The marketing funnel doesn’t exist, suggests RAA CMO, Michael Healy. He thinks “too many marketers get too ideological about how you have to do brand and then awareness and then conversion”. He has an interesting anecdote about a $329 knife, his wife, and Meta, to support the theory.

Healy says “the vast majority of marketers that I talk to – from startup to enterprise – don't actually have a marketing strategy.” They just have “a plan and a budget”. He recommends reading Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy – and stop treating brand and performance separately.

“It's all performance and it's all brand,” per Healy. “Everything is double duty.”

Equally, he urges marketers to focus on the metrics that matter: “What is driving business performance?”

Tammy Barton, CEO and founder of MyBudget is the brand, literally. Along with its customers, Barton features in its ads. The one time she changed tack, at the suggestion of “one of Australia’s largest agencies”, it backfired. Results tanked and she had to pull the expensive series of TVCs. She put the old ads back on TV “and leads immediately that week went up 15 per cent”. She shot low cost new versions – still using real customers – “and leads went up another 40 per cent”, says Barton. “So you just do whatever works.”

MyBudget’s marketing team looks at “hundreds of metrics”, she says. “But the ones that are really important to us are, what is it costing us per lead? What is it costing us per contract? What is it costing us per acquisition, including our sales expense? And we have to look at our lifetime value … versus what are we investing for that cost of acquisition, and what is that ratio? We track that every month.”

Atomic 212° co-founder and Chief Digital Officer, James Dixon, thinks media agencies “have been guilty of metric vomit over the years”, spewing data and numbers at clients.

Dixon suggests only one “mother metric” is required: MROI – which can stand for marketing return on investment, or, in the media agency context, media return on investment.

To underline how media is delivering returns, Atomic 212° has been “doubling down on MMM” with clients, but focusing on media, rather than broader variables within market mix models.

RAA’s Healy thinks Dixon “is onto something”, though, “I just don't think it's applicable in all circumstances”.

Either way, he backs MyBudget’s Barton: “Just test everything. Whatever works, do that. And if it doesn’t work, get out of it, fast.”

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Lawmakers around the world are setting their sights on ‘dark patterns’, the way consumer choice is manipulated wholesale by companies for profit – either directly by upselling and herding them into higher yielding decisions, or locking them into services, or “data grabs” that can be monetised indirectly. Australia is next off the rank, and businesses should take action now, starting with UX design, according to Chandni Gupta, Deputy CEO of influential think tank the Consumer Policy Research Centre, who’s work underpins key planks of the ACCC’s regulatory overhauls and which holds sway in Canberra.

Dark patterns are “entrenched” across the digital economy – with companies “reverse engineering” the “nudge” principles of Daniel Kahneman’s behavioural economics to serve profit rather than help people make better choices, says Gupta. Already, the likes of LinkedIn, Amazon, TikTok, Meta and Epic Games have run afoul of regulators, while ticketing platform StubHub has conducted experiments that show the double-digit profit impact of manipulating consumer choice via hidden costs. 

Gupta, back from a global tour or regulators, lawmakers and enforcement bodies, and armed with a fresh report on her findings, says the practice is so widespread across the digital economy that most young adults have probably never lived in a world where they are not being manipulated. AI risks “supercharging” the practice – and making dark patterns darker still.

But Gupta warns businesses to prepare for regulation, enforcement and redress, with the Australian government committed to a ban on unfair business practices – and a strong overlap between dark patterns and the Privacy overhaul now gearing up for its second act.  

She sees profit upside for those that overhaul UX design now “to put the person and their wellbeing at the centre” rather than “waiting to be caught”.

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Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher

Short CMO tenure, job complexity, unrealistic expectations of delivery – commonly driven by short-term ultimatums – plus a disconnect on the metrics that matter, are all contributing to a dangerously common misalignment between CMOs and their CEOs and CFO. And it’s a recipe for trouble for marketing leaders wanting to enact strategic growth.

That’s the view of four luminaries participating in the latest CMO Awards Podcast episode. All know a thing or two not only about providing marketing’s value as CMOs, but also now sit on the other side of the c-suite: ADMA CEO and former FMCG CMO, Andrea Marten; Lounge Lovers CEO and former Aldi and Westpac marketing chief, Samuel Viney; Adobe director of digital strategy group APAC and former Tourism Australia CFO, John Mackenney; and Seek commercial growth APAC leader and former consumer marketing lead for ANZ and customer chief at Mercer, Cambell Holt. 

