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.”

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What happens when you get a neurodivergent, a dopamine dissident and a socio demographic myth buster riding the boundaries of the media and marketing business on the mics together? We’ve done just that after The Media Federation’s (MFA) recent annual conference produced an eclectic mix of keynotes and speakers - the conversation and data should challenge long-held assumptions about what makes us tick as marketers, people and consumers.

Firstly, some busted myths: Gen Z can’t get on the property ladder? Actually 40 per cent of under 30s in Australia own their own house, per Slingshot Media’s Flo Gleeson-Cook’s data deep dive, which means banks may be doing their media targeting all wrong. Luxury brands should target those with money in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs? Wrong. Sydney’s “westies” have more ready cash to spend and less debt. Meanwhile, personal care brands targeting women are missing 40 per cent of their market - blokes. Sephora and Mecca take note. But there were some myths Gleeson-Cook couldn’t bust – MAFS’ audience skew being one.

OMD strategy chief Rob Frost didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD and autism until he was 33. Before then he’d been exhausted trying to keep up with social norms – preparing for social conversations in the shower, writing down jokes on his phone, telling himself in major pitches to focus on what people were saying so hard that he hadn’t taken in a word being said. Now he’s harnessing divergence – and bringing it to work. “There’s a Harvard Business Review study that shows that teams are 30 per cent more productive when they're neurodiverse,” per Frost.

But it’s also critical for bosses to create environments for neurodiverse people to thrive – creative, breakthrough thinking can surge but they are way more likely to die early. “If you have ADHD, you are significantly more likely to die of suicide, to end up in prison,” says Frost. “Your life expectancy is lower than someone who smokes 20 cigarettes a day for their whole life … because your brain is constantly searching and striving and trying to find that element that gets you that little dopamine hit and that little reward.”

Hearts & Science’s Peita Pacey reckons the media industry with its need for creative and lateral thinking is close to 30 per cent neurodiverse, which is why “trying to fit everyone into one box” in terms of working patterns is “a really terrible idea”.

But she got a muffled, collective groan from MFA’s heaving younger contingent when she suggested as little as 30 minutes a day of scrolling short form video on social media has the same negative physical impacts as three glasses of alcohol. The average Australian under 40 is now using their phone 7 hours a day, she said, creating massive cortisol and dopamine spikes, increasing heart rates and creating “basically a hot mess that is aging us significantly”.

But Pacey says phone addiction is a problem for business leaders as it is for the rank and file, because our brains are trained to be constantly reactive to the latest ping, rather than fresh thinking.

“If your brain is being trained to be reactive, that means that all you're using is your experience and what you've done before. You're not actually generating new ideas. You're not being expansive in your thinking,” says Pacey.

“And of course, these people are the ones who are most connected to their phones, because the expectation is that you're available at all times.”

But she says there is a solution to “stopping the brain rot”: Just don’t look at your phone for the first hour of every day. “That hour period regulates your dopamine system for the next 24 hours.”

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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.”

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

AI is reshaping the rules of business at breakneck speed - and likewise for marketing. Legendary tech sector analyst, founder, CEO and chairman of global analyst firm Forrester, George Colony, calls this the Seventh Wave. It’s an upheaval that will eclipse previous waves like the internet, mobile and cloud. It brings turmoil but also eventual re-ordering. For marketers, agencies, and media owners, the implications are extraordinary. Traditional SaaS pricing models are breaking down and legacy vendors are scrambling with defensive AI “upgrades” that mask deeper weakness in their systems. Colony says Agentic AI — autonomous systems that learn, adapt and act — is poised to collapse the tech stack, creating both risk and opportunity for brands. At the same time he explains why Google’s dominance in search is under existential threat - although its latest quarterly earnings results say otherwise. SEO will also fade into irrelevance, says Colony. Beyond, the open web Colony says will morph into the web’s version of AM radio and in its place, a new set of tech cartels is forming, each manoeuvring to entrench control. Colony sets out the strategic risks, the likely winners, and the moves marketers must make now. It is advice that many tech vendors will fear.

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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.

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YouTube last week officially ousted the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster ITV as the video platform now second only to the BBC in audience size, according to the tech and media regulator Ofcom.

YouTube’s ad take is pumping everywhere – it raked $9.8bn in the June quarter, according to its latest earnings results – up 13% year-on-year.

YouTube has been increasingly vocal on its ambition to target legacy broadcasters for bigger brand budgets and recast TV as swerving rapidly to the creator economy.

Last week UK broadcasters lobbed a counterstrike, attempting to demonstrate that advertisers needed clearer, comparable reporting of YouTube with TV audiences if it wants to take TV’s revenues. To date, YouTube has vigorously resisted joining any audience measurement system around the world if not on its terms and definitions - that position has not hurt its growth trajectory as advertisers large and small buy YouTube’s market narrative of being different.

If there was any doubt YouTube sees itself as reframing TV to its likeness – broadcasters and global streamers are equally old-world in its eyes – the user generated content platform last week pulled its involvement with the UK TV and streaming body BARB Audiences. To many observers, the timing was not random. Last week also saw BARB and its audience measurement partner Kantar release a world-first initiative reporting YouTube’s audiences at a channel level on connected TVs in the same way for broadcasters and streamers. The first week’s numbers from BARB and Kantar, showed YouTube’s top 200 channels dominated by content for kids aged under 5 like Peppa Pig, and lots of music. YouTube’s audience reach numbers by channel, central to how TV and streaming services win advertising contracts – were tiny.

