Deep Dive

In most B2B businesses lead generation, or individual qualified "lead gen" more accurately, is at the core of business marketing – certainly for the tech sector. The merits of focusing on groups of buyers influential in a large corporate purchase over an individual executive is not new, but what is has a veteran B2B marketing analyst warning that almost every sector in B2B is still "focused on completely the wrong thing". And the required shift that Kerry Cunningham, a former Forrester Principal Analyst now at US-based 6Sense, says is needed from B2B marketers has the backing of the Global Head of Marketing at engineering giant ABB Process Industries, Jo Woo, who agrees "traditional lead metrics are outdated". B2B marketers must ditch their "obsession with counting leads", she says, just as sales teams too must rethink their approach. For Andrew Haussegger, CEO at specialist B2B agency Green Hat, part of the fix is to "free the content". That is, stop putting content behind a gate in order to capture leads – because brands need to influence a much broader set of people much earlier. Here’s the conversation that puts the hard data on lead generation.  

This article is about getting marketers, agencies, media and tech talent to become more like chartered accountants – in a good way. That is, have letters after their name that mark them out to employers, peers and recruiters as the most horizontally skilled and relevant in the business – and be required to continue learning every year to keep them. It's why marketing leaders at the AFL, Menulog and Chartered Accounts Australia and New Zealand are backing the AMI's competencies framework, embedding it to future-proof their teams and drive marketing upstream – and pushing for industry-wide CPM status. And it's why Mi3 and the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) have partnered as part of the industry body's ambition to elevate the profession's standing. From today, AMI members can log-in and read Mi3’s articles and earn continuous professional development (CPD) points that count towards retaining the AMI’s Certified Practising Marketer (CPM) status. CPMs need 100 points every year to keep their status. So keep reading – as getting to the end of this article earns a point while unpacking

The stampede by companies into CX, with massive associated investments into martech, specialists teams and organisational overhauls, is having little impact on customer experience scores – and big banks, telcos, and car brands are at best benchmarked as average, despite investing billions collectively. CSBA Managing Director, Paul van Veenendaal, has seven years of CX performance data from 12,000 annual assessments across 200 Australian firms and it’s a sobering read for those firms heralding their commitment to connecting up and improving the experience across all customer contact points. In short, all that tech investment is simply not hooked up to customer contact centres – and NPS scores, which many leadership teams have linked to performance and bonuses, are “being gamed”, he warns, for better but hollow CX benchmarks. No big brands feature in the top 10 of CSBA’s CX rankings, and only one, a superannuation company, makes the top 20. Chatbots aren’t up to scratch yet, says van Veenendaal, and companies have “pretty much parked” speech analytics. Meanwhile despite heavy investment in digital transformation, call centre volumes have not declined over the last seven years – and those call centres are focused on the wrong outcomes and metrics, he says. Hence underwhelming CX scores across CSBA’s rankings. But some sectors are nailing it: Universities and colleges, water companies and local authorities – the latter at least partially due to the policies of a one-time adman and former Victorian Premier. Here’s where van Veenendaal thinks it’s all going wrong – and how to fix it.

Australia is a global leader in podcast listenership, but the growth of local industry is being stifled by measurement that many suggest simply doesn’t stack up. Fully 41 per cent of media agencies basically overlooked podcast ads in 2023, with concerns around measurement, effectiveness, addressability, and standardisation being the key barrier to uptake. It all comes down to a lack of consensus, with publishers like Spotify and Acast building out their own systems rather than working towards a more collective approach. The Triton Digital Ranker is the closest there is to an industry-wide currency, but there’s contention over the suitability of listeners and downloads as key metrics, plus buyers say it lacks the context required to make informed investments. While there’s a diversity of opinions about the way forward, what buyers can agree on is that collaboration by all stakeholders will be key if progress in podcast measurement – and therefore share of budgets – is to be made. 

Forget cookies, regulatory risk is live and legal for marketers, publishers and the media, martech and adtech supply chain. Peak industry groups are responding to economic analysis commissioned by the Attorney General's department on the cost to implement what some say are hardening privacy reforms, including tightening rules on geo-location and what constitutes personal information. Data brokers like Woolworth's-owned Quantium, however it may protest to the contrary, will also find out within weeks if not days whether their arguments hold regulatory water – and it will likewise be an anxious wait for loyalty operators and their retail media progeny as privacy and consumer advocates successfully displace industry within Canberra's sphere of influence. Across the pond, the US Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have seemingly decided to try and break up Google in a series of lawsuits. So if you're planning major martech, CX, adtech and data investments, privacy experts suggest holding fire – and get to grips with what is about to hit. There's massive change in play, with day-to-day movement. Here's the latest from experts Peter Leonard, Ricky Sutton, Laurel Henning and Chris Brinkworth – with least regrets actions for brands, publishers and pretty much any business turning over north of $3 million.

Uber’s ads business is starting to scale and its New York-based boss Michael Akkerman says Australia – one of its best performing markets, with a rapidly growing sales operation – will see the next wave of new formats first. He’s touting retail media meets “mobility media” and a collapsed funnel “brand-formance” model – brand and performance marketing in a single execution. A younger, richer set exposed to an Uber Ride brand ad is driving hard sales via Uber Eats with delivery and verified "closed loop” attribution. Akkerman was in Sydney last week wooing “hundreds” of agency execs and rattling off big numbers. Coke’s gamified ads in the ride business got a tonne of new customers and orders via Eats. Absolut Vodka got a 28 per cent sales increase, HSBC likewise a major uplift – and they are coming back for more.
 Put a performance element on a brand ad – and a percentage of people will immediately go and buy, says Akkerman, blurring the line between brand and demand that he suggests is a false marketing construct anyway. Just don't ask for cheap reach, because advertisers are getting "100 per cent share of voice" with “actual humans, not digital representations” and because "bots don't hail rides".  Hence why Uber’s bullish on hitting a billion dollar ad business very soon – if it hasn’t already.

The post-pandemic change in private equity largesse, a repositioning of brand investment priorities and the march of big tech has radically altered the M&A landscape in recent years, certainly as far as agency deals are concerned. Outside of highly specialised shops, few of the big networks locally are buying indies. Most are busy consolidating the brands they have. Globally, the major holding companies have been pushed out of the acquisition market by the big IT consulting firms or cashed-up private equity-backed outfits offering hefty payouts and short earn-outs to the right agency founders – often scaling up those businesses and flogging them on. While agency holdcos aren’t completely out of the game, it’s left exit opportunities few and far between for generalist agencies that aren’t ticking key capability boxes, especially as generative AI stalks pretty much everyone. But there are some recent success stories, where the promise of an APAC foothold and niche capability continues to tempt global acquirers, particularly for those indie founders with expansion plans of their own.