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A weekly wrap of the “must-know” developments in Marketing, Media, Agency and Technology for leaders and emerging leaders in the industry. Veteran industry journalist and Mi3 Executive Editor Paul McIntyre talks each week with guest marketers who are in the know on what matters at the nexus of marketing, agencies, media and technology. Powered mostly by Human Intelligence (HI).

  1. 5 HRS AGO

    ‘Age of the erratic’: How KFC’s Vanessa Rowed and Lyka’s Cam Luby are using MMM to navigate extreme volatility, bury dud products and replace them with better, faster

    Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large In the last 20 years, KFC CMO Vanessa Rowed has worked across retail, banking, and QSR. Right now, compound market volatility makes “predicting demand really difficult” says Rowed.“That’s the biggest shift I am seeing.” Boards and management are twitchy. “Everything is just happening faster. At the same time, there's less margin for error … The illusion of stability is gone … It’s just complete volatility and it's the speed of volatility that people are struggling with,” per Rowed. “People are moving from asking, ‘what's happened’, to ‘what are we going to do?’ Rowed is walking the talk on velocity – it took just six days for the QSR giant to have all of its business data ingested into a first model run of the Mutinex MMM and her teams are firing up. Mutinex CEO Henry Innis calls the broader market and civic state “the age of the erratic”. But flux presents opportunity for marketers: Organisations “are more willing to take risks to grow”, because, Innis says, they have little choice. There’s also opportunity for marketing to move upstream by mapping what consumer and market instability means for demand forecasting and P&L impacts – questions Innis says would previously have been directed to the CFO or financial planning & analysis teams. Rowed is seeing that play out: “I'm definitely seeing more risk taking now.” She says it’s born of necessity. “At McDonald’s 15 years ago, we had an 18-24 month innovation process. Now you can’t wait 18 months to launch a product – it's been launched by my competitors three times. TikTok food trends come and go overnight … You’re ready to launch, then someone launches two weeks before you do and you have to pivot – that happens more frequently than you would expect.” Hence wasting little time obtaining a sharper read on best growth bets. Rowed plugged into Mutinex upon joining KFC – with an initial model run completed in six days. “In past lives, that's taken us three, four months.” Ex-Optus and Google top marketer Cam Luby joined pet food subscription scale-up Lyka four months ago and likewise immediately tapped Mutinex. “When I was at Google, we would get back the equivalent of an MMM on a campaign six months after they finished ... ‘Okay, great. Thanks for the information. What do you expect us to do with it?’ … People were just busy writing history books, basically.” Today’s MMM approach is less archaic. “We've got the MMM updated to the end of March. We’re currently halfway through April, so the ability to make decisions about what we're going to do in the next few weeks based on what has happened in the last few weeks is … wildly different,” says Luby. From a media perspective, Luby’s using the MMM to determine lost causes, where growth is left on the table – and what increasing ad investment will deliver in hard sales. "[It provides] opportunity to recognise where your losers might be before they really hurt you. You can move to those a lot faster, and quickly optimise,” he says. “A big one for me – as in just this week – is understanding what possibly is left in the tank: If we needed to drive a greater business result than what we're currently seeing, what more opportunity is there? Just very quickly understanding what is the max efficiency of all the channels that we're using ... We've now got the confidence to make a decision. We're going from 30,000 a week to 40,000 a week. Let's action that. Here's what we expect out of it. It gives you that confidence to move incredibly quickly and then see the results flow through in a very short time.” He’s also using AI-powered functionality within Mutinex’s MAITE to unpick seasonality impacts on brand versus performance investments, plus handle reporting and presentation legwork ahead of board meetings: “I've got a board update that's coming up. So I said, ‘Can you please make me a table that does this, this, this, and this’ – copy paste, done. There's my table." As well as growth bets, KFC’s Rowed will tap MMM to cut new product insights faster – with a live example in the last quarter. “We launched a product and there were signs within a week that it wasn’t driving the incremental demand we needed. Historically, we would have waited until the end of that four-week promotional period, then analyse it three months later. But within one week, we said ‘this isn’t working’. We pivoted, reallocated media and creative, adjusted the plan mid-flight – and while we didn't hit the sales target that we needed to, we prevented loss. For me, that's just as important.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    1hr 2min

