The CMO Show

SEM, SEO and data - they're the holy grail of the modern marketer's strategy tool kit. Yet, the struggle to understand and effectively implement them at a tactical level is all too real.

This week on The CMO Show, hosts Mark Jones and JV Douglas are joined by Aaron Agius, managing director at Louder Online - and an expert in just about every field of online marketing. "It's not just about throwing links at an average website and thinking that's all you need," he said when talking about the realities of SEO and web-based marketing.

The struggle that modern marketers face is trying to marry online marketing and data-driven decisions from a strategic point of view, to tangible results and tactical processes, Agius told Jones and Douglas.

"A really basic strategy that's highly effective is create content that answers questions and solves problems in your industry," Agius said. "If you're doing that you're going to be providing value so it's as simple as that."

Adding that, "In order to rank well you need links from great sites, in order to get links from great sites you need great content, in order to have great content you need a good strategy behind it and a good message and good story."

Tune in to learn about the mistakes you could be making in online marketing and how to overcome them in a simple, cost-effective way.

As we move into an era of user-generated content, customer supply chains and individual consumption, the age old adage "the customer comes first", has never rung more true.

Without your customers you'd be out of business faster than you can say the word customer. But somewhere along the line we lost sight of why customers are so important and how to connect with them.

In this episode of The CMO Show, Mark and JV are joined by Linden Brown, the man who wrote the book on marketing (he actually did - it's called Marketing and you can read all about it here).

With more than three decades of experience practicing and teaching marketing around the world, Brown shares his insights into a new paradigm for the global marketing culture, the Market Responsiveness Index. Today, as chairman and chief value officer at MarketCulture Strategies, Brown is pioneering a new frontier in marketing that is customer centric and insight-led.

"Marketers have always had a view that we should be focussing on the customer," he told Mark and JV.

"The thing that is so important in marketing today is that everything that CMOs and marketing people are doing should be customer-insight or customer-foresight led. And by that I mean it should be based on some real knowledge around the customer's need or their future need and building campaigns actually around that."

Tune in to discover what customer centricity really means, and how it is defining the future of global marketing.

As we approach the 85th anniversary of Neil McElroy's famous brand memo, in which he announced the creation of 'brand men' as a role crucial to understanding who customers are and what it is they really want, we've decided to delve deep into the world of brand to find out how it's changed.

This week on The CMO Show, Mark and JV are joined by Emma Sharley, director at Emma Sharley Consulting and a brand marketer with over 10 years experience around the world.

"Now customers are a lot more empowered in the feedback they're giving, which is really holding brands accountable in terms of what they're doing from a marketing point of view," Emma said. "It's about having that two-way conversation and dialogue on an ongoing basis."

"Your life's course is not determined by the things you do or know, it's really determined by trying hard outside your natural skill set." This is Lee Tonitto's message to marketers who are struggling in the face of disruption and the need to constantly reskill.

This week we take a deep dive into the colourful world of modern marketing to ask the hard questions; What does the future of marketing look like? How is innovation impacting the skills needed to survive and thrive? What should graduates and career professionals do to make sure they remain relevant and continue to add value?

In this episode of The CMO Show, Mark and JV are joined by Lee Tonitto, CEO at the Australian Marketing Institute and a lifelong marketer. With more than two decades of experience across several areas of marketing, Lee brings a mix of unique customer insights, industry experience, and data and analytics to the fore, to discuss the current state of the industry and where it's all headed.

"The fundamental principles of marketing will always be the same in terms of marketing activity meeting unmet needs. The how marketing is executed has changed enormously, and it's all led by marketing technology and automation," says Lee.

In particular, the burgeoning of marketing automation tools and resources available to marketers is having a continual impact on the industry. Five years ago there was around 250 such tools whereas today, marketers have access to around 3,500, says Lee. This is why marketers must commit to being lifelong learners.

"I always recommend to marketers, whether they be seasoned professionals or starting out in their career, they keep across the latest trade articles, webinars, podcasts," says Lee. "The dynamic nature of the profession is that if you want to be part of it you need to be relevant and create value."

Public relations. As the many facets of the media and communications industry continue to converge, there are many who would tell you PR is doomed to fail. But with the federal government predicting that an extra 25,000 people will join the PR profession in Australia by 2019, surely there's more to the story.

The rapid growth of digital and social branded content has caused disruption across the PR sector, as traditional methods of communicating are replaced by modern techniques, data and analytics. This shift has brought with it many questions: What does the future of PR look like? What skills do PR professionals need to thrive in the modern industry? And why is there such grave concern for the future of this sector?

