Host: Nadia Cameron, Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher

Amid all the hype, excitement and trepidation around digital, marketing automation, data utilisation and now AI coming into marketing, is the very real need to build team capability and empowerment to actually use the tools effectively – and in a way that delivers business outcomes. As Infosys global CMO, Sumit Virmani, told Mi3 recently: “As AI is a very new technology, it can be a big challenge for teams at large to embrace because they don’t know how to do it. Educating them in the process of embracing AI, on the tools, and actually making investments in your team to get them the comfort to experiment, is the responsibility of a marketing leadership team.”

But it’s not just tech changing the shape of marketing execution. New channels and connectivity to customer – as well as higher expectations of said customer –  are demanding marketers build a diverse range of brand, people and specialist skill sets. Then there’s the relentless scrutiny of marketing effectiveness and budgets requiring ever stronger commercial nous. Mi3 and the AMI’s Marketing & Customer Benchmarks FY2023 Outlook report last June of 105 Chief Marketing, Customer and Growth Officers highlighted the changes they’re preparing for – team structures and shifting KPI’s among them, with customer lifetime value metrics surging for many.   

All this makes it imperative marketing teams run continuous learning and capability development loops. Two CMOs striving for this are Freedom Furniture’s Jason Piggott and Wesfarmers Health’s Corrina Brazel. Quick to jump into the Australian Marketing Institute’s new skills assessment tool, 12 months after the launch of its Competency Framework, both see a need for more formalised learning programs that don’t just cover new specialist skills, but can also improve core marketing knowledge across their teams. While the AMI’s Competency Framework provides those foundations and learning structures, the assessment tool is about having productive, proactive conversations with teams while also holding up a mirror to your own strengths and weaknesses, both say.

Per AMI CEO, Bronwyn Heys: “Modern marketers need to be bench ready. They need to be ready for anything – for the market, for the consumer.”

No less keen to pursue learning rigour is REA Group, whose GM of audience and marketing, Sarah Myers, says has a “very feedback hungry culture” and commitment to deep, specialist skills. A one-size-fits-all program, however, hasn’t been the right option, nor has a pure marketing strain to capability development. Instead, the company has been building out an internal university that recognises certain skills as important across the business. 

Tune into this latest Mi3 podcast episode as we unpack the pros and cons of skills assessment, specialist versus generalist capability building, and how marketing leaders encourage continuous learning across their teams from the bottom up – while also not forgetting to skill up themselves.

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SCA has spent four years building its uber-app LiSTNR from idea to the fulcrum of its audio business. It’s got 2.25m logged-in users, knows their postcodes – handy ahead of the federal election – what they listen to and what they might want to hear next. Kelly says acquisition is no longer core focus – “we’ve got the base we wanted to get” – and SCA is moving to kill churn, now at a record low.

“We’re approaching 70 per cent retention per month,” says Kelly. “For every percentage point of reduction in churn, we are seeing about a half million dollar increase in revenues on platform on an annual basis.”

Personalisation and discovery are powering those churn reductions while boosting time spent listening, per Kelly.

Next he sees massive opportunity in regional markets to take that further – for SCA, its advertisers and other radio businesses. Kelly points to a streaming deal it struck with Victoria broadcaster ACE Radio as a template for a triple win.

Bringing the broadcaster’s streams into LiSTNR, says Kelly, gave ACE an incremental revenue stream while boosting inventory and audiences for SCA. “They've seen about a 30 per cent increase in their audience levels listening on LiSTNR,” per Kelly. “And with the introduction of ACE, we’ve seen about a 20 per cent increase in monthly listening on our platform, which is pretty incredible.”

Plus, SCA is driving those new audiences into its other programs and podcasts, meaning bigger numbers to sell, at higher CPMs.

“We'll be speaking to other broadcasters, and particularly the regional network groups, to see if we can provide that service to them,” says Kelly.

“We are the largest regional audio business in Australia. 73 per cent of the regional audience comes through either SCA-owned or represented – stations like ACE – so we've got great scale. We haven't yet tapped into that regional audience in a meaningful way. But that's the next opportunity for LiSTNR.

Plus, regional consumption levels per user outpace their metro counterparts – and Kelly thinks they are a chink in the global platforms’ armour.

