Mi3 Audio Edition

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.

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.

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large 95 per cent of St Kilda Football Club’s marketing budget goes into its owned assets. Chief Customer and Commercial Officer, Michael Scott, has worked across some of the world’s biggest and best consumer marketing companies. Now he’s packaging up “rich reach” and “mind-blowing” engagement rates to woo advertisers. The likes of Chery are buying in: Across two years working with the Chinese car brand, “we've increased their awareness by 17 percentage points, consideration by eight percentage points, and trust by 14 percentage points,” says Scott. “For a new entrant brand that had almost no awareness … that's an incredible result, which we've been able to deliver through our owned media channels.” Engagement rates among St Kilda’s fans and members eclipse anything Scott’s seen at the likes of Rip Curl and Nike. Email open rates are 60-70 per cent; TikTok engagement rates between 9-10.5 per cent. Instagram? “Our engagement rate is four to five times that of Nike.” He’s betting advertisers will pay a premium for “rich reach” versus bigger audiences touted by media rivals. Scott sees Netflix, Paramount and Stan as competitors. “I've always been an advocate of having a quality conversation with a small number of people on the street, rather than walking through the middle of the road with a megaphone. I’m not sure yelling at the top of your voice achieves much,” per Scott. St Kilda’s is simultaneous stretching its own base beyond middle-aged male heartlands. Tweenage girls are a key growth target; the club sees major upside within the women’s game. Scott has monetised owned media with the likes of Myer and Virgin Australia – and says functional silos are the biggest blockers, particularly for retail media networks. “It just becomes far more powerful and easier to execute when the egos are dropped, the paradigms are put to the side, and everyone just recognises the incredible value which [owned media] offers the organisation.” He suggests underlining the financial upside concentrates minds. “I think the value creation – on a dollars and cents level – was the thing that probably captured most people's attention. You can talk to acquisition of data, personalisation and marketing sharpness and they are all nice to hear. But the CEO or CFO are the ultimate arbiters on where resource is placed. So you need to present a value creation story. That's probably the thing that allows organisations to shift gear.” Jonathan Hopkins and Angus Frazer, founders of owned media consultancy Sonder, back that view to the hilt.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large Merging two massive holdco structures after the global Omnicom-IPG merger and culling 100 brands is not for the faint hearted. Overhauling the local operating model entirely at the same time? Fraught with risk. But Nick Garrett’s master plan has the blessing of Omnicom chairman John Wren, and Garrett says he wouldn’t have taken the job without licence to radically recut the ANZ business.  If it works, “I think the US and other markets are all looking at this with support and optimism, hoping that this is a great test case”, says Garrett. The new model puts a three-pronged upstream advisory layer at the top of its structure, supported by six ‘centres of excellence’, pooling and centralising resources to concentrate firepower as Omnicom heads “upstream”. It’s going head-to-head in “transformation” and business strategy through brand with the likes of Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey and Bain while taking marketers and customer chiefs upstream with them.  Too many marketers have been relegated to execution, per Garrett. He thinks Omnicom Oceania’s new approach can help both parties regain strategic high ground. Corporate and government relations firm GRACosway may play an outsized role in opening up that pathway. A major content and creative automation play for the group is also imminent – but it’s not Ted Horton’s BRX.  Garrett says not to undertake radical surgery poses the greatest risk for comms holding companies – they’ve become too narrow and communications focused and lost the strategic high ground across industries and inside corporate executive leadership teams. With IPG absorbed, he thinks widespread industry speculation that at least one, perhaps two fewer direct holdco competitors by year’s end is plausible - a WPP break-up and piecemeal sell-off being one of them. But it’s telling that while eyeing consulting firms’ turf and moving away from a media and creative-led holdco into marketing transformation services, Garrett, when pushed, reckons Publicis is a bigger threat to Omnicom’s new growth model than Accenture Song. Despite the seismic overhaul, Garrett claims Omnicom Oceania is six months ahead of where the market thinks it is. But the proof is in the pudding – there’s a lot riding on whether Omnicom’s people can actually stretch to the new model’s intent. Garrett’s confident. Here’s what’s coming next. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing Live shopping, a blend of live video, real-time interaction and in-stream checkouts, is becoming a significant incremental ecommerce growth lever. Global figures suggest living shopping will tip an eye-watering US$2 trillion by 2030 and hit $1 trillion this year. It’s already revolutionising retail in Asian markets: Live shopping in China represents 80 per cent of the incremental growth in the ecommerce sector. A big driver for this gamified commerce phenomenon? FOMO. Per eBay research, almost half of Australians (48%) are driven by fear of missing out in their shopping habits, and one in two say they’ve missed out on coveted limited edition or rare items they would have liked to have purchase. With such insights to hand, eBay Live launched in Australia just in time for Christmas, coupling the livestream broadcasting format with its goods marketplace. First port of call: The growing collectables audience of buyers and sellers on its platform (30 per cent of Australians are collectors). Over the last 3-4 years, eBay took a position that it wasn’t going to be a marketplace for everyone and everything, says eBay head of marketing and communications, Zannie Abbott. Core categories for eBay include car parts and accessories, pre-loved fashion and the ballooning category of collectibles and trading cards.  “There are other places where you can buy your tissues and your nappies, but we really are the place to go for the things you love, and we have really doubled down in specific focus categories where we know we have a right to win here locally in Australia,” she says. “There is a perfect synergy around community, commerce and culture as an opportunity that really is ripe for us.” eBay Live has been natively built into the marketplace and app. Users can go straight into a live stream and start bidding and buying, participating in short auction bursts running for just seconds. The local rollout took a snappy six weeks thanks to learnings from US and UK launches, cross-functional collaboration and an “agile” all-in approach to innovation fuelled by a low-ego culture, says Abbott. Trust is at the heart of the offering, continues eBay Live category manager, Eric Chen. Every seller is vetted, handpicked as much for personality and broadcast potential as they are for their selling prowess. Tapping directly into FOMO and culture, eBay chose to make its first Aussie livestream secret, featuring AFL superstar, Buddy Franklin, who auctioned rare, signed AFL trading cards for just $0.01. The global trading card games market is forecast to grow to $18bn in the next five years. “It's incredibly exciting for everyone tuning in at the moment, but that also then turns into content afterwards that reaches a much bigger audience,” Chen says. “We just had a stream last week with Veronica Taylor, who was the original voice of Ash Ketchum for the Pokémon 30th anniversary event. These moments are something we’re able to build through eBay Live, which previously we didn't have a platform for, and create these special moments.” To grow awareness and education, eBay Live’s marketing strategy emphasises owned channels and grassroots connection. It’s leveraged five collectible toy events, undertaking live activations on stage to build momentum, interest and excitement in the entertainment-with-commerce proposition. Using the starting point of behaviour, iProspect national managing director, Marcelle Hoyek, says the agency worked with eBay to identify two audiences: Those ready for Live now, and those who will be ready sometime in future. Live wasn’t an unfamiliar concept, but the habit wasn’t ingrained, she points out. “It all starts with audience and that’s the biggest role we play with eBay when they’re launching something new into market,” she says. “Who's the audience? What are they into? What are their drivers? And what's the opportunity for us? Commercial data is indicating eBay is onto a winner. In the US, one seller sold $1M USD of watches in 3 hours. A livestream in Australia featuring Pokémon cards clicked over $100,000 AUD in one night. “There are a number of metrics we're monitoring as a business to understand whether we're getting traction or not, and that's everything from number of sellers to number of live streams to sales,” comments Abbott, adding a fine balance of new buyers coming to site, content density and number of sellers is critical to success.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.