Mi3 Audio Edition

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing Numbers are increasingly stacking up that sticking to your brand narrative and creative platform knitting year after year pays outsized dividends. And it might just be the ticket to avoiding AI slop. But it takes a wealth of market sensibility, consumer contextual input, creativity, fresh thinking and strategic nous to sell in such bold work in the first place – then keep at it. It’s equally true tenure and commanding influence inside an organisation plays a sizeable role in orchestrating a longer-term marketing and brand game plan and builds buy-in for the long-term vision, not just the next execution. Two leading Australian CMOs have been over indexing on these compounding brand building and campaign benefits and have just celebrated five years of compounding success: Suncorp Executive General Manager of Brand and Customer Experience, Mim Haysom, and Tourism Tasmania CMO, Lindene Cleary. Suncorp’s ‘One House’ campaign was the most highly awarded work in the country in 2021/22, including a Cannes Lion Grand Prix for innovation. It’s the foundational piece of Suncorp’s multi-year brand platform shift from recovery to resilience, a consistent thread that’s since been realised through work such as ‘Resilience Road’, strengthening five existing homes in Rockhampton to better combat extreme weather. The third piece launched last year was ‘Haven’, a data-infused tool providing personalised advice on help owners understand their potential extreme weather risks and how to be more resilience down to the individual property level. While the brand and industry kudos have flowed, the work has importantly also driven change at the regulatory level. From $0.97 cents in every $1 going on recovery, the figure’s dropped to $0.93, seeing more money spent on prevention instead. “Four cents might not sound like much, but that's a big thing to move the dial on,” says Haysom. For Tourism Tasmania, debuting the ‘Come Down for Air’ platform, then commencing the multi-year ‘The Off Season’ program to drive visitation during the quieter winter months has also demonstrated similarly compounding benefits. It’s played a pivotal role in growing winter visitation year-on-year to record levels in 2025. It is a statewide initiative that requires the whole organisation and its stakeholders to move together. “There’s a reason we're doing it in the first place, and that’s to get people here. But it’s also making sure we’re getting the right people here who will actually come and spend money, value what we offer in Tasmania, respect what we offer and really understand it,” says Cleary, adding visitation is up 10 per cent since the launch in 2021.  Tune into this latest CMO Awards podcast episode to hear more about how these two dynamic CMOs sold, and kept the focus on, compounding brand building. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Andrew Birmingham, Editor - CX | Martech | Ecom Banks, telcos, and insurers are rethinking how they engage customers, shifting away from mass marketing campaigns toward real-time decisioning systems designed to respond to individual behaviour, according to Jonathan Tanner, a senior executive at Pegasystems. Tanner said many organisations still struggle with fragmented customer experiences, where interactions across channels are disconnected and force users to repeat themselves. “They get a very jarring experience,” he said, pointing to structural issues such as product silos and outdated segmentation models that fail to reflect how customers’ needs change over time. The emerging alternative is a decisioning approach that continuously evaluates customer context, including behaviour, signals and lifetime value, to determine the next best action. Unlike traditional campaigns, which Tanner described as a “blast approach” delivering only marginal returns, these systems aim to personalise interactions in the moment, sometimes choosing not to sell at all. “What we’re talking about here is a very different approach,” Tanner said. “It may not even be a selling decision at that point in time… but over time what that does is it builds that NPS, it builds that customer connection.” The shift requires a willingness to invest and the change. Firms are committing to significant investments annually over several years to build the underlying infrastructure. While returns can reach “multiple hundred percent,” Tanner said the gains depend on sustained investment and organisational change, not just technology deployment. “You’re not going to just wake up, implement this technology, and then suddenly discover that everything’s great,” he said, noting that many firms underestimate the effort required to align people, processes and systems. Artificial intelligence is central to the transformation, but Tanner warned against treating it as a single solution. Instead, organisations need to combine multiple approaches, including rules-based systems, statistical models and generative AI, each suited to different tasks. “If I’m making a decision that’s backed up by a set of very well-defined rules, why would I be hammering away at an LLM spending tokens… and getting a probabilistic decision?” he said. Deterministic systems, he added, remain critical for real-time execution, compliance and auditability. The stakes extend beyond marketing. Financial institutions are also