Mi3 Audio Edition
Mi3 & iHeart Podcasts Australia
Recent Episodes
Redundancy is rife across the marketing and agency ecosystem right now. And whether you have an inkling your job could be on the line, as Liana Dubois did when management consultants entered the Nine building, or it's a complete shock – such as Josh Slighting experienced when he left a growing REA Group, or Katie Dally felt after surviving a first round of cuts at Endeavour Group only to be hit in the second set – it often triggers a professional and personal crisis of confidence and identity. Even experienced marketer Amy De Groot, who’s been made redundant twice, nearly 20 years apart, still felt the shock, upset and grief of this occupational hazard.
It’s hard to get a precise handle on the exact volume of redundancies, but cuts can be found in every pocket of the industry. A clue is in the Advertising Council of Australia’s 2025 Salary Survey, which revealed a redundancy rate of 11%, compared to the usual range of 5–7%, in the 12 months to 31 March 2025.
More overtly, Omnicom’s global CEO last week said 4000 jobs are likely to be shed by end of the year as the merged Omnicom-IPG structure is bolted into place. Up to 120 people are also being made redundant as Menulog shuts up shop in Australia. Endeavour Group is another that made marketing, experience, digital and CX redundancies this year. Dentsu flagged 8% global headcount reduction in Q2. Nine, Seven, News Corp have made hundreds of cuts. The Australian HR Institute quarterly outlook for September 25 shows redundancies are on the rise, with 27 per cent of employers planning cuts, up 3 percentage points since the June 2025 quarter.
Those are the numbers and an attempt at hard facts. But the reality is there are a bunch of marketing and advertising industry colleagues having the cope with the fallout and impact of being made redundant.
In Mi3’s latest podcast, we’re focusing on exploring the impact of the redundancy crisis through the lens of four senior marketers who have been there: Former Nine group CMO, Liana Dubois; former REA Group media lead, Josh Slighting, former Endeavour Group GM of brand, creative and operations, Katie Dally, and former Cars24 head of brand marketing, Amy de Groot.
In this very personal conversation, we humanise the experience of being made redundant to help others out there that have, or are experiencing, the repercussions of redundancy directly and indirectly. We also explore the lateral career paths that have opened up for our guests, as we share learnings and advice on how we can all make more progressive career choices.
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Marketing effectiveness: How we all strive to achieve it. In today’s episode, two very distinctive takes on successful work, from the verticals and business objectives in play, to audience targeting, messaging and channels used – traditional media through to gaming streaming – are in the spotlight. And both landed their brand leaders and agencies coveted Gold Effies at this year’s Advertising Council Australia Awards.
Scoring two Gold gongs was Australian Red Cross Lifeblood and Clemenger BBDO for ‘Lifeblood Blood Supply: How a media first, elevated blood donation into a national news story, saving up to 28,848 lives’ . The pair leveraged a well-established idea – the emergency warning system and media ticker – plus a partnership with the Seven Network to create a mechanism showing the blood supply in a real-time way via the nightly news bulletin, with state-based tailoring, supported through TVCs, integrations with AFL broadcasts and ambassadors and digital capabilities. Lifeblood CMO, Jeremy Weiss says the “behaviour changing” campaign led to a 120% boost in blood donation appointments, along with new donor registrations signing up, were tentpole results. As each new donor saves up to three lives with their first donation, they more than quadrupled the number of intended lives saved.
In contrast, Nestle Australia and VML Australia were honoured with their Gold Effie for their work on extending the iconic ‘Have a break, have a Kitkat’ creative platform into the edgier, decidedly younger media platform, Twitch and streaming. The aim of the ‘Break Chair’ was to connect with Gen Zers aged 18-27, 80% of which engage in gaming – many doing it often. Forging that sense of connection, emotion and engagement on the consumer’s terms played a big part here. The “boundary pushing” mix of tapping influencers, livestreaming, a killer consumer insight on needing regular breaks, and an already distinctive creative platform further compounded impact and results including brand and penetration gains to sales lift, says Nestle head of marketing confectionery, Shannon Wright.
Joined by Alison Tilling, chief strategy officer, VML Australia, and Frank Curcio, national head of product, Clemenger BBDO, our guests unpack their work and the surprising similarities behind their distinctively different but seriously impactful work.
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British luxury department store Selfridges has just launched a Christmas campaign co-created with Disney across almost the entire Selfridges portfolio of in-store and digital media assets. Now it’s pushing harder into retail media – and looking for similarly deep relationships with select brands aiming to tap its 36 million annual customers.
Selfridges head of brand partnerships Kate Eastop is driving that agenda – and bringing in more non-endemic brands, i.e. those it doesn’t stock in stores – into the retail media business. “I see this as a significant growth area for the business over the next few years”, says Eastop. So, she commissioned owned media advisor Sonder to develop a rate card for its physical and digital assets – and ensure everything is properly valued.
The new rates will be live for 2026 and Eastop says the process has helped “establish Selfridges as a serious player in retail media” while bringing internal stakeholders together on the kind of assets and partnerships the luxury retailer will build – and what remains off limits.
Sonder’s Jonathan Hopkins and Angus Frazer see momentum in the luxury retail media market as the supermarket and grocery sector matures. They say brands are willing to pay a higher premium to tap audiences that are more immersed in “retail theatre” experiences versus the transactional hit of the grocery aisle.
“If you’re walking into a theatre of brands in a store like Selfridges, then there is immense dwell time,” per Hopkins. “You’re there to enjoy the shopping experience, not get out as quickly as possible – so those factors are considered in the valuation.”
