Right, let’s get down to brass tacks. What were the four key takeaways from last week’s inaugural Marketer’s and Money event?
1) We presented the world’s first AI powered MMM chat product
First cab off the rank – ‘Hendren’. The category defining AI chat powered market mix modelling product that will relieve you from spreadsheets and get you back to being creative. Because that’s why you’re in marketing.
Ask a simple question, get a simple answer.
Not only in simple language, but boardroom ready. In seconds.
The problem with talking about marketing data analytics is that very few people, least of all those that need to know, have any idea what you’re talking about and why they should care. That changes today.
As Global CEO Henry Innis phrases it,
"We want marketer's to do what they love. Be creative. Instead, we found that marketers spend 80% of their time doing things they don't necessarily love. Wading through data and spreadsheets."
People bandy around terms like ‘disruptive’ and ‘redefinition’, so you’ll be forgiven for mistaking this for marketing spiel. We assure you, it’s not.
As CEO Mat Baxter puts it,
“Every so often something comes along that breaks a category and creates a new one. Hendren is one of those rare products. It exists in a category of one,”
2) Branding not blanding
We heard from several stalwarts that we, as marketers, should get back to being truly creative with our brands. In an onstage chat with Teltra’s Brent Smart we heard the notion that playing it safe creatively is ineffective.
“Being more creative is more effective”, said Smart.
“It's not branding, it's blanding – we’re all being the same. I think the biggest job for any marketer is distinctiveness. That’s the job.”
The example of ‘Liquid Death’ was liberally deployed, and for good reason. While other water brands look and feel almost identical, Liquid Death has the visage of an aggressive alcohol brand, complete with lurid aluminium can packaging. It might feel like a wild creative decision, but the numbers don’t lie – it’s the fastest growing beverage brand in the United States and was recently valued at $1 Billion USD,
Angela Greenwood from Youi had a similar message with her own keynote about growing a challenger brand. Greenwood also urged attendees to “double down on distinctiveness.”
“A challenger brand is on a mission driven strategy to change the category to the benefit of the consumer,” noted Greenwood.
It’s time to get weird again, or at least generate the confidence to stand out from the crowd.
3) Domino’s and the incredible weight of data
To open the proceedings, we heard from Domino’s Australia CEO, Don Meij. It was in fact the only time he’s ever spoken publicly about his story with the famous pizza brand.
Apart from an intriguing tale of Don starting out as a pizza delivery driver and door knocking to drum up business, we also got a glimpse into the incredible power of their data.
As Don told attendees, at one stage in Tokyo, Domino’s were delivering pizzas in 2 minutes and 38 seconds. How did this come about? A ridiculously powerful deployment of accumulated data.
Domino’s were already cooking your pizza before you’d even made your choice and proceeded to payment. The predictive power of their data was so strong that according to Don, they knew who the new Australian Prime Minister would be the day before an election.
Through innovations such as their pizza tracking app, they also had new opportunities to market themselves even further. As Don tells us,
“People would watch the pizza tracker for 12 minutes. We had eyeballs for 12 minutes, so what do we do with that?”
The issue was that crunching those vast reams of data and creating actionable insights was an industrious task. Which is why they turned to Mutinex.
As Don said, “before we met with Mutinex, we would see insights every two years. Two years and it was out of date. How much that has changed with GrowthOS.”
In a closing note, Don urged that,
“If you have the data, make a decision! That's when you get a competitive edge. Opinion land is dangerous – you’ve gotta get out of opinion land and into data land.”
4) Is TV really dead?
In a rather robust interview with Paul McIntyre from M13, Melissa Hopkins (formerly at Seven Network), and Liana Dubois (Nine), debated the continued relevance of TV advertising and ‘linear TV’.
Starting from the seemingly popular opinion that ‘linear TV advertising is dead’, we heard some reasonable retorts, backed with solid data, that this may not be true at all.
As Nine’s Dubois poses it,
“Reality and perception don’t go together. The cohort of people who believe that TV is dead or dying are falling victim to the cohort who wish that were true.” said Dubois.
“The reality is that TV today is reaching the same amount of people as 10 years ago.”
Hopkins echoed these statements with an example of live TV’s reach, “Home and Away still gets 1 million live viewers per night.”
Having said this, there were copious admissions that perhaps TV organisations had failed in communicating their value to marketers. As Hopkins said, “We have not kept pace with measurement. We’ve made TV hard to buy.’
Dubois agreed, “we do need to get better at proving the efficacy of TV and proving return on investment. The industry has to tell its story more effectively”, said Dubois.
Perhaps marketers should now be looking at the data before writing off TV?
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There’s so much more we’ll be showing you in the coming days and weeks. We have roundtables with industry heavyweights, excellent keynotes, and big ideas aplenty. Watch this space for individual session breakdowns and videos.