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Last weekend Netflix’s #2 trending title in Australia underlined just how good marketing and product teams in fashion, FMCG and consumer tech have got at triggering desire to the extent executives who worked for – and ran – some of the biggest names in consumer goods and ecommerce globally now say convenient consumption brought about by the ecom revolution is producing such an increase in waste it's choking countries designated for dumped re-use and recycling – literally. Company presidents, top marketers, UX designers and even Unilever’s former CEO outline the impact of industry mastering the science of consumption for growth strategies that have already busted the thresholds for planetary trash. It's a perplexing conundrum going mainstream if the popularity of the Netflix film is any signal.

Gaming advertising in Australia overtook news media's ad revenues for the first time this year. By 2028, PwC reckons it will climb north of $2bn. But that includes in-game product placement, not the traditional digital ad market – which agency execs say locally is lagging the $70bn global market, despite circa 80 per cent of Australian adults engaging with games in some form. It's a massive, high attention medium that dollar for dollar can yield bumper results, per latest attention studies – but the need for a clearer identity in gaming advertising is becoming critical. Is it a channel, an audience, or an environment? Time for marketers to rethink their strategies say execs from Havas, RGA, iion and Amplified Intelligence.

Last year, Apple made an iOS update that podcast businesses hadn't seem coming – and as a result downloads globally plummeted 15 per cent. For some, the impact was massive, with The Kyle & Jackie O Show losing 48 per cent. Cue commercial scrambling. With the dust now settled, industry execs reckon the new numbers are more transparent and have downweighted downloads – which can be misleading – as a core commercial metric. What's more, podcast revenue is strongly climbing locally. Acast's Henrik Isaksson, LiSTNR's Grant Tothill, and Nova's Nicole Bence unpack what happened when the numbers dropped, how things have panned out – and what's next.

The AI driven marketing landscape is a big messy, complex ecosystem of disparate technologies all at different points along the technology landscape according to Scott Brinker and Frans Rierersma in their Martech 2025. But irrespective of that, CMOs should expect it to cause significant real-world changes during 2025. Some of the biggest changes are predicted to emerge in areas such content marketing, sales automation and chatbots, which currently dominate early AI use cases. All of this is creating a new headache for CMOs - modern martech stacks connected in a fragile point-to-point fashion to serve specific use cases, according to the report: "We only connect them to customer data in the late stages of campaigns or customer experiences to deliver limited personalisation."

Every customer interaction counts, and brands need to bring their best game in an era when consumers always expect more, says Jamie Domenici, CMO of Klaviyo. She argues modern marketers need to navigate the complex web of touchpoints, from pre-sale to post-sale, to foster loyalty and drive profitability. Speaking with Mi3 recently she showcased the experiences of brands such as Rhianna's Fenty Beauty, and July Luggage successfully, which capitalised on unexpected surges in brand demand, showcasing the need for seamless connectivity between top of the funnel and the systems and processes that have to deal with occasionally dramatic spikes in demand.

A new era in CMO community connection and recognition has arrived. Mi3 this week formally debuts the CMO Awards, a program aimed at building excellence and elevating the stature of Australia’s bravest and most effective marketing chiefs and their teams. This annual program, which culminates in a gala dinner event in May 2025, takes its cues from the former CMO50 program but provides a fresh and expanded platform for connecting and supporting CMOs, emerging marketing leadership and champions of growth.

The corporate blow torch is turning on the decade-long free rein customer experience has had at the top echelons of industry as the “right thing to do” – the next wave of transformation already underway is customer and business transformation itself, says Nigel Vaz, global CEO of big four consulting rival Publicis Sapient. Vaz made a flying visit last week to announce the new boss of his Australian outpost, former Deloitte partner Angela Robinson. Both talk of a hard swing by company leadership here and abroad to only greenlight investments in customer experience, digital transformation and AI – mostly irreversibly entwined – that prove a “steel thread” to clear, short-term business objectives and outcomes. It’s either revenues up or cost out, they posit. And in the high-stakes, high yield business consulting sector, Vaz and Robinson point to a fault line opening up for the big consulting firms and others like Accenture and Cognizant – enormous threats loom from AI to their massive, arbitraged and outsourced business process services. 

Three weeks before Google is due to pay publishers $100m via a deal struck to avoid Canada's equivalent of a news media bargaining code, the Canadian competition bureau has just ordered Google to sell its ad server DFP and ad exchange AdX, the backbone of its $238bn-a-year ad machine. Plus, it says Google must pay multibillion dollar damages for forcing publishers to use its anticompetitive ad products. If the search giant blocks access to its data, the bureau says it will fine Google “three per cent of its global revenue”, or US$9.2bn.

With new privacy laws passing Parliament last week, Australia's biggest companies find themselves contending with a regulatory regime that will ultimately prioritise 'fair and reasonable behaviour' over the consent management of complicated data and marketing stacks. That might be just as well. Analysis by Mi3 working with DataTrue reveals that only 15 ASX100 firms have implemented a consent management platform or basic banner. (CMP). Nicole Stephensen, managing director of Ground Up Privacy, warns that when the era of fair and reasonable privacy rules with the second tranche of privacy reforms, "If consent lacks specificity and purpose, CMPs "may not be worth the software they're written on."