There is an ongoing refrain marketing leaders need to do more to build and demonstrate commercial acumen and their value to the c-suite. And we have a fresh report making the point again: In the latest Gartner survey, only 27% of CEOs and CFOs reported their CMO’s performance exceeded expectations over the past year.

Confidence in a CMO's ability to prove the value of marketing to the enterprise is held by just half (54%) of senior executives. Gartner’s survey also found only 34% of CEOs and CFOs agree with CMOs on the role of marketing in supporting growth. And only one in five CEOs and CFOs report receiving significant clarity from their CMO regarding marketing accountabilities.

They’re sobering figures, and they’re not in isolation. Viney paints an all-too-common “chicken-and-egg” scenario: New CMO comes into an organisation and is confronted with demands to improve marketing’s performance “after the last person didn’t achieve what we expected”.

“When asked if you’re going to be able to do it, the CMO will say of course I am, that’s why I’m here,” Viney comments. “What you get then is two challenges: Number one is you're perhaps being unrealistic with the expectations you're setting … secondly, just understanding the metrics that matter in the context of a new organisation, particularly if you're changing sectors, takes time.”

As a former CFO, Mackenney agrees there’s a further translation issue between the language of finance and marketing which he’s constantly coming up against in his current role at Adobe – in fact, he often finds himself being the “CFO whisperer” for marketers. But he doesn’t put all the blame on CMOs.

“I think it's incumbent on a lot of CFOs to better understand, actually, what are the levers that the CMO has, really, what are the some of the cost drivers and the benefits drivers there, so we can have a better understanding between two really critical roles in the organisation,” he says.

Yet Martens points out we're still seeing many CMOs reporting on outputs like campaign performance instead of strategic business outcomes and things like customer growth, retention, margin, contribution, pricing, power and overall business improvement and business performance. “They're the metrics that, at the end of the day, the CEOs and the CFOs are looking for, and they're the metrics that actually influence the total enterprise value. They're the conversations that are not being had,” she says.

Holt agrees CMOs need to do a better job of business-grade insight to align their own ability to deliver value. “Early on, I discovered the best way to align yourself and to create mutual understanding is to take on the task of learning someone else's language, then also take on the task of translation within the marketing function. Don't make it the CFOs challenge to learn your language, learn their language and speak it, and train as many people in your function as a marketing leader to speak the other person's language as well.”

This CMO Awards podcast series is hosted by Nadia Cameron, associate publisher and editor of marketing at Mi3, plus program leader for the CMO Awards.

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Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher

At its core, the job of the CMO is to deliver business growth. And if Mi3’s story on marketing jobs recently and what company CEOs want in their marketing hires in 2025 is anything to go by, there is a recalibration back to topline growth rather than just pure cost cutting and efficiency, coming our way – good news for marketers, it seems.

Yet companies are increasingly favouring alternative job titles, such as chief growth officer and chief customer officer, or creating new functional structures and ways of working to set the north star and signal the need for disruptive, transformational growth. At the same time, diversity of marketing remits makes it difficult to understand what levers marketing chiefs will actually control in their pursuit of growth for a business.

In episode three of the CMO Awards podcast, powered by Mi3, three marketing and business luminaries with the mantle of delivering net new approaches to growth, share how they define and pursue that ambition: Lion co-MD and former chief growth officer and CMO, Anubha Sahasrabuddhe; SiteMinder chief growth officer, Trent Innes; and recently installed McCain growth marketing director and former Chobani GM of growth, Olivia Dickinson.

All agree putting ‘growth’ front and centre in job titles sends an unambiguous message as to a company’s intent to pursue new growth opportunities, the whole-of-organisation approach required to get there, and the disruptive nature of what is required. It’s also given each executive the power to make the hard decisions necessary to deliver sustainable growth. In Lion’s case, generational shifts around beer consumption provided a burning platform for change, while in organisations such as Chobani, pursuing agility in product innovation pipelines, again with the aim of following consumer trends, created the path to new growth – even amid fears of cannibalising existing SKUs.

For Innes at Australian hotel management software-as-a-service company, SiteMinder, growth is encapsulated in the phrase ‘win, love and grow’. “It's not just a simple case of winning them. You actually need to love them. And if you actually do that, you have the opportunity to grow with them.”

