Platform 'bells' and analytical 'whistles': Is digital just a box of turds and spiders?

With the digital overhaul facing marketers and business strategies today, do all the new platform 'bells' and analytical 'whistles' actually amount to anything?

When he looks out across the marketing industry, what Professor Mark Ritson sees is clients and agencies who have largely lost their business direction. The Melbourne Business School professor attributes a lack of industry training in the basics as feeding the perpetual gap between how marketers think consumers behave, and how they actually do.

"If [marketers] had been properly trained, the first thing they would have been trained on is market orientation, which means you are not the consumer," Ritson says. "What you do and think is highly, highly unrepresentative of your consumer, because you're being paid to market a product, ergo you don't see that product or service the way the consumers do."

In part one of our two-part series, CMO Show hosts Mark Jones and JV Douglas sit down with the oft-notorious Ritson to discuss why the industry today is a broken one.

Tune in for a contentious look at the role of automation, how media agencies will shape the future, and why digital is overrated.

Ambushed immediately after leaving the stage, this episode of The CMO Show takes place in the back halls of AANA's annual marketing conference RESET as JV Douglas track down this year's best speakers.

Spotlighting what to expect in 2017, JV discusses how to go viral with Unruly founder Sarah Wood, anticipating disruption with digital prophet David Shing, and penetrating consumer memory with Professor Karen Nelson-Field.

Firebrands. Academics. New-age prophets? Find out what they're all preaching to marketers today and in the future.

How do you crack a foreign market that shifts your business values, depends on local partnerships, and has a work culture of "close enough"?

At the age of 27, Australia's Andrew Collins arrived in China to do just this, acquiring the 'Postkard Media' agency Mailman Group. He now admits if he knew more at the time, he probably wouldn't have gone.

"The reality is [you're] dealing on different terms. The approach is very different. The quicker you understand that, the quicker you're going to start to realise where it is that you're going to find value and create a business in China."

Collins has established Mailman as a Chinese advisory and gatekeeper for Western brands looking to plunder this lucrative audience.

Navigating China's unique online environment, Mailman has engaged 100 million+ Chinese fans for Manchester United, produced 26 million Weibo reads for UFC, and garnered 140 million media impressions for GoUSA.

With numbers like these, many see the 'Middle Kingdom' as an unchartered land of opportunity, but Collins cautions the voyage. "Expect you'll lose. Expect it's going to be difficult. Expect that you won't win without local support. Expect that the market is not designed for you. It's designed for them."

With a warning like this, would you still take on the dragon? In this episode of The CMO Show, JV and Mark share the story of the man who broke into China's accelerated market, thrived, and survived to tell the tale.

Trying to stand out in Australia's university circuit is barbed with expendable resources, exclusivity, and prestige.

This was the challenge tackled head on by Angelo Kourtis, Western Sydney University's VP of People and Advancement, who had a clear vision for his institution. "My critique of the current branding strategies that universities have is that they default into this position of preparing people to get jobs. It's not a narrative that we actually should own."

The ensuing university rebrand - and the Unlimited campaign - has produced industry awards, inspirational advertisements, and even an Archibald prize-winning portrait.

In this special episode of The CMO Show, Mark Jones is joined by WSU's Angelo Kourtis and George Betsis, creative director at VCD+We, to shine a spotlight on the "retro-brand", the business drivers behind the campaign, and how hard it can be to reframe internal and external brand perceptions.

Tune in for a healthy dose of inspiration as the three talk about why philosophy underpins marketing in the education sector, what the campaign has meant for the university and how other institutions can learn from what has fast become one of the most popular campaigns of the past twelve months.

It's no secret the world of marketing is changing at lightning speeds. Marketers are increasingly tapping into new technologies to create great customer experiences. In this episode of The CMO Show, Lee Hawksley joins us to investigate the evolution of the marketing industry and the role of artificial intelligence, Big Data and the Internet of Things in creating a personalised experience for the customer. "If we really want to push the envelope and we want to gain competitive advantage as marketers then we have to experiment." Senior Vice President and General Manager at Salesforce, Lee has over 20 years of experience in the software and digital media industries. He's also a fierce advocate of Australia's entrepreneur-led innovation economy. Tune in as Mark and a jet-lagged JV tackle the dynamic industry landscape and how technology will increasingly underpin marketing objectives in the future.

How do you define creativity? Is it the process of painting beautiful pictures and making music that inspires you? Is it the process of consuming and interpreting content, creations and collaborations in the world around us? Perhaps it's gathering great thinkers and enabling them to do great things.

In this episode of The CMO Show, Anne Miles shares insights about what it means to be creative - and what happens when it collides with marketing.

With a wealth of experience across several creative streams, today Anne is the managing director at International Creative Services, an independent consulting services firm that assists with creative services in the advertising and marketing industries.

