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

Agentic commerce is about to redraw the shopping journey. AI is moving beyond search and recommendation to evaluate products, weigh trade-offs and increasingly make decisions on the customer’s behalf.

For brands, a chatbot and a few tweaks for AI search will not cut it. Winning will require trusted data, credible evidence and enough brand strength to ensure the machines do not reduce everything to price.

In the latest edition of the Mi3 Market Voice podcast, Accenture Song Senior Managing Director and Global Commerce Practice Lead, Rajat Agarwal, joins Mi3 technology editor Andrew Birmingham to explain why AI agents could transform consumer behaviour faster than the original shift to e-commerce.

Digital commerce solved the problem of access, then replaced it with the problem of abundance. Consumers can find almost anything, but they are often left wading through endless options, dubious claims and reviews they do not entirely trust before abandoning the purchase anyway.

Agarwal says agents could break that cycle by understanding what the customer is actually trying to achieve, testing the available evidence and cutting the field down to a smaller set of credible choices.

The most immediate change will be a move from search-and-browse journeys towards intent-based commerce. Fully autonomous transactions remain at an early stage, but Agarwal expects customers to give agents greater authority as their confidence increases.

That development creates a sharper divide between brands with genuine emotional connections and those that rely primarily on broad positioning. Consumers may continue to ask agents for favoured brands, but weaker brands will increasingly be assessed through price, promotion, availability, features and supporting evidence.

“Mediocrity will evaporate,” says Agarwal who argues that brands without a strong connection to customers risk becoming commodities selected by agents according to functional attributes. “However, brands which still have the right emotional connection with the customer will continue to thrive and to do well.”

This episode also explains why agentic commerce cannot be left to a specific functional or local team or treated as another optimisation programme. Agents may draw on product pages, ratings, reviews, community discussion, video, pricing, inventory and other internal and external sources. Brands need consistent, structured and credible information across that entire environment.

Agarwal advises companies to begin with the customer journeys they want to win. They should then identify the evidence an agent will need, create the supporting knowledge graph, improve product-information and digital-asset systems, distribute the information consistently and measure whether the strategy is working.

Starting with a generic AI-visibility score can produce the wrong result. Agarwal cites a fashion business that appeared to perform strongly in agent discovery but was being associated with discounts and value rather than fashion, inspiration and style.

Choice of agents, agents of choice

The episode develops an important distinction between becoming a choice of agents and becoming an agent of choice.

Every consumer-facing business will need to become a choice of agents by ensuring its products can be found, understood and purchased through external AI systems. Agarwal calls this a no-regret move. “You have to make your product discoverable and transactable by these horizontal agents.”

A smaller group of companies will aim higher. Rather than simply making their products visible to other people’s agents, they will try to build the agent customers choose first. Done well, those vertical agents could combine deep category expertise and human judgment with the speed and convenience of digital commerce.

The prize is establishing and preserving intimate customer relationships.The risk is that the agent carries the brand with it. If it hallucinates, makes a poor recommendation or loses the customer’s trust, the damage will not stop with the technology.

Agarwal’s advice is to start now, without pretending the data, models or architecture are finished. Agentic commerce needs to be built as an enterprise capability spanning marketing, commerce, communications, supply chain, technology, governance and the operating model.

The business case runs well beyond cost cutting. Agentic commerce could lift conversion, rescue sales lost to choice overload, reduce acquisition costs and give brands more room to move without adding spending at the same rate.

Agarwal tells Mi3 that the early results are promising. The catch is that the market is still too young, and the evidence too uneven, to produce reliable benchmarks that every company can plug into a business case.

His 12-month prescription is straightforward. First, understand how the brand is being read across the AI decision ecosystem. Then fix the data and technology foundations. In parallel, companies should decide whether their own websites, apps and commerce platforms need to become agentic experiences.

The winners will be the companies that treat agentic commerce as a fundamental change to how they operate. The rest risk accumulating pilots, presentations and proofs of concept that look impressive in the boardroom but amount to little more than AI theatre.

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Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing

Brand rejuvenation: How do you honour the legacy while seeking a new narrative that grabs attention, compounds consumer and customer affinity, and delivers new commercial momentum? In this episode, two of our 2026 top 10 CMOs from the CMO Awards – Bank of Queensland marketing chief and #1 CMO of the year, Adrian McCaffrey, and Uber head of marketing and #6 CMO of the year, Nicole Bardsley – unpack what they’ve been doing to deliver marketing effectiveness with their fresh, reinvigorating approaches to brand.

