The experts at Hoyts and Val Morgan didn’t see it coming quite as it did. Hoyts CEO Damian Keogh says he was “laughed out of the room” for suggesting Barbie would take $35m at the Australian box office. It will do double that – meaning Margot Robbie’s not the only one in the pink. Kia, AAMi, Chemist Warehouse, Modibodi and Nintendo aside, marketers are kicking themselves for being equally blind to the opportunity. Now Val Morgan’s phone is ringing hot with advertisers “asking what are our next ten Barbies”, per MD Guy Burbidge. He and Keogh have a good idea what they are. They think the lesson for brands is to think earlier and smarter about IP marketing. Meanwhile, Barbenheimer has brought lapsed cinema audiences back to screens – 15 per cent hadn’t been for a year, per Hoyts 2.5 million member loyalty data – auguring well for a year in which the box office is powering back to the billion dollar mark. Plus, says Burbidge, cinema’s investment in attention data is having a “significant” revenue impact as marketers seek mass cultural alternatives to sport. Here’s the next big screen bets they think marketers should be laying over the next 12 months.

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Just about every B2C business is trying to build superglue stickiness into their user platforms. Nimble start-ups, at least prior to the big VC squeeze, were the poster children, leaving big legacy firms foundering in their wake. But SCA’s pivot to uber app Listnr is a standout exception, reinventing its digital audience business and building a new brand from scratch – pretty much all in-house. Launched mid-Covid in a bid to see off local incursion from the likes of Apple, Spotify and iHeart, Listnr has already powered past 1.5m signed-up users. Now SCA is using the logged-in data – alongside a new martech stack and digitally upskilled marketing department – to move the needle across acquisition, retention and engagement, while giving advertisers sharper incentive to spend. CMO Nikki Clarkson said the pivot required the entire business to suspend traditional thinking – from finance, sales, marketing, content, distribution, research and tech – without dropping the ball on its day-to-day game. Then the business had to go through a major systems overhaul while learning the language of tech and customer experience. But she says the pay-off and ROI is already landing, with marketing alone making “monumental gains” by aligning sharper digital tools with brand-building assets. Her takeout for those planning mass audience transformations? Go broad or go home.

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Tectonic movement is reshaping blue chip marketing with remits expanding by the day. Coles and IAG replaced the CMO role with Chief Customer officers. ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra was last month promoted to Managing Director of ANZ’s Everyday Banking business. But Lion’s latest move tops the lot for adventure. Anubha Sahasrabuddhe in February became Chief Growth Officer at the $3bn drinks firm. The former Mars global marketing chief has responsibility for marketing, M&A plus enterprise-wide transformational innovation beyond new product development. Just to make things more interesting she’s also been handed responsibility for IT and technology. Which means the CMO is now effectively CTO, CIO and CDO to boot. Lion CEO Sam Fischer, former APAC chief at Diageo, is backing Sahasrabuddhe to deliver. She’s given herself and her team 500 days to move the needle and reengineer the company’s culture, including IT, entirely around the customer. “If we can't demonstrate sufficient progress, then we can't justify our existence,” says Sahasrabuddhe. “The days are ticking.” This podcast is as wide-ranging as the remit. Tuck in.

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Uber launched at South by Southwest, as did Twitter, Pinterest and Foursquare. Billie Eilish was discovered as an unsigned 14-year old. Mumford and Sons first made their name at the creative-tech-culture jamboree in Austin, Texas. In three months time the world will learn whether the powerhouse event can replicate itself outside of the Lone Star State. SXSW Sydney MD, Colin Daniels, is backing Sin City to deliver – with the likes of futurist Amy Webb, Coachella co-founder Paul Tollet and Slack co-founder Cal Henderson joining “titans of every industry” across tech and innovation, music, games and screens. He says every one of its 70 featured speakers would likely be the keynote at any other event. No wonder circa 500 brands are keen to get involved – which is one of the reasons Seven West Media is going large, partnering with SXSW Sydney and planning to spring a very different kind of upfront during the week-long festival. Chief Revenue Officer, Kurt Burnette, said getting the investment over the line was a “difficult conversation”, but he’s backing the play to position the network at the heart of the creative-tech nexus and change perceptions. CMO Mel Hopkins will have a big hand in shaping what that looks like. No pressure then. 

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 Tightening privacy regimes around the world are forcing Google to change the way it tracks and measures web traffic across the majority of the globe’s estimated 100m sites on the open web. That’s forced Google’s Universal Analytics to be swapped out with an entirely new product knowns as GA4. The problem is it’s a mess for most. And it's a likely marker for what’s to come in Australia - companies in Europe, and even the US, are pulling out of Google'snear-ubiquitous [and once free] analytics platform as marketers fumble with new tools, unable to quickly pull key reports, historical comparisons and insights. Many are raging against the big Google data-swiping machine as European regulators enforcing stricter rules on how people’s data is used, stored and transferred and dishing out big fines over GDPR breaches. Some of the big questions hovering over Google’s new analytics products include whether they’re fully privacy compliant, particularly if Google is feeding its vast global advertising business via sample data carved out from website owner data, most of whom are only now discovering they don’t own or often see all their real audience behaviour. In France, about 80 per cent have reviewed their analytics, per Piano’s global analytics chief Marie Fenner, and “about 60 per cent” have switched". That scenario may soon repeat in Australia as data privacy rules are beefed-up. Scentre Group performance marketing lead Jason Elk thinks the shake-up threatens Google’s analytics dominance and by proxy its broader business. Matomo CRO Dion Blair, agrees. “Right now, unlike any time in the past 15 years, we're seeing the choice [businesses are making for analytics] is potentially not the big behemoth.” With Google shutting off Universal Analytics a few weeks ago, here’s what marketers locally and globally are likely to face.