using decisioning platforms to combat fraud, which is rising alongside real-time payments. Faster transactions benefit customers but also give fraudsters less time to be detected. “One of the best ways of preventing it is to add just a little bit of friction into the process,” Tanner said, citing examples such as delaying payments to new accounts. More broadly, Tanner said the most effective use cases focus on building trust rather than driving immediate sales. Examples include helping customers access government benefits or providing proactive support during financial hardship or natural disasters. “The obvious immediate reaction is, well, how can that possibly be a benefit to the bank?” he said. “But of course… it’s building customer loyalty… it’s building connection.” Looking ahead, Tanner expects the industry to move beyond the current hype cycle around AI and focus instead on practical outcomes. “I’d like to see us moving to it being more of a system-based conversation,” he said, where value is measured not by the technology itself but by the decisions it enables in real time.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing CMOs have always sought to build best-practice marketing teams – it’s one of the first things they’ll have on the to-do list when they take up a new gig. But what does the marketing team of the future even look like in a world where AI is disrupting everything? How do you as a CMO chart a path through the changing AI landscape as organisations continue to pile on pressure to leverage AI tools, and as headcount cuts and productivity efficiencies become an even more expected output of AI adoption? CMOs from Unicef, RAA and Accenture Australia, joined by Adobe ANZ head of Gen AI content and commerce, took to the mics in the latest CMO Awards podcast series, powered by Mi3, to unpack how they’re beginning to recast roles and build AI fluency, while managing the very real fear of AI existing across teams. Accenture’s Carrie Smith says marketing team was ground zero for adopting AI agents from optimisation to entire workflow remodelling. Not an early journey to go on, it started with centralised planning, transparency and a focus on the marketing discipline first – not the tech – to understand which parts are difficult across workflows to get to great outcomes, she says. RAA’s Michael Healy cites the first aha moment when the team saw what AI creative production was going to achieve. The second catalyst was adopting enterprise-grade Claude inside the organisation. “Very quickly, I formed a view as a marketing leader that with AI, one of a few things is going to happen. One, you'll get the tools in the hands of the people, and you'll figure out how to use it together, and thus, generate competitive advantage. Or two, you will eventually have a consultancy in with your CEO or board saying, this is how your marketing team should be using AI, and if they're not, you're already behind, which I have openly said to my team is a very problematic place to find ourselves in.” Giving people time to experiment was critical at Unicef, but equally, a CEO-wide mandate to not shrink with AI and instead, drive incremental revenue proved transformative. It’d led to temporarily bringing the full technology team into the marketing remit to unite the technical experts with the marketers using those tools and driving those business needs. “It's been a big learning curve on both sides, and it's not a permanent structure, but I think it will leave a deeper way of working and understanding between the two teams,” says Libby Hodgson. When it comes to where AI is having greatest early impact in marketing, Adobe’s Sheerien Salindera points to content supply chain efficiencies as the first unlock. “We call it content economics, and the throughput of a piece of content, the ability to remix it, send it off for legal approval, bring it back all of those sort of steps and hand offs that used to take a long time, making that more automated,” she says. “But the next piece is getting the AI to not just give you speed to market … but really embedding the AI on your brand, on your tone of voice, on your creative and bringing your own IP and brand models to life.” Tune into this highly informative, relevant marketing conversation here.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing Last year, one of the world’s leading minds on attention, Amplified founder Dr Karen Nelson-Field, set out to put a figure on the eye-watering cost of dull media. The job followed on from the esteemed Dr Peter Field and Eatbigfish consultancy lead, Adam Morgan’s original work ascertaining the cost associated with dull creative. The media work was based on attention volume – a metric that compares how much attention an ad actually gets versus how much is theoretically possible (the total time in view). Globally, the tariff exposed was huge: US$198bn per year is being spent to make up for shortfall of dull media choices as attention collapses tenfold and the mental availability opportunity is lost. That’s an average of $0.43 in every dollar spent. And it’s even higher than the $189bn wasted on dull creative per the former research. Now for the first time, the true cost of dull media has been revealed in Australia, and yep, it’s equally shocking: $6bn in annual wasted media budget. That’s over 20% of the nearly $30 billion Australian marketers reportedly