Mi3 Audio Edition

Mi3 & iHeart Podcasts Australia
  • 4.6 (36)
  • Business News
  • Updated Fortnightly

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. 11 hrs ago

    Retail Media Builds Bridges: Canada’s leading department store Holt Renfrew on how marketing and merch alignment powers growth in demand, CX and profit

    Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large Not all retailers are victims of scale. North America is pouring billions of dollars into retail media, largely sponsored search and digital screens, making giants like Amazon, Kroger and Walmart richer and other retailers chasing scraps. But luxury department store chain Holt Renfrew has carved out a higher-end niche in Canada, and its physical-plus-digital approach is pulling in new advertisers like Mercedes, as well as taking a larger share of endemic advertiser budgets as they bid to build brand and drive performance in a single hit. Demand for both physical and digital inventory is running hot, helped partly by Holt Renfrew’s retail media operation three years ago moving to its own P&L under trade marketing boss, Ashlee Nickel – whose 16 years at the firm also span merchandise, buying and vendor marketing. It means she speaks the merchandise team’s language as well as that of brands selling through the store. That’s critical to avoid “conflict”, says Sonder’s Jonathan Hopkins. “Media has been used as merch’s sweetie jar for decades, and that entrenched behaviour doesn't change overnight.” He argues retailers will increasingly struggle with their retail media ambitions unless they “create a cross-functional team with people from merch, marketing, finance, media,” all pulling in the same direction. Even then, he says, “give and take” is a pre-requisite. “Pick your battles would be my recommendation.” Since the shift from top line co-op to standalone, Holt Renfrew’s profitable media revenue has changed how every program is priced, packaged, and pitched to vendors. In all, it’s packing 245 distinct media formats, all evaluated by Sonder. It will soon have another – but given Holt Renfrew’s store environment makes even Apple’s look cluttered, a design challenge looms as the retailer mulls how to roll out a screen network that doesn’t damage that aesthetic. Sonder’s Angus Frazer isn’t worried – subtlety is key, he says. “Retail media is not an excuse to ignore CX. Done well, it's an opportunity to improve CX and deliver on broader business objectives.” I.e. “highly profitable commercialisation”. Trade marketing boss Nickel is now hunting more of them – in places where few retailers have thought to monetise. She’s already added in-store beauty carts and cafe menu takeovers to the inventory stack, and has brands queuing up for its in-store Montreal F1 Grand Prix weekend experience – and Holt Renfrew doesn’t even have an official partnership. “One of the biggest opportunities in the space right now is looking beyond the obvious,” says Nickel. “When you start thinking differently about the retail environment, there are often opportunities that don't fit within a traditional media place.” Outside of physical environments – and despite huge digital retail media spend, many are overlooking powerful channels – particularly email, say Sonder’s Frazer and Hopkins, leaving easy money on the table. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    39 min

  2. 10 June

    Coles ‘Down Down’ blockbuster not dead yet says brainchild Ted Horton after ACCC wins lawsuit over ‘deceptive’ price spikes - but agency economics breaking, attention metrics ‘pseudo science’, ad awards still warp industry

    Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large For the shopping public, Coles’ ‘Down Down’ has stuck like super glue for more than a decade – while loathed by adland’s elite. They’ll be mostly thrilled on what Horton – Down Down’s creator – figures is likely now in a rare and wide-ranging interview and podcast. Think rest and hibernation, not a Down Down burial.   Horton ran four winning election campaigns for former Prime Minister John Howard and is characteristically frank on the effect the Down Down campaign had on him and his Big Red agency – it spawned a new shop BRX with co-founders Bridget Cleary and Marty Hungerford - to snap the straightjacket it created for him and Big Red. BRX is now being circled by potential suitors.  Horton is the last old adman standing – at 74 he’s seen-off John Singleton and Mojo’s Mo and Jo. And while very uncool today, he remains adamant good jingles etch into consumer memory encoding faster than fancy, award- winning creative. It’s why he still warns on the warping dangers of advertising awards in the lead-up to the international Cannes gongfest in two weeks, proffering an ego-busting encounter with his then boss, Mojo’s Alan “Mo” Morris on why. "While you and all your mates are sitting around in a circle telling each other how good you are, your mum and dad are sitting at home singing my ads,” Horton’s recounts with a dense injection of Mo expletives. He’s never been the same since. But Horton casts wider than jingles and Down Down, to the “pseudo science” of attention metrics, “insecure” creatives and a pause-for-thought observation that the uncool craft of catalogue copywriting in the 80s and 90s has striking parallels to what works in social media today. It’s those craft skills, which BRX has captured, templated and automated, that is now partly why global holding companies and others are said to be circling. Here’s the thoughts - and confessions - of adland’s oldest creative. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    1hr 13min

