Mi3 Audio Edition

When experienced B2B marketer and former agency planner Taz Bareham decided to take on the title of 'Fractional CMO' three years ago, there were a handful of people on LinkedIn using the moniker. Fast forward to today, and the supply pipeline has grown to thousands, even outpacing solidly growing demand for these forms of executives.

Why? Better work / life balance, avoiding burnout, a desire to stick with the craft of marketing instead of moving into non-exec or CEO roles, plus more opportunity to try another category and industry are just some of the reasons experienced marketers are being lured in.

“I get back to go to back to the joy of being a CMO versus sinking under the pressure of being a CMO,” Bareham says.

There are plenty of reasons for why businesses are turning to this emerging executive gig economy too. Cost efficiency is inevitably one, and Deloitte has noted companies can save up to 50 per cent by getting in fractional execs over full-time equivalents [FTE]. It’s also a way for scale-ups to access marketing and other senior leadership talent they otherwise couldn’t afford, and have the helping hand of specialist or generalist expertise they don’t have on the existing team.

“In that tech space, where I focus, words like profitability and runway are now back in vogue after 10 years of kind of being in the wilderness,” says Zac King, founder of The Fractional Exec Community. “The ability to pick up a senior exec or senior marketer who's been there, done that, got the scars to prove it, and to do it in a really flexible and targeted way just makes sense.”

Then there’s the flexibility – fractional execs can be a liquid workforce, something to turn on and off, to help build or support strategy and teams as an organisation matures, operationalise capability, go-to-market expertise and get to commercial impact quicker. It’s certainly how US-based founding partner of CMO Syndicate, Shayne de La Force, and his army of 21 CMOs across six countries operate.

And in marketing specifically, complexity and breadth of remit can make it incredibly difficult to find a CMO who can do all you need. It’s why Tumbleturn launched its fractional CMO service in 2024.

“What we found is the remit so broad, you have either very strong, strategic CMO, or generally, more often than not, a strong operational CMO,” says partner, Anthony Gregorio. “But rarely do you find that unicorn who is very comfortable playing in both spaces.”

In this episode, hosted by Mi3’s Nadia Cameron, we take a deep dive into the real-life experience of being a fractional exec, what it means for the wider marketing fraternity, and how dominant fractional executive workforces will become.

The upside of market mix modelling (MMM) is it “certainly helps with credibility,” when proving marketing’s return on investment, per Optus consumer marketing boss Cam Luby. The downside is that it spits out a shedload of data. Hence Mutinex combining its real-time MMM platform with an AI-powered co-pilot called Hendren to hep marketers more easily interrogate and interpret the data with prompts – and shortcuts next best actions. Optus’ marketing team is already putting it to work.

“The MMM gives us the opportunity to understand something we previously couldn’t; Hendren gives us the ability to understand that faster and make decisions quicker. It puts the data we have to better use,” says Luby.

“It facilitates a really valuable discussion about the outputs that we should expect from marketing and puts it in terms that matters to the business. Our finance team … they're not really that interested in buying media. They're interested in the outcome for the business.” Using Mutinex’s MMM has enabled Optus’ marketing team to prove hypotheses and adjust channel allocation as a result, “and that's yielded increases for us,” says Luby.

Michael Hill CMO, Jo Feeney, is about to plug in the Mutinex platform and will use the first model as a “performance review ... to make sure that every dollar we're spending is being spent in the right place, and it's actually paying back”. Plus, she aims to demonstrate that generating retail sales requires a little more than lower funnel performance tactics and offers. Likewise “myth busting” some misconceptions that may be held by management, such as “no-one watches TV anymore”. More broadly, Feeney wants to prove marketing’s P&L contribution over any perception of marketing as a cost centre.

After that, Feeney’s keen to prove the value of Michael Hill’s rapidly growing loyalty scheme – now at 2.5m members – and the dollar value of its owned channels versus paid media. “I've got some early data, but to be able to put that through a model like this as well would be amazing.”

Mutinex’s Will Marks says “repointing” Mutinex’s GrowthOS engine to do exactly that is top priority for 2025, alongside “supercharging our forecasting and optimisation capability so that we can help marketers get to different scenarios faster and easier” – and with deeper granularity on what’s really going on within channels.

Australian law firm Maurice Blackburn is investigating a publisher class action against Google in a strikingly similar $8 billion lawsuit already underway in Canada – led by a tiny regional community publishing boss, Lisa Sygutek, who won’t be cowed. “Find your inner warrior, sign-up, go for it,” she urges Australian media owners.

Miranda Nagy, the lawyer leading the Australian class action investigation, likewise calls on publishers large and small to join the proposed action. She’s aiming to secure “best possible” retrospective compensation.

Maurice Blackburn has come to the same conclusion as the US Department of Justice, various European regulators, and a dozen US state attorneys general. They allege Google manipulated and gamed publishers and brands for years with secret deals and projects – some in collusion with Meta – that actively sought to disadvantage them while entrenching Google’s market dominance – taking billions of dollars away from publishers and fleecing advertisers in the process by charging far more than was either necessary or officially disclosed.