spent on advertising in 2025. The numbers behind the dollar headline are stark: Very dull media makes advertising up to 12× less efficient, meaning every dollar has to work dramatically harder to generate the same outcome. Only 38 per cent of viewers are reaching the crucial 2.5-second memory threshold – the point when advertising is encoding in memory, per Dr Nelson-Field – from the media choices brands are marketing right now. That means brand impact falls 35%, weakening brand growth – something marketers cannot afford to do. “These are sticker shock moments for people because … we're not codifying the value, we're codifying the loss. And it makes people really gasp, quite frankly, because they don't really realise it at an aggregate level,” Dr Field says. “What that technically means is you need the same amount of money again, Australia, to get the same outcomes in non-dull if you continue to advertise in extremely or very dull media.” An underlying conundrum is too many are chasing the cheapest CPM and reach, thinking that’s both efficient and effective, when in fact it’s an illusion: Too often the brand is sacrificing being seen to simply being served, says Dr Nelson-Field. For Peita Pacey, chief strategy and behaviour change officer, Hearts & Science Australia, part of the Omnicom Media Group, Dr Field’s data finally puts a price on something many planners, strategists and marketers have felt intuitively. “This is not about vilifying different channels, just to be really clear, it’s actually about understanding the role very specifically of channels in order delivering to specific objectives,” she says. “It’s also not about necessarily chasing a new metric. We have a number of different metrics we use when we're planning and when we're negotiating, and maybe some of them aren't as fit for purpose as they used to be, because we have more data now. But it's really about giving us the tools in our armour so we can go and more effectively plan to cognition and think about human processing, rather than just exposure or opportunity to see.” Val Morgan MD, Guy Burbidge, goes further, arguing obsession with reach and CPMs has led too many down the garden path to media choices that do not pay off. “I don't think it's any secret that something like $0.75 cents or $0.80, and the dollar is going into the big platforms. That's really what the problem is,” he says. “What we see is proxies like reach and CPM overtaking some of the other more important and more valuable proxies, like outcomes, windows of time – what we're all trying to actually deliver as marketers. An awful lot of channels, ours included, are being debased to those two very simple things.” Listen to the full conversation here. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large Merging two massive holdco structures after the global Omnicom-IPG merger and culling 100 brands is not for the faint hearted. Overhauling the local operating model entirely at the same time? Fraught with risk. But Nick Garrett’s master plan has the blessing of Omnicom chairman John Wren, and Garrett says he wouldn’t have taken the job without licence to radically recut the ANZ business.  If it works, “I think the US and other markets are all looking at this with support and optimism, hoping that this is a great test case”, says Garrett. The new model puts a three-pronged upstream advisory layer at the top of its structure, supported by six ‘centres of excellence’, pooling and centralising resources to concentrate firepower as Omnicom heads “upstream”. It’s going head-to-head in “transformation” and business strategy through brand with the likes of Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey and Bain while taking marketers and customer chiefs upstream with them.  Too many marketers have been relegated to execution, per Garrett. He thinks Omnicom Oceania’s new approach can help both parties regain strategic high ground. Corporate and government relations firm GRACosway may play an outsized role in opening up that pathway. A major content and creative automation play for the group is also imminent – but it’s not Ted Horton’s BRX.  Garrett says not to undertake radical surgery poses the greatest risk for comms holding companies – they’ve become too narrow and communications focused and lost the strategic high ground across industries and inside corporate executive leadership teams. With IPG absorbed, he thinks widespread industry speculation that at least one, perhaps two fewer direct holdco competitors by year’s end is plausible - a WPP break-up and piecemeal sell-off being one of them. But it’s telling that while eyeing consulting firms’ turf and moving away from a media and creative-led holdco into marketing transformation services, Garrett, when pushed, reckons Publicis is a bigger threat to Omnicom’s new growth model than Accenture Song. Despite the seismic overhaul, Garrett claims Omnicom Oceania is six months ahead of where the market thinks it is. But the proof is in the pudding – there’s a lot riding on whether Omnicom’s people can actually stretch to the new model’s intent. Garrett’s confident. Here’s what’s coming next. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing For Expedia Group country director and marketing activation lead, Philippa Durant, completing an MBA culminated in three leadership pillars reflecting her own personal brand: Kindness, passion and creativity. For Monash IVF head of marketing, Stuart Matthewman, securing a new formal tertiary qualification meant being uncomfortable – especially when squaring up to financial acumen – but also turned into growth and ultimately, compounding learning. And for Fitness and Lifestyle Group EGM of marketing and PR, Sara Dunseath, time at Harvard studying corporate revitalisation – “after a kick up the bum from my CEO” – fostered adaptability, confidence and relevance. These three marketing executives join Mi3 Publisher and CMO Awards program leader, Nadia Cameron in the first of our new series of CMO Awards podcasts for 2026 to explore how formal knowledge is power, and why these mid-career learning experiences have proven of such benefit professionally and personally. There’s no doubt the pressure is piling on marketing executives to be constantly learning and adapting their skill sets to suit rapidly changing marketing, business and customer environments. And it can be exhausting, all three agree – especially when there is such scrutiny of marketing ROI and an onus to know how to always deliver success. But surprisingly, taking the time to tackle formal learning in courses that first appeared to be outside the boundaries of the marketing function gave them renewed energy to tackle tasks at hand. Even more significantly, it elevated their own respect for the very discipline of marketing itself in organisations today. Tune into the conversation here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large When Jo Boundy greenlighted the second series of CommBank's financial wellbeing series The Brighter Side on Paramount 10, she expected good things but maybe not as good as the audience engagement levels turned out. The bank’s The Brighter Side  TV series garnered 2 million viewers. Tailored social content, which was  “double stacked” in production with the TV series, reached another 8 million in social media and Boundy says 80 per cent of people who watched the show “took an action to improve their finances … so we're seeing when the content is relevant, when it's utility, when it connects with people, it's really making a difference.” And Boundy is tantalisingly close to tagging her brand content program as a full funnel silver bullet. “It is such a critical piece in the full funnel tool kit,” she says. “It’s a really cluttered market so we have used our content to help build that consideration and then it ultimately goes through to conversion with customers.” It’s the latter point around creating compelling, relevant brand-originated content across rapidly changing formats and distribution channels that Nick Smith, Managing Director of content agency Medium Rare, says has spawned a “nuanced shift” from in-house “content ecosystems”, often led by corporate affairs teams or viewed through the lense of performance marketing. "That’s a company-centric approach,” says Smith on how corporate content ecosystems are typically run. “We’ve got to get particular messages out on our own channels and it’s lined up with the calendar of business objectives and all the things we want to tell the customer.” “Brand worlds” flip the content model to start with what “a consumer is doing in the real world,” says Smith. “It’s a different content approach than just talking about products.” Boundy says it’s a welcome shift – content starts with designing first for a customer problem or need. All of this new thinking and brand content trends has been captured in News Australia’s recent 2026 Future of Brand Content report – among the headline statistics is that brand content consumption is up 11 per cent. Trust and the relevance of brand-originated content among consumers increased by double digits. The former adman and CEO of WPP ANZ, Mike Connaghan, jumped from advertising to content when he was appointed to run News Australia’s commercial content division, which includes Medium Rare, Storyation, Suddenly and Visual Domain. Connaghan says the likes of CommBank, Qantas, Chemist Warehouse, Coles and Bunnings are all firing with their brand content programs. He agrees with Boundy that they drive results through the funnel to purchase, rather than just mid. “They’re creating mini publishing businesses for themselves,” says Connaghan. “We also work with Chemist Warehouse on the House of Wellness. It’s a media conglomerate. They have a huge print presence, they advertise very heavily through News Corp newspapers, they've got their own radio, they've got their own podcasts, they've got their own TV shows, all of which we are helping them with. It's a really powerful platform for them. So the sector is in high demand and high interest. Having people like Jo and Commonwealth Bank step into the breach in financial services has only really stirred more interest.