  2. 2 DAYS AGO

    The CMO Awards Podcast Episode 12: Compounding benefits – playing the long game in brand and campaign strategy

    Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing Numbers are increasingly stacking up that sticking to your brand narrative and creative platform knitting year after year pays outsized dividends. And it might just be the ticket to avoiding AI slop. But it takes a wealth of market sensibility, consumer contextual input, creativity, fresh thinking and strategic nous to sell in such bold work in the first place – then keep at it. It’s equally true tenure and commanding influence inside an organisation plays a sizeable role in orchestrating a longer-term marketing and brand game plan and builds buy-in for the long-term vision, not just the next execution. Two leading Australian CMOs have been over indexing on these compounding brand building and campaign benefits and have just celebrated five years of compounding success: Suncorp Executive General Manager of Brand and Customer Experience, Mim Haysom, and Tourism Tasmania CMO, Lindene Cleary. Suncorp’s ‘One House’ campaign was the most highly awarded work in the country in 2021/22, including a Cannes Lion Grand Prix for innovation. It’s the foundational piece of Suncorp’s multi-year brand platform shift from recovery to resilience, a consistent thread that’s since been realised through work such as ‘Resilience Road’, strengthening five existing homes in Rockhampton to better combat extreme weather. The third piece launched last year was ‘Haven’, a data-infused tool providing personalised advice on help owners understand their potential extreme weather risks and how to be more resilience down to the individual property level. While the brand and industry kudos have flowed, the work has importantly also driven change at the regulatory level. From $0.97 cents in every $1 going on recovery, the figure’s dropped to $0.93, seeing more money spent on prevention instead. “Four cents might not sound like much, but that's a big thing to move the dial on,” says Haysom. For Tourism Tasmania, debuting the ‘Come Down for Air’ platform, then commencing the multi-year ‘The Off Season’ program to drive visitation during the quieter winter months has also demonstrated similarly compounding benefits. It’s played a pivotal role in growing winter visitation year-on-year to record levels in 2025. It is a statewide initiative that requires the whole organisation and its stakeholders to move together. “There’s a reason we're doing it in the first place, and that’s to get people here. But it’s also making sure we’re getting the right people here who will actually come and spend money, value what we offer in Tasmania, respect what we offer and really understand it,” says Cleary, adding visitation is up 10 per cent since the launch in 2021.  Tune into this latest CMO Awards podcast episode to hear more about how these two dynamic CMOs sold, and kept the focus on, compounding brand building. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    1hr 1min

  3. 28 APR

    The CMO Awards Podcast Episode 11: Selling the unreliable: How to build belief in bold marketing

    Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing Patience of a saint, ‘glass half full’ mentality and commercially persuasive: These may not be the first things you put down on the list of attributes required in modern marketing leaders. But marketing today is as much about exercising influence internally as it is about delivering compelling creative and content externally. And exercising this muscle is never more important than when you’re trying to convince the organisation to back a bold new program of work, agree CMOs from Pernod Ricard, Tassal and Australian Unity. Marketers are often building the vision and executing against a future and growth prospect that doesn’t yet exist. At a time where pressures to do more with less is also palpable, that makes for a lot of stakeholder management and influence if you’re to truly sell in brand programs that actually move the needle long term over a short-term performance hit. Recognising you’re standing on a burning platform, then using it to create momentum for change, is a major ingredient – and that certainly helped Pernod Ricard’s Kristy Rutherford attain significant investment for the first Altos tequila brand partnership with the Australian Open in 2026. Having held an early leadership position in the burgeoning tequila category, the FMCG was “a bit shocked” to find itself declining in a growing category just 18 months later. “You either get on strongly at the first point in development of a category, and put yourself in the top few players, or forever chase your tail for the next 10, 20 years trying to get on that wave. We knew we had to do something quite significant,” Rutherford says. But that’s not just a case you can make on the day. “To begin with, we had to really work out strategically why it was important – and that brand awareness piece was critical for us,” she says. “But then it’s the internal sign-off piece – it’s engaging the entire people, both locally, but also through Singapore, Paris and globally, that you need to get on-board in order to say yes to a partnership like this. It probably took us a good year end-to-end to do that process.” Getting what’s historically been a farming-led business focused on functional benefits to understand the power of brand to unlock greater value was the big task at hand for Tassal’s Matt Vince. His tools included providing data-driven benchmarks to support the argument, better articulating the drivers of brand power, as well aligning the c-suite around common language and a strategic mission of becoming an ‘iconic’ brand. “When I joined the business, that [brand thinking] was the lens missing – it was all farming-led. But how do we – before we even think about farming it – understand who is going to consume it, where’s it going to go, what’s the occasion we’re trying to obtain three years prior versus as it’s comes out of the water, when we’re then a bit rushed? That certainly straightened us up,” he says.  It’s been the lack of growth Jee Moon has leveraged across her varied career to drive bold programs forward. “That’s been the fire I’ve run towards across the likes of Best & less, OPSM and even Nuix,” the CMO says. “The burning platform was super clear: The mandate for marketing is often in these business transformations to lead and create a vision of what can be, while the business works to line up towards that. In order to achieve that, you have to buy the hearts and minds of the people ‘within’ first, before you create that impact externally. “That’s always been my approach: To find the language that resonates internally and motivates and inspires. You're asking for a lot from people who predate you, have lived through the decline and have been wearied trying lots of different things … So to find something that motivates them, to then get them to dig deep again and try one more time is what’s key.” Listen to the full CMO Awards episode here. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    1hr 2min

  4. 23 APR

    ‘Why hammer at an LLM spending tokens’: Pega’s Jonathan Tanner warns on AI hype; banks pivot to rules, context and real-time decisioning as CX, fraud prevention, and lifetime value collide

    Host: Andrew Birmingham, Editor - CX | Martech | Ecom Banks, telcos, and insurers are rethinking how they engage customers, shifting away from mass marketing campaigns toward real-time decisioning systems designed to respond to individual behaviour, according to Jonathan Tanner, a senior executive at Pegasystems. Tanner said many organisations still struggle with fragmented customer experiences, where interactions across channels are disconnected and force users to repeat themselves. “They get a very jarring experience,” he said, pointing to structural issues such as product silos and outdated segmentation models that fail to reflect how customers’ needs change over time. The emerging alternative is a decisioning approach that continuously evaluates customer context, including behaviour, signals and lifetime value, to determine the next best action. Unlike traditional campaigns, which Tanner described as a “blast approach” delivering only marginal returns, these systems aim to personalise interactions in the moment, sometimes choosing not to sell at all. “What we’re talking about here is a very different approach,” Tanner said. “It may not even be a selling decision at that point in time… but over time what that does is it builds that NPS, it builds that customer connection.” The shift requires a willingness to invest and the change. Firms are committing to significant investments annually over several years to build the underlying infrastructure. While returns can reach “multiple hundred percent,” Tanner said the gains depend on sustained investment and organisational change, not just technology deployment. “You’re not going to just wake up, implement this technology, and then suddenly discover that everything’s great,” he said, noting that many firms underestimate the effort required to align people, processes and systems. Artificial intelligence is central to the transformation, but Tanner warned against treating it as a single solution. Instead, organisations need to combine multiple approaches, including rules-based systems, statistical models and generative AI, each suited to different tasks. “If I’m making a decision that’s backed up by a set of very well-defined rules, why would I be hammering away at an LLM spending tokens… and getting a probabilistic decision?” he said. Deterministic systems, he added, remain critical for real-time execution, compliance and auditability. The stakes extend beyond marketing. Financial institutions are also using decisioning platforms to combat fraud, which is rising alongside real-time payments. Faster transactions benefit customers but also give fraudsters less time to be detected. “One of the best ways of preventing it is to add just a little bit of friction into the process,” Tanner said, citing examples such as delaying payments to new accounts. More broadly, Tanner said the most effective use cases focus on building trust rather than driving immediate sales. Examples include helping customers access government benefits or providing proactive support during financial hardship or natural disasters. “The obvious immediate reaction is, well, how can that possibly be a benefit to the bank?” he said. “But of course… it’s building customer loyalty… it’s building connection.” Looking ahead, Tanner expects the industry to move beyond the current hype cycle around AI and focus instead on practical outcomes. “I’d like to see us moving to it being more of a system-based conversation,” he said, where value is measured not by the technology itself but by the decisions it enables in real time. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    46 min