"When it comes to commercial creativity, I think (creativity) is being the coolest way to solve a client's problem and get people to engage with the brand."

Tune in as JV and Mark dive into why marketers should care as much about creativity as they do about data and numbers, explore what businesses can do practically to keep their jobs on track and how to best deliver to your business and brand strategy.

Mobile. It's an unavoidable channel to reach target audiences and has become the most dominant aspect of digital strategy. But is current practice still best practice?

With more than 30 years' experience, including five years spearheading the Mobile Marketing Association, Paul Berney is a juggernaut in the mobile space bringing learned wisdom and a new perspective to a much-discussed subject.

As Managing Partner of mobile marketing education and advisor service mCordis, Berney is providing clients with guidance that goes against the common grain of mobile strategy.

"For me the term 'mobile first' is a misnomer. It suggests that you have to do everything via the mobile channel and everything has to be pushed towards it. Mobile has to play its part as part of a marketing mix."

Berney also has strong views on how marketers are missing the point in their digital strategy – especially in cohort segmentation.

"I absolutely hate it when brands tell me that their target market is millennials. It just drives me crazy! There is no similarity whatsoever between a 35-year-old millennial that's married with three kids compared to a 23 year old just left university. Although they both fit in the same bracket, it's just lazy sloppy marketing."

Tune in as JV and Mark Jones break down the new era of the 'connected consumer,' how we're getting it wrong with audience segmentation, and why Google knows more about you than Facebook does.

Women account for more than 50% of the global population yet, by and large, they're kept out of the boardroom when it comes to marketing.

Estimated to be worth some 28 trillion of a 35 trillion dollar global consumer economy, it's undeniable that women - as a demographic - hold the pursestrings when it comes to the consumer economy.

In fact, women are so powerful as a consumer group that they could easily bring the world's most powerful companies to their knees, says marketing to women pioneer, Bec Brideson. "As a collective group, women are really powerful consumers and absolutely worth more than 50% of the economy and therefore, need to be considered in a more insightful and empathetic way to make sure that we're connecting the right messages with them," she adds.

"I believe that marketing needs to catch up with the social evolution that women are influencers and that we prefer to be connected to, in a different way than we've all been taught to market, so marketing has to evolve in the same way that women have evolved."

Listen in to this episode of The CMO Show as Brideson shares insights from her professional experience in marketing, shedding light on the huge gender gaps in the marketing industry - both in terms of career opportunities and campaign creation.

Trust: it's a lucrative and aspirational factor in any brand story, but all too often we fail to understand its true meaning – or value.

When it comes to making informed decisions, consumers are increasingly driven by the same value – trust – which strikes at the very core of how products and services are being accessed, delivered and evaluated.

In this episode of The CMO Show, Rachel Botsman drops by to shed light on the role of trust in building your brand, and how the collaborative economy is driving this. An author, teacher, speaker and recognised authority on the role of trust in the collaborative economy, Botsman has a passion for understanding human behaviour and the reasons we trust companies, ideas, and each other, as much as we do.

"I can tell you the one thing not to do, which is to say, 'You should trust this bank'. Although that is a tagline believe it or not," says Botsman. "There's this notion that if you say it, people will believe you and there is something really important in that."

"Now, with platforms where you have a producer and consumer, you can no longer control that relationship. So getting millions of people that this company doesn't employ and doesn't control behaving on brand, or delivering a quality product or service, involves a whole new way of thinking about marketing and design."

Tune in as Mark Jones and JV Douglas chat to Botsman about the future of the collaborative economy, building a trusted brand, and thinking about the bigger picture.

It has been touted as "an increasingly integral part of many industries, including marketing". But what exactly is artificial intelligence? And, more importantly, what does it means for marketers in the future?

The uptake of artificial intelligence may have been measured to this point, but there are many who predict a future of robots, computers and intelligence beyond anything we can currently imagine.

In this episode of The CMO Show, Mark and JV delve into the depths of AI, marketing culture and the state of digital marketing with Chaminda Ranasinghe, head of digital sales & marketing at ANZ.

"A lot has been made out of AI and the future of marketing in terms of AI," says Ranasinghe. "In my view, the reason AI os hitting the market in such a big way is because of three things – the power of computing, the neutral networks available and the data the machines are able to consume is what's making AI so powerful."

Ranasinghe also sheds light on ANZ's latest rebrand and the role of customer experience in navigating that change. "The old days of mass communication when one message was thought to fit everybody are long gone," he says. "It's not just about simplifying the language and turning it from bank-speak to customer-speak, but it's also about making sure you get out of the way of that conversation."

Tune in to learn more about the role of culture in marketing and the rise of artificial intelligence.