Deep Dive

Massive personalisation at scale; wholesale CX overhauls; martech switch-outs; porn star martinis; huge customer remits; 80,000 ad variants; deploying a holdco’s 100,000 workers using an AI hive mind; in-housing properly; reorganising a bank’s media spend around owned media; halving ad carbon emissions by culling adtech supply chains; linking brand investment directly to sales; de-coupling from Google; generative AI’s impact on search and content strategies; double duty on brand versus demand; copying the marketing effectiveness rulebook word for word and winning the biggest budgets in company history and much, much more. Mi3’s top podcasts are deep, wide-ranging and durable. Even the sponsored ones are genuinely good. More than 24 hours worth of insight and occasional humour from smart people at the sharpest end of marketing, media, tech and consulting – bookmark this one, dip in at leisure and genuinely learn from some of the best in the business.

Another year packed with reviews, pivots, and positioning as agencies and consulting firms move deeper into each other's turf – but this year with the spectre of generative AI finally pulling the pin on remuneration models, or "hours based extraction", per one agency boss. Some smart takes from disruptive independents jostle with the strategic capability of the large holdcos but almost all are working through the implications of a tech-regulatory-business model crunch – and for many a generation reluctant to get back into the office.

Amid exploding remits and static resource, marketing is being squeezed – and compared to what’s coming down the track, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. The reaction by many marketers has been to seek safety in specialism. But that risks narrowing career choices at best and functional obsolescence at worst. Which is why the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) has created a 25-strong capability program that future-proofs marketers and gives marketing the same accredited status and standards as accounting and engineering, via its overhauled Certified Practising Marketer (CPM) program. Marketing bosses from ANZ, Deloitte and Destination NSW are among those backing the push for an overarching professional development and standards benchmark for industry - agencies, media and customer tech included. AMI CEO Bronwyn Powell, a former local and global CMO with the likes of Mars and KFC, urges Australia’s marketers – from top, through middle-rankers to those beginning their careers – to get on board and upskill their way to growth, status and credibility. Agency leads too – and Powell’s also targeting CEOs and CFOs.

TV's race to transform amid aggressive incursion from all quarters made up most of Mi3's top read media stories in 2023. As did the main network's countermeasures. Tensions around measurement and currency came to a head – a story that will play out next year. But the big bang threatened by global streamers' push into advertising turned out to be a damp squib, though next year may be different. Retail media's rise continued, with the likes of Nine and News positioning to get in on the action, as did BVOD's frequency capping problem, though some suggest it's within agencies' power to fix it. 

This was the year of generative AI. It seemed to find a way of sliding into just about every topic we covered in tech. But while ubiquitous, it wasn't exclusive. CDPs' rise, privacy fallout, upheavals in ad tech, major ecom swings, CX overhauls and Twitter/X shenanigans all made the cut. Foxtel, Domino's, Bupa, Workato, Adore Beauty and RM Williams all piqued interest, along with Adobe, Coles, Woolworths, Westpac and more. Ultimately though there's no escaping ChatGPT. The most popular tech story of the year – how a consulting giant's staff using ChatGPT outperformed non-generative AI enabled colleagues on every measure – was also Mi3's most popular story of 2023 in any category. 

If Mi3’s fancied audience of senior industry leaders across brands, marketing, customer tech, media and agencies signalled anything this year it’s that the broad appetite for chasing better marketing and advertising effectiveness has not waned on the industry heat map over the past three years. Whether its Mark Ritson, Byron Sharp, Binet & Field, Karen Nelson-Field or flagship cases studies of marketers and brands applying the theory, effectiveness themes again dominated Mi3’s top stories for 2023. Mi3’s coverage of Ehrenberg Bass’ Prof Byron Sharp sparked much global debate over his “Singapore diss” of other marketing and effectiveness commentators – Mi3 loves an agent provocateur – or is the world’s leading marketing academic an enfant terrible? Outside those lofty themes, there was a newcomer that burst onto the marketer’s radar this year – customer experience and customer-facing tech. Interest in Mi3’s coverage of marketing technology, CDPs, decisioning engines, ecom, AI and the impact they’re having in the real world of business deployment and impact has surged this year – in no small part down to the arrival of Mi3’s Technology Editor Andrew Birmingham. Expect more tech and more marketing coverage on the stuff that matters next year with the recent arrival of Associate Publisher and Marketing Editor Nadia Cameron. For now, here’s the top 30 marketing stories for this year.           

Owned media in Australia – brands’ own websites, magazines, email, apps, in-store and social assets – now has $4.3bn in commercial potential. It could reach $5bn in as little as 12 months as brands, eyeing the growth of retail media, start to realise the value of their own media channels. Valuation firm Sonder has just released its annual Owned Media Market Report & Rankings for the '24 financial year and it contextualises the retail media boom – retailers might be making all the noise but, depending on how you split the numbers, retail aggregators represent just a third of the commercial value that brands across any sector can derive from their own media channels. Mike Connaghan, MD of News Corp’s Commercial Content division, says his business is booming as the likes of Coles, Bunnings, Officeworks, David Jones and Chemist Warehouse make media revenue from suppliers and use it to fund their own paid marketing efforts as well as turn a healthy margin. Sonder is seeing the same thing. The likes of ANZ have reorganised operations to put owned channels first – and co-founder Angus Frazer thinks more will follow, especially as pressure on marketing budgets intensifies. In retail media, Sonder says the ones to watch are Bunnings, Accent Group, JB-Hi-Fi, Mecca and Kmart. In grocery and liquor it’s First Choice and Vintage Cellars, while in finance it's Visa and Mastercard. Co-founder Jonathan Hopkins says the market is now at a "tipping point".

Cashrewards CMO Nicole Bardsley has flipped the advertising spend from performance to brand aka Binet and Field, refreshed the brand with "braver" creative, updated the tech stack, and delivered a clutch of very big wins. These include closing in on an million extra members, a 50 per cent increase in active membership, a 41 per cent cut in cost per acquisition, and overachieving on brand recall while pulling away from direct competitors on the same measure. Backed by a leadership team that hired her for this specific mission, drawing on her previous experience working with brands like Westpac and Virgin Mobile, and supported by key partners like Zenith and GHO, Bardsley is set to build on the wins through greater customer engagement and an ongoing commitment to test-and-learn as the brand begins leveraging sophisticated investment in first-party data strategies.