But does any of this matter? Do brands and advertisers care? The Future of TV Forum’s Justin Lebbon and global CEO of market mix modelling firm Mutinex, Henry Innis, duke out YouTube’s revenue romp, its surging adloads and a likely hurricane for traditional media-funded audience reporting – Innis argues business outcome-based audience measurement is set to shake-up decades of norms.

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Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher

Brand evolution: It’s in the sights of every marketer, but how do you honour the legacy while seeking a new narrative that grabs attention, signals distinctiveness, and builds loyalty? How do you prove it’s worth investing in brand not just demand internally? What team structures and measures are better for driving a brand-led marketing approach? And what does it take to avoid what Mark Ritson calls “the pornography of change” in your creative and brand execution for the sake of it, versus innovating to ensure continued cultural relevance and commercial success?

Joining in this final episode in the CMO Awards podcast series for 2025 are three of our finalists and winners – Michael Hill CMO, Jo Feeney, Reflections Holidays CMO, Pete Chapman, and Allianz Australia general manager of customer strategy and marketing, Laura Halbert – who have made brand their mantra and mechanism for commercial success.

Each of these marketing chiefs is in a different lifecycle stage of brand maturity. Yet similarities in ingredients are in evidence: Capturing then leveraging data and customer insight, identifying and sticking to brand values, recalibrating media spend, committing to long-lasting creative and content that oozes distinctive brand assets, multi-year horizons, whole-of-company buy-in, baseline metrics and commercial smarts.

Take Reflections Holiday, a relatively young brand representing 40 holiday parks in Australia. As the business has transformed its operating model and committed to becoming a social enterprise, building brand has taken centre stage. Under the moniker, ‘Life’s better outside’, Chapman has been flipping category perceptions on their heads and stridently seeking engagement with a more discerning outdoors audience that puts nature, not novelty, first. From only 10 per cent of budget going on brand versus performance, it’s completely switched the other way. Last year, Reflections also underwent a rebrand complete with new positioning and brand look.

The new brand strategy made for some exceptional – and ironically, short-term – results, Chapman says. These include 10.1 year-on-year, topline revenue growth between February 2024 and February 2025, a +15.9 per cent lift in NPS, and a 20 per cent increase in loyalty club membership.

For Feeney, the lack of clarity on what Michael Hill stood for, overreliance on product and price promotions, limited insight into what customers thought and the absence of a narrative around a compelling lineage in fine jewellery all made rebranding a must. But you can’t tackle it all in one hit. So she introduced brand tracking first, and made the case for taking price points off advertising. Feeney also jettisoned the catalogues and shifted towards digital and “better media channels”, as the longer-term shift to reinvest an unprecedented 60 per cent of advertising funding into brand began.

“We couldn't have gone from zero to 100, we actually had to start to retell the story of Michael Hill,” says Feeney. “Resetting ourselves and getting a baseline was the really important part to then be able to even think about what could a rebrand look like.”

Even with persistently tough retail conditions, brand efforts helped turn three years of negative growth into three years of positive growth in group sales: +13.1 per cent (2021), +7 per cent (2023) and +9.8 per cent (2024).

Halbert meanwhile, is in the early stages of a rebranding effort for Allianz Australia, debuting its new brand positioning work, ‘Care you can count on’ in June. She’s already reporting a 15-point lift in brand awareness thanks to a creative approach grounded in leveraging distinctive brand assets that take their cues from a level of care Halbert felt in her first interviews before even joining the insurance giant.

“So the first marker was just in the experience. But the wonderful thing about a German organisation is we do have data. I was flooded with all the data and all of the research you could possibly dream of. When you really unpacked it… what was clear was that it was an amazing brand, with good awareness, good consideration, lots of trust. But when you unpack it further, it wasn't enough.

“We needed to be different. We needed to be distinctive. So we went on a mission over the course of the last 18 months to really go and understand who we were right at the core.”

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Employment Hero and Salesforce are at opposite ends of the B2B spectrum. One’s a rapidly scaling $2bn platform, the other a $260bn behemoth. But both have adopted a consumer marketing playbook, applied it to B2B and are watching growth power. Employment Hero’s Tasman Page says the approach is notching 700 per cent gains.

Lifting B2C’s distinctive assets, emotional, humorous playbook and deploying brand characters – while swapping out whitepapers and rational content for 30 second video ads – are netting leads and acquiring customers at much lower cost, per Page, because the brand investment is fuelling cheaper leads and customer acquisition, up to 70 per cent cheaper.

That’s linked to a generational shift within B2B buying groups – of which 71 per cent are now Gen Z and millennials, per LinkedIn ANZ Head of Enterprise, Andrea Rule. Video natives, busy and human, they want something that both strikes an emotional chord, quickly tells them something interesting without boring them, and gives them a reason to go deeper if they are in market, or lands a memory if they are not yet buying. Video consumption is soaring across the platform locally, per Rule, who unpacks the types of content that is getting best traction.

Cat Bowe, Salesforce’s Senior Director, Marketing, has likewise seen big improvements in results using video over static ad formats. But she’s also leaning heavily on LinkedIn to own agentic AI amid an arms race. It’s working.

AI is enabling Employment Hero’s 30 person in-house agency team to move even faster – speed to market is critical per Page. Which is why he says external agencies just can’t deliver the turnaround times he needs without hoovering up all of Employment Hero’s budget.

Salesforce’s Bowe says a hybrid approach is currently working for her team – the agency can work on what is immediately in front of them, giving the in-house team time to think a little further out.

But both are fully aligned that there is a “fundamental technology shift going on”, per Bowe, and a fundamental shift in B2B marketing approaches that are massively moving the needle.

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