Mi3 Audio Edition

SCA has spent four years building its uber-app LiSTNR from idea to the fulcrum of its audio business. It’s got 2.25m logged-in users, knows their postcodes – handy ahead of the federal election – what they listen to and what they might want to hear next. Kelly says acquisition is no longer core focus – “we’ve got the base we wanted to get” – and SCA is moving to kill churn, now at a record low.

“We’re approaching 70 per cent retention per month,” says Kelly. “For every percentage point of reduction in churn, we are seeing about a half million dollar increase in revenues on platform on an annual basis.”

Personalisation and discovery are powering those churn reductions while boosting time spent listening, per Kelly.

Next he sees massive opportunity in regional markets to take that further – for SCA, its advertisers and other radio businesses. Kelly points to a streaming deal it struck with Victoria broadcaster ACE Radio as a template for a triple win.

Bringing the broadcaster’s streams into LiSTNR, says Kelly, gave ACE an incremental revenue stream while boosting inventory and audiences for SCA. “They've seen about a 30 per cent increase in their audience levels listening on LiSTNR,” per Kelly. “And with the introduction of ACE, we’ve seen about a 20 per cent increase in monthly listening on our platform, which is pretty incredible.”

Plus, SCA is driving those new audiences into its other programs and podcasts, meaning bigger numbers to sell, at higher CPMs.

“We'll be speaking to other broadcasters, and particularly the regional network groups, to see if we can provide that service to them,” says Kelly.

“We are the largest regional audio business in Australia. 73 per cent of the regional audience comes through either SCA-owned or represented – stations like ACE – so we've got great scale. We haven't yet tapped into that regional audience in a meaningful way. But that's the next opportunity for LiSTNR.

Plus, regional consumption levels per user outpace their metro counterparts – and Kelly thinks they are a chink in the global platforms’ armour.

“The big digital companies, the Metas, haven't played in that regional space. So our ability to work with major blue chip companies to actually access those particular customers – the appetite is insatiable. We can't get enough inventory from those regional markets, which is why the ACE partnership has been so successful. There's a huge opportunity.”

Host: Paul McIntyre | Executive Editor

Media agency holding company CEOs are openly acknowledging the importance of arbitrage-based principal trading to their business models – and it’s spreading rapidly out of digital display into TV, audio, digital out of home, connected TVs and beyond. Former UM Global Chief Media Officer Joshua Lowcock, who left the IPG-owned media agency network last year to head up media at US group Quad, is bleak on the distorting market effects of holding companies buying media for themselves and on-selling to advertiser clients with handsome mark-ups - often in ‘bundled’ products which blend a small quota of quality inventory with the tonnage more in low value, low quality ad placements. “Both agencies and clients have built themselves a prison that they can't get out of,” says Lowcock.

And agencies resisting principal models are increasingly disadvantaged – they risk being dragged into “financial engineering” too. Per Lowcock, “somewhere in the myriad of complexity of a holding company, I can tell you it's occurring and a large armoured vehicle with boatloads of cash is pulling up somewhere and unloading it into a holding company … well, it's probably more electronically transferred.”

Should anyone care that agencies are finding ways to make money that procurement-driven clients are in effect incentivising by refusing to pay fees for service – especially if the media bought and on-sold arguably does the job?

“It's not doing the job because clients are not getting the media that they should be getting to drive the ultimate business performance,” Lowcock argues. "They’re getting the media that drives the agency's bottom line,” per Lowcock. He describes it as a nutritionist advising a diet of “junk food”, with clients at risk of morbid obesity.

Indy shop Media by Mother, headed by former GroupM exec Dave Gaines, says he doesn’t do principal media deals or arbitrage but “it’s surprisingly hard to get people to align on business success outcomes” versus the short-term allure of trading off not paying media agency fees for the hidden costs in mark-ups and tech and data fees typically wrapped into principal media agreements. Moreover, Gaines says retail media is making the situation worse with retailers becoming media owners and seeking their own preferential deals. While traditional media owners complain about principal media trading eating their margin and agency mark-ups making them appear expensive, Gaines says the truth is, “a lot of the big TV networks don't like to have to deal directly with clients. They're happy to offload a lot of this media inventory because then they haven't got to worry about selling it”.

Either way, few owners will complain publicly for fear of retribution, i.e. being cut out of group spend, per Nick Manning, non-executive chairman of Media Marketing Compliance and adviser to peak US advertiser body the ANA. Manning sees principal media’s rise leading holdcos to becoming just the same as the walled gardens whose business models they are trying to emulate.

“They're all building AI tools that will do creative production, media distribution and analytics together in one in one box. It will be a black box, and clients won't be able to tell a lot about what's going on in there, but it will be an arbitrage-led model.”

Quad’s Lowcock says he’s happy to tell any finance, procurement, marketing, legal and internal auditing department “all the answers” as to what goes on and how to fix it – and does just that in this podcast.

Four years ago, Flight Centre’s global CMO Megan Henderson was tasked with leading a sweeping restructure of Flight Centre’s worldwide marketing operation – centralising five teams into one while overhauling its martech stack and contracts and simultaneously finding efficiencies and growth.