In the last 18 months, McCaffrey has been spearheading BOQ’s key strategic growth program, ‘The Bank of Queenslanders’. The multi-pronged repositioning takes into account brand, media and customer channels to new product development, tech and app innovation, and internal cultural and operational change.

BOQ was carrying the “hallmarks of being a leader”, including the brand codes and cultural affection that could take it there. Yet it lacked the energy and united momentum to make it one, says McCaffrey. Having been outspent by the majors by 25:1 in a $400m+ media spend category, BOQ marketers also found themselves almost entirely skewed to performance-heavy campaigns and spread too thin. Three pillars reset the gameplan: Reinvigorate the brand’s core promise as a bank for Queenslanders, build a new customer-first multi-channel platform model, and win in retail and business banking. Cue a return to significant sporting partnerships, a more targeted media approach, and even an ‘ultimate Queenslander’ program and quiz on TikTok.

“The genius of the ‘Bank of Queenslanders’ is that it’s so simple,” says McCaffrey. “It felt like we’d fallen into a trap of having to explain who we were and what our brand meant a little too much, versus leveraging what it says on the tin, or what people know us for.”

The result in six months were hefty: Number one share of voice in Queensland, double-digit percentage growth in home loan SME applications the team “had to check a few times to make sure they were correct”, per McCaffrey, and positive uplift in key brand metrics. Importantly, it’s an example of how marketing can drive true balance sheet contribution, he says.

At Uber, a mature Australian market and category leadership meant a diminishing growth trajectory for the rides business if it continued relying on its product-led marketing approach. It was a strange contradiction to the Uber Eats business, where brand-led growth dominated, Bardsley says.

Having identified private car trips as the next big competitor to square up to, behaviour change was evidently going to be needed if rides was to find net new growth. Cue Shania Twain, Aussie comedian Tom Cardy, and the brand platform. ‘Can’t do that if you’re driving’.

“Brand marketing is most effective at doing behaviour change. Hence why we needed to shift away from saying there’s not a product that’s going to change that. It needs to be a brand-led strategy,” Bardsley says.

Halfway through the rollout, budgets were cut – a challenge Bardsley agrees many marketers can relate to. “It forced us to be much more disciplined in our approach,” she says.

“We made the deliberate decision to concentrate investment and to prioritise learning … we created a robust market-level experiment, which mean we had clear treatment markets and clear control markets. It meant major cities of Australia didn’t receive the campaign, which is often a tough decision when you’ve got the business wanting to drive short-term impact as well. But we needed to ensure we could build out statistically robust evidence to be able to support the business case that marketing can drive both long-term brand impact as well as short-term incremental demand.”

It worked: The marketing team proved out incremental demand in markets the campaign was live in. “Most importantly, those numbers have been critical to help us prove out the business case and we’re currently planning for the second run of the campaign,” says Bardsley.  

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Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing

This year’s CMO Awards again set out to recognise marketing teams driving strategic growth for their organisations with our Best Growth Initiative of the Year Award, presented by Publicis Groupe.

Our 2026 winner? A driving test from the Suncorp team that set out to change behaviour and instill safer driving practices across Australian consumers, thereby combatting a 42 per cent rise in motor claim costs and 22 per cent lift in national fatalities. The AAMI Driving test not only achieved this ambition – so far, it’s reduced annual insurance claims by $4.2 million, 9 per cent above target – it also lifted brand consideration and engagement for the iconic red brand across customers and non-customers alike. And while it wasn’t the objective, it’s now expected to bring in $1.9m in premium revenue generated.

“Too often, growth is approached as a marketing or sales problem, focused on immediate volume, reach or conversion. The AAMI Driving Test reinforced that real growth really came from solving a meaningful business problem,” says AAMI head of brand and content, Rapthi Thanapalasingam. “By focusing on prevention first, we unlocked growth outcomes as a byproduct, including stronger engagement, brand consideration, and that premium revenue.

“Campaigns end, but capabilities compound. The biggest value came from us building an asset using our telematics and data capability that can continue creating value long after the campaign is over.”

In a similar vein, this year’s Highly Commended growth initiative, Wesfarmers Health’s ‘Anything Menopause’ program, developed in response to a clear and urgent consumer, commercial and societal gap. Over 3 million Australian women experience menopause, with 85 per cent reporting symptoms. Despite this prevalence, stigma and confusion persist. Market analysis identified a $667 million menopause category, with at least one-third of that effectively unserved.