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Redundancy is rife across the marketing and agency ecosystem right now. And whether you have an inkling your job could be on the line, as Liana Dubois did when management consultants entered the Nine building, or it's a complete shock – such as Josh Slighting experienced when he left a growing REA Group, or Katie Dally felt after surviving a first round of cuts at Endeavour Group only to be hit in the second set – it often triggers a professional and personal crisis of confidence and identity. Even experienced marketer Amy De Groot, who’s been made redundant twice, nearly 20 years apart, still felt the shock, upset and grief of this occupational hazard. It’s hard to get a precise handle on the exact volume of redundancies, but cuts can be found in every pocket of the industry. A clue is in the Advertising Council of Australia’s 2025 Salary Survey, which revealed a redundancy rate of 11%, compared to the usual range of 5–7%, in the 12 months to 31 March 2025. More overtly, Omnicom’s global CEO last week said 4000 jobs are likely to be shed by end of the year as the merged Omnicom-IPG structure is bolted into place. Up to 120 people are also being made redundant as Menulog shuts up shop in Australia. Endeavour Group is another that made marketing, experience, digital and CX redundancies this year. Dentsu flagged 8% global headcount reduction in Q2. Nine, Seven, News Corp have made hundreds of cuts. The Australian HR Institute quarterly outlook for September 25 shows redundancies are on the rise, with 27 per cent of employers planning cuts, up 3 percentage points since the June 2025 quarter. Those are the numbers and an attempt at hard facts. But the reality is there are a bunch of marketing and advertising industry colleagues having the cope with the fallout and impact of being made redundant. In Mi3’s latest podcast, we’re focusing on exploring the impact of the redundancy crisis through the lens of four senior marketers who have been there: Former Nine group CMO, Liana Dubois; former REA Group media lead, Josh Slighting, former Endeavour Group GM of brand, creative and operations, Katie Dally, and former Cars24 head of brand marketing, Amy de Groot. In this very personal conversation, we humanise the experience of being made redundant to help others out there that have, or are experiencing, the repercussions of redundancy directly and indirectly. We also explore the lateral career paths that have opened up for our guests, as we share learnings and advice on how we can all make more progressive career choices.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

British luxury department store Selfridges has just launched a Christmas campaign co-created with Disney across almost the entire Selfridges portfolio of in-store and digital media assets. Now it’s pushing harder into retail media – and looking for similarly deep relationships with select brands aiming to tap its 36 million annual customers. Selfridges head of brand partnerships Kate Eastop is driving that agenda – and bringing in more non-endemic brands, i.e. those it doesn’t stock in stores – into the retail media business. “I see this as a significant growth area for the business over the next few years”, says Eastop. So, she commissioned owned media advisor Sonder to develop a rate card for its physical and digital assets – and ensure everything is properly valued. The new rates will be live for 2026 and Eastop says the process has helped “establish Selfridges as a serious player in retail media” while bringing internal stakeholders together on the kind of assets and partnerships the luxury retailer will build – and what remains off limits. Sonder’s Jonathan Hopkins and Angus Frazer see momentum in the luxury retail media market as the supermarket and grocery sector matures. They say brands are willing to pay a higher premium to tap audiences that are more immersed in “retail theatre” experiences versus the transactional hit of the grocery aisle. “If you’re walking into a theatre of brands in a store like Selfridges, then there is immense dwell time,” per Hopkins. “You’re there to enjoy the shopping experience, not get out as quickly as possible – so those factors are considered in the valuation.” Sonder has benchmarked a global owned media asset pool of circa $12bn – and Frazer says the market is “approaching an inflection point” with in-store static and digital assets now presenting “the next wave of opportunity” for retail media networks versus commoditised low hanging fruit, like sponsored search and website product tiles. He says the department stores Sonder has worked with on owned media “typically top out at around 25 per cent of revenues being derived from non-endemic brands”. Key to netting that upside is not being too greedy and eroding both the customer experience, the value of the brand, and thereby undermining the sustainability of the retail media business. Their advice? Partner wisely.  “Deep with a few can be better than light with many,” says Hopkins. “Find brands that are a really good fit with your customers and go deep in terms of those brand partnerships across the year. Find those mutually beneficial activations that are going to add value to your customers that you could never have achieved without that partnership. “If you manage to achieve that, it’s going to create a proven use case within the business, start to normalise behaviour for stakeholders who might have been resistant to it, and then make it easier for future growth.” Which is precisely the playbook that Selfridges is following – and carving out a deeper niche within the UK’s increasingly crowded retail media market.