Australian brand marketers and their UK counterparts came up with very different views on where they see their biggest challenges, according to a study by QMS that was aligned to research by Ocean Outdoor UK. Marketers from the UK cited attention as their key challenge, while Australian marketers flagged sustainable growth and unified measurement.

When it came to top marketing investment priorities, the top two criteria for both markets were the same things. Number one: reach. Number two: ROI. But they diverged on the third, which for the UK was cost (CPM), whereas for Australian marketers it was attention.

“So the question [for Australian marketers] is not ‘how much?’ but ‘how well?’, per global advisor to QMS and ad industry veteran, Anne Parsons. “It's a real shift that says that Australian brand marketers are thinking about effectiveness much more than they're thinking about efficiency.”

She says that chimes with peer-reviewed research by Oxford University Professor Felipe Thomaz that found optimising media for reach alone no longer works because all reach is not equal – and used bluntly won't deliver business outcomes. “It's attentive reach, the quality of the reach,” that matters, per Parsons.

Netflix ANZ marketing boss Tony Broderick is 100 per cent aligned.

“As a business, the only metric that really counts is revenue. But the one that marketing is chiefly tasked with is to drive outsized conversation – and reach for the sake of reach won't generate conversation. You need to capture attention. You need to build creative that stops someone scrolling through a feed – phone stopping content,” he says.

“We make great stories … our job is to create the conversation around it. If we do that, we're supporting acquisition, retention, engagement. We have an ad service – engagement drives that as well.”

He says Netflix analyses what people are watching, the conversations about it (Netflix has a billion social media followers globally) and then aims to rapidly launch campaigns based on those insights. “How can we bring those proof points in and get it live within digital out of home, targeted at the right people, a couple of days later? That's something we now do each and every week, working with partners like QMS.”

While Australian marketers flagged cross-media measurement as their biggest challenge, Broderick thinks focusing too hard on measurement creates its own problems.

“A big challenge and an ongoing discussion I have with my team, with my agencies, is ensuring that we try to pursue a plan that is best versus what's easiest to measure. What I'm most focused on is really just the right set of signals, rather than the absolute best report card for every campaign,” says Broderick.

“If you're just following what has always delivered the best results in the past, you're naturally steering away from innovation as well.”

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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.

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Atomic 212°’s Chief Strategy Officer, Asier Carazo and Bupa's GM of Marketing, Naomi Driver once shared a common fear that permeates much of the industry: How does a brand advance the cause for the 20 per cent of Australians with a disability – without being unintentionally tokenistic or offensive?

Driver says those concerns often stop her marketing peers from doing anything – she would know given it was also once her experience. Driver shares some personal anecdotes that are funny now but mortifying at the time: She once told Mike Rolls, who lives with a double amputation, she liked “keeping people on their toes … then realised I’d put my foot in my mouth”.

Rolls “is a mate” and enjoyed making her feel uncomfortable for a few seconds. But Driver said it made her think even harder about the language used across Bupa’s creative and digital assets – and Bupa's Paralympics program around last year's event (with ads featuring Rolls, who’s humour helped shape the script) is a benchmark for what brands can and should do, according to Inclusively Made’s CEO, Paul Nunnari.

Like Driver, Asier Carazo’s fears have also flipped. He cites Atomic 212° colleague, Senior Account Exec Angus McLeod as an advocate for the missing piece in media industry planning. McLeod lost his hearing after an accident and often experiences media that hasn’t taken into account people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

“Working side by side with Angus is just understanding the reality of millions of Australians,” says Carazo. “Twenty per cent of Australians live with some form of disability. Are we even thinking about them when we put forward the media plan? Are we challenging publishers to include accessibility features on the ads? Are we challenging creative agencies to think about accessibility as a forethought, not as an afterthought?”

Roy Morgan, the go-to source for media pros, started reporting on Australians living with disability within its database in the last quarter. That’s a win, adds Carazo, “but what I would love to see is greater genuine curiosity around understanding the reality of this country … As marketers, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on research and testing, but then you're not allocating any money to understanding how your audiences are able to consume media.”

Inclusively Made has a framework for brands that do want to make inclusivity BAU. The key: “Don't let perfection get in the way of progress … just get the ball rolling,” says CEO Paul Nunnari. “It's not always going to be perfect, but at least having the conversation, seeing what are those low hanging fruits that can be achieved with minimal risk outputs is a really good place to start.”

While Bupa’s Paralympics approach is the benchmark, per Nunnari, it can be as simple as having a wheelchair user in the background of an ad, having a coffee with a mate. “It doesn’t need to be highlighted, it doesn’t need to be inspirational. It’s just two blokes getting together having a coffee, right? It's the norm.”

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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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