Priceline’s response has been an end-to-end menopause care platform. Grounded in education and empowerment, the key was firstly knowledge uplift across pharmacists, says GM of marketing, Corrina Brazel. Across 3500 frontline staff, Wesfarmers has already seen a 35 per cent jump in confidence in staff discussing menopause with customers as a result. The commercial gains also ensued, including a 63 per cent increase in dispensary sales, 6 per cent increase in penetration with the core target demographic of women between 45 to 65 years of age, and 13-point increase with standard Priceline shoppers.

“Given the topic at hand around menopause, if we’d just been chasing purely a transactional play, that could have gone very badly for us from a brand and reputation point of view. Because the real opportunity would have been completely missed,” comments Brazel. 

For Brazel, it’s also creating new confidence inside the marketing team. “What ‘Anything Menopause’ has done for the marketing team is built a real level of capability and awareness and strength of conviction that I don't know they previously necessarily thought they had,” she says. “It's built a bit of a muscle we're now going to continue to use as we see what other platforms we may be able to get out there to drive more growth.”

For Growth Initiative judge and former V2 Foods chief growth officer, Andrew May, the two examples stand out because they don’t talk to standard campaign metrics and come from a position of behaviour change.

“It was really about where do they show broader business alignment, better capability, stronger customer experience, margins or reduced costs,” he says. “The growth isn't just coming from marketing alone. Marketing is, and always has been, a growth engine for strong businesses. Seeing where we can impact other areas is critical.”

Tune into this latest CMO Awards podcast as we unpack the nature of unlocking and pursuing these AAMI and Wesfarmers Health growth opportunities, and importantly, how it’s paying off.

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Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing

In a fragmented media landscape, reach isn’t the only factor broadcast channels need to deliver brands. They also need to grab attention – a vital quantity in building the mental availability and positive, differentiated associations brands require to stand out and be considered. Marketers know it and they’re crying out for ways to achieve it: Per a recent study undertaken by QMS, reach, ROI and attention are the top three investment priorities for Aussie marketers looking to connect what they’re doing through to the commercial line.

With the QMS Winter Games Network, digital-out-of-home’s ability to deliver this trifecta skated into premium position as it served up a public, shared, high-attention broadcast layer that connected brands to cultural and contextually relevant sporting moments in real time.

Built on the success of QMS’s Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games network, the Milano Cortina Winter Games approach delivered a custom built, 100% digital out-of-home network that paired brand advertising with dynamic content. In all, over 9,400 pieces of dynamic content were broadcast during the four-week tournament across 1,108 panels nationally, reaching over 10 million Australians and delivering 278 million total impressions. Think breaking news, medal moments from bob sledding to ski jumping and highlight reels, interspersed with brand messaging, all delivered in real-time.

But importantly, extensive new research undertaken by Kantar and Neuro-Insight showed these highly contextual and attention-grabbing plays also resulted in meaningful brand equity gains not only for Games affiliated sponsors, but non-sponsors alike.

“We saw a significant increase in things like consideration, brand affinity, brand preference, as well as those deeper, broader brand perceptions,” said Kantar Australia head of media effectiveness, Sharon Hilton. “Those are more important because they're obviously much closer to driving future choice rather than awareness alone. They tell us people are noticing the brands, and that they're becoming more positively predisposed towards them as well.”

That juxtaposition of powerful, emotive games content and brand advertising provided weighty uplift: 84% of brands strengthened positive associations, from community minded to value and customer focused. Gains were also category neutral: From Allianz to Samsung, advertisers all scored a halo effect from being associated with dynamic content, driving deeper connections in market.

Per Kantar, participation in the Winter Games network benchmarked even higher than out-of-home category norms: Advertisers saw 1.2 times stronger consideration to choose their brand, and came out 1.3 times stronger on driving deeper brand perceptions.

And significantly, there was a +19% lift in long-term memory encoding compared to global benchmarks. That’s critical to influencing behaviour, Neuro-Insight global principal consultant, Peter Pynta, said.

“Without memory encoding, you have no mental availability,” he said. “When you talk about marketing communications, there's a very, very high correlation between memory encoding of your brand, of your communications, and successive predictors of consumer behaviour, or behaviour in in general.

“I can't think of a more important metric … to measure the effectiveness of some things that are pretty nuanced."