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New ARN CEO, Michael Stephenson, has been unusually quiet for much of the year. After this week’s upfronts, we now know why. Stephenson has been rapidly redesigning ARN from an audio operator to a fully-fledged entertainment company. ARN unveiled a dozen big new content and commercial initiatives on Wednesday, and at the centre of Stephenson’s blueprint for ARN 3.0 is the iHeart digital platform. ARN has the APAC rights to iHeart, which, in its US home market, has 188 million users. In Australia, it's 3 million on the platform and 7 million when syndicated. One of the announcements this week was Ruby, iHeart’s branded content studio, which produces 30-minute podcasts for brands. “It’s a simple model: We will produce your podcast, for free, and we will distribute, amplify and monetise it for you. All we need from you is an upfront commitment in advertising dollars to co-promote your own product, to drive audience to your destination,” says Stephenson. Ruby has been a massive success in the US: “Many of the podcasts [iHeart has] produced, actually are in the top 10 per cent of downloads of podcasts within the US across the board,” per ARN’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Ben Campbell, “and that's branded content.” The barrage of new initiatives includes a move into video, new TV-style tentpole entertainment programming like Kissed at Sea and Save Our Pub. The latter involves finding and rescuing a rundown pub, bringing back the schnitty, live music and giving it national prominence post-reno.  It's also pushing into live events, like Run Club Rave, “with global DJs playing in parks,” per Stephenson. “Nightclubs are out. Mornings are in”. Across all of that, the content will include audio, video and will run on TikTok as part of a beefed-up, integrated brand platform with the social juggernaut. Campbell, meanwhile, has also supercharged ARN’s ad tech and data credentials – deals with Westpac DataX, Experian for targeting and LiveRamp on clean rooms were part of the upfront show this week. As were launching a women's sports network, a podcast deal with Are Media and its portfolio of women's brands, not to mention the complete overhaul of the radio network into two national Metro brands, KIISS and Gold. Stephenson hopes the move will make them easier to buy for national advertisers – and plans to use the revenue upside to keep funding the reinvention. He’s got an even busier 12 months ahead. Here’s the plan.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Six years ago, media ecologist Jack Myers called it right on the almost total automation of media buying. Now he says extending principal trading models into retail media is the future for media agencies, as more retail media brands – the likes of Uber and United Airlines “that aren’t that interested in selling ads” – sell directly to agencies, who then arbitrage for bigger margins.   Myers thinks that presents new competitive challenges for the likes of The Trade Desk (TTD) as holdcos simultaneously acquire FAST channels and digital assets from pressured publishers and hunt TTD’s robust market cap growth versus those of the global agency owners. As media owners, he argues, holdcos are far less likely to hand over 15 cents on the dollar to DSPs when that is margin they could keep. “That doesn’t mean The Trade Desk is going to go away. I just believe they’ll find the holdcos are going to be their competitor, as opposed to their client,” per Myers. “Media consolidation will happen inside of media agencies, which I believe will increasingly become media financial services companies.” While media owners seemingly grasp that they must “come together as a single force to compete with these [big tech] monoliths instead of fighting against each other for a declining share of business”, Myers remains bleak – because most looming M&A and deal-cutting is focused on cost-cutting rather than genuine transformation.   A united media front, he says, is “not going to happen. Why? Because that's not what the leaders of those companies get paid to do. They're paid to make sure their Wall Street value remains viable, and they do that by holding on to the past until it's too late. They become the Kodak of the television business.” Across the piste, Myers thinks AI’s total disruption will force company leaders to focus less on quarterly results and more on actually leading their people “through a time when it's no longer about the answers, it's about the questions”, he suggests. “In a world where the answers are immediately available through technology, it's the quality of the questions, it's the insights that are gained, it's the use of those insights [that defines winners and losers]. “So when it comes to the advertising business and when it comes to people, I have two foundational beliefs. One is that creativity is going to be the saviour of the advertising and media business. Number two, it will only save those who invest in their human talent, and that means investing in the creativity, the ingenuity, the intuition of their human talent,” per Myers. “In order to lead that talent, the qualities that are most required are empathy and ethics… two things that modern corporations are not particularly well-versed in.” However, he sees some immediate potential wins for advertisers and streamers of all persuasions: Getting smarter about harnessing back-catalogue content that powers the bulk of viewing. How? Proactive, bespoke sponsorsh For everyone else, Myers advises getting more fluent in short-form content. “We're going to see more and more short-form, serial dramas and comedies … where every day there's a new episode, and it's going to be across social media. We're seeing that heavily in China, it's a big business. So I think we're going to see more advertising connecting up to the content and being content itself,” says Myers. “When that happens, we need new currency – based on attentiveness, based on brand equity value of the content, attention. So the fundamentals of the industry need to change.