The alleged ruses include things like ‘project Bernanke’, in which Google was essentially able to “to take a bigger spread between publishers and advertisers, which means both publishers are getting less money and advertisers are paying more,” according to Adil Abdulla, the lawyer leading the Canadian legal effort through Sotos Class Actions.

Then there was ‘Jedi Blue’, in which Google is accused of colluding with Facebook to kill the free market publishers and the broader ad market had tried to build through header bidding, while ensuring Facebook got an ad auction advantage in return.

Jason Kint, CEO of US peak publisher body Digital Content Next, says Jedi Blue’s impacts “are still playing out” and forecasts “a bloodbath of lawsuits being filed”. He thinks the Trump administration will go just as hard with “eight to 10 different code name projects” to go after. While many US publishers, advertisers and agencies had been “captured” by Google, Kint reckons that “halo is starting to come off”. He urges marketers and the supply chain locally to likewise reject being strong-armed.

For publishers, Future Media founder Ricky Sutton echoes that call: “This is the first window in 20 years where we've got a chance to take back some of the things that we've lost. What we do is too valuable to be lost to one commercial company with a 25 year run in the sunlight.”

The B2B world is a market where you don't call customers, customers call you - although it’s the opposite of widespread B2B marketing assumptions and practice today. A B2B awakening is underway as business marketers see increasing evidence that an under-investment in B2B brand work leads to a sea of sameness and mediocre results among buyers – across most industry sectors, many feel there is little supplier differentiation, limiting the likelihood you’ll receive that all-important first call.  But if the phone does ring from a buyer, the latest round of research across Asia Pacific says you’re overwhelmingly likely to land the deal, irrespective of the sales teams prowess. 

Sameness leads to nothingness and a B2B marketing strategy that prioritises marketing qualified leads (MQLs) over all else comes with serious limitations, according to this week’s guests.

Instead, the brand signals you send out “need to align with how modern customers research and purchase, particularly in complex B2B environments where decision making often involves multiple stakeholders,” says Sophie Neate, Global Head of Digital Marketing & Content for industrial giant ABB.

When making the case internally for change, however, don’t underestimate the support from sales teams, says Lara Barnet, the Head of Marketing in Australia for the global technology-managed service provider Logicalis.  “Sellers face that problem more than anyone else,” she says. “They’re on the front line, they're the ones picking up the phone and talking to customers. They face this all the time.”

The broader growth in influence of buying committees necessarily lessens the influence of a single C-Suite decision maker, and that influence wanes further as the size of the buying committee scales along with the value of the opportunity. An MQL led approach also fails to recognise that customers, not sellers, control the product research agenda and most of those are invisible until they choose to turn public. By then, says the boss of B2B agency Green Hat, Stuart Jaffray, it’s likely too late - they have mostly made their decision.

SCA in March launched three big tech bets for its LiSTNR master app – a customer data platform (CDP), customer-specific data matching clean rooms and dynamic creative optimisation. The bets are paying off and SCA is no longer reliant on third party data sources. Execs say the platform and its 2.1m logged-in users already command over 40 per cent of all digital audio ad dollars, helping SCA’s $50m investment reach breakeven a year ahead of schedule. LiSTNR is now moving into the next phase of audience matching, granular targeting and attribution via its own first party data and ANZ spend data. Its first API-connection based on fuel price changes went so well – landing multiple briefs within weeks – that LiSTNR’s launching 20 more across five categories including finance, property, travel, weather and utilities. “Whatever the agency or brands want to work on, we're able to activate those APIs quite quickly,” per LiSTNR commercial boss Oliver Newton.

It’s also launching ‘mood targeting’, i.e. contextual ads for brands based on what audiences are listening to, as well as audio retargeting. Next year LiSTNR will also be able to tell brands the carbon impact of their campaigns across SCA’s assets thanks to a partnership with emissions mapping platform, Scope3. Newton reckons CO2 measurement credentials will be table stakes as advertisers move into negotiation mode for 2025 – especially for larger firms newly mandated to report emissions data, of which advertising and marketing is an eye-wateringly large chunk.

The advertiser adoption curve is steepening. In June, 20 per cent of LiSTNR campaigns made use of the Adtech Hub. By September that had jumped to 33 per cent. Next year LiSTNR aims for 45-50 per cent, according to head of SCAiQ Abi Wallis. She says brands are buying-in because they can target people based on where they are, what they are doing, and which brands they are buying. They can suppress existing customers and target only new potential customers based on their listening and spending habits, or likewise upsell and cross-sell to their existing customers, with sharper smarts and context, tailored dynamic creative, and with the spend and audience data enabling “a real world view of the impact” and ROI.

LiSTNR’s new capabilities put it on a par with the big tech platforms, per Wallis and Newton, if not beyond – and the opportunity to harness the Adtech Hub is not limited to big brands. “Agency or direct … It’s there to be utilised by anyone looking to access digital audio,” says Newton.