It’s this thinking that has Innes suggesting marketers too commonly fall into the trap of generating short-term demand instead of thinking about customer lifetime value. “I think marketing has fallen a bit too much into the ‘we're here to create demand’ position… Growth is not demand, it's not sales. It is a team sport, so it has to be across the entire end in business.”

Which is why Innes advises marketers to think like a CEO and to “try to get outside of your lane and think about the broader business … How does the broader business look at marketing, and what role do you play in growth?” he asks. “For marketing leaders moving forward to remain relevant, they're going to have to start thinking like that.”

Dickinson describes growth in three words: “Bold, strategic choices … we're talking bold bets, sharp focus, but really importantly, knowing when to walk away if it doesn't serve the bigger picture,” she says.

Ensuring employees understand Lion’s growth investment is about delivering for future generations is not a won-and-done job, but requires ongoing productivity hunting, is another must for Sahasrabuddhe. “That really helps change your mindset when you are faced with going through the tough choices,” she says. “And there are plenty of tough choices, but they're in service of growth, which gives you a very clear why.”

This CMO Awards podcast series is hosted by Nadia Cameron, associate publisher and editor of marketing at Mi3, plus program lead for the CMO Awards.

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Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher

Being able to convince others is the most critical skill marketers need to possess  – the whole job of marketing is to influence consumers to consider then purchase your brand, after all. But as marketers progress into senior management positions, they also need to get better at getting team members as well as executive leadership and internal stakeholders onside. 

In episode 2 of The CMO Awards podcast series, powered by Mi3, three leading marketing chiefs who exhibit influence in spades tell us how they’ve done it: Former Google director of marketing ANZ, Aisling Finch, Tourism Australia CMO, Susan Coghill, and Creative Australia executive director of development and partnerships and former ABC director of audiences, Leisa Bacon. 

For Finch, who spent 13 years with Google, advocating for the local market to global stakeholders was a daily job. Having started with an Australia-first advocacy approach, picking and choosing the metrics that told the story she wanted to tell, she switched a blunt instrument for nuanced engagement and putting herself in the listener’s shoes.

“I found it actually quite a disarming strategy to almost go the opposite way of advocacy and say to people: ‘Okay, so we're 55th in population in the world, why are you even spending time with me?’ It’s almost that underdog card. But then you build a bit of credibility – you bring data, bring empathy… and you start to build a story. It's quite disarming and builds trust when you say, ‘interesting, we’re 55th in terms of population, but guess what, we’re 13th on GDP. And look at the willingness of consumers to spend on smartphones, or content,” she says. “Putting yourself in their shoes, being empathetic, and bringing in data without over advocating – I found that to be more effective.” That, and sharing the odd Tim Tam, she quips. 

Being honest and sharing bad news early is another must CMOs agree on. Coghill, has a “no surprises” rule she applies from team to CEO, finance team, and corporate affairs. “I joke with them I am still a Catholic school girl and feel the need to confess everything and bring everybody into the tent,” she jokes. “But it has served me well, and it has kept my colleagues well informed and able to help me when and where I've needed it.”

It’s a similar philosophy for Bacon. “In media – and especially the ABC – you are so heavily scrutinised, you have to be transparent about the good and bad all the time,” she comments. “I would apply that going forward to every job I would do. Transparency builds credibility, it builds trust, but it also is just a good way of working.”  
Bacon adds: “You can’t actually have influence without credibility, and you need to do things to actually build credibility”.

This CMO Awards podcast series is hosted by Nadia Cameron, associate publisher and editor of marketing at Mi3, plus program leader for the CMO Awards.

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Oxford University Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz was a runaway Mi3 hit last year with a peer-reviewed paper that smashes the economics and relevance of audience reach. His analysis – based on 1,000 campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and Wavemaker data – finds blunt use of reach will not deliver business outcomes, because not all reach is equal.

Business outcomes was all the talk at the Future of TV Advertising last week, with industry backing the build of a real-time dashboard via Adgile Media to map and measure impressions delivered to hard results close to real-time. Thomaz thinks it’s a start but warns industry risks falling into a “trap” of short-term skew, essentially applying performance metrics to a brand channel.

“That worries me,” per Thomaz. “We know from decades of existing research that the long-term impact of advertising is twice the short-term impact of advertising.”

But that doesn’t mean industry shouldn’t build it.