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last October Nine corralled a posse of market mix model (MMM) providers, co-funding a program to prove what its assets could do in hard business terms. Since then Nine has poured over three years of historical data from dozens of campaigns, along with brand tracking, consumer attitudinal research, business case studies and other inputs from the likes of Neuro Insight, getting granular on what is moving the needle for brands – and how. Now the early results are in. Some are obvious – The Block generates product trials. Other findings less so – MAFS, for instance, drives trust and credibility as a halo effect for brands like Westpac. Meanwhile, Love Island Australia has Cointreau toasting a massive 42 per cent lift in consideration. Kia signed up to Nine’s $30m program – and marketing boss Dean Norbiato says the early MMM reads now have him plotting channel reallocations: “Looking at the first cut [of MMM data], it would be commercially negligent not to,” said Norbiato, though noting that a broad mix of channels has been crucial to driving growth for Kia, and that TV advertising and tent pole sponsorships have hugely influenced performance marketing results. But Norbiato, plus Nine’s Stewart Gurney and Nikki Rooke, underline a combination of short, medium and long-term strategies, across a broad mix of channels, and layering network effects, are critical growth drivers. Overall, binary pursuit of one-dimensional metrics like ROI is likely to backfire – and MMMs have limits, which even Mutinex co-founder and global CEO, Henry Innis acknowledges. He says there is no silver bullet to give marketers a universal fix. Growth is nuanced, multi-layered and complicated – much harder than lightweight “easy sell, dollar in, dollar out” ROI metrics, per Kia’s Norbiato. But there are ways to start understanding how to put a better plan together, and optimise with sharper data more rapidly. “And that gives you a much bigger seat at the senior management table.” Now Norbiato’s moving to act on the MMM data: “We need to get further understanding, but this initial cut is definitely going to sharpen that [channel] selection.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Just when you thought the bulging TV, BVOD, streaming and video sector had peaked with too many consumer and advertiser choices, along comes the no-subscription, ad-supported international streamer Tubi with 100 million global  viewers dominated by a younger set binging TV shows like the 30 year-old Friends and creating new genre “rabbit holes” like horror and Bollywood ‘vertical fandoms’. To boot, half of Tubi’s 1.3 million younger skewing monthly Australian viewers are regularly missing on most of the international streaming and local BVOD services. Seventy per cent of Tubi’s local viewers, for instance, don’t watch 10Play; 59 per cent are not clocking 7Plus and 53 per cent are avoiding Amazon’s Prime juggernaut. Although it’s commissioning originals globally, mostly to top-up the voracious appetite of the younger set diving into the back catalogues of horror, true crime and old hit shows like Friends, Grey’s Anatomy and Lost, Tubi International’s Executive Vice President and Managing Director, David Salmon, says TV and video are on an “interesting parallel” to music consumption – old is still good and big. “This idea of recency [new titles] not being the only thing that drives value in a viewer’s mind is similar to music not being defined by the latest album being released,” Salmon says. “Yes, people are viewing new releases but it is not actually driving the bulk of engagement on streaming platforms. Instead it’s evergreen, comfort viewing, nostalgic viewing and deep and narrow interests.” And it’s a global phenomenon – Salmon cites Digital i’s top 10 most streamed titles across the major global platforms in the second half of 2024 – six of the top ten were “actually more than 20 years old and rather staggeringly it also includes Friends, now more than 30 years old. Consumers are going deeper and going further back and that’s where they’re choosing to spend their time.” For Pippa Leary, News Australia’s Managing Director & Publisher for Free News and Lifestyle, Tubi completes an  “All Screens, All Day” line-up blending news and lifestyle publishing with video across all day parts and demographics. Before Tubi’s arrival, the rapidly reinventing news publisher had already created a “small and medium-sized video ecosystem” which topped 1 billion video views from 5 million users – in the past 12 months video views have surged 85 per cent as the publisher cracked how to bring stories across its news and magazine titles together with video to the same user via vertical and shoppable video formats. News’ massive investment in data and segmentation capabilities for full funnel targeting credentials – it has 3000 audience segments across the portfolio – still needed the big TV screen to round it out.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.