Winter Games network advertiser results matched the delta brands saw during QMS’s first Summer Olympics DOOH network play, despite the differing sports program and Australia’s smaller chance of tallying up medals. It’s proof for Pynta that brands associated with such an emotive cultural moment and dynamic content win big on affinity.

And it pays commercially. As Patties Foods’ CMO, Anand Surujpal, put it in a previous Mi3 podcast on why he took a punt on the Summer Olympics proposition with QMS, such a rare opportunity to be “connected to the mood of the nation” paid dividends: A 30 per cent jump in Four’NTwenty pie sales.

For QMS chief strategy officer, Christian Zavecz, this third major study into the power of combining high-attention, dynamic content with a 100% digital OOH network shows how it’s rewriting the rule book on media partnerships.

“What we're finding is it’s not so much about what that cultural moment is; it is the media and attaching that cultural moment to that brand opportunity that’s working in out-of-home,” he said.
Traditionally, out-of-home, particularly in a roadside environment, is not a content medium – so newness has some sway, Zavecz agreed. It’s equally evident out-of-home works very differently to other content mediums.

“It's a non-intrusive medium, and I think those elements, combined with the halo effect of some of these events. are contributing to what's proving to be a really exciting and advantageous opportunity for clients.”

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Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large

57 per cent of all web traffic is automated and climbing as AI upends search, discovery and commerce. Marketers are watching page views tank – down 20-30 per cent in Australia this year – and scrambling for answers to a fundamental question: When a machine, not a person, discovers, compares, and recommends your brand, what exactly are you optimising for as currency moves from click to LLM citations?

The new reality is that a consumer can meet a brand, weigh it up, and walk away with a recommendation without ever touching the brand’s website, its own media, or any single thing that marketing controls.

Marketers, says Marie Joyce, GM of News Australia’s Suddenly, are concerned. 

“There absolutely is a sense of panic. Their page views are through the floor. There’s a lot of pressure from internal stakeholders; they're also starting to see some impact on the bottom line as well.” Most, she says are, “unsure where to start”.

News Australia’s Head of Search and Emerging Platforms, Mike Cook does know where to start: “With an audit of how you’re showing up – and how your competitors are showing up.”

After that, Marie has a five-point plan – and it’s working for the likes of Chemist Warehouse, which notched “a 219 per cent increase in Google AI overviews, and a 283 per cent spike in AI brand mentions” for its House of Wellness media network.

In short? Give both humans and bots what they want in a single hit:

1. Implement the 50-word rule. “Give the answer in the very first paragraph of your content. Don't make humans or bots dig for it.”
2. Prioritise facts over fluff. “Swap out generic marketing speak for real data, hard numbers, and verified expert quotes.”
3. “Build a knowledge web and create one main authoritative page that links out to smaller, hyper-detailed sub articles. This layout proves to AI that you understand a whole topic, not just a key single word.”
4. Structure for machines: “Use listicles, FAQs, and tables. AI loves these formats because they are easy to ingest and serve up the answers quickly.”
5. Prove it with links: “Link out to trusted official government or industry websites and experts. This builds out immediate trust and data viability for both humans and bots.”

Simultaneously, per Marie, “stop chasing the volume game”, because ironically, the LLMs are now filtering out “AI slop” and upweighting quality, trusted content. “The rules of great content still apply”.

Those rules must be applied across all channels – including the ones marketing has little or no control over. Which means de-siloing across marketing, comms, corporate affairs, media and customer experience.

The good news for CMOs? Fundamentals remain paramount.

“What we're seeing now is the more interconnected these platforms can be the more beneficial it will be for brands. This is … going back to the old way of thinking on consistency of brand … across channels,” says Marie. “Those things that we know embed memory structure for humans also now meet the needs of bots.”

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

A year after Mi3 Australia began its agentic AI research deep dive – dubbed Inside the Tornado – that first wave of febrile experimentation has given way to what feels like the beginning of a Cambrian explosion as businesses embed AI agents into core operations, and realise measurable gains in areas ranging from pricing optimisation to creative production. But as adoption accelerates, executives say attention is shifting from the promise of autonomous systems to the practical realities of governing them, understanding and controlling costs and ensuring they do not drift off course – because they will absolutely drift of course.