Per Thomaz, “It's definitely the right path, and we can do this, but we cannot stop there. This is low hanging fruit. You start there, start measuring and say, ‘look, I'm getting outcomes’ … But you cannot ignore the fact that the future exists.” However, he thinks if industry builds it – and keeps building – it could pay off. “If you're eating low hanging fruit and everybody else is eating off the floor, you're golden.”

Meanwhile Thomaz thinks agencies could be the key to cracking the code on moving beyond reach and into outcomes because they have enough visibility on pool of clients and, potentially, their data. He says one big global brand owner that has in-housed most of its media is finding exactly the same thing as his paper suggests – and making major gains as a result.

Thomaz says that code is all outlined in his paper – and any agency can lift it. “They literally can just go steal the code and run.”

Now he’s working on another paper – aiming to prove the impact of different media channels and beyond – including touchpoints like “customer service and salespeople and their effectiveness in driving different outcomes” within different categories.

“This is interesting for the people that own those channels, because suddenly they're not competing just on audience size – they're competing on value derived from that audience,” says Thomaz. “That is what media owners are going to be really interested in: Can I charge more for an impression on my platform for this client because they'll get 6x the return [versus another channel].”

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It was the sudden declines in footy audiences that did it for Suncorp Executive Manager of Media, Greg Kearney and OMD Chief Media Partnerships Officer, Marelle Salib. They knew that diehard sports fans don’t just ditch their teams overnight. But Kearney and Salib had years’ worth of market mix model (MMM) data that countered the volatile numbers coming from OzTAM back in 2023.

Those zero ratings, or “doughnuts” per Foxtel Media boss Mark Frain, preceded the split between the pay TV provider and the free-to-air TV networks on measurement, with Foxtel Media breaking away to use Kantar to validate its own return path data from a million subscribers.

Digging deeper showed that the ratings were way off for a slew of shows, “and clients were asking what was going on”, per Salib. No measurement system can ever be 100 per cent perfect all of the time, she acknowledges, but OMD has been running Kantar and its own client MMM data in parallel: “What we're seeing is the performance of things like sports sponsorships are remaining stable, and that is a really good indicator of performance … The Kantar data set appears to be really robust,” says Salib.

While Suncorp has a sophisticated approach to media investment, Kearney says reach remains a “crucial” input.

“We need to know where the audience is, and it's changing so rapidly. If you don't know that, you're significantly behind the eight ball. And secondly, audience numbers are a huge part of the cost equation,” he says.

“If you don't get that right, the inputs into your market mix models are going to be off … and you're never going to have a good view on your business outcomes.”

Foxtel’s Frain acknowledges the move from one measurement system to another is “pretty challenging” for the industry, but says breaking away and enabling Foxtel Media to plug its pipes into multiple data sources and market mix models “is the best thing we have ever done”. Plus, it gets the pay TV provider closer to closing the loop on how media investment actually delivers a business result. Now Frain’s aiming to plug in more data sources.

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Four’N Twenty pies are literally baked-in to footy and Patties Food Group marketing boss Anand Surujpal gets a related proposition across his desk every week. But his challenge is to grow share through new buyers beyond “diehard footy fans” and tradies.

So when the prop for the Paris Olympics landed, Surujpal saw an opportunity for a bigger demographic slice of the action by mashing live Olympics content with ads in real-time via QMS’ digital out of home network.

The results were meaty: “When the campaign went live, we had unit sales lifts of up to 30 per cent,” says Surujpal. “This is on a big brand with distribution, awareness, trial, recognition.” Even better, “We've actually retained the consumers and maintained the growth … It’s had a big halo effect.”

Strategy chief Christian Zavecz says QMS wanted to match Australia’s athletes in “pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved” while “bringing big brands and Australians together through the unifying power of sport”. Plus, the Olympics provided the perfect platform to prove digital out-of-home is now a broadcast medium that can deliver real-time creative responses – and results. So QMS, TBWA and Patties Food Group pulled out all the stops to make it happen.

“We had a 24/7 newsroom that worked really closely with our tech team. We had a custom-built dynamic content optimisation platform that enabled us to continually publish real-time branded content featuring everything from medal moments to breaking news and live metal tallies, along with what to watch coming up,” says Zavecz.

The results speak for themselves – Surujpal admits it’s opened his eyes to just how far digital out-of-home has advanced. “It has changed my perception of the medium. To have speed and accuracy, being relevant immediately, I think that's a powerful tool.”

QMS now has the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics just around the corner.

