The stampede by companies into CX, with massive associated investments into martech, specialists teams and organisational overhauls, is having little impact on customer experience scores – and big banks, telcos, and car brands are at best benchmarked as average, despite investing billions collectively. CSBA Managing Director, Paul van Veenendaal, has seven years of CX performance data from 12,000 annual assessments across 200 Australian firms and it’s a sobering read for those firms heralding their commitment to connecting up and improving the experience across all customer contact points. In ..read more

Uber’s ads business is starting to scale and its New York-based boss Michael Akkerman says Australia – one of its best performing markets, with a rapidly growing sales operation – will see the next wave of new formats first. He’s touting retail media meets “mobility media” and a collapsed funnel “brand-formance” model – brand and performance marketing in a single execution. A younger, richer set exposed to an Uber Ride brand ad is driving hard sales via Uber Eats with delivery and verified "closed loop” attribution.  Akkerman was in Sydney last week wooing “hundreds” of agency execs ..read more

The wave of TV disruption from streamers has accelerated as they pile into ads amid flatlining subscriber growth. That means faster fragmentation of audiences and ad dollars as global platforms attack TV’s heartlands, focusing on crime and documentaries for older viewers and investing more in realty and non-scripted shows. Streamers bidding for sports rights pose sufficient threat for Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery to set aside rivalries and launch a joint platform. Ampere Analysis veteran analyst Guy Bisson thinks similar collaboration from broadcasters locally may be r ..read more

Future of TV Advertising international keynote Jon Evans is Chief Customer Officer at marketing effectiveness data firm System1 – and one of the world’s top marketing podcasters. He's on a mission to help marketers hold the line and sell-in emotional, creative campaign investment to rational, hard-nosed exec teams by better predicting its P&L impacts. While the media industry obsesses on the medium – optimising channel mix, ROI, CPMs, the value equation of the channel – fully half of the business outcome depends on the creative, i.e. the message, per System1’s analysis of 100,000 ..read more

At one point “the performance marketing [team’s] main KPI was actually how much investment they could deploy,” says Uber APAC marketing boss Andy Morley. “The mandate was spend, spend, spend … It was getting crazy.” But then they realised it wasn’t actually working. Then they flipped hard to brand – well above Binet & Field’s 60:40 heuristic – and powered to delivery market leader. Today Morley says both Uber’s rideshare and food business has seen no slowdown despite squeezed wallets. Now it’s driving into grocery and beyond with another brand-powered push: “Pianos delivered in one hour” i ..read more

Some media companies are feeling the heat on what they describe as a tightening advertising market, particularly linear TV. But there's a very different story coming out of investor briefings in recent weeks at some of the world's biggest brands. Many are increasing their advertising and promotion and much bigger overall marketing budgets. Some of these listed CFOs and CEOs apparently agree with marketing’s brand building champions – at least at face value. L'Oreal's overall advertising and promotion budgets, for example, pumped 11 per cent in 2023. Unilever, Diageo, Kellogg’s, Gucci ..read more

50 Australian CMOs have just been briefed on a “massive opportunity” for marketers to increase influence and impact with executive leadership colleagues via ‘humanised growth'. How? By offering their strategy and insights nous to help build out divisional and all-of-company stakeholder-employee management blueprints and programs. But it’s crucial to avoid making those cross-departmental overtures appear a land-grab, says former Unilever marketer turned Institute for Real Growth (IRG) co-founder Marc de Swaan Arons. In town with the IRG’s latest study across 475 CEOs, CFOs, CCOs, CMOs and HR ch ..read more

The ANA’s latest transparency report looks ugly for agencies, the ad tech supply chain, marketers and their procurement departments. Probably why its findings – just 36 cents on the programmatic dollar stand a chance of being seen by audiences – have been met with deafening silence. None of the big agency holdcos have piped up, while Google, Yahoo, The Trade Desk, Pubmatic and other major adtech players didn’t allow the ANA into their systems. Not even P&G played ball. Nick Manning, who co-authored the ANA’s scoping brief, says even 36 cents on the programmatic dollar is optimistic – becau ..read more

Data from big platforms such as Salesforce, Afterpay, Stocard, Shopify and Adobe suggest the recent Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales period has resulted in robust sales (although headline figures also reflect strong inflation). We pulled data from across some of the biggest global e-commerce ecosystems to identify several key retail and consumer behavioural trends ..read more

TV's race to transform amid aggressive incursion from all quarters made up most of Mi3's top read media stories in 2023. As did the main network's countermeasures. Tensions around measurement and currency came to a head – a story that will play out next year. But the big bang threatened by global streamers' push into advertising turned out to be a damp squib, though next year may be different. Retail media's rise continued, with the likes of Nine and News positioning to get in on the action, as did BVOD's frequency capping problem, though some suggest it's within agencies' power to fix it.&nbs ..read more