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45 years after first setting foot in a creative agency, Mike Thomas has managed to reach his retirement with his love for the work still in tact – and he says that might just be his greatest achievement. Having spent decades helming creative at some of Australia's best-known agencies before taking a leap to the media side (as creative director for Fairfax, and then Nine's Powered), Thomas says he's learned that's it's relationships that really make a good idea tick: "You can have a good idea and a bad relationship, and it’s not going to go anywhere". It's on that basis – the connection of people and ideas – that he thinks there's not so much different between agencies and media businesses. Since learning his craft designing biscuit packages for Sainsbury's, Thomas has made his way through some of Australia's best known agencies, created lasting work for the likes of Qantas, Pizza Hut, Kimberly-Clark, worked on two Olympic bids, and much more – but it's the people he's worked with that he remembers most fondly. 

Last week under a request from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the Federal Attorney General [AG] Mark Dreyfus dropped a privacy curveball – the new Privacy Act will be introduced into Parliament in August, well ahead of an end-of-year deadline many thought would spill into next year. More pressing for the broad church of marketing, media, CX, adtech, programmatic and ecom teams across every industry sector, it appears the rhetoric from the AG and even the new Privacy Commissioner on the definition, treatment and transparency of personal information is firming against many current and emerging industry practices – first-party customer data matching between different entities is just one. The use of website tracking pixels is also under investigation, led by a Privacy Commissioner probe into how TikTok deploys such code. “It would have significant implications for a huge number of things,” says Omnicom Media Group’s Chief Investment Officer Kristiaan Kroon on any restrictions in customer matching programs.  “From an Omnicom perspective, we would say privacy reform is one of the top things that will redefine our industry in the coming decade.”

After a 15-year absence from market, ANZ has brought back its iconic Falcon creative and brand device in a new campaign promoting its increasingly sophisticated, personalised customer protection capabilities. The campaign is the first step towards delivering what ANZ’s GM marketing, Sian Chadwick, hopes will be a new era of distinctiveness in market for the big four bank that unites heritage with modern relevance. Chadwick unpacks the mechanisms she’s using to deliver relevance to a younger generation of consumers, along with the commercial mix modelling increasingly driving decision making and more informed, whole-of-customer “investment trade-offs” for ANZ’s newly unified marketing centre of excellence.

Less than a year after it announced a $500m additional investment in AI, Qualtrics has started rolling out significant enhancements to its customer and employee experiences suites as well as research and strategy offerings. At its QualtricsX4 user conference in Salt Lake City last week, brands such as Hilton, Carsales and Porsche shared insights into their EX and CX programs, while Qualtrics execs outlined a slew of AI-infused innovations. Yet even as experience management companies push hard on the idea that CX and EX can be better integrated to deliver more powerful emotional connections to customers, analysts warn it's a hard road to hoe. Despite years of CMOs pushing hard on the need to improve customer experiences, the level of integration between martech and CX vendors remains immature.

Robert Markey, one of the pioneers of Net Promoter Score — created by his colleague Fred Reichheld at Bain — says the real power of NPS comes from the creation of a three-layered system of the kind developed by Bain at Telstra, which sat at the heart of the giant telco's digital transformation. 

On one level, this week’s IAB’s Affiliate and Partner Marketing Summit felt like an ‘emerging marketing channel is coming of age’ moment. Brands, agencies and publishers touting the benefits of affiliate and partnership marketing as an increasingly viable, full-funnel solution to customer acquisition, building brand awareness, understanding sentiment and consideration that benefits both sides. If only everyone could align on commission schemes, upfront versus post-delivery payments, measures of success, perceived versus realised value – and cut the gamble out, of course. Because the event also signalled another contest is brewing between what a media / publisher / influencer thinks their channel, content and reach is worth, and what brands are willing to pay for it. And just like the battles still present in many of our more mature media channels, there’s a lack of consistency around metrics, immature referral and attribution models, perceived rigidity / flexibility of commissions and payment models, and simple education all inhibiting perceptions of value and alignment.

Just when it appeared linear TV was finally facing its Waterloo after a decade of demise predictions, the global boss of Omnicom’s PHD media agency network, Guy Marks, says “non platform media” –  literally everyone but the six global tech-media platforms now controlling circa 60 per cent of the world’s digital advertising market – has likely bottomed out and “have now found their new level”. Even linear TV, facing double digit advertising declines in the Australian market this year, is seeing “greater consideration … because it does a different job”. And that’s the start of a candid and sweeping take from the one-time app developer turned global media agency boss who sees Omnicom Media Group’s mix-and-match “Agency as a Platform” model as the grand solution to meet rising consumer and media complexity and the pressure to integrate broader capabilities – and more specialists – into the firm. For Marks, the hottest growth tickets for PHD are scaled management of influencers as a channel, retail media and commerce.  

Customer obsession to attain product market fit, stronger team talent management, fostering singular creative vision that spurs brand growth – they’re all critical for marketers, media executives and agency leaders right now. And they’re all things Giles Pearman has a firm opinion on thanks to a raft of practical experience in the field. The current co-founder of MyBrandTruth and startup coach, who earned his stripes as group marketing chief of Global Radio UK and ice-cream product manager from the school of Unilever brand management, is now a mentor for the Global Mentorship program and is keen to coach others through the challenges they face through his own unique storytelling approach.

The way B2B customers purchase products and services has evolved but the way brands sell to them has not necessarily kept pace according to a new study by Arktic Fox which finds too much reliance still on traditional outbound sales approaches. The most successful methods these days involve a stronger alignment with marketing and the use of techniques like account-based marketing (ABM). However, there's still a lack of trust between Venus and Mars, which can lead sales to go off on their own tangent, even to the extent of creating their own content marketing assets. Sales leaders who have more direct relationships – and are usually the 'one throat to choke' for the B2B buyer – often feel marketers have an inadequate understanding of customer needs. But among marketers Mi3 spoke with, there's a recognition of the pressures on marketing, the value of brand, and the benefits of alignment. The good news: half of sales leaders give their marketing colleagues top marks on the quality of the working relationship. Of course, that means half don't, and indeed 50 per cent of those surveyed by Arktic Fox gave the relationship a neutral rating or worse.