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Host: Nadia Cameron, Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher

Amid all the hype, excitement and trepidation around digital, marketing automation, data utilisation and now AI coming into marketing, is the very real need to build team capability and empowerment to actually use the tools effectively – and in a way that delivers business outcomes. As Infosys global CMO, Sumit Virmani, told Mi3 recently: “As AI is a very new technology, it can be a big challenge for teams at large to embrace because they don’t know how to do it. Educating them in the process of embracing AI, on the tools, and actually making investments in your team to get them the comfort to experiment, is the responsibility of a marketing leadership team.”

But it’s not just tech changing the shape of marketing execution. New channels and connectivity to customer – as well as higher expectations of said customer –  are demanding marketers build a diverse range of brand, people and specialist skill sets. Then there’s the relentless scrutiny of marketing effectiveness and budgets requiring ever stronger commercial nous. Mi3 and the AMI’s Marketing & Customer Benchmarks FY2023 Outlook report last June of 105 Chief Marketing, Customer and Growth Officers highlighted the changes they’re preparing for – team structures and shifting KPI’s among them, with customer lifetime value metrics surging for many.   

All this makes it imperative marketing teams run continuous learning and capability development loops. Two CMOs striving for this are Freedom Furniture’s Jason Piggott and Wesfarmers Health’s Corrina Brazel. Quick to jump into the Australian Marketing Institute’s new skills assessment tool, 12 months after the launch of its Competency Framework, both see a need for more formalised learning programs that don’t just cover new specialist skills, but can also improve core marketing knowledge across their teams. While the AMI’s Competency Framework provides those foundations and learning structures, the assessment tool is about having productive, proactive conversations with teams while also holding up a mirror to your own strengths and weaknesses, both say.

Per AMI CEO, Bronwyn Heys: “Modern marketers need to be bench ready. They need to be ready for anything – for the market, for the consumer.”

No less keen to pursue learning rigour is REA Group, whose GM of audience and marketing, Sarah Myers, says has a “very feedback hungry culture” and commitment to deep, specialist skills. A one-size-fits-all program, however, hasn’t been the right option, nor has a pure marketing strain to capability development. Instead, the company has been building out an internal university that recognises certain skills as important across the business. 

Tune into this latest Mi3 podcast episode as we unpack the pros and cons of skills assessment, specialist versus generalist capability building, and how marketing leaders encourage continuous learning across their teams from the bottom up – while also not forgetting to skill up themselves.

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SCA has spent four years building its uber-app LiSTNR from idea to the fulcrum of its audio business. It’s got 2.25m logged-in users, knows their postcodes – handy ahead of the federal election – what they listen to and what they might want to hear next. Kelly says acquisition is no longer core focus – “we’ve got the base we wanted to get” – and SCA is moving to kill churn, now at a record low.

“We’re approaching 70 per cent retention per month,” says Kelly. “For every percentage point of reduction in churn, we are seeing about a half million dollar increase in revenues on platform on an annual basis.”

Personalisation and discovery are powering those churn reductions while boosting time spent listening, per Kelly.

Next he sees massive opportunity in regional markets to take that further – for SCA, its advertisers and other radio businesses. Kelly points to a streaming deal it struck with Victoria broadcaster ACE Radio as a template for a triple win.

Bringing the broadcaster’s streams into LiSTNR, says Kelly, gave ACE an incremental revenue stream while boosting inventory and audiences for SCA. “They've seen about a 30 per cent increase in their audience levels listening on LiSTNR,” per Kelly. “And with the introduction of ACE, we’ve seen about a 20 per cent increase in monthly listening on our platform, which is pretty incredible.”

Plus, SCA is driving those new audiences into its other programs and podcasts, meaning bigger numbers to sell, at higher CPMs.

“We'll be speaking to other broadcasters, and particularly the regional network groups, to see if we can provide that service to them,” says Kelly.

“We are the largest regional audio business in Australia. 73 per cent of the regional audience comes through either SCA-owned or represented – stations like ACE – so we've got great scale. We haven't yet tapped into that regional audience in a meaningful way. But that's the next opportunity for LiSTNR.

Plus, regional consumption levels per user outpace their metro counterparts – and Kelly thinks they are a chink in the global platforms’ armour.

“The big digital companies, the Metas, haven't played in that regional space. So our ability to work with major blue chip companies to actually access those particular customers – the appetite is insatiable. We can't get enough inventory from those regional markets, which is why the ACE partnership has been so successful. There's a huge opportunity.”

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