Mi3Australia

While addressable advertising is widely adopted in our industry, the true impact lies in the nuances of quality, sophistication, and strategic application. Emily Smith, Head of Commercial Transformation, Paramount ANZ, unpacks the key elements needed to unlock its full potential and deliver unrivalled advertising success. #sponsored Paramount Australia & New Zealand

This year’s winner of the Australian Marketing Institute’s Certified Practising Marketer award, Paper + Spark’s Paul Everson, is in plenty of conversations right now, but reports a market afraid to commit to decisions as socio-economic uncertainty and short-termism persist. It’s not helping many marketers are either struggling to draw insights from data, or lack commercial nous to connect the dots to the business bottom line, he says – a big reason why skills development programs like Certified Practising Marketer are so critical to the industry. But with the core fundamentals of marketing as solid as ever – even with more channels and sophisticated terminology at our disposal – this experienced agency leader, marketing industry mentor and Uni lecturer is keen to see the industry embrace big M marketing with more confidence.

Nine is touting younger audiences on its total TV services, claiming one in three signed in viewers are millennials. It's gunning for more, per Director of 9Now and programming Hamish Turner, transforming content formats and programming efforts to keep the advertiser catnip incoming. Among its bets: Vertical video, shorter, personalised news formats, a willingness to embrace the intersection of data, product and tech – and more off-platform partnerships. #9Now

Market rumblings have the heat on Nine’s Chief Sales Officer Michael Stephenson and although media markets tend to mutter, Stephenson last Thursday at Nine’s annual upfronts presentation all but put his job on the line. In a high-stakes game to snap market perceptions that “total TV” is bleeding audiences – and prevent a three-year near billion dollar broadcast rout by 2025, Stephenson made his job breaker or maker move. Nine laid $30m down on five rival econometrics models and 20 or so blue chip brands who, in return for Nine’s funding, will test up to 30 hypotheses and open-source their commercial results from “total TV” versus the rest of the media world – Meta, Google, TikTok and the armada of advertiser-fancied subscription streaming services included. For some, 2025 might be about to get curly as Nine takes on the “performance measurement monopolists” at Meta and Google in a bid to slow the revenue bleed. Here’s what’s next as Nine punts on provoking the $14bn ad market and big corporates into making media investments based on business impact over audience and market reach. 

"It's the use case, stupid." The ways firms use data and the technology architecture underpinning that usage have changed dramatically over the last 20 years. But one thing has remained constant, according to Sriraman ("Sri") Annaswamy GAICD IIT IIM Annaswamy is a pioneer of the Australian analytics sector, whose firm Swamy and Associates has been a go-to service provider for some of Australia's biggest organisations in finance and healthcare. Value from each new wave of innovation, whether that be business intelligence, data science, or now, generative AI is realised when it is applied to very specific parts of the business operations. Andrew Birmingham 🕵️♂️reports https://lnkd.in/grZdx5FF #analytics, #bigdata #AI #genAI #generativeAI #BI #businessintelligence

TikTok marketing science chief Rory Dolan says performance media costs are soaring while conversions flatline. He has the data to prove it. After mapping TikTok platform activity with Tracksuit’s brand tracking data, Dolan has one key message – invest in brand to boost conversion and beat biddable auction inflation: “Advertisers with 60 per cent-plus awareness have a 2.86 times increase in their baseline conversion rate versus advertisers that are 20 per cent below,” he says, rendering brand versus performance arguments redundant, if not suicidal. Full funnel execution is king, says Dolan, because building future demand means easier, cheaper conversions at scale: “Brand is fundamentally a performance tactic.” Tracksuit co-founder James Hurman literally wrote the book on that principle. He penned Future Demand after one of his own DTC businesses, initially hockey-sticking via Facebook ads, experienced the performance media ‘Easter Island Effect’. Acquisition dried up, performance costs spiralled, the economics tanked. Without priming new customers, “brands use all of their resources, then they have nothing left, and then they die”, warns Hurman. The idea that brand campaigns have to be broad, multichannel and expensive is a myth, says TikTok’s Dolan. “Brand can be built by targeting subgroups of your target audience consistently over time. So this can actually be achieved with small amounts of investment.” The awareness sweet spot for small brands, per the research, is 37 per cent. “We see very strong business impacts as a result of that early on.” Even “big performance-focused advertisers” are hitting the same growth ceiling “which is very expensive to bypass by performance [spend]”, says Dolan. “These are businesses that maybe three years ago wouldn't have touched brand [investment] because of the inability to track their short-term ROI. They're now seeing the impact of that.” Dolan says TikTok’s research underlines that increasing performance spend will not build brand – but brand spend will boost both brand and performance outcomes. For those facing hard budget choices and sceptical CFOs, Dolan suggests leaving performance media to bots and spending more time and money on brand: “That seems to be the big sweet spot at the moment – automating the performance and focusing on driving these multipliers.” But first, get brand tracking sorted. #sposnored

Personalised Plates Queensland (PPQ) has overhauled its data-driven approach to marketing on top of a new platform implementation built upon Tealium, Dotdigital and Craft CRM. It's part of a wider change which has also seen the creation of a digital experience team inside the group. And they are getting wins on the board with strong conversion rates and much higher visibility over the audience thanks to much more sophisticated approach to analytics. Joshua Lee | Maurice Riley | Publicis Groupe ANZ | Dotdigital

There were audible gasps when the Treasury Wine Estates board saw the first non-red Penfolds Grange gift box designed by creative collaborator, Japanese artist, Nigo, earmarked for the ever-younger luxury market. But as chief data and technology officer, Kate Whitney, points out, all the consumer insights, demand zone mapping, consumption occasion trends, moments and retail markers make it plain: Disrupting the wine category by building cultural credibility and meeting changing retail experience expectations is critical if Penfolds is to win against declining wine preferences. The former CMO joined Mad Paws CEO, Justus Hammer, plus FiftyFive5 head of cultural forecasting, Michelle Newton, to debate the facets of future retail and changing consumer views of value on a panel at the recent SXSW Sydney event. Fiftyfive5, part of Accenture Song | #sxswsydney

Publishers of all creeds and scale are close to consensus on the Federal government winding back its earlier aggressive rhetoric to “designate” Meta under the News Bargaining Code, forcing it and publishers into arbitration to land news funding deals. Meta stared down the Federal Government earlier this year, announcing it would not continue payments to publishers and would pull news from its platforms in Australia if it had to. Now the Feds have tasted big tech defiance, a broader levy, tax or licensing fee on Google, Meta and TikTok, possibly around a digital advertising revenue threshold, is what most publishers Mi3 canvassed now broadly expect from the Albanese government – along with a transition fund for news publishers until a mechanism for a tech tax is legislated. But calling it a tax could be a dirty enough word for the powerful tech giants to turn recalcitrant again. So let’s stick with tax. #MediaBargainingCode #Media #News

Clear career goals, an insatiable desire to lean in and learn new skills, and mentorship have all helped emerging marketing and business leaders from ANZ Bank and MOVE Bank to be recognised in this year’s this year’s Australian Marketing Institute's Marketing Excellence awards program. And their passion for marketing as both a growth engine and as a team sport could teach other brands a thing or two. Alice Callaghan | Matt Farnham | Kristy Keyte | Treasury Wine Estates | Australian Marketing Institute