This week on The CMO Show, Mark and JV are joined by Jennifer Muir, national president of the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) and general manager at Primary Communication. With more than 20 years experience in the PR and communications landscape, Jenny brings fresh insight and new experiences to her role with PRIA, and to the future of the PR industry more broadly.

Since the dawn of time there's been one question that's plagued content marketers and journalists alike: How do you marry native advertising with quality journalism? (If such a thing should exist).

The Guardian is a global brand that has made a name for itself localising content, tapping into innovation and creativity, and publishing quality journalism side-by-side with advertorial content.

n this episode, Mark and JV are joined by the managing director of The Guardian Australia, Ian McClelland. A digital-first strategist, Ian shares insights on modern storytelling, how The Guardian has dealt with fragmented commercial models but retained their audience, and what it means to create content in a mobile-first world.

"Native advertising like any type of advertising or communication only works in the context of a broader strategy. You have to know why you're doing it and you have to know how it relates to all of the other things you're doing," Ian said.

Customers. In today's data-driven world they seem somewhat mystical to catch and difficult to keep. So what's the best way to catch new customers - hook, line and sinker? And how can you use branded content to connect with existing customers at multiple touch points?

This week on The CMO Show, Mark and JV delve deep into the world of branded content when they're joined by Philip Otley, a partner at PwC's Experience Centre in Sydney. Philip sheds insight into the world of branded content, bringing his 20 years of experience in the marketing industry to talk about the importance of emotional connections with customers, the rise of data-driven marketing and how creativity still thrives.

"Back in the golden age of advertising, there was a cultural monopoly where a small number of channels would actually determine what you would be seeing," Philip told Mark and JV. "Yet the challenge now is we still need to pull those emotional strings but the volume, the number of channels, the competition within content, the amount of user-generated content is much, much higher."

Tune in to hear more of Philip's thoughts on how branded content and emotional engagement could help you increase customer retention...

It's the divide that every marketer knows about, but is so rarely broached in the workforce. So what is it about sales and marketing that has polarised for so long? And why does this dynamic continue to exist when the outcomes of sales and marketing are actually the same?

This week on The CMO Show it's all about sales versus marketing. Or is it? We will ask the hard questions in an attempt to work out how these two historically divided fields are colliding and changing. Ian Lowe, founder and CEO at eccoh joins Mark Jones and JV Douglas to chat about why the marketing department should listen to the sales department (and vice versa, of course).

With more than 20 years' experience in sales, Lowe's vision to pioneer a customer-centric sales revolution is reframing the sales and marketing space.

"There's definitely a bit of tension between sales and marketing and I think part of that tension is because of the internal competitive nature of sales organisations," Lowe said. "Typically sales people are taught sales skills and sales techniques to control the sales cycle to produce the results that they want to produce. Typically marketers aren't part of that sort of training."

Lowe's vision that the customer and their experience be central to the entire sales and marketing process is pioneering a new way of thinking in the Australian marketing industry. "I think sales is something that typically is fear based," he told Jones and Douglas. "Once we take away all that baggage and all that sort of negativity, people just are able to be themselves and be comfortable with who they are and flourish individually in their lives and in their businesses."

This week on The CMO Show, hosts Mark and JV are joined by dynamic duo Ronni Kahn, CEO and founder of OzHarvest, and Vince Frost, CEO and founder of the Frost* Collective.

Recounting the rise of OzHarvest as Australia's first food rescue organisation, Kahn delves into the details of her social entrepreneurialism, demonstrating the power of meaningful storytelling and the importance of design in brand reinvention – the latter leading to the business "marriage" of Kahn and Frost that's lasted four years and is still going strong.

"The turning point for OzHarvest was having Vince help us with our brand, look, collateral, and design because it took us stratospherically from where we were to where we are today," Kahn said.

With 25 years experience and a wealth of expertise in design thinking, Frost understands the power behind his art form.

"Design has so much power today and people recognise that power more than ever before," he said. "It's all about ideas. OzHarvest is an idea. How strong is that idea? The idea is phenomenally strong. I think that's the key thing. It's working out what's... what's the unique point of difference."

As one of the most linguistically diverse regions in the world, the Asia Pacific presents its own unique set of challenges.

In our opening episode of The CMO Show for 2016, Graham Fink, the Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy & Mather, China, talks all things creativity and how it can cross cultural borders.

"You can come back to basic human truths and that is the thing that does unite everyone. I mean, we all like going on holiday, we all like having some time off with our friends, we like going to a restaurant or a bar or having a drink and there's basic human truths where if you can tap into it, you resonate and it doesn't matter whether that ad is running in Brazil or whether it's running in China or London or the States, you know, people get it."