  5. 16 APR

    Family back as the new black: World chaos, kids’ killer schedules and personal screen rabbit holes trigger cross-generation co-viewing surge to fastest-growing audience segment for 2026

    Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large Ryan Gosling is not a goose - at least on which feature films to front. His new movie, Project Hail Mary, from Amazon-owned Hollywood studio MGM, has blasted to this year’s best opener at the Australian box office at the time of its release. It’s pulling mum, dad, kids and even the grandparents into a co-viewing experience they no longer do much of but want - more than brands imagine. Yes, even the kids are saying that. How weird. Social researcher Matt Sandwell from The Owl Insights argues the potent and polarising forces of personal device proliferation, shrinking shared living spaces in homes (down 10 per cent collectively in a decade) and killer kids schedules – three-in-four kids under 10, have before or after school activities – has thrust shared family moments into “rarefied air”. And that’s before the uncertainty and craziness of multiple geopolitical flashpoints and civic restlessness is accounted for. The irony in Sandwell’s latest research is that every generation wants more shared family moments but struggle to land them – 16-year-olds may be a global exception. Mid-teen angst aside, it’s a serendipitous trendline for Val Morgan cinema boss Guy Burbidge. “This will be our fastest growing audience segment this year,” he says. “Last year has seen some huge numbers off the family unit coming back into cinema.  Five of the top 10 titles at the box office last year were “all family” he says and family co-viewing experiences at the movies will lift 25 per cent in 2026 because Hollywood has clocked the sentiment and a string of top family viewing franchises are slated for the coming 12 months and beyond – think Super Mario, Minions, Toy Story and some. Val Morgan commissioned Sandwell to go deep on the qualitative aspects of shared family moments – and he unearthed some gold in collective sentiment. “So, the kind of big moral of the story for us in the research is these moments are harder to get than ever but the desire for them is greater than ever and cinema is one of the last and best places where people can get it. They recognise the benefits of connection, immersion and that kind of emotional depth that comes with the family.” Burbidge is already seeing huge upside for some brands starting to tap the social need – retail, consumer goods and auto among them. But there’s still a lag for a market at large now hitched to “blunt reach, high level demographics [i.e. grocery buyers] and cost conversations,” Burbidge says. “At the moment, the market on the family trend is probably not thinking as deeply as we need to. They are bankable moments that the family understands. It’s providing some confidence and security in the world of algorithms about what is trusted. We’re seeing that audience on fire.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    24 min

  6. 7 APR

    The CMO Awards Podcast Episode 10: Recasting marketing teams and capabilities in an AI world

    Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing CMOs have always sought to build best-practice marketing teams – it’s one of the first things they’ll have on the to-do list when they take up a new gig. But what does the marketing team of the future even look like in a world where AI is disrupting everything? How do you as a CMO chart a path through the changing AI landscape as organisations continue to pile on pressure to leverage AI tools, and as headcount cuts and productivity efficiencies become an even more expected output of AI adoption? CMOs from Unicef, RAA and Accenture Australia, joined by Adobe ANZ head of Gen AI content and commerce, took to the mics in the latest CMO Awards podcast series, powered by Mi3, to unpack how they’re beginning to recast roles and build AI fluency, while managing the very real fear of AI existing across teams. Accenture’s Carrie Smith says marketing team was ground zero for adopting AI agents from optimisation to entire workflow remodelling. Not an early journey to go on, it started with centralised planning, transparency and a focus on the marketing discipline first – not the tech – to understand which parts are difficult across workflows to get to great outcomes, she says. RAA’s Michael Healy cites the first aha moment when the team saw what AI creative production was going to achieve. The second catalyst was adopting enterprise-grade Claude inside the organisation. “Very quickly, I formed a view as a marketing leader that with AI, one of a few things is going to happen. One, you'll get the tools in the hands of the people, and you'll figure out how to use it together, and thus, generate competitive advantage. Or two, you will eventually have a consultancy in with your CEO or board saying, this is how your marketing team should be using AI, and if they're not, you're already behind, which I have openly said to my team is a very problematic place to find ourselves in.” Giving people time to experiment was critical at Unicef, but equally, a CEO-wide mandate to not shrink with AI and instead, drive incremental revenue proved transformative. It’d led to temporarily bringing the full technology team into the marketing remit to unite the technical experts with the marketers using those tools and driving those business needs. “It's been a big learning curve on both sides, and it's not a permanent structure, but I think it will leave a deeper way of working and understanding between the two teams,” says Libby Hodgson. When it comes to where AI is having greatest early impact in marketing, Adobe’s Sheerien Salindera points to content supply chain efficiencies as the first unlock. “We call it content economics, and the throughput of a piece of content, the ability to remix it, send it off for legal approval, bring it back all of those sort of steps and hand offs that used to take a long time, making that more automated,” she says. “But the next piece is getting the AI to not just give you speed to market … but really embedding the AI on your brand, on your tone of voice, on your creative and bringing your own IP and brand models to life.” Tune into this highly informative, relevant marketing conversation here.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    53 min

  7. 26 MAR

    Biggest consumer trust, sentiment shift since Covid; Gen Z leads as AI, deep fake content sows doubt – brand safety tools block swing to safer sources

    Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large AI’s impact is rapidly eroding public trust in content, including the vast volumes originated by brands.Gen Z is leading the public concern, typified by confusion over what is real and what has been blurred, blended and bent by nefarious AI operatives with hot prompts.At stake for marketers and corporate affairs in an independently commissioned study called News Nation, is escalating consumer doubt over the provenance and authenticity of the content they consume – and around the brands linked to it. It holds as much for brand-produced content and owned channels as the content from others they pay to place their ads around.The impact for brands is seismic – VaynerMedia’s Gary “Vee” Vaynerchuk predicts in as little as two years, “we're not going to believe a single video on the internet, not one”. (It’s a pressing problem for a content house and media buyer like Vaynerchuk who invests big client ad dollars in social video.)The war in Iran offers the latest example, where graphics from a video game have been shared as real footage and viewed 70 million times.The Gulf conflict has triggered a new flight to trusted sources – people seeking out truth from news sites. Audiences are spiking – particularly younger Australians, according to the latest ThinkNewsBrands data, which suggests one of the biggest shifts in behaviour and sentiment since Covid is now underway.Yet advertisers are largely absent on the soft assets they say matter most – reputation and trust. Already they’re missing Gen Z’s return to selective news environments, in part because they deploy blunt brand safety tools that suppress and blacklist content and environments considered unsafe for their brands to be alongside. Their customers, particularly the younger set, meanwhile, pile into content they feel safer to trust.Case in point? Major brands blocked adverts on Time Magazine’s Taylor Swift cover story because suppression lists detected the word “feminist”; likewise, the same kill switch was deployed for a Time article on the James Webb telescope – because it mentioned the “violent death of a star”. Advertisers also missed out on surging Wimbledon and Olympics audiences because of blocked words like ‘shot’, ‘smash’ and ‘killer technique’. The Trade Desk’s VP – ANZ James Bayes, News Corp Australia’s Laura Maxwell and Nine’s Ashleigh Thomas suggest marketers and media buyers align with real, in-market customers and audience behaviour – and challenge the commercial incentives of brand safety firms whose fees and revenues on these products are linked to volume and the appearance of good governance. Brands also need to question whether they can afford to keep pouring money into walled gardens dominated by AI-created content. Especially when nobody believes it is real, nobody trusts it, and ultimately, if nobody worth targeting watches. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    36 min