Speaking with Inside the Tornado author, and Mi3 Tech editor Andrew Birmingham, T2 Tea marketing director Peter Randeria and Omnicom Oceania chief product officer Alex Pacey argue that the organisations moving fastest are not those taking the greatest risks, but those building the strongest governance foundations. Their message is clear: agentic AI can create significant commercial value, but success depends on the discipline to supervise it, redesign workflows around it and manage its rapidly growing economic footprint, as much as it requires corralling a still immature and rapidly evolving technology that even its developers sometime still struggle to understand.

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Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large

Not all retailers are victims of scale.

North America is pouring billions of dollars into retail media, largely sponsored search and digital screens, making giants like Amazon, Kroger and Walmart richer and other retailers chasing scraps.

But luxury department store chain Holt Renfrew has carved out a higher-end niche in Canada, and its physical-plus-digital approach is pulling in new advertisers like Mercedes, as well as taking a larger share of endemic advertiser budgets as they bid to build brand and drive performance in a single hit.

Demand for both physical and digital inventory is running hot, helped partly by Holt Renfrew’s retail media operation three years ago moving to its own P&L under trade marketing boss, Ashlee Nickel – whose 16 years at the firm also span merchandise, buying and vendor marketing.

It means she speaks the merchandise team’s language as well as that of brands selling through the store.

That’s critical to avoid “conflict”, says Sonder’s Jonathan Hopkins.

“Media has been used as merch’s sweetie jar for decades, and that entrenched behaviour doesn't change overnight.” He argues retailers will increasingly struggle with their retail media ambitions unless they “create a cross-functional team with people from merch, marketing, finance, media,” all pulling in the same direction. Even then, he says, “give and take” is a pre-requisite. “Pick your battles would be my recommendation.”

Since the shift from top line co-op to standalone, Holt Renfrew’s profitable media revenue has changed how every program is priced, packaged, and pitched to vendors. In all, it’s packing 245 distinct media formats, all evaluated by Sonder.

It will soon have another – but given Holt Renfrew’s store environment makes even Apple’s look cluttered, a design challenge looms as the retailer mulls how to roll out a screen network that doesn’t damage that aesthetic.

Sonder’s Angus Frazer isn’t worried – subtlety is key, he says. “Retail media is not an excuse to ignore CX. Done well, it's an opportunity to improve CX and deliver on broader business objectives.” I.e. “highly profitable commercialisation”.

Trade marketing boss Nickel is now hunting more of them – in places where few retailers have thought to monetise. She’s already added in-store beauty carts and cafe menu takeovers to the inventory stack, and has brands queuing up for its in-store Montreal F1 Grand Prix weekend experience – and Holt Renfrew doesn’t even have an official partnership.

“One of the biggest opportunities in the space right now is looking beyond the obvious,” says Nickel. “When you start thinking differently about the retail environment, there are often opportunities that don't fit within a traditional media place.”

Outside of physical environments – and despite huge digital retail media spend, many are overlooking powerful channels – particularly email, say Sonder’s Frazer and Hopkins, leaving easy money on the table.

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Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large

For the shopping public, Coles’ ‘Down Down’ has stuck like super glue for more than a decade – while loathed by adland’s elite. They’ll be mostly thrilled on what Horton – Down Down’s creator – figures is likely now in a rare and wide-ranging interview and podcast. Think rest and hibernation, not a Down Down burial.  

Horton ran four winning election campaigns for former Prime Minister John Howard and is characteristically frank on the effect the Down Down campaign had on him and his Big Red agency – it spawned a new shop BRX with co-founders Bridget Cleary and Marty Hungerford - to snap the straightjacket it created for him and Big Red. BRX is now being circled by potential suitors. 

Horton is the last old adman standing – at 74 he’s seen-off John Singleton and Mojo’s Mo and Jo. And while very uncool today, he remains adamant good jingles etch into consumer memory encoding faster than fancy, award- winning creative. It’s why he still warns on the warping dangers of advertising awards in the lead-up to the international Cannes gongfest in two weeks, proffering an ego-busting encounter with his then boss, Mojo’s Alan “Mo” Morris on why. "While you and all your mates are sitting around in a circle telling each other how good you are, your mum and dad are sitting at home singing my ads,” Horton’s recounts with a dense injection of Mo expletives. He’s never been the same since.

But Horton casts wider than jingles and Down Down, to the “pseudo science” of attention metrics, “insecure” creatives and a pause-for-thought observation that the uncool craft of catalogue copywriting in the 80s and 90s has striking parallels to what works in social media today. It’s those craft skills, which BRX has captured, templated and automated, that is now partly why global holding companies and others are said to be circling.

Here’s the thoughts - and confessions - of adland’s oldest creative.

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Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing

They all work for cheeky challenger brands in their respective categories, they’re not afraid of doing unconventional things – and now they’ve all been recognised as top 20 CMOs of the Year for committing to innovative and distinctly different approaches to realising growth ambitions at hand.

In this latest CMO Awards podcast episode, we’re looking at how marketers ‘break the mould’ by exploring three of our most compelling CMO submissions this year: amaysim’s Pete MacGregor (#7), Mountain Culture Beer Co’s Brad Firth (11th and SMB CMO of the Year), and Australian Pork’s Rob Farmer (#13).

Each of these marketing chiefs shares how they’ve respectively been tackling ‘big M marketing’. For Farmer, it’s about bold brand decisions to get pork on the fork. To realise this, he’s leveraging the triumvirate of creative, commercial and science to challenge rusted-on cooking habits while also tackling confronting – and commonly misunderstood – perceptions of the industry head-on.

For Firth, listening to research enough – but not too much – has led to unusually creative product innovations such as a fruit hazy, defiantly full-strength beer inspired by hallucinogenic insights and the consumer’s desire for enhanced experiences. The bold bet has paid off: Juice Trip represented 20 per cent of volume sales in its first year thanks to its talkability and differentiated approach.

Over at amaysim, meanwhile, MacGregor is going all-in on AI creative to gain velocity, speed and differentiation in market, while pursuing simplicity and responsiveness inside the challenger telco brand. He’s also resetting the dialogue around what it means to be ‘courageous customer champions’, getting into the weeds of customer insight and strategy, then owning the fixes in a way that’s building connection and cultural buy-in. 

For all three, ‘courageous marketing’ comes down to a belief in – and then being accountable to – the bold strategies they’ve set out to deliver.

“There’s so much noise, there are so many inputs, there are so many opinions everywhere you turn. I find it really easy to start to second guess, see things watered down, and even just get distracted,” comments Firth. “So for me, a really courageous marketer is just one who sticks to the strategy, rides it, and then obviously learns from it.”

Likewise, Farmer believes in “playing your own game”. “Having the confidence to stay focused on doing not what you would love to be doing because it's not in strategy. I think that that is the most courageous thing to do – hold the line, then hold it over the long term.”

Equally, MacGregor backs conviction over consensus. “You’ve got to really back yourself, whatever role you have, as you’re in that role because someone believed in you and trusted you,” he says. “Know what your internal superpower is. If you really believe in someone, whether it be a strategy, idea of whatever it is, you have to really back yourself.”

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Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing

The Iconic CMO, Joanna Robinson, describes commercial marketers as “customer obsessed, commercially disciplined, always data-informed and strategically curious”. Former Naked Wines CEO and Unilever marketing leader, Paul Connell, says it’s about being highly accountable, “and also being someone who’s in for the business outside of their lane”. And TPG CMO, Bec Darley adds another all-important word to the list: Profit.

“This is we know how much of the net cash that’s falling to the bottom line. Is it a term you’d expect a commercial marketer to have? Absolutely. Is it one we see a lot of? No … If marketing is truly to be seriously among our c-suite and board, understanding profit has to be part of the language of the commercial marketer,” Darley argues.

There’s absolutely no doubt marketing leaders are being asked to be more accountable for commercial outcomes. Yet they continue to carry a ball and chain around their ankles: Marketing as discretionary spend on the P&L, and the first thing to be cut when times are tight. So how do you successfully reframe marketing as revenue, not cost, and ensure you’re fiscally responsible while pursuing the growth game?

These three marketing luminaries joined us on the mics for an exploration of the strategies – formal and informal – they’ve pursued to embed an expansive mentality around marketing that beats those tired perceptions of marketing and brand investment as a lag on the balance sheet. From getting to the heart of unit economics, and truly understanding what creates value inside a business, to balancing the logic of brand – increasingly possible through tools like MMM and tech – with the magic and behavioural psychology informing why marketers do what they do, through to inviting CFOs and CEO into the pitch to see the power of creativity, these three provide a wealth of insight into how marketers win over stakeholders.

We also explore key tenets of meeting the leadership team and board on their terms, from the language required to connect, to problem solving, plus tactics for structuring teams and capability to make the most of cross-functional ways of working.

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