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.

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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.

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A decade after launching viewability metrics, the Media Ratings Council is moving to standardise attention metrics globally. That means buying media based on attention metrics will scale faster. But a world first out of home study into attention by QMS and Amplified Intelligence is already going global – and the findings for brands are huge. In short, out of home completely flips ratios around average active attention rates, with 85 per cent of sites studied getting at least 2.5 seconds – the baseline for memory encoding that grows brands. Some sites and formats get much more, and the rate of attention decay is slower than other media.

The results have the likes of Suncorp and OMD media executives pumped, suggests QMS Chief Strategy Officer Christian Zavecz. He thinks all out of home players will benefit as a result, especially those ramping up programmatic trading of assets. That’s because the study, which mapped 1.3 million people passing large and small format outdoor ads, also finds that active attention (people looking directly at the ad) and passive attention (where the ad is in people’s peripheral vision) can be predicted by site, which means planners and buyers can reliably trade on it.

Amplified Intelligence CEO, Dr Karen Nelson-Field, says the study will likely lead challenger brands to rethink out of home, because greater active attention does heavier lifting in terms of brand building, where smaller brands are traditionally disadvantaged by larger rivals whose codes and distinctive assets are already embedded in people’s brains.

Bus shelters, per the study, are a particularly good bet, notching “about 7.4 seconds of active attention and about 14 seconds of passive,” per Nelson-Field.

But getting the attention is only the first critical step. To drive sales, the creative and branding must cut through. “Anyone that tells you that attention and outcomes are linearly related is lying,” says Nelson-Field. “It’s the combination of the two: Media drives the opportunity for creative; creative takes it and gets the sale.”

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TikTok marketing science chief Rory Dolan says performance media costs are soaring while conversions flatline. He has the data to prove it.

After mapping TikTok platform activity with Tracksuit’s brand tracking data, Dolan has one key message – invest in brand to boost conversion and beat biddable auction inflation: “Advertisers with 60 per cent-plus awareness have a 2.86 times increase in their baseline conversion rate versus advertisers that are 20 per cent below,” he says, rendering brand versus performance arguments redundant, if not suicidal. Full funnel execution is king, says Dolan, because building future demand means easier, cheaper conversions at scale: “Brand is fundamentally a performance tactic.”

Tracksuit co-founder James Hurman literally wrote the book on that principle. He penned Future Demand after one of his own DTC businesses, initially hockey-sticking via Facebook ads, experienced the performance media ‘Easter Island Effect’. Acquisition dried up, performance costs spiralled, the economics tanked. Without priming new customers, “brands use all of their resources, then they have nothing left, and then they die”, warns Hurman.

The idea that brand campaigns have to be broad, multichannel and expensive is a myth, says TikTok’s Dolan. “Brand can be built by targeting subgroups of your target audience consistently over time. So this can actually be achieved with small amounts of investment.” The awareness sweet spot for small brands, per the research, is 37 per cent. “We see very strong business impacts as a result of that early on.”

Even “big performance-focused advertisers” are hitting the same growth ceiling “which is very expensive to bypass by performance [spend]”, says Dolan. “These are businesses that maybe three years ago wouldn't have touched brand [investment] because of the inability to track their short-term ROI. They're now seeing the impact of that.”

Dolan says TikTok’s research underlines that increasing performance spend will not build brand – but brand spend will boost both brand and performance outcomes.

For those facing hard budget choices and sceptical CFOs, Dolan suggests leaving performance media to bots and spending more time and money on brand: “That seems to be the big sweet spot at the moment – automating the performance and focusing on driving these multipliers.”

But first, get brand tracking sorted.

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Six months ago conversational commerce wasn’t really on the radar of Deloitte Digital’s National Partner Lead Leon Doyle. Now Doyle is reorganising his entire content team around it – and believes it’s coming at the $200bn content industry like a freight train. AI-powered chatbots and the speed at which all major platforms are developing and deploying, particularly on messaging apps, are accelerating – ultimately they’re heading to full-funnel capabilities where in travel, for example, discovery to purchase is completed in a single conversational thread.

Doyle says brands must prepare for far more content governance to clear “content debt” fast. I.e. start writing not only for humans, but commerce-enabling AI applications which will ingest forgotten, incorrect, outdated or even misleading corporate information and content lurking in digital corners that the bots will otherwise scrape to build their customer responses from. That means restructuring content architecture and taxonomies and focusing on “conversation design, not just content design”, says Doyle

“This is what my team are doing. They're thinking about AI conversation strategy … rather than design just for one platform, they're actually thinking about how they structure content in modules for conversations across multiple modes - website, app, chat.”

While Doyle cites a handful of brands including Commbank and Qantas aiming for early mover advantage locally, Deloitte Digital's Global Marketing and Commerce Lead, Nick Garrett, says conversational commerce is “exploding in every market”. He thinks the impact on content economics is seismic – with everything that existed pre-AI at risk of obsolescence.

“If $200 billion is moving into play …. no client, no organisation, could not be looking at this at a forensic level.”

As Doyle puts it: “If you're not thinking actively about your content debt, your content supply chain, start right now. Because the machines are here, they're learning from your content, and we need to be good teachers to them.”