  8. 23 MAR

    Australia’s $6bn dull media tax: Quest for the Cost Per Meaningless Thousand, cheap reach sees brands sacrificing attention and impact, culminating in a 12X efficiency gap, finds Dr Karen Nelson-Field

    Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing Last year, one of the world’s leading minds on attention, Amplified founder Dr Karen Nelson-Field, set out to put a figure on the eye-watering cost of dull media. The job followed on from the esteemed Dr Peter Field and Eatbigfish consultancy lead, Adam Morgan’s original work ascertaining the cost associated with dull creative. The media work was based on attention volume – a metric that compares how much attention an ad actually gets versus how much is theoretically possible (the total time in view). Globally, the tariff exposed was huge: US$198bn per year is being spent to make up for shortfall of dull media choices as attention collapses tenfold and the mental availability opportunity is lost. That’s an average of $0.43 in every dollar spent. And it’s even higher than the $189bn wasted on dull creative per the former research. Now for the first time, the true cost of dull media has been revealed in Australia, and yep, it’s equally shocking: $6bn in annual wasted media budget. That’s over 20% of the nearly $30 billion Australian marketers reportedly spent on advertising in 2025. The numbers behind the dollar headline are stark: Very dull media makes advertising up to 12× less efficient, meaning every dollar has to work dramatically harder to generate the same outcome. Only 38 per cent of viewers are reaching the crucial 2.5-second memory threshold – the point when advertising is encoding in memory, per Dr Nelson-Field – from the media choices brands are marketing right now. That means brand impact falls 35%, weakening brand growth – something marketers cannot afford to do. “These are sticker shock moments for people because … we're not codifying the value, we're codifying the loss. And it makes people really gasp, quite frankly, because they don't really realise it at an aggregate level,” Dr Field says. “What that technically means is you need the same amount of money again, Australia, to get the same outcomes in non-dull if you continue to advertise in extremely or very dull media.” An underlying conundrum is too many are chasing the cheapest CPM and reach, thinking that’s both efficient and effective, when in fact it’s an illusion: Too often the brand is sacrificing being seen to simply being served, says Dr Nelson-Field. For Peita Pacey, chief strategy and behaviour change officer, Hearts & Science Australia, part of the Omnicom Media Group, Dr Field’s data finally puts a price on something many planners, strategists and marketers have felt intuitively. “This is not about vilifying different channels, just to be really clear, it’s actually about understanding the role very specifically of channels in order delivering to specific objectives,” she says. “It’s also not about necessarily chasing a new metric. We have a number of different metrics we use when we're planning and when we're negotiating, and maybe some of them aren't as fit for purpose as they used to be, because we have more data now. But it's really about giving us the tools in our armour so we can go and more effectively plan to cognition and think about human processing, rather than just exposure or opportunity to see.” Val Morgan MD, Guy Burbidge, goes further, arguing obsession with reach and CPMs has led too many down the garden path to media choices that do not pay off. “I don't think it's any secret that something like $0.75 cents or $0.80, and the dollar is going into the big platforms. That's really what the problem is,” he says. “What we see is proxies like reach and CPM overtaking some of the other more important and more valuable proxies, like outcomes, windows of time – what we're all trying to actually deliver as marketers. An awful lot of channels, ours included, are being debased to those two very simple things.” Listen to the full conversation here. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    42 min
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About

A weekly wrap of the “must-know” developments in Marketing, Media, Agency and Technology for leaders and emerging leaders in the industry. Veteran industry journalist and Mi3 Executive Editor Paul McIntyre talks each week with guest marketers who are in the know on what matters at the nexus of marketing, agencies, media and technology. Powered mostly by Human Intelligence (HI).

Information

  • Creator
    Mi3 & iHeart Podcasts Australia
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    425
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Mi3
  • Show Website
    Mi3 Audio Edition

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