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NAB CMO Suzana Ristevski is a touch emphatic after just completing a three-year, $45m grinding overhaul of the bank's marketing technology systems that has seen 95 per cent of the tools used by the marketing team switched out - a Pega decisioning engine and Tealium's customer data platform are among the new line-up. Now NAB is ready for the AI stuff.  Ristevski acknowledges “inflicting a lot of pain” on the bank’s marketing team in the tech transformation and there’s more to come but "more exciting" as NAB works to embed machine learning and generative AI to deliver personalisation at scale that isn’t just “sending out rubbish”. She’s already sent out 10x more comms, now circling at 500m. But the bank is acutely aware of the risks posed by AI – and the strategy goes all the way up to the top. Tabcorp is onto its third in-house generative AI program and the creation of a centralised unit, Next Labs, to experiment - the problem with the other two was that they lied, or suffered “hallucinations”, per Chief Data & Analytics Officer Amy Shi-Nash. But Tabcorp can’t risk plugging into things like ChatGPT. The Monkeys and Accenture Song ANZ boss Mark Green, meanwhile, is back from Cannes where the AI banter was redlining on a "moral crisis" crisis for creativity, not dissimilar to the previous metaverse hype cycle. Green’s not worried. He reckons he’s slipped Accenture Song Global Creative Chair Nick Law an idea “that’s as good as any we’ve ever created” with generative AI at its core - and he says the client briefs are coming in from all angles. New York-based Law thinks there are new AI risks which will undermine the fascination and effectiveness of personalisation - namely, tonnes of mediocre messaging that will be created under the guise of 'right person, right time', unleashing a sea of sameness. NAB's Ristevski agrees.

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When Elsa Beaumont was tapped last year by Treasury Wines Estate – home of the mighty Penfolds – the former exec at global hot shops like Mother and Big Spaceship, and her colleague Ben Oliver, who’s running Treasury’s internal media unit at Splash, were worried. Could they beat all the warnings that come from agencies when brands try to go in-house with capabilities all previously outsourced: talent is hard to attract and keep stimulated, burnout is a high risk and any cost benefits would be shortlived. Burnout risk turned out to be true but the talent, quality and volume of work is rocking, they say  – and now Splash is preparing for a global rollout across Treasury Wines’ international markets. The upside is faster turnarounds, tighter links with marketing teams and better output than what was possible by just using agencies. And in the case of media, Oliver is chasing down transparent digital media buys and practices that he never quite got in life before Splash.

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After ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra commissioned owned media specialists Sonder to conduct a valuation and audit of the media assets the bank owned and managed, her big discovery was that circa 85 million impacts a month, mostly from ANZ customers, were under leveraged by the business.

Now ANZ’s marketing team think first about their owned channels before developing paid media briefs. New content hubs coupled with ANZ’s two year investment overhauling its tech and personalisation capabilities, for example, has seen “up to a tripling of conversion rates”, says Mehra.

Sonder Co-Founder Jonathan Hopkins says ANZ also has a big upside in acquiring new customers from its owned media assets, not just better cross-selling of products to existing customers."ANZ have screens outward facing in most branches around the country - in some cases they can also do customer acquisition."

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Coles and IAG have joined the march to install Chief Customer Officers into roles that were either previously at least partly the domain of CMOs or now have marketing as a reporting line. But what does a CCO do? Is it job title semantics or is the mission sweep broader? And where does this new executive species come from? Three Chief Customer Officers from Inghams Group, Hipages and MyCar, the overhauled Kmart Tyre & Auto, breakdown their agenda and why their firms opted for the role – and in Inghams case, why everything starts with “balancing the bird”.

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The Media Federation of Australia unveiled a hot shortlist of the brands and agencies delivering the best work and business impact in media for 2023, with Lego, NRMA, Campari’s Aperol, Netflix and Suncorp among those leading the finalists tally. About 30 advertisers and 20 agencies made the cut of finalists with three marketers among the judging line-up for the 2023 MFA Awards joining Mi3 to unpack why some entries got their likes - and laments. Arnott’s CMO, Jenni Dill, Unilever’s Director of Digital Marketing, Media and Commerce, Sarah Sorrenson and Deakin Business School’s Adjunct Professor and former CMO at Coles and Tourism Australia, Lisa Ronson, reveal their collective observations and scorecards (well some of them) on the standard of work in the past year. 

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