Marketers have been smashed by the pandemic – but have emerged more powerful, with much bigger, broader remits, according to The Marketing Academy CEO, Sherilyn Shackell. The Academy has spoken with thousands of marketers over the last 18 months and finds greater numbers are becoming board members and CEOs. But they must now carry even greater weight under broader demands and silo-busting skillset requirements.  Agencies, however, are struggling to stem severe blood loss. Leaders must step up – because their people are burnt out and disillusioned – and new blood is in short supply. Shackell sees more in-housing incoming. Both agencies and brands, she says, underestimate the need for ‘soft’ skills around leadership and staff wellbeing at their peril. “If you don't look after that stuff, you're shafted.” 

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The marketing and media world are rushing to get to market first with engagement metrics – or at least talk about them. But how is that playing out on the ground, and are brands ready? “Before you can go to market and thump the table and expect clients to buy to engagement, you need to be really clear about … the proof that engagement can deliver better results for brands,” says Foxtel Media’s Customer Engagement Director, Toby Dewar. Westpac brand, media and ad chief Jenny Melhuish says the bank is testing engagement and attention-based campaigns but agrees the metrics are yet to catch up with prevailing market sentiment. “The CPM metric is a rational one… we need to believe in the robustness of a metric, and currently, we don’t have a robust metric.” Either way, Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Anthony Gregorio says the creative is vital, whatever metrics people use: “If no-one is paying attention to your message, then it doesn’t really matter how good the media buy is.”

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Professor Mark Ritson was right all along: “90 per cent of marketers fail to brief agencies effectively, and their failures begin with a total lack of strategy.” The headline findings of the Better Briefs Project and its research spanning 1,700 marketers and agencies make for grim reading. Marketers don’t even realise their briefs are mostly duds, yet agencies are “screaming for objectives”, according to report co-creators, strategists Pieter-Paul von Weiler and Matt Davies. Unless things improve, marketer tenures – and marketing and advertising’s standing within boardrooms – will continue to decline. But there are some very simple fixes. Applying them promises to repair the marketer-agency disconnect – and deliver advertising that moves the needle. 

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How a marketer’s budget is set is often doomed to fail, Pet Circle CMO Jon Wild says. Typically, it stems from a business’s growth target. “There’s an arbitrary increase to marketing spend and you’re told to go hit the target. Typically, you fall short in the first quarter, and it’s death by a thousand cuts for the remainder of the year.” That method is “set up for failure”, he says. Rather, growth should be function of the whole company – with marketing being one factor – working towards those targets. Budgets and spend is the last of eight steps detailed in a new book from Atomic212’s James Dixon and Claire Fenner on how to build an Effective Media System. “The place we want to get to is where we know for every dollar we spend on media, what we’re going to get back out,” Dixon says.

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10 ViacomCBS will headline its 2022 Upfronts by touting its credentials as a more diverse, full-service broadcaster with room to grow and a big hitting content slate straight out of the gates. I’m a Celebrity starts on January 3, with Survivor and MasterChef hot on its heels. After that, “you’re into that pattern of big franchises all year,” says Chief Content Officer Beverley McGarvey. “It’s about consistency, maintaining big brands, but also adding some fresh content and fresh shows.” The network is investing heavily in streaming service Paramount+, which McGarvey admits is “a hungry beast that you need to feed with lots of new shows all the time”. Key to the new 10ViacomCBS offering is its full suite: “Paramount+, 10Play, MTV, Nickelodeon… we don’t run those businesses separately,” Jarrod Villani, Chief Operating and Commercial Officer, says. “Bev and I have oversight over all of those businesses.”

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Dell tops US$94 billion in revenues, but it had been in a perpetual street fight on pricing for years and was losing margin with brand health metrics flatlining. With a new premium push it went large on brand, inviting Australia’s publishers to pitch their ideas. Around 150 publishers turned up, the response blowing away marketing boss Arjun Dueskar. Opting to go with 10ViacomCBS and MediaCom, the results have been “phenomenal” with double-digit growth continuing quarter on quarter since the start of 2020 and brand metrics rocketing. Now marketing is getting all the plaudits – and board backing to go harder on brand investment. 

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The QR code was once the daggy tech no-one wanted - but it’s now back, and even David “Kochie” Koch’s 87-year-old mother is using them. Five years of e-commerce development has been squeezed into the past 18 months, and Aussies haven’t been able to spend their money in lockdowns. “The economy is going to come out with a vengeance,” Koch, the host of Seven’s Sunrise and Pinstripe Media chair, says. People have money and they want to spend it. Forward bookings with Seven are “extraordinary”, Chief Revenue Officer Kurt Burnette says. “71 per cent of connected TV viewers use their mobile to look up related content… the time between being inspired and purchasing is shrinking,” he says. “All of these trends that are happening are making this the perfect storm.” Coles CMO Lisa Ronson says e-commerce sales have soared – and they don’t expect them to slow. Brands that aren’t ready will be left behind.

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The second and final episode in our two-part series breaks down five of the six recommendations in the ACCC report to the Federal government on the Digital Advertising Services inquiry – the first recommendation was covered in Part 1 yesterday. On the mics again today for the follow up are Peter Leonard, Professor of Practice at UNSW Business School, advisor at law firm Gilbert + Tobin and principal of Data Strategies; Gai Le Roy, CEO at the IAB; Dan Stinton, Managing Director at The Guardian Australia and Kristiaan Kroon, Chief Investment Officer at OMG. Buckle in because as our experts say in this two-part series, apathy won’t work for the industry this time. It's no time to ignore the regulators.   

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Avoid reading another 200 page ACCC probe with this two-part series on the regulator’s final recommendations to the Federal Government from the Digital Advertising Services Inquiry. Google is squarely in the spotlight but as our panel of industry experts warn, what the ACCC is doing to Google is an early signal for broader industry. In today’s heavyweight line-up: Peter Leonard, Professor of Practice at UNSW Business School, advisor at law firm Gilbert + Tobin and Principal at Data Strategies; Dan Stinton, Managing Director at The Guardian Australia; Gai Le Roy, CEO at the IAB and Kristiaan Kroon, Chief Investment Officer at OMG. 

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Consider a few stats: The Discovery Channel, Turbo, TLC and Animal Planet are having their best ratings years – ever. Back catalogue episodes are booming: Video on-demand consumption of Friends is up 103 per cent. Fifty-six per cent of people have watched more food and cooking shows, and 70 per cent of them said they would keep watching more post-lockdowns. New viewing habits are here to stay. Brands with environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals can tap into this by targeting ads to those audiences. “If someone is going to sit down and watch an hour-long documentary on conservation, then they must be interested in that space,” Rebecca Kent, Discovery’s Senior Vice President of Transformation, says. “There’s lots of opportunity, I’m not seeing us capturing it yet.” Tim Christlieb, BBC Studios’ Director of Branded Services, says the era of a hidden sustainability web page are over. Meanwhile, when we’re all on video calls, all we can talk about is what we’re watching, Foxtel Media’s Daniella Serhan says. “We’re making it really easy for… brands to a part of that conversation.”

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