“The big digital companies, the Metas, haven't played in that regional space. So our ability to work with major blue chip companies to actually access those particular customers – the appetite is insatiable. We can't get enough inventory from those regional markets, which is why the ACE partnership has been so successful. There's a huge opportunity.”

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Host: Paul McIntyre | Executive Editor

Media agency holding company CEOs are openly acknowledging the importance of arbitrage-based principal trading to their business models – and it’s spreading rapidly out of digital display into TV, audio, digital out of home, connected TVs and beyond. Former UM Global Chief Media Officer Joshua Lowcock, who left the IPG-owned media agency network last year to head up media at US group Quad, is bleak on the distorting market effects of holding companies buying media for themselves and on-selling to advertiser clients with handsome mark-ups - often in ‘bundled’ products which blend a small quota of quality inventory with the tonnage more in low value, low quality ad placements. “Both agencies and clients have built themselves a prison that they can't get out of,” says Lowcock.

And agencies resisting principal models are increasingly disadvantaged – they risk being dragged into “financial engineering” too. Per Lowcock, “somewhere in the myriad of complexity of a holding company, I can tell you it's occurring and a large armoured vehicle with boatloads of cash is pulling up somewhere and unloading it into a holding company … well, it's probably more electronically transferred.”

Should anyone care that agencies are finding ways to make money that procurement-driven clients are in effect incentivising by refusing to pay fees for service – especially if the media bought and on-sold arguably does the job?

“It's not doing the job because clients are not getting the media that they should be getting to drive the ultimate business performance,” Lowcock argues. "They’re getting the media that drives the agency's bottom line,” per Lowcock. He describes it as a nutritionist advising a diet of “junk food”, with clients at risk of morbid obesity.

Indy shop Media by Mother, headed by former GroupM exec Dave Gaines, says he doesn’t do principal media deals or arbitrage but “it’s surprisingly hard to get people to align on business success outcomes” versus the short-term allure of trading off not paying media agency fees for the hidden costs in mark-ups and tech and data fees typically wrapped into principal media agreements. Moreover, Gaines says retail media is making the situation worse with retailers becoming media owners and seeking their own preferential deals. While traditional media owners complain about principal media trading eating their margin and agency mark-ups making them appear expensive, Gaines says the truth is, “a lot of the big TV networks don't like to have to deal directly with clients. They're happy to offload a lot of this media inventory because then they haven't got to worry about selling it”.

Either way, few owners will complain publicly for fear of retribution, i.e. being cut out of group spend, per Nick Manning, non-executive chairman of Media Marketing Compliance and adviser to peak US advertiser body the ANA. Manning sees principal media’s rise leading holdcos to becoming just the same as the walled gardens whose business models they are trying to emulate.

“They're all building AI tools that will do creative production, media distribution and analytics together in one in one box. It will be a black box, and clients won't be able to tell a lot about what's going on in there, but it will be an arbitrage-led model.”

Quad’s Lowcock says he’s happy to tell any finance, procurement, marketing, legal and internal auditing department “all the answers” as to what goes on and how to fix it – and does just that in this podcast.

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Four years ago, Flight Centre’s global CMO Megan Henderson was tasked with leading a sweeping restructure of Flight Centre’s worldwide marketing operation – centralising five teams into one while overhauling its martech stack and contracts and simultaneously finding efficiencies and growth.

Daunting. But Henderson knew that Fight Centre’s 60 million annual unique online visitors, broad customer comms channels yielding rich first party data plus circa 400 physical stores could help drive the business into fresh territory – adjacent travel market services beyond flights – while generating revenue via owned media packaged and sold to new and existing brand partners.

Enter owned media valuations specialist, Sonder, which dived deep to benchmark and calculate the value of each and all of Flight Centres channels and assets – and highlight where it could go next as an owned media network.

Now Henderson aims to make Flight Centre a global case study in how customers, data, physical and digital footprint combine to drive growth, revenue, profit and cross-funnel, cross-category expansion – while landing new paying partners. It’s now rolling out screens across all stores to boost brand building capability and link it through to first party data-powered conversion.

“Having Sonder shine a light on what we could be doing with our digital screens has really fast-tracked the process for us to make sure that our stores have a minimum of two digital screens that I can use for brand advertising with all kinds of partners,” says Henderson.

She’s now ensuring partners think of Flight Centre “as a mass market retailer with millions of customers online and in store… and see that as an opportunity that they can't get with a standard media buying mix.”

Sonder co-founder, Jonathan Hopkins, says that’s the key takeout for businesses currently leaving money on the table by overlooking their owned media channels and assets:

“There is vast opportunity out there. If you have a website, store network, an email program with a sizeable customer base, then you're more than halfway there to building an owned media proposition to leverage through your own marketing and with brand partners,” says Hopkins. “It’s all about seizing the opportunity.”

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Mi3’s most read story of 2024 came via an Oxford University marketing scientist’s peer-reviewed paper underlining precisely why not all reach is equal. Based off analysis of 1,000-plus campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and Wavemaker, the data shows optimising for reach alone rarely tallies with business growth. In fact, in almost all cases, per Saïd Business School Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz, it delivers “really mediocre outcomes”.

That’s the collective market failure News Australia aims to address – at least the start of it, with ‘Engaged Reach’, which counters the current industry bias for chasing fleeting user volumes for shallow scale. News Australia’s Lou Barrett, Dean La Rosa and Jess Gilby unpack how it’s already working for Mars Petcare, Chemist Warehouse, Inspiring Vacations and Subway, the latter a benchmark win for the publisher in QSR after Subway’s CMO said News Australia’s custom-built, integrated program outplayed the big tech platforms and landed the entire Subway initiative. The “all assets” rollout rapidly notched 3 per cent sales growth after a single campaign for Subway.

The trio also underline why News Australia’s partnership with free streaming service Tubi – Barrett aims to rapidly double its monthly audience towards 3 million – means it can map buyer intent signals from the content audiences are reading to the shows they are watching. Plus tell advertisers where their best targets can be found around the clock, what they are interested in and how to engage them to maximise results.
News Australia feeds circa 2.5 billion monthly intent signals into its CDP, enabling marketers to target audiences across 7,000 segments, using AI to hit sweet spots that might not be immediately obvious, per La Rosa. “It will forecast, it will understand the size, the scale, the relevance.” As Gilby underlines: “Everyone's got data, but it's about how you use it, how you apply it, and how you can be creative with it … We’re going from efficiently reaching audiences to effectively engaging them.”

Somewhere in Oxford, a professor will be nodding in agreement.

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Welcome to the first in our CMO Awards podcast series, powered by Mi3. This limited-episode series dives into the key topics and issues making up how marketing as a function, and its leaders, contribute to growth. To do this, we’re engaging in a select number of conversations with industry luminaries, CMO Awards judges, former CMO50 winners, current and former marketing and customer leaders and more as we lead into, then recognise the winners of our inaugural CMO Awards on 7 May. This podcast is brought to you by platinum CMO Awards 2025 sponsor, Adobe.

Kicking us off to talk about how marketing elevates its stature in the eyes of the CEO and board are three of this year’s CMO Awards judges: Former Westfield CMO and non-exec board director, John Batistich; former Audi chief marketing and customer officer and now non-exec director, Nikki Warburton; and executive and board recruitment partner and one-time Kimberly Clark CMO, Michele Phillips. All three have the unique ability to see it from both sides: As former marketers plying the trade, and now as non-executive board directors or in board and CEO-level recruitment.

Channel and audience fragmentation, too much data, relentless transformation across organisations, dour economic conditions, ever-more pressure to prove marketing’s worth, too much efficiency while trying to find more effectiveness and ever-higher demands for technology competence – these are just a few of the things CMOs are navigating. For many, it can feel like they don’t have enough control of what’s happening to their function while they look to execute their craft with excellence. And admitting something was less than a success feels like certain doom. 

View it from the other side, however, and you get a rather different picture of what marketing needs to do to win respect. CEOs and Boards are needing to do more with less to find profitable growth, investor and financial markets are relentless, and business, cyber and market risk factors have multiplied. These execs want marketing leaders who can make hard and strategic choices, and judge them as much on what they choose to do as much as what they say no to. All while telling a realistic but progressive story of customer and market engagement.

This series is hosted by Nadia Cameron, associate publisher and editor of marketing at Mi3, plus program leader for the CMO Awards.

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Mim Haysom’s world-beating, Cannes-winning One House initiative at Suncorp in 2022 was a big bold bet on innovative, mould-breaking marketing that Suncorp’s executive leadership and board only saw days before a documentary on the initiative was set to broadcast on Nine. “The first time the board saw One House, I took them into the auditorium and played them the 26-minute documentary three nights before it was going live on Channel Nine,” says Suncorp’s Executive GM, Brand & Customer Experience. “The accountability for creativity stops with me … I set myself up that way from the get-go.”

Haysom is also the person who tells the CFO she needs incremental money for performance media – and not to siphon it out of brand.

“Insurance search terms [at peak cost of living crunch] were 50 per cent up year on year. They are about 35 per cent up now. With that there is opportunity to pump more money into search to capture demand. So, I've absolutely been doing that,” she says.

“But what I've been doing is writing business cases to say … we don’t touch brand … because if you haven't got that awareness, consideration, if you're not building trust in your brand – especially in insurance – then people won't convert in the lower levels anyway.”

Legendary adman Sir John Hegarty couldn’t agree more.

“The trouble is we live in a bubble called commerce, and the people out there don't – they live in a world called ‘engage me, entertain me’,” he says.

It’s a challenge Val Morgan Cinema’s Guy Burbidge has been wrestling with for cinema.

There’s an "awful lot more measurement conversations” which Burbidge says is a "good thing ... but it’s an increasingly binary conversation about reach and cost and not the power of a [media] platform and creativity.

“We've gone down too much science, arguably, with too many ones and zeros and cost and reach and algorithms. The next piece of work for us is talking to the creative community to understand how do you take advantage of those cultural moments created by movies and cinema as they come up.”

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A world first creative benchmarking study from System1 and JCDecaux has run stacks of Australian Out-of-Home ads through its globally-renowned effectiveness scoring system and drawn a stark conclusion: 70 per cent of outdoor ads fail to move the needle.

Andrew Tindall, SVP – Global Partnerships at System1, goes even further: “No-one understands how Out-of-Home works,” he says, particularly the critical need to land the brand within two seconds.

At face value, not a wholly positive headline for the medium. But System1 has come up with a formula that, its data strongly suggests, massively improves effectiveness. It’s not rocket science. For example, just placing your logo at the top of an Out-of-Home ad increases brand recognition four times versus a logo parked at the bottom. Likewise be consistent – entertaining and never boring – and keep messaging simple and positive to get much higher brand lift, and ultimately, sales.

On that front, Tindall says there is a false divide between brand and performance campaigns: The long, i.e. brand, always drives the short, i.e. performance. The research with JCDecaux, “allows us to add a lot more nuance to what is a very non-nuanced industry” and underlines why brand and demand “need to be brought back a little bit closer together”.

Brands nailing Out-of-Home effectiveness locally include Compare the Market with its Meerkats, Uber Eats with the Wiggles and Simon Cowell, Specsavers and Ocean Spray, per Tindall. Sephora’s latest campaign, he says, is one of the highest scoring Out-of-Home ads System1 has ever tested.

The bottom line? “The single standout thing for me in this research is it confirms that creative is the make and break of how effective a campaign can be.”

Tindall, plus JCDecaux’s Cris Smart and Scott Jenkins, unpack the research’s key findings – and the seven simple steps to massively boost Out-of-Home effectiveness.

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Host: Andrew Birmingham, Editor - CX | Martech | Ecom

Two years after a Mi3 published a comprehensive analysis of the customer data market in Australia, we revisited many of the brands we spoke with to assess their progress and measure their return.

Companies that have persevered are realising strong returns and extending beyond their early use cases. But it has often been a hard road to hoe. There are integration and organisational challenges to overcome - and unexpected problems such as bill shock from unanticipated quarterly charges that can run into tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As to the market, it’s more competitive than ever with the number of CDP vendors active in Australia rising significantly even though the volume of tenders has largely held the line, according to industry insiders. That means competition is heating up.

There are three macro trends – the rise of composable CDPs - we’ll explain that later - and greater CIO control over data infrastructure amid a backdrop of three-year software renewals rolling over and the need to accurately assess ROI for a technology that is often hard to assign direct value against.

Rich McFarland from Compare Club, Courtney Gerrits from the University of Tasmania, and Cam Strachan from Southern Cross Austereo dive deeply into the detail, discussing their experience with their own CDP implementations, describing the tangible benefits gained, such as improved customer acquisition costs, enhanced communication strategies, and increased operational efficiencies…there’s a few lessons they learned along the way to boot too.

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Rival radio networks are transplanting big talent from Sydney and trying to make it work in Melbourne.

SCA Chief Content Officer, Dave Cameron, is taking the opposite strategy. Local talent that “speaks the language of the city” and gets the “fabric” of its suburbs is particularly crucial for breakfast audiences, he says.

Plus, as platforms and content globalise, localism becomes a competitive advantage: “Anti-globalism will pay dividends for us … otherwise we’re playing the same game as everyone else.”

Hence SCA launching six new shows, pairing fresh local talent with station “juggernauts” while focusing harder on radio’s core heartlands – like Western Sydney, where massive audiences and engagement are found. “That is where the bulk of radio listening, the bulk of audience data and surveys, is happening,” per Cameron. “It's not happening in Bondi.”

SCA is laser-focused on growing audiences and revenues without blowing holes in the budget that could later prove problematic. Content economics are underpinned by sharpened appetite for advertiser integration – with those commercial discussions happening upfront and early. “We’ve never been more commercially savvy around that,” says Cameron.

Seeking new audiences via greener talent and formats could risk dislocating “rusted-on” loyalists, Cameron acknowledges. “But we believe in the combinations we’ve put together,” he says. “If you're not investing in fresh thinking, talent and voices, your industry may become irrelevant.” Plus, there’s growing evidence to suggest a younger set is discovering the analogue dial – either through nostalgia, or as a reaction to algorithmic overreach.

The next year will test SCA’s strategy, but Cameron’s confident audiences will hold and then grow. The alternative is to keep hoping the world doesn’t change, or emulate the metro lift and shift being attempted by rivals. Can that transplant strategy pay off, given time to bed-in?

“That’s a $200 million question,” says Cameron.

SCA is staking out a different numbers game.

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Nico Neumann is deep in the weeds on digital marketing attribution, market mix modelling [MMM] and incrementality testing – likewise the dangers of narrow audience targeting and junk user data - the latter a $20bn market in the US alone. The Melbourne Business School Associate Professor in 2019 published research proving that closing your eyes and randomly selecting male or female audience targets was more accurate than the data brokers and DSPs many advertisers buy from. Neumann claims a senior data broker admitted to him privately that they knew their data was crap, “but who cares? Marketers are buying this”.

(Like Arielle Garcia, UM’s former US privacy lead who last year told Mi3 she had accessed her data profile from multiple third party brokers with laughable results, Neumann has downloaded his own, “and it’s hilarious”. You should do the same - we’ve got a URL in our Mi3 feature to test your profile segments).

Neumann batted away claims his B2C audience studies were too broad and challenged widely held assumptions that niche segments and B2B were where precision targeting of online users actually works. Last year he ran tests with IT giant HP - a paper is coming - that sharply contests most B2B marketing plans and particularly so for tech sector practitioners. “No matter what we used, it was either equal to random targeting, or even worse,” says Neumann.

First party data is better, per Neumann, but there are caveats, particularly around clean rooms and matches that can be bogus. He advises marketers to upload made up email addresses and see what they get back - hashed user 'match rates’ may not be what they seem. His advice: stick with the first and second party data you can trust, but even then, don’t assume targeting will deliver better bang for buck.

“I would even take a step back and ask, do you need to target that narrowly? There are very few cases where it makes sense … Why do you even need to exclude people and increase the cost, instead of just letting the content or message do that?”

Neumann sees the explosion of market mix modelling and measurement approaches as “a good thing”. But there are market rumblings that the big platforms pushing MMMs risk skewing towards inherent model biases. Either way, Neumann’s working on a project to compare how all the main MMMs hitting the market actually perform.

He urges marketers to question all models – and his advice for those emerging from business schools is the same as for seasoned CMOs: Hone fundamentals that will last a lifetime; don’t overspecialise in trends and fads. “Ask hard questions – and just test stuff yourself.”

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