Sonder has benchmarked a global owned media asset pool of circa $12bn – and Frazer says the market is “approaching an inflection point” with in-store static and digital assets now presenting “the next wave of opportunity” for retail media networks versus commoditised low hanging fruit, like sponsored search and website product tiles.
He says the department stores Sonder has worked with on owned media “typically top out at around 25 per cent of revenues being derived from non-endemic brands”. Key to netting that upside is not being too greedy and eroding both the customer experience, the value of the brand, and thereby undermining the sustainability of the retail media business.
Their advice? Partner wisely.
“Deep with a few can be better than light with many,” says Hopkins. “Find brands that are a really good fit with your customers and go deep in terms of those brand partnerships across the year. Find those mutually beneficial activations that are going to add value to your customers that you could never have achieved without that partnership.
“If you manage to achieve that, it’s going to create a proven use case within the business, start to normalise behaviour for stakeholders who might have been resistant to it, and then make it easier for future growth.”
Which is precisely the playbook that Selfridges is following – and carving out a deeper niche within the UK’s increasingly crowded retail media market.
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Australian brand marketers and their UK counterparts came up with very different views on where they see their biggest challenges, according to a study by QMS that was aligned to research by Ocean Outdoor UK. Marketers from the UK cited attention as their key challenge, while Australian marketers flagged sustainable growth and unified measurement.
When it came to top marketing investment priorities, the top two criteria for both markets were the same things. Number one: reach. Number two: ROI. But they diverged on the third, which for the UK was cost (CPM), whereas for Australian marketers it was attention.
“So the question [for Australian marketers] is not ‘how much?’ but ‘how well?’, per global advisor to QMS and ad industry veteran, Anne Parsons. “It's a real shift that says that Australian brand marketers are thinking about effectiveness much more than they're thinking about efficiency.”
She says that chimes with peer-reviewed research by Oxford University Professor Felipe Thomaz that found optimising media for reach alone no longer works because all reach is not equal – and used bluntly won't deliver business outcomes. “It's attentive reach, the quality of the reach,” that matters, per Parsons.
Netflix ANZ marketing boss Tony Broderick is 100 per cent aligned.
“As a business, the only metric that really counts is revenue. But the one that marketing is chiefly tasked with is to drive outsized conversation – and reach for the sake of reach won't generate conversation. You need to capture attention. You need to build creative that stops someone scrolling through a feed – phone stopping content,” he says.
“We make great stories … our job is to create the conversation around it. If we do that, we're supporting acquisition, retention, engagement. We have an ad service – engagement drives that as well.”
He says Netflix analyses what people are watching, the conversations about it (Netflix has a billion social media followers globally) and then aims to rapidly launch campaigns based on those insights. “How can we bring those proof points in and get it live within digital out of home, targeted at the right people, a couple of days later? That's something we now do each and every week, working with partners like QMS.”
While Australian marketers flagged cross-media measurement as their biggest challenge, Broderick thinks focusing too hard on measurement creates its own problems.
“A big challenge and an ongoing discussion I have with my team, with my agencies, is ensuring that we try to pursue a plan that is best versus what's easiest to measure. What I'm most focused on is really just the right set of signals, rather than the absolute best report card for every campaign,” says Broderick.
“If you're just following what has always delivered the best results in the past, you're naturally steering away from innovation as well.”
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New ARN CEO, Michael Stephenson, has been unusually quiet for much of the year. After this week’s upfronts, we now know why. Stephenson has been rapidly redesigning ARN from an audio operator to a fully-fledged entertainment company.
ARN unveiled a dozen big new content and commercial initiatives on Wednesday, and at the centre of Stephenson’s blueprint for ARN 3.0 is the iHeart digital platform. ARN has the APAC rights to iHeart, which, in its US home market, has 188 million users. In Australia, it's 3 million on the platform and 7 million when syndicated.
One of the announcements this week was Ruby, iHeart’s branded content studio, which produces 30-minute podcasts for brands.
“It’s a simple model: We will produce your podcast, for free, and we will distribute, amplify and monetise it for you. All we need from you is an upfront commitment in advertising dollars to co-promote your own product, to drive audience to your destination,” says Stephenson.
Ruby has been a massive success in the US: “Many of the podcasts [iHeart has] produced, actually are in the top 10 per cent of downloads of podcasts within the US across the board,” per ARN’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Ben Campbell, “and that's branded content.”
The barrage of new initiatives includes a move into video, new TV-style tentpole entertainment programming like Kissed at Sea and Save Our Pub. The latter involves finding and rescuing a rundown pub, bringing back the schnitty, live music and giving it national prominence post-reno. It's also pushing into live events, like Run Club Rave, “with global DJs playing in parks,” per Stephenson. “Nightclubs are out. Mornings are in”. Across all of that, the content will include audio, video and will run on TikTok as part of a beefed-up, integrated brand platform with the social juggernaut.
Campbell, meanwhile, has also supercharged ARN’s ad tech and data credentials – deals with Westpac DataX, Experian for targeting and LiveRamp on clean rooms were part of the upfront show this week. As were launching a women's sports network, a podcast deal with Are Media and its portfolio of women's brands, not to mention the complete overhaul of the radio network into two national Metro brands, KIISS and Gold.
Stephenson hopes the move will make them easier to buy for national advertisers – and plans to use the revenue upside to keep funding the reinvention.
He’s got an even busier 12 months ahead. Here’s the plan.
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