  3. 3 June

    CMO Awards Podcast Episode 14: The cheeky challengers: CMO winners from amaysim, Australian Pork, Mountain Culture Beer Co on breaking the marketing and creative mould

    Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing They all work for cheeky challenger brands in their respective categories, they’re not afraid of doing unconventional things – and now they’ve all been recognised as top 20 CMOs of the Year for committing to innovative and distinctly different approaches to realising growth ambitions at hand. In this latest CMO Awards podcast episode, we’re looking at how marketers ‘break the mould’ by exploring three of our most compelling CMO submissions this year: amaysim’s Pete MacGregor (#7), Mountain Culture Beer Co’s Brad Firth (11th and SMB CMO of the Year), and Australian Pork’s Rob Farmer (#13). Each of these marketing chiefs shares how they’ve respectively been tackling ‘big M marketing’. For Farmer, it’s about bold brand decisions to get pork on the fork. To realise this, he’s leveraging the triumvirate of creative, commercial and science to challenge rusted-on cooking habits while also tackling confronting – and commonly misunderstood – perceptions of the industry head-on. For Firth, listening to research enough – but not too much – has led to unusually creative product innovations such as a fruit hazy, defiantly full-strength beer inspired by hallucinogenic insights and the consumer’s desire for enhanced experiences. The bold bet has paid off: Juice Trip represented 20 per cent of volume sales in its first year thanks to its talkability and differentiated approach. Over at amaysim, meanwhile, MacGregor is going all-in on AI creative to gain velocity, speed and differentiation in market, while pursuing simplicity and responsiveness inside the challenger telco brand. He’s also resetting the dialogue around what it means to be ‘courageous customer champions’, getting into the weeds of customer insight and strategy, then owning the fixes in a way that’s building connection and cultural buy-in.  For all three, ‘courageous marketing’ comes down to a belief in – and then being accountable to – the bold strategies they’ve set out to deliver. “There’s so much noise, there are so many inputs, there are so many opinions everywhere you turn. I find it really easy to start to second guess, see things watered down, and even just get distracted,” comments Firth. “So for me, a really courageous marketer is just one who sticks to the strategy, rides it, and then obviously learns from it.” Likewise, Farmer believes in “playing your own game”. “Having the confidence to stay focused on doing not what you would love to be doing because it's not in strategy. I think that that is the most courageous thing to do – hold the line, then hold it over the long term.” Equally, MacGregor backs conviction over consensus. “You’ve got to really back yourself, whatever role you have, as you’re in that role because someone believed in you and trusted you,” he says. “Know what your internal superpower is. If you really believe in someone, whether it be a strategy, idea of whatever it is, you have to really back yourself.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    1hr 5min

  4. 25 May

    CMO Awards Podcast Episode 13: Combatting the belief marketing is a discretionary spend

    Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing The Iconic CMO, Joanna Robinson, describes commercial marketers as “customer obsessed, commercially disciplined, always data-informed and strategically curious”. Former Naked Wines CEO and Unilever marketing leader, Paul Connell, says it’s about being highly accountable, “and also being someone who’s in for the business outside of their lane”. And TPG CMO, Bec Darley adds another all-important word to the list: Profit. “This is we know how much of the net cash that’s falling to the bottom line. Is it a term you’d expect a commercial marketer to have? Absolutely. Is it one we see a lot of? No … If marketing is truly to be seriously among our c-suite and board, understanding profit has to be part of the language of the commercial marketer,” Darley argues. There’s absolutely no doubt marketing leaders are being asked to be more accountable for commercial outcomes. Yet they continue to carry a ball and chain around their ankles: Marketing as discretionary spend on the P&L, and the first thing to be cut when times are tight. So how do you successfully reframe marketing as revenue, not cost, and ensure you’re fiscally responsible while pursuing the growth game? These three marketing luminaries joined us on the mics for an exploration of the strategies – formal and informal – they’ve pursued to embed an expansive mentality around marketing that beats those tired perceptions of marketing and brand investment as a lag on the balance sheet. From getting to the heart of unit economics, and truly understanding what creates value inside a business, to balancing the logic of brand – increasingly possible through tools like MMM and tech – with the magic and behavioural psychology informing why marketers do what they do, through to inviting CFOs and CEO into the pitch to see the power of creativity, these three provide a wealth of insight into how marketers win over stakeholders. We also explore key tenets of meeting the leadership team and board on their terms, from the language required to connect, to problem solving, plus tactics for structuring teams and capability to make the most of cross-functional ways of working. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    1hr 1min

  5. 7 May

    ‘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

  6. 5 May

    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

  7. 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

  8. 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
See All (429)

Trailer

4.6
out of 5
36 Ratings

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
    429
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Mi3
  • Show Website
    Mi3 Audio Edition

You Might Also Like