Daunting. But Henderson knew that Fight Centre’s 60 million annual unique online visitors, broad customer comms channels yielding rich first party data plus circa 400 physical stores could help drive the business into fresh territory – adjacent travel market services beyond flights – while generating revenue via owned media packaged and sold to new and existing brand partners.

Enter owned media valuations specialist, Sonder, which dived deep to benchmark and calculate the value of each and all of Flight Centres channels and assets – and highlight where it could go next as an owned media network.

Now Henderson aims to make Flight Centre a global case study in how customers, data, physical and digital footprint combine to drive growth, revenue, profit and cross-funnel, cross-category expansion – while landing new paying partners. It’s now rolling out screens across all stores to boost brand building capability and link it through to first party data-powered conversion.

“Having Sonder shine a light on what we could be doing with our digital screens has really fast-tracked the process for us to make sure that our stores have a minimum of two digital screens that I can use for brand advertising with all kinds of partners,” says Henderson.

She’s now ensuring partners think of Flight Centre “as a mass market retailer with millions of customers online and in store… and see that as an opportunity that they can't get with a standard media buying mix.”

Sonder co-founder, Jonathan Hopkins, says that’s the key takeout for businesses currently leaving money on the table by overlooking their owned media channels and assets:

“There is vast opportunity out there. If you have a website, store network, an email program with a sizeable customer base, then you're more than halfway there to building an owned media proposition to leverage through your own marketing and with brand partners,” says Hopkins. “It’s all about seizing the opportunity.”

Mi3’s most read story of 2024 came via an Oxford University marketing scientist’s peer-reviewed paper underlining precisely why not all reach is equal. Based off analysis of 1,000-plus campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and Wavemaker, the data shows optimising for reach alone rarely tallies with business growth. In fact, in almost all cases, per Saïd Business School Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz, it delivers “really mediocre outcomes”.

That’s the collective market failure News Australia aims to address – at least the start of it, with ‘Engaged Reach’, which counters the current industry bias for chasing fleeting user volumes for shallow scale. News Australia’s Lou Barrett, Dean La Rosa and Jess Gilby unpack how it’s already working for Mars Petcare, Chemist Warehouse, Inspiring Vacations and Subway, the latter a benchmark win for the publisher in QSR after Subway’s CMO said News Australia’s custom-built, integrated program outplayed the big tech platforms and landed the entire Subway initiative. The “all assets” rollout rapidly notched 3 per cent sales growth after a single campaign for Subway.

The trio also underline why News Australia’s partnership with free streaming service Tubi – Barrett aims to rapidly double its monthly audience towards 3 million – means it can map buyer intent signals from the content audiences are reading to the shows they are watching. Plus tell advertisers where their best targets can be found around the clock, what they are interested in and how to engage them to maximise results.
News Australia feeds circa 2.5 billion monthly intent signals into its CDP, enabling marketers to target audiences across 7,000 segments, using AI to hit sweet spots that might not be immediately obvious, per La Rosa. “It will forecast, it will understand the size, the scale, the relevance.” As Gilby underlines: “Everyone's got data, but it's about how you use it, how you apply it, and how you can be creative with it … We’re going from efficiently reaching audiences to effectively engaging them.”

Somewhere in Oxford, a professor will be nodding in agreement.

Welcome to the first in our CMO Awards podcast series, powered by Mi3. This limited-episode series dives into the key topics and issues making up how marketing as a function, and its leaders, contribute to growth. To do this, we’re engaging in a select number of conversations with industry luminaries, CMO Awards judges, former CMO50 winners, current and former marketing and customer leaders and more as we lead into, then recognise the winners of our inaugural CMO Awards on 7 May. This podcast is brought to you by platinum CMO Awards 2025 sponsor, Adobe.

Kicking us off to talk about how marketing elevates its stature in the eyes of the CEO and board are three of this year’s CMO Awards judges: Former Westfield CMO and non-exec board director, John Batistich; former Audi chief marketing and customer officer and now non-exec director, Nikki Warburton; and executive and board recruitment partner and one-time Kimberly Clark CMO, Michele Phillips. All three have the unique ability to see it from both sides: As former marketers plying the trade, and now as non-executive board directors or in board and CEO-level recruitment.

Channel and audience fragmentation, too much data, relentless transformation across organisations, dour economic conditions, ever-more pressure to prove marketing’s worth, too much efficiency while trying to find more effectiveness and ever-higher demands for technology competence – these are just a few of the things CMOs are navigating. For many, it can feel like they don’t have enough control of what’s happening to their function while they look to execute their craft with excellence. And admitting something was less than a success feels like certain doom. 

View it from the other side, however, and you get a rather different picture of what marketing needs to do to win respect. CEOs and Boards are needing to do more with less to find profitable growth, investor and financial markets are relentless, and business, cyber and market risk factors have multiplied. These execs want marketing leaders who can make hard and strategic choices, and judge them as much on what they choose to do as much as what they say no to. All while telling a realistic but progressive story of customer and market engagement.

This series is hosted by Nadia Cameron, associate publisher and editor of marketing at Mi3, plus program leader for the CMO Awards.