pandemic and the pace is mind-boggling, he says. Food aggregators like Uber Eats and Menulog were non-existent three years on Domino's ledger but now are changing customer expectations and eating culture. Domino's still has some secret sauce though - it's own delivery fleet and first party data.

Programmatic out of home makes up less than 5 per cent of the Australian digital OOH market, but is tipped as the next major growth area by agencies. Supply side players are making a landgrab for scale and the demand-side platforms globally are moving rapidly to integrate 'pDOOH' into their stacks. But there are concerns that the "tech tax" and opacity that continue to plague broader programmatic may be repeated. Agencies are questioning "50 per cent-plus" price premiums attached for programmatic flexibility, and whether larger advertisers are better off steering clear. More mature markets suggest otherwise.

Growth hacking was once a favourite term of the Silicon Valley crowd instead of marketing, fuelling the meteoric rise of early tech pioneers like PayPal, Tesla and Amazon. But there’s a fascinating blurring going on, where once successful growth hacks are starting to falter – “failing miserably”, in the words of one-time growth hacker and services marketing advisor Jonathan James. Instead, tech companies – think Canva – are turning to out of home, television, and other traditional media. In most verticals, there’s increased competition, meaning start-ups are rediscovering the need to have a “brand”. Traditional marketing smarts and brand talent are increasingly sought-after, and what’s old is becoming new again.

Nine last month claimed massive active attention for BVOD ads playing on mobile devices, 72 per cent for a 30-second commercial, per Amplified Intelligence’s study. But the data is now in for Val Morgan – and it suggests cinema blows other channels out of the water for active attention, with no wastage and zero decay across the entire length of an ad. As attention metrics gain momentum globally, Amplified's CEO Karen Nelson-Field is just back from a World Federation of Advertisers conference, warning marketers not to let themselves get gamed by those touting cheap, “dirty” attention CPMs while addressing the naysayers on  the march of attention metrics. Locally, the likes of NAB want to bring attention data into econometric modelling; agencies are already using it to re-weight channel spend and show marketers that their share of voice models could be way off.

Chris Stephenson, global CMO at media agency network PHD, thinks marketing's massive blindspot around gaming may come back to haunt those left behind when the metaverse – eventually – eats the internet. But that and other myopic tendencies may be because marketers are buried in admin rather than doing actual marketing. Per PHD’s latest research, 1,700 marketers globally say their biggest time allocation is spent on reporting, not smarts. Marketers unable to shake off administrative shackles risk being overtaken by a function overhaul now fast approaching – at least according to the group’s new book, ‘SHIFT: a Marketing Rethink’. PHD's futurists says it's time to build influencer programmatic teams, creator collaborators, decision scientists and distributed talent managers while preparing for 'agencies as a platform'. Meanwhile, Stephenson thinks those rushing headlong into Web 3.0 are barrelling into Gartner Hype Cycle's trough of disappointment.

Skills and capabilities across digital marketing, CX, data and analytics have flatlined in Australia over the last three years according to a study of more than 200 marketers. If the data is right, brand owners are a touch delusional about the skills they have versus what they need, while fully half the market has either been stripped of CX responsibility, or never had it to start with. Fresh from a decade in the UK, Coles GM of Brand, Digital and Design Sam McLeod thinks Australia is way behind the data-to-insight curve. Willem Paling has just left Woolies X and Cartology and says marketing must present itself as greater than the promotional function if it is to regain the CX remit. Teresa Sperti, whose firm Arktic Fox is behind the Marketing State of Play study, thinks ANZ’s marketing team and Kate Young have set the standard when it comes to equipping teams with the skills now sorely required. But there’s a big chunk of the market that still needs a plan.

Big Tech’s $200m pay-off last year has silenced Big Australian Media. That’s what more than 40 independent publishers think after attempting to negotiate with Facebook and Google in the afterglow of huge payouts to leading Australian media groups when landmark federal legislation was passed. On 21 March, dozens of local publishers synchronised a freeze of their news feeds for 24 hours and launched a public awareness campaign protesting Facebook and Google’s dismissive and arrogant approach to small and medium-sized, independent media companies under the Federal Government’s internationally regarded media bargaining laws. Ultimately it pitches Silicon Valley’s cool coders against the Pilbara’s commodity king, Fortescue Metals founder Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest.