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Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing Marketing teams have become incredibly good at optimising campaigns and communications through ever-more precise data and measurement tools. But have we been pursuing precision and ROI to the point where we’ve optimised and measured ourselves into oblivion? That’s a key question that lies at the heart of the latest Mi3 podcast episode. The second question immediately alongside it: If modern measurement tools are telling us what worked in the past, how do we find the complementary intelligence that’ll help us predict the customers and trends that might drive effective strategies for future growth? There’s no doubt the rise of digital media and performance marketing have brought marketing teams extraordinary advances in accountability. But for the likes of Les Binet, Mark Ritson and James Hurman, such precision puts brands in danger of losing sight of how to generate future demand. How to identify which customers are worth winning longer term is a key piece of the value intelligence puzzle, says social and behavioural scientist, Ross Honeywill – and he’s pitching his 5.5m next economic order (NEO) consumers as the predictive bellwether for early adoption as well as less price-sensitive customer mindsets. For David Jones’s GM of marketing and retail media, Melissa Polglase, escaping a short-term view is tough in an economic climate where growth is hard to come by. “The digital world has allowed us to track ROAS conversion at a really microscopic level, and that can be quite addictive, particularly in a very choiceful economy now, where customers are really being quite prudent in how they’re spending,” she agrees. Moreover, platforms are great at “driving an outcome to an audience within a platform”, continues Polglase. Getting past that firstly means staying true to the marketing strategy. But it also means adopting a more customer-oriented mindset, says Polglase. For example, focusing on a more affluent customer who identifies with experiences and quality was a critical step in designing the retailer’s customer loyalty program – and such care has paid dividends, including a +40 per cent better transaction value than non-member shoppers. “It really comes down to putting customer strategy ahead of channel optimisation and having the leadership in place to be bold, and to be able to continue driving short-term results while asking long-term questions,” Polglase says.   OMD chief strategy officer, Rob Frost, agrees digitisation has tipped the scales too far towards optimisation. “What we were doing is taking any metrics we could get and saying this was a proxy for something else that happened,” he says. “At the same time, what we started to do is apply those metrics to any piece of activity beyond direct response as well. So we started thinking, how can we do this for our brand? Then we fell into this trap of short terms.” One of the critical things about consumers with a NEO mindset is they choose what matters to them, explains Honeywill. Unlike traditional consumers, they’re also socially progressive, independent minded and curious about what comes next – and importantly, “are more ready to spend and spend more frequently and pay more for a difference they believe in”. While NEOs appeal, Frost is quick to warn against “oversegmenting” for the sake of it, particularly in the upper funnel. “If we know that speaks to 95 per cent of your out-of-market customer base at any point, we should be thinking about building up that distinctive brand for the long term, however possible. But there seems to be really interesting use cases for any segmentation, especially when we start to look at that predictive element of how we do that in the mid and lower funnel,” he says.   One of the things Omnicom is looking at is building what Frost dubbed “a brand brain”. “This would allow us to pull in real-time [customer] signals and understand not just what's happened previously in all of your campaigns through your modelling, results and metrics, but start to get an idea of how those real-time signals are starting to impact what happens in the lives of consumers or within your categories,” he says. “If we have a way of building these brand brains and repositories of that kind of data and information, and can find smarter ways of asking the right questions and pulling from that, we can get closer to doing something different – and that hopefully better predicts a potential outcome than we ever have done before.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This year’s Nine Upfronts gave brands and media buyers a decidedly different narrative to engage in, and it wasn’t just down to the high-production, immersive format of its showcase. Nine put forward a confident content slate that exuded what the locally owned and operated media company does best: Breadth of Australian programming, talent and connection across sports, entertainment, drama, news and lifestyle. But secondly, it revealed the engine fuelling how it’s taking all this to market in 2027 has been strategically recharged. As Nine’s chief executive officer, Matt Stanton, and chief sales officer, Matt James, told Mi3 in a podcast recorded in the immediate afterglow of the Upfronts event, Nine has become a very different media company in the last 12 months. Having tackled the heavy lifting on portfolio mix and strategy, it’s putting forward a refreshingly firm, unified proposition that covers broadcast to streaming, publishing and digital-out-of-home. Propelled by its most integrated owned and operated media offering to date, buoyed by the $850m acquisition of digital out-of-home player QMS, Nine is pitching a ‘sofa to street’ cross-platform play for advertisers, supported by a single media planning and buying platform, Nine Neo. This go-to-market strategy is designed to bring cohesion to how brands trade and measure the effectiveness of what Nine has to offer. And it’s backed by significant investment into unifying audience targeting and insights extending from screens into physical locations and commerce. The upshot: Nine is pitching itself as a strong contender against big tech and the global streaming platforms, and the only Australian-owned, fully integrated media network that can connect brands to audiences across their entire day. It’s a crucial time to shore up this full-funnel, multi-channel proposition in market. Hundreds of millions of ad dollars have exited the linear and broadcast industry over recent years, reallocated to digital platforms and walled gardens. There’s active debate right now around whether it’s the responsibility of government, media buyers or brands to proactively back Australia’s domestic media industry. Many agree supporting local-first content and journalism is crucial to societal cohesion and cultural connection. But ultimately, media companies have to demonstrate they have the audiences, scale and solid returns on investment to win ad dollars. That’s what Nine is backing itself to provide. Stanton pointed to the power of the State of Origin, Olympics and Married at First Sight in delivering cultural moments as his first proof point. “It's very important to have scale and diversity in this marketplace,” Stanton continued. “If you are a single platform – and it doesn't matter how big you are – it’s very difficult to compete with some of the big global tech players because obviously, they have the investment of a whole global team versus a local team like ours. So it's really important to get these three business units – streaming and broadcast, publishing, and out-of-home – working closely together, but also in their own right as well. They have to stand on their own two feet is the way I think about it, but then they've also got to collaborate when they need to collaborate … That's the only way we are actually going to be able to compete with the big global players. “That’s very clear to me, and the portfolio changes we’ve talked about are really significant. Now, it’s about execution, and using these three big assets at the right time, either individually or cooperatively.” Then there’s strength in fully owning and operating such assets. Nine has a “powerful” ability to unify and coordinate these all the way from content to data, technology, audience and cultural moment, said James. “It’s a big full-funnel proposition that enables us to start from brand to covering the breadth between awareness and transaction,” he said. “This is also only going to work if you fundamentally have your strategic destiny in your own hands. This requires unified content delivery systems. It requires unified IDs around our 22 million audience base. And it needs all of the investments we are making in the technology to develop this the right way. “Everything we’re developing comes with a long-term perspective, which I think is another one of our fundamental differences. I appreciate there are lots of partnerships going on in that [out-of-home] marketplace, but you can't make these kinds of investments and unify that in the way we're unifying our data, and even our content platforms across 9Now and Stan.” James additionally points to the heft of Nine’s assets today as evidence it can deliver this to advertisers. “They really do reach most of Australians, and anything we now do, we can develop from a long-term perspective, particularly as we embed outcomes-based reporting,” he said. Nine’s commitment to longevity extends to the content it’s investing in. Its recent NRL deal to 2034, along with a freshly minted seven-year EPL deal, are examples. Nine also has rights to the Olympics through to Brisbane 2032. Demand for these marquee events has never been bigger, James added. “We have properties such as The Block, MAFS [Married at First Sight], and news, which clearly anchors on consistency,” Stanton said. “Advertisers know what they are getting; it’s very consistent, trusted and at the heart of Australian cultural moments.” Under Nine’s cross-platform strategy, many loved content offerings are also now showing up across its broader asset base. “If you just put one bit of content on one bit of platform, it will not grow,” Stanton commented. “We now have the EPL and the rights on the streaming side on Stan, but we can put it onto Nine and 9Now as well. We can push it through the publishing business and outdoor as well … From an advertising point of view, when you can do that, it’s very powerful.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing There is a constant refrain in the marketing industry and it’s this: That many marketers are brilliant at what they do, but very few are brilliant at marketing the actual profession to the CEO, CFO, boards and executive peers. Lying at the heart of this issue is marketing’s persistently problematic commercial nous and its all-too-commonly crippling ability to connect the dots on what it does to business strategy, growth and outcomes. “It’s something that does frustrate me generally about marketing as a practice: The attribute would be the notion of commercial curiosity. By that I mean a deep commitment to really understanding the commercial contribution of marketing and how every interaction and activity contributes to the bottom line,” says Stuart Tucker, former Hourigan Partner, chief customer officer of Hipages and senior executive in brand, sponsorship and marketing at Commonwealth Bank, Aussie Home loans and Optus before that. “Too often, marketers are guilty of not really knowing the flow of money and not really knowing how they contribute to that. And they use it as a bit of a bit of an excuse, saying no one really understands me at the boardroom or the CFO wants to cut my budget all the time. To nurture a genuine commercial curiosity would be one attribute I would encourage every marketing team to get stuck into.” Per recent figures from an Australian Marketing Institute survey, 69 per cent of marketers admit they need better financial fluency and only 12 per cent feel confident interpreting financial data. In addition, only 35 per cent of marketers say they’re working regularly with the finance department. This juxtaposition of what marketing does and commercial delivery is also a frustration point for Nicki Kenyon, one-time CMO of Visit Victoria. A former director of Nine Powered, APAC regional lead for Mastercard and business partner for Meta, Kenyon is now a chair and non-executive director for Big4 Holiday Parks and Australian Grand Prix and sits on the Fenwick Software board. “It is the bugbear in my career and continues to be, and it would be simply this: Marketing needs to be linked to business outcomes, and be a driver of growth every single time,” she says. “Marketing for marketing's sake is just irresponsible and wrong. If there isn't a clear business goal, then why are we doing?”   In this latest Mi3 podcast episode, these two rare individuals to have trodden the boards as practising marketers, as well as executives, advisors, educators and board members, explore why we’re still having to defend marketing’s role, budgets and strategy. They also reflect on the big shifts in marketing they’ve lived through that have made it both easier and harder to set and meet expectations of modern marketing effectiveness. Both Tucker and Kenyon, for instance, urge marketing leaders to sidle up to their CFO tomorrow. “Work with, not against, the finance team. They can and will be your best friend,” said Kenyon. “We've got the tools, we've got the passion, we've got the vision. We can do everything a CFO wants and needs us to do. But instead of working with finance, we tend to work against finance because they're the ones that can cut us off. “The number of times I've discovered the disconnect between a business strategy and a marketing strategy – it’s mind-numbing that those two things are not absolutely linked.” Neither Tucker nor Kenyon has any time for the delineation between brand and performance marketing either. Tucker labels such distinction “absolute rubbish”. “They work in concert, they work together. If your brand is good, your performance works harder. If your performance is good, your brand works harder,” he comments. “I saw it at Hipages: We saw a significant increase in brand metrics and a significant decrease on our reliance on performance.” For Kenyon, the distinction made between brand and performance is commonly clouding effectiveness. “The depths of academia that dive into analysis and hypotheses and all the data on this stuff, particularly led by people who have never a day spent their lives in a practicing marketer's seat, is generating a lot of hype, it's generating a lot of conversation, and it's generating a lot of revenue for those companies that are specialising in attribution and metrics,” she argues. “It's important, but it's a double-edged sword. Again, it comes back to what are we trying to achieve: What is the goal? The goal, for example, is not reach. Reach is a media buying tool. It is not in and of itself a goal. So naming what the goals are, then defining what the metrics are to measure the effectiveness of what you're doing in pursuit of business goal is the crux of it.” All this and a lot more wisdom through the mics – tune into the latest Mi3 podcast here. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing Every financial brand talks about backing small business. American Express has spent 14 years proving it. Now it's bringing that commitment together under a single organising platform: Because it Matters. The American Express Because it Matters platform unites the company's long-standing commitment to small businesses under one strategic idea. From Shop Small to Sporting Small, it brings together multiple initiatives around a shared belief: that behind every small business is a person, a family and a future worth backing. AMEX's latest push comes as many small businesses continue to navigate rising costs and softer consumer demand. Yet they remain the backbone of the Australian economy, employing more than five million people and playing a critical role in the vibrancy of local communities. AMEX research across 4,000 consumers reflects this, with 86% agreeing small businesses help create more connected communities and 93% recognising their contribution to local area vibrancy and distinctiveness. An organising platform first and foremost, Because it Matters shifts the conversation from payments and products to the people, effort and resilience behind every business. Rather than starting with cards, payments or rewards, the platform starts with the business owner and what matters most to them. That philosophy extends into media through Sporting Small. Working with Kayo and UM, American Express and Dentsu Creative transformed the familiar "back in a moment" holding screen into live-style crosses to Australian small businesses, using FOX Sports talent and QR codes to drive viewers directly to participating merchants. Rather than simply buying attention, the idea turns media investment into something of value for the businesses AMEX is backing. "Intention has to move to action and how we are truly backing small businesses," says American Express VP Brand and Customer Marketing, Naysla Edwards. "This year we asked ourselves: How do we put businesses at the centre of what we're doing? How do we make it possible that they are the main character of this initiative? So we shifted all of our investment really into giving that back to small businesses." The creative work was informed by conversations with 150 business owners across Australia, uncovering the small, often invisible things they do because their business matters deeply to them. Those personal truths became the foundation of the campaign. Take Bin Master Skips owner Terry Hayward. "On Fridays, Terry Hayward cleans his truck like he's going to sell it the next day. And you know that truck is going to get very filthy the next day. But it's that love for your business; you're so proud of your truck that gets you in and out through the day," Edwards says. Or Hudson's Bakery founder Sandra Hudson. "When she talks to you about how she sources the ingredients, I was like, 'Oh my goodness, Sandra, that is a lot of effort'. But that's why that bakery is so successful," says Edwards. For AMEX, the work goes beyond marketing. Teams regularly visit small business owners to better understand their challenges, opportunities and ambitions firsthand. "Everyone from our country manager, and all of us, go and visit small businesses and talk to them, and do it on a regular basis," says Edwards. "Don't just talk to yourself. Make sure you're actually talking to the person that has the real information that's going to drive the meaningful change for them, which is the business owner." That long-term commitment is also delivering measurable outcomes. But Edwards is equally focused on the commercial returns the platform creates for AMEX. "Growth is one of the pillars of our company strategy, and backing small businesses and helping grow small businesses is part of that," she says. "But we also need to go back to linking it to commercial outcome; that's very important." To support this, Edwards has built a full-funnel measurement model to evaluate the effectiveness of Because it Matters as it continues to evolve. "We can actually see the improvement in brand consideration, the funnel going into evaluation, and then the conversion at the bottom of the funnel," she says. "Which ultimately, is growth for our business. And what is most important to us: It's great to do all that, but it's the loyalty. It's the retention. Those businesses stay with us for the existence of that business. Fortunately for us, our attrition levels are very low in the B2B space."   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing Not all reach is equal and neither is our level of attention: We know it instinctively, we’re told it, and now we’re getting better understanding into how to apply its qualitative impact to achieve mental availability, brand equity and sales uplift. The good news for digital out-of-home users is that the channel not only commands solid, bankable doses of total attention, it’s delivering the short and long for brands more efficiently than other digital, scrolling formats. QMS and Amplified have just dropped the latest landmark research in a multi-year program of work to gauge how attention is playing out in the digital out-of-home sphere. And it’s an eye opener for what DOOH can deliver, revealing surprisingly distinctive attributes that are sure to get tongues wagging in our industry. What’s more, the new study maps attention based on the principles of active, passive and non-attention, leveraging models and methodologies to ensure these findings can be understood and applied within the broader digital media ecosystem. The first and arguably most significant finding: Digital out-of-home has a dual effect, not only helping to build short-term advertising strength but also mental availability. “We found this situation where both metrics moved similarly together, which was very surprising to us, but also amazing,” said Amplified founder, Dr Karen Nelson-Field. It’s a nod to Mark Ritson’s ‘bothism’ argument – yes, brands actually can get both if they find the right vehicle to deliver them. “This is the first time I've seen where, in fact, it does drive both in the same platform,” said Dr Nelson-Field. “You can get your short and your long.” In complement, and arguably the stat most likely to upset the industry apple cart: DOOH can do this with just 1 second of active attention. That’s less than half the 2.5-second threshold established for scrolling, “fast decay” digital formats. Such results certainly had OMD chief planning officer, Thad King, rethinking both the right levels of attention required, and the role DOOH can play against a more diverse set of campaign objectives. “Think about out-of-home: It's visible from the moment you see you see it. The brand is visible; the message is visible,” he commented. “I think it stands to reason why it doesn't need as much attention. All the stuff that's been established previously around the two-and-a-half seconds to establish mental availability is still true, because it's for formats that storytell; you definitely need that level of attention for those storytelling formats. But it's something we probably haven't thought of before. “The level of attention that's required to drive outcomes from both a short-term and a long-term perspective is definitely going to help us potentially reframe some of the thinking in terms of out-of-home and the role for the channel at different stages.” That’s not the end of it either. The study also shows the longer time in view for one of these billboards or street furniture assets, the more active attention it earns, stacking both passive and active attention in tandem and further strengthening outcomes. “This is not saying that passive converts on its own. To be honest, we feel like there are a lot of publishers who do get a lot of passive attention that say it's highly valuable from a conversion perspective. It's not,” argued Dr Nelson-Field. “What we see here is that passive is leading to more active, and active is related to the outcome; it's related to the sales or related to the equity, the brand equity.” The power of this new data also comes from the fact this was an expansive study, with large format billboards in Sydney and Melbourne, City of Sydney CBD assets and a mix of pedestrian and vehicular traffic all in the frame. “We measured everything from overbridge sites to monopoles, sites that were on the sides of buildings, A sides, B sides. We wanted to really make sure we had this wide variety of different types of sites. The reason behind that is to give us a really thorough understanding of our assets, but also to take away bias,” said QMS chief strategy officer, Christian Zavecz. “We didn't want to sugarcoat it and just do our most premium sites. We felt that was really important to understand the contribution and relative performance of all of our assets.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Andrew Birmingham, Editor - CX | Martech | Ecom Agentic commerce is about to redraw the shopping journey. AI is moving beyond search and recommendation to evaluate products, weigh trade-offs and increasingly make decisions on the customer’s behalf. For brands, a chatbot and a few tweaks for AI search will not cut it. Winning will require trusted data, credible evidence and enough brand strength to ensure the machines do not reduce everything to price. In the latest edition of the Mi3 Market Voice podcast, Accenture Song Senior Managing Director and Global Commerce Practice Lead, Rajat Agarwal, joins Mi3 technology editor Andrew Birmingham to explain why AI agents could transform consumer behaviour faster than the original shift to e-commerce. Digital commerce solved the problem of access, then replaced it with the problem of abundance. Consumers can find almost anything, but they are often left wading through endless options, dubious claims and reviews they do not entirely trust before abandoning the purchase anyway. Agarwal says agents could break that cycle by understanding what the customer is actually trying to achieve, testing the available evidence and cutting the field down to a smaller set of credible choices. The most immediate change will be a move from search-and-browse journeys towards intent-based commerce. Fully autonomous transactions remain at an early stage, but Agarwal expects customers to give agents greater authority as their confidence increases. That development creates a sharper divide between brands with genuine emotional connections and those that rely primarily on broad positioning. Consumers may continue to ask agents for favoured brands, but weaker brands will increasingly be assessed through price, promotion, availability, features and supporting evidence. “Mediocrity will evaporate,” says Agarwal who argues that brands without a strong connection to customers risk becoming commodities selected by agents according to functional attributes. “However, brands which still have the right emotional connection with the customer will continue to thrive and to do well.” This episode also explains why agentic commerce cannot be left to a specific functional or local team or treated as another optimisation programme. Agents may draw on product pages, ratings, reviews, community discussion, video, pricing, inventory and other internal and external sources. Brands need consistent, structured and credible information across that entire environment. Agarwal advises companies to begin with the customer journeys they want to win. They should then identify the evidence an agent will need, create the supporting knowledge graph, improve product-information and digital-asset systems, distribute the information consistently and measure whether the strategy is working. Starting with a generic AI-visibility score can produce the wrong result. Agarwal cites a fashion business that appeared to perform strongly in agent discovery but was being associated with discounts and value rather than fashion, inspiration and style.Choice of agents, agents of choice The episode develops an important distinction between becoming a choice of agents and becoming an agent of choice. Every consumer-facing business will need to become a choice of agents by ensuring its products can be found, understood and purchased through external AI systems. Agarwal calls this a no-regret move. “You have to make your product discoverable and transactable by these horizontal agents.” A smaller group of companies will aim higher. Rather than simply making their products visible to other people’s agents, they will try to build the agent customers choose first. Done well, those vertical agents could combine deep category expertise and human judgment with the speed and convenience of digital commerce. The prize is establishing and preserving intimate customer relationships.The risk is that the agent carries the brand with it. If it hallucinates, makes a poor recommendation or loses the customer’s trust, the damage will not stop with the technology. Agarwal’s advice is to start now, without pretending the data, models or architecture are finished. Agentic commerce needs to be built as an enterprise capability spanning marketing, commerce, communications, supply chain, technology, governance and the operating model. The business case runs well beyond cost cutting. Agentic commerce could lift conversion, rescue sales lost to choice overload, reduce acquisition costs and give brands more room to move without adding spending at the same rate. Agarwal tells Mi3 that the early results are promising. The catch is that the market is still too young, and the evidence too uneven, to produce reliable benchmarks that every company can plug into a business case. His 12-month prescription is straightforward. First, understand how the brand is being read across the AI decision ecosystem. Then fix the data and technology foundations. In parallel, companies should decide whether their own websites, apps and commerce platforms need to become agentic experiences. The winners will be the companies that treat agentic commerce as a fundamental change to how they operate. The rest risk accumulating pilots, presentations and proofs of concept that look impressive in the boardroom but amount to little more than AI theatre. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing Brand rejuvenation: How do you honour the legacy while seeking a new narrative that grabs attention, compounds consumer and customer affinity, and delivers new commercial momentum? In this episode, two of our 2026 top 10 CMOs from the CMO Awards – Bank of Queensland marketing chief and #1 CMO of the year, Adrian McCaffrey, and Uber head of marketing and #6 CMO of the year, Nicole Bardsley – unpack what they’ve been doing to deliver marketing effectiveness with their fresh, reinvigorating approaches to brand. In the last 18 months, McCaffrey has been spearheading BOQ’s key strategic growth program, ‘The Bank of Queenslanders’. The multi-pronged repositioning takes into account brand, media and customer channels to new product development, tech and app innovation, and internal cultural and operational change. BOQ was carrying the “hallmarks of being a leader”, including the brand codes and cultural affection that could take it there. Yet it lacked the energy and united momentum to make it one, says McCaffrey. Having been outspent by the majors by 25:1 in a $400m+ media spend category, BOQ marketers also found themselves almost entirely skewed to performance-heavy campaigns and spread too thin. Three pillars reset the gameplan: Reinvigorate the brand’s core promise as a bank for Queenslanders, build a new customer-first multi-channel platform model, and win in retail and business banking. Cue a return to significant sporting partnerships, a more targeted media approach, and even an ‘ultimate Queenslander’ program and quiz on TikTok. “The genius of the ‘Bank of Queenslanders’ is that it’s so simple,” says McCaffrey. “It felt like we’d fallen into a trap of having to explain who we were and what our brand meant a little too much, versus leveraging what it says on the tin, or what people know us for.” The result in six months were hefty: Number one share of voice in Queensland, double-digit percentage growth in home loan SME applications the team “had to check a few times to make sure they were correct”, per McCaffrey, and positive uplift in key brand metrics. Importantly, it’s an example of how marketing can drive true balance sheet contribution, he says. At Uber, a mature Australian market and category leadership meant a diminishing growth trajectory for the rides business if it continued relying on its product-led marketing approach. It was a strange contradiction to the Uber Eats business, where brand-led growth dominated, Bardsley says. Having identified private car trips as the next big competitor to square up to, behaviour change was evidently going to be needed if rides was to find net new growth. Cue Shania Twain, Aussie comedian Tom Cardy, and the brand platform. ‘Can’t do that if you’re driving’. “Brand marketing is most effective at doing behaviour change. Hence why we needed to shift away from saying there’s not a product that’s going to change that. It needs to be a brand-led strategy,” Bardsley says. Halfway through the rollout, budgets were cut – a challenge Bardsley agrees many marketers can relate to. “It forced us to be much more disciplined in our approach,” she says. “We made the deliberate decision to concentrate investment and to prioritise learning … we created a robust market-level experiment, which mean we had clear treatment markets and clear control markets. It meant major cities of Australia didn’t receive the campaign, which is often a tough decision when you’ve got the business wanting to drive short-term impact as well. But we needed to ensure we could build out statistically robust evidence to be able to support the business case that marketing can drive both long-term brand impact as well as short-term incremental demand.” It worked: The marketing team proved out incremental demand in markets the campaign was live in. “Most importantly, those numbers have been critical to help us prove out the business case and we’re currently planning for the second run of the campaign,” says Bardsley.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing This year’s CMO Awards again set out to recognise marketing teams driving strategic growth for their organisations with our Best Growth Initiative of the Year Award, presented by Publicis Groupe. Our 2026 winner? A driving test from the Suncorp team that set out to change behaviour and instill safer driving practices across Australian consumers, thereby combatting a 42 per cent rise in motor claim costs and 22 per cent lift in national fatalities. The AAMI Driving test not only achieved this ambition – so far, it’s reduced annual insurance claims by $4.2 million, 9 per cent above target – it also lifted brand consideration and engagement for the iconic red brand across customers and non-customers alike. And while it wasn’t the objective, it’s now expected to bring in $1.9m in premium revenue generated. “Too often, growth is approached as a marketing or sales problem, focused on immediate volume, reach or conversion. The AAMI Driving Test reinforced that real growth really came from solving a meaningful business problem,” says AAMI head of brand and content, Rapthi Thanapalasingam. “By focusing on prevention first, we unlocked growth outcomes as a byproduct, including stronger engagement, brand consideration, and that premium revenue. “Campaigns end, but capabilities compound. The biggest value came from us building an asset using our telematics and data capability that can continue creating value long after the campaign is over.” In a similar vein, this year’s Highly Commended growth initiative, Wesfarmers Health’s ‘Anything Menopause’ program, developed in response to a clear and urgent consumer, commercial and societal gap. Over 3 million Australian women experience menopause, with 85 per cent reporting symptoms. Despite this prevalence, stigma and confusion persist. Market analysis identified a $667 million menopause category, with at least one-third of that effectively unserved. Priceline’s response has been an end-to-end menopause care platform. Grounded in education and empowerment, the key was firstly knowledge uplift across pharmacists, says GM of marketing, Corrina Brazel. Across 3500 frontline staff, Wesfarmers has already seen a 35 per cent jump in confidence in staff discussing menopause with customers as a result. The commercial gains also ensued, including a 63 per cent increase in dispensary sales, 6 per cent increase in penetration with the core target demographic of women between 45 to 65 years of age, and 13-point increase with standard Priceline shoppers. “Given the topic at hand around menopause, if we’d just been chasing purely a transactional play, that could have gone very badly for us from a brand and reputation point of view. Because the real opportunity would have been completely missed,” comments Brazel.  For Brazel, it’s also creating new confidence inside the marketing team. “What ‘Anything Menopause’ has done for the marketing team is built a real level of capability and awareness and strength of conviction that I don't know they previously necessarily thought they had,” she says. “It's built a bit of a muscle we're now going to continue to use as we see what other platforms we may be able to get out there to drive more growth.” For Growth Initiative judge and former V2 Foods chief growth officer, Andrew May, the two examples stand out because they don’t talk to standard campaign metrics and come from a position of behaviour change. “It was really about where do they show broader business alignment, better capability, stronger customer experience, margins or reduced costs,” he says. “The growth isn't just coming from marketing alone. Marketing is, and always has been, a growth engine for strong businesses. Seeing where we can impact other areas is critical.” Tune into this latest CMO Awards podcast as we unpack the nature of unlocking and pursuing these AAMI and Wesfarmers Health growth opportunities, and importantly, how it’s paying off. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing In a fragmented media landscape, reach isn’t the only factor broadcast channels need to deliver brands. They also need to grab attention – a vital quantity in building the mental availability and positive, differentiated associations brands require to stand out and be considered. Marketers know it and they’re crying out for ways to achieve it: Per a recent study undertaken by QMS, reach, ROI and attention are the top three investment priorities for Aussie marketers looking to connect what they’re doing through to the commercial line. With the QMS Winter Games Network, digital-out-of-home’s ability to deliver this trifecta skated into premium position as it served up a public, shared, high-attention broadcast layer that connected brands to cultural and contextually relevant sporting moments in real time. Built on the success of QMS’s Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games network, the Milano Cortina Winter Games approach delivered a custom built, 100% digital out-of-home network that paired brand advertising with dynamic content. In all, over 9,400 pieces of dynamic content were broadcast during the four-week tournament across 1,108 panels nationally, reaching over 10 million Australians and delivering 278 million total impressions. Think breaking news, medal moments from bob sledding to ski jumping and highlight reels, interspersed with brand messaging, all delivered in real-time. But importantly, extensive new research undertaken by Kantar and Neuro-Insight showed these highly contextual and attention-grabbing plays also resulted in meaningful brand equity gains not only for Games affiliated sponsors, but non-sponsors alike. “We saw a significant increase in things like consideration, brand affinity, brand preference, as well as those deeper, broader brand perceptions,” said Kantar Australia head of media effectiveness, Sharon Hilton. “Those are more important because they're obviously much closer to driving future choice rather than awareness alone. They tell us people are noticing the brands, and that they're becoming more positively predisposed towards them as well.” That juxtaposition of powerful, emotive games content and brand advertising provided weighty uplift: 84% of brands strengthened positive associations, from community minded to value and customer focused. Gains were also category neutral: From Allianz to Samsung, advertisers all scored a halo effect from being associated with dynamic content, driving deeper connections in market. Per Kantar, participation in the Winter Games network benchmarked even higher than out-of-home category norms: Advertisers saw 1.2 times stronger consideration to choose their brand, and came out 1.3 times stronger on driving deeper brand perceptions. And significantly, there was a +19% lift in long-term memory encoding compared to global benchmarks. That’s critical to influencing behaviour, Neuro-Insight global principal consultant, Peter Pynta, said. “Without memory encoding, you have no mental availability,” he said. “When you talk about marketing communications, there's a very, very high correlation between memory encoding of your brand, of your communications, and successive predictors of consumer behaviour, or behaviour in in general. “I can't think of a more important metric … to measure the effectiveness of some things that are pretty nuanced." Winter Games network advertiser results matched the delta brands saw during QMS’s first Summer Olympics DOOH network play, despite the differing sports program and Australia’s smaller chance of tallying up medals. It’s proof for Pynta that brands associated with such an emotive cultural moment and dynamic content win big on affinity. And it pays commercially. As Patties Foods’ CMO, Anand Surujpal, put it in a previous Mi3 podcast on why he took a punt on the Summer Olympics proposition with QMS, such a rare opportunity to be “connected to the mood of the nation” paid dividends: A 30 per cent jump in Four’NTwenty pie sales. For QMS chief strategy officer, Christian Zavecz, this third major study into the power of combining high-attention, dynamic content with a 100% digital OOH network shows how it’s rewriting the rule book on media partnerships. “What we're finding is it’s not so much about what that cultural moment is; it is the media and attaching that cultural moment to that brand opportunity that’s working in out-of-home,” he said.Traditionally, out-of-home, particularly in a roadside environment, is not a content medium – so newness has some sway, Zavecz agreed. It’s equally evident out-of-home works very differently to other content mediums. “It's a non-intrusive medium, and I think those elements, combined with the halo effect of some of these events. are contributing to what's proving to be a really exciting and advantageous opportunity for clients.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large 57 per cent of all web traffic is automated and climbing as AI upends search, discovery and commerce. Marketers are watching page views tank – down 20-30 per cent in Australia this year – and scrambling for answers to a fundamental question: When a machine, not a person, discovers, compares, and recommends your brand, what exactly are you optimising for as currency moves from click to LLM citations? The new reality is that a consumer can meet a brand, weigh it up, and walk away with a recommendation without ever touching the brand’s website, its own media, or any single thing that marketing controls. Marketers, says Marie Joyce, GM of News Australia’s Suddenly, are concerned.  “There absolutely is a sense of panic. Their page views are through the floor. There’s a lot of pressure from internal stakeholders; they're also starting to see some impact on the bottom line as well.” Most, she says are, “unsure where to start”. News Australia’s Head of Search and Emerging Platforms, Mike Cook does know where to start: “With an audit of how you’re showing up – and how your competitors are showing up.” After that, Marie has a five-point plan – and it’s working for the likes of Chemist Warehouse, which notched “a 219 per cent increase in Google AI overviews, and a 283 per cent spike in AI brand mentions” for its House of Wellness media network. In short? Give both humans and bots what they want in a single hit: Implement the 50-word rule. “Give the answer in the very first paragraph of your content. Don't make humans or bots dig for it.” Prioritise facts over fluff. “Swap out generic marketing speak for real data, hard numbers, and verified expert quotes.” “Build a knowledge web and create one main authoritative page that links out to smaller, hyper-detailed sub articles. This layout proves to AI that you understand a whole topic, not just a key single word.” Structure for machines: “Use listicles, FAQs, and tables. AI loves these formats because they are easy to ingest and serve up the answers quickly.” Prove it with links: “Link out to trusted official government or industry websites and experts. This builds out immediate trust and data viability for both humans and bots.” Simultaneously, per Marie, “stop chasing the volume game”, because ironically, the LLMs are now filtering out “AI slop” and upweighting quality, trusted content. “The rules of great content still apply”. Those rules must be applied across all channels – including the ones marketing has little or no control over. Which means de-siloing across marketing, comms, corporate affairs, media and customer experience. The good news for CMOs? Fundamentals remain paramount. “What we're seeing now is the more interconnected these platforms can be the more beneficial it will be for brands. This is … going back to the old way of thinking on consistency of brand … across channels,” says Marie. “Those things that we know embed memory structure for humans also now meet the needs of bots.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Andrew Birmingham - Editor - CX | Martech | Ecom A year after Mi3 Australia began its agentic AI research deep dive – dubbed Inside the Tornado – that first wave of febrile experimentation has given way to what feels like the beginning of a Cambrian explosion as businesses embed AI agents into core operations, and realise measurable gains in areas ranging from pricing optimisation to creative production. But as adoption accelerates, executives say attention is shifting from the promise of autonomous systems to the practical realities of governing them, understanding and controlling costs and ensuring they do not drift off course – because they will absolutely drift of course. Speaking with Inside the Tornado author, and Mi3 Tech editor Andrew Birmingham, T2 Tea marketing director Peter Randeria and Omnicom Oceania chief product officer Alex Pacey argue that the organisations moving fastest are not those taking the greatest risks, but those building the strongest governance foundations. Their message is clear: agentic AI can create significant commercial value, but success depends on the discipline to supervise it, redesign workflows around it and manage its rapidly growing economic footprint, as much as it requires corralling a still immature and rapidly evolving technology that even its developers sometime still struggle to understand. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large Not all retailers are victims of scale. North America is pouring billions of dollars into retail media, largely sponsored search and digital screens, making giants like Amazon, Kroger and Walmart richer and other retailers chasing scraps. But luxury department store chain Holt Renfrew has carved out a higher-end niche in Canada, and its physical-plus-digital approach is pulling in new advertisers like Mercedes, as well as taking a larger share of endemic advertiser budgets as they bid to build brand and drive performance in a single hit. Demand for both physical and digital inventory is running hot, helped partly by Holt Renfrew’s retail media operation three years ago moving to its own P&L under trade marketing boss, Ashlee Nickel – whose 16 years at the firm also span merchandise, buying and vendor marketing. It means she speaks the merchandise team’s language as well as that of brands selling through the store. That’s critical to avoid “conflict”, says Sonder’s Jonathan Hopkins. “Media has been used as merch’s sweetie jar for decades, and that entrenched behaviour doesn't change overnight.” He argues retailers will increasingly struggle with their retail media ambitions unless they “create a cross-functional team with people from merch, marketing, finance, media,” all pulling in the same direction. Even then, he says, “give and take” is a pre-requisite. “Pick your battles would be my recommendation.” Since the shift from top line co-op to standalone, Holt Renfrew’s profitable media revenue has changed how every program is priced, packaged, and pitched to vendors. In all, it’s packing 245 distinct media formats, all evaluated by Sonder. It will soon have another – but given Holt Renfrew’s store environment makes even Apple’s look cluttered, a design challenge looms as the retailer mulls how to roll out a screen network that doesn’t damage that aesthetic. Sonder’s Angus Frazer isn’t worried – subtlety is key, he says. “Retail media is not an excuse to ignore CX. Done well, it's an opportunity to improve CX and deliver on broader business objectives.” I.e. “highly profitable commercialisation”. Trade marketing boss Nickel is now hunting more of them – in places where few retailers have thought to monetise. She’s already added in-store beauty carts and cafe menu takeovers to the inventory stack, and has brands queuing up for its in-store Montreal F1 Grand Prix weekend experience – and Holt Renfrew doesn’t even have an official partnership. “One of the biggest opportunities in the space right now is looking beyond the obvious,” says Nickel. “When you start thinking differently about the retail environment, there are often opportunities that don't fit within a traditional media place.” Outside of physical environments – and despite huge digital retail media spend, many are overlooking powerful channels – particularly email, say Sonder’s Frazer and Hopkins, leaving easy money on the table. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large For the shopping public, Coles’ ‘Down Down’ has stuck like super glue for more than a decade – while loathed by adland’s elite. They’ll be mostly thrilled on what Horton – Down Down’s creator – figures is likely now in a rare and wide-ranging interview and podcast. Think rest and hibernation, not a Down Down burial.   Horton ran four winning election campaigns for former Prime Minister John Howard and is characteristically frank on the effect the Down Down campaign had on him and his Big Red agency – it spawned a new shop BRX with co-founders Bridget Cleary and Marty Hungerford - to snap the straightjacket it created for him and Big Red. BRX is now being circled by potential suitors.  Horton is the last old adman standing – at 74 he’s seen-off John Singleton and Mojo’s Mo and Jo. And while very uncool today, he remains adamant good jingles etch into consumer memory encoding faster than fancy, award- winning creative. It’s why he still warns on the warping dangers of advertising awards in the lead-up to the international Cannes gongfest in two weeks, proffering an ego-busting encounter with his then boss, Mojo’s Alan “Mo” Morris on why. "While you and all your mates are sitting around in a circle telling each other how good you are, your mum and dad are sitting at home singing my ads,” Horton’s recounts with a dense injection of Mo expletives. He’s never been the same since. But Horton casts wider than jingles and Down Down, to the “pseudo science” of attention metrics, “insecure” creatives and a pause-for-thought observation that the uncool craft of catalogue copywriting in the 80s and 90s has striking parallels to what works in social media today. It’s those craft skills, which BRX has captured, templated and automated, that is now partly why global holding companies and others are said to be circling. Here’s the thoughts - and confessions - of adland’s oldest creative. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing They all work for cheeky challenger brands in their respective categories, they’re not afraid of doing unconventional things – and now they’ve all been recognised as top 20 CMOs of the Year for committing to innovative and distinctly different approaches to realising growth ambitions at hand. In this latest CMO Awards podcast episode, we’re looking at how marketers ‘break the mould’ by exploring three of our most compelling CMO submissions this year: amaysim’s Pete MacGregor (#7), Mountain Culture Beer Co’s Brad Firth (11th and SMB CMO of the Year), and Australian Pork’s Rob Farmer (#13). Each of these marketing chiefs shares how they’ve respectively been tackling ‘big M marketing’. For Farmer, it’s about bold brand decisions to get pork on the fork. To realise this, he’s leveraging the triumvirate of creative, commercial and science to challenge rusted-on cooking habits while also tackling confronting – and commonly misunderstood – perceptions of the industry head-on. For Firth, listening to research enough – but not too much – has led to unusually creative product innovations such as a fruit hazy, defiantly full-strength beer inspired by hallucinogenic insights and the consumer’s desire for enhanced experiences. The bold bet has paid off: Juice Trip represented 20 per cent of volume sales in its first year thanks to its talkability and differentiated approach. Over at amaysim, meanwhile, MacGregor is going all-in on AI creative to gain velocity, speed and differentiation in market, while pursuing simplicity and responsiveness inside the challenger telco brand. He’s also resetting the dialogue around what it means to be ‘courageous customer champions’, getting into the weeds of customer insight and strategy, then owning the fixes in a way that’s building connection and cultural buy-in.  For all three, ‘courageous marketing’ comes down to a belief in – and then being accountable to – the bold strategies they’ve set out to deliver. “There’s so much noise, there are so many inputs, there are so many opinions everywhere you turn. I find it really easy to start to second guess, see things watered down, and even just get distracted,” comments Firth. “So for me, a really courageous marketer is just one who sticks to the strategy, rides it, and then obviously learns from it.” Likewise, Farmer believes in “playing your own game”. “Having the confidence to stay focused on doing not what you would love to be doing because it's not in strategy. I think that that is the most courageous thing to do – hold the line, then hold it over the long term.” Equally, MacGregor backs conviction over consensus. “You’ve got to really back yourself, whatever role you have, as you’re in that role because someone believed in you and trusted you,” he says. “Know what your internal superpower is. If you really believe in someone, whether it be a strategy, idea of whatever it is, you have to really back yourself.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing The Iconic CMO, Joanna Robinson, describes commercial marketers as “customer obsessed, commercially disciplined, always data-informed and strategically curious”. Former Naked Wines CEO and Unilever marketing leader, Paul Connell, says it’s about being highly accountable, “and also being someone who’s in for the business outside of their lane”. And TPG CMO, Bec Darley adds another all-important word to the list: Profit. “This is we know how much of the net cash that’s falling to the bottom line. Is it a term you’d expect a commercial marketer to have? Absolutely. Is it one we see a lot of? No … If marketing is truly to be seriously among our c-suite and board, understanding profit has to be part of the language of the commercial marketer,” Darley argues. There’s absolutely no doubt marketing leaders are being asked to be more accountable for commercial outcomes. Yet they continue to carry a ball and chain around their ankles: Marketing as discretionary spend on the P&L, and the first thing to be cut when times are tight. So how do you successfully reframe marketing as revenue, not cost, and ensure you’re fiscally responsible while pursuing the growth game? These three marketing luminaries joined us on the mics for an exploration of the strategies – formal and informal – they’ve pursued to embed an expansive mentality around marketing that beats those tired perceptions of marketing and brand investment as a lag on the balance sheet. From getting to the heart of unit economics, and truly understanding what creates value inside a business, to balancing the logic of brand – increasingly possible through tools like MMM and tech – with the magic and behavioural psychology informing why marketers do what they do, through to inviting CFOs and CEO into the pitch to see the power of creativity, these three provide a wealth of insight into how marketers win over stakeholders. We also explore key tenets of meeting the leadership team and board on their terms, from the language required to connect, to problem solving, plus tactics for structuring teams and capability to make the most of cross-functional ways of working. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.