What does it mean for the broader content supply chain? Disruption for all but absolute tier one providers, per Garrett. “If your bread and butter was making [content at] scale and you’re dependent on bums and seats, a little bit of automation and a bit of offshore, you’re probably staring into a pretty uncomfortable place right now.”

For pretty much everyone on the brand-side, it means content creation is moving into a risk management business. Doyle’s advice for CX’s next big overhaul? Keep it “simple, human and trustworthy”.

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Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz, of University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, suggests Professor Byron Sharp’s best known book, How Brands Grow, is a misnomer – it’s actually about how big brands keep big marketshare, not how they got there. He also says it’s based on flaws within Andrew Ehrenberg’s earlier work, primarily static markets and a requirement not to differentiate. Thomaz suggests that’s why big FMCG firms adhering to those rules were caught napping by more nimble differentiated start-ups.

Reach “sufficiency”, or optimising media for reach, no longer works, he suggests, because all reach is not equal – and reach alone doesn’t deliver business outcomes. “There is a missing dimension,” per Thomaz. He’s out to prove it with a peer-reviewed paper that analyses 1,000 campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and WPP. The upshot? “None of it holds … I'm seeing that 1 per cent of campaigns are actually getting exceptional money, while the vast majority are choosing to get some really mediocre outcomes.”

That’s partly because audience reach doesn’t account for their ability to be influenced - and different media, different categories and consumer types have varying degrees of impact in different moments. Reach, he says, is proving a misleading media proxy for business impact - the variances of consumer receptivity to switching is different by category. Personal care, for instance, has less consumer preparedness to trial alternatives once they’ve established their preference - they’re harder to “manipulate”, Thomas posits, but some media channel characteristics stand a better chance. TV versus influencers in lower funnel strategies will likely surprise many. Which has knock-on impacts on channel effectiveness and weighting. Thomaz says that’s good news for media owners – if they can stop selling on impressions and start selling on functionality. “For some categories, there might be a premium they can charge.”

The need to reach all potential buyers in the category, he says, “has not changed in the least … Reach is important, and you still need that scale. However, you also need [to optimise to] the business outcome. But he still thinks it’s “really bad to waste your money on people who will never buy you”.

In short: “If you're managing your company's marketing on simplistic and reductive laws, you might want to revisit those, because you're leaving money on the table or leaving yourself open to very simple counter-plays. It's dangerous.”

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Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind was “surprised” – read underwhelmed – by the first tranche of Privacy Act legislation laid before parliament last month. But she says the hard stuff is still coming after the election, which means businesses now diverting budgets away from compliance to other activities may regret it, especially as the regulator has sharper teeth. Kind says firms are failing under the current Privacy Act – and they are in the regulator’s crosshairs. Tracking pixels are under serious scrutiny across the piste, as are companies using data beyond what it was collected for and potentially passing it to third parties.

In that vein, Kind has “existing concerns” about loyalty programs, customer data enrichment businesses and data broking: “It's something I'd like to look at again under the current framework,” she says, suggesting those operators “make sure that they're watertight”. Likewise firms targeting via geolocation: “We’re looking at a case at the moment … We have some real concerns about how it's being used.” Lookalikes, customer audiences, hashed emails and data clean rooms appear to be in the clear. But under the next wave of reforms “the changing definition of personal information could certainly have an impact,” she says, though for now it’s not clear-cut.

In the meantime, Kind says there are four areas for businesses to laser in on – including small firms who will no longer be exempt from regulation.

First, “know what data you hold and who you’re giving it to.” Second, “make sure you've got a retention and destruction regime in place – anything that’s old, you don’t need to hold it any more.” Next, get into the weeds on contracts with third party service providers and be sure to have a data breach response plan in place. “It's an area of vulnerability we're seeing a lot at the moment,” says Kind.

In short: “Don't take your foot off the gas, because we're looking to take a more enforcement-based approach to regulation in the interim.”

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Part One: Seven companies now account for a third of the total value of the US S&P 500 – and the bulk of their collective trillions in market value happens to come from marketers and advertising. It’s a crazy number, but Terry Kawaja, the fast talking banker, considered by some the ‘godfather’ of adtech start-up investment, says another wave of advertising and marketing related tech spin offs are incoming that’s making him a little more bullish than the cooling of the past 18 months.

Kawaja’s New York firm Luma Partners is behind the Lumascape spaghetti maps that try to make sense of the sprawling, connected pipes of the adtech industry. Kawaja thinks consolidation has to happen for the industry to shake the cowboys – “the environment is highly fragmented and that allows people to hide,” he says.

That’s code for nefarious market behaviour which undermines adtech’s credibility - and Kawaja argues a clean digital ad system is more important now than ever if open web players are to compete with big tech, especially as he sees retail media quickly eating a third of open web ad dollars.

But there’s little sign of that consolidation right now and Kawaja admits adtech is still notoriously opportunistic and has played a starring role in the creation of some of the problems the market is struggling to address with junk digital data, fake people and opaque trading practices that nobody seems able to solve.

Regardless, Kawaja says another wave of tech investment is coming and for good measure and says Google’s pervasive global advertising trading system being broken up would have huge financial upside for Alphabet shareholders – and the industry at large. The US Department of Justice has been landing punches over the past three weeks in its current US Federal District Court adtech "monopoly” trial against Google.

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