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

Mi3’s tech editor Andrew Birmingham is joined by global Martech doyenne and Chief Martec's editor-in-chief Scott Brinker to dissect the 2025 Martech Landscape, his famed spaghetti-styled industry maps, now at 15,000 different tech solutions, and what it really means for marketers. From the prolific number of martech vendors and AI-powered tools to the dawn of agentic AI and the quest for a universal data layer to unify fractured data feeds, they unpack the pace, the promise - and the peril - of martech’s accelerating complexity. Brinker explains why martech consolidation is finally underway, why agentic AI may be as transformative as the internet, and what needs to happen before we hit a truly interoperable, multi-agent future. Along the way: data chaos, consumption pricing, cybersecurity blind spots—and why marketers must learn to ride the wave, not be crushed by it.

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It’s less than a year since Salesforce launched autonomous AI agents into the wild. But the bots are already reshaping business functions. In the US, online accounting platform 1-800 Accountants, which handles payroll and book keeping for circa 100,000 firms, has slashed the time staff spend on customer service by 70 per cent. Open Table and Singapore Air are deploying the agents to similar effect. But what are they doing with all that freed human capital? And what are the broader implications for everyone as ‘agentics’ move rapidly through the digital supply chain?

Salesforce global CMO Ariel Kelman and his say we will all soon have our own agentics buying – and negotiating prices – for us in online shopping and services. Which has significant implications for business structures and marketing functions and capability in particular. Kelman says we are now looking at a step change in marketing automation beyond content, where the agentic labour force will generate campaign briefs, launch campaigns off those briefs, and self-optimise the creative messaging and channels to deliver on the brief it crafted in the first place.

Outside of agentics, Kelman says Salesforce’s new multi-touch attribution model is powering, telling the firm which marketing investments are driving sales and how cost-efficient they are. But not for brand – Kelman thinks it’s pointless trying to attach a dollar value to brand investments in B2B. “It’s just so disconnected from the purchase.” Those attempting to do so, he suggests, are “operating at a false level of precision.”

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