New & exciting Interview from across the globe | Marketing Mag

Forbes Australia’s Sarah O’Carroll: Web 3.0 and NFTs are here to stay

Liv Croagh — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 22:42:01 +0000

With a history spanning 105 years and a global presence, the iconic and highly regarded Forbes has opened an Australian arm. Headed by its founder and CEO Michael Lane, the prestigious title has brought Yahoo! Finance’s Sarah O’Carroll on board as the editor-in-chief.

Sitting down with Marketing magazine, O’Carroll talks about the plans for the magazine, as well as how art direction is at the forefront of everything Forbes Australia will do, as well as the NFT universe.

MM: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us today, I’m so excited that something as iconic as Forbes is coming to home soil! Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you ended up in the role?

SO: I was working for Yahoo! Finance for the past three and a half years. During my tenure, we got up to about two million readers. It was really focused on empowering people to take control of their finances.

Is this your first foray into print?

This is actually me returning to print. At the start of my career I was the editor of HR Magazine. I’m so glad that my path has brought me back to it. In saying that, print is only one part of our offering.

How much do you think will be syndicated across print and digital?

I would like to see the print as a window into the whole world of Forbes Australia. There will be digital newsletters and podcasts and then when the team is built out enough, we will focus on events. The magazine is one part of the media universe, but we want to bring stories to life. We can bring these stories to life through digital or in-person events. Allow our readers to delve in, meet these people – even if it’s the billionaires or venture capitalists or philanthropists. We want to meet and connect with people.

Some of the stories we’ll share across the digital platforms, but not all of them. We want to keep some for print. Some may be drip fed, but we won’t have every story on every platform.

When it comes to Australia compared with the American market, what is the difference there? Australia seems to have a real ownership in the tech sweetheart space, for example Mr. Yum, Strava and Atlassian, will you focus on these sorts of businesses?

Absolutely, we really have the darlings in the Canva and the Atlassian and they’re just the epitome of a homegrown success story. They’ve done phenomenally well. But there is a lot more going on, and now these tech companies are going through a time that is going to be really tough. Inflation is really affecting them.

But looking at our cover story, we have the brothers behind Immutable. They’ve been so phenomenally innovative in this space and they’re leading the way in Web 3.0. We see so many people put this and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into the too hard basket, but this is actually where we can potentially create a whole new world of digital economies. Immutable have built that infrastructure.

Web 3.0 and NFTs are so highly spoken about. We find our audience at Marketing is highly engaged in this.

I do think Australians were probably a little late to it, a bit more hesitant to pick it up – but there’s a lot of money to be made in it. People want to be, what they call, ‘early adopters’. Some people are slow. But in my opinion, Web 3.0 and NFTs are not going anywhere.

The first issue of Immutable was such a beautiful image, is this creative direction important for Forbes?

It’s everything. We have brought on board Huw Reynolds from Harper’s Bazaar, and his vision is so important. On our team we have Stewart Hawkins who’s ex-Bloomberg and AFR. Elise Shaw is our digital editor from The Australian, but I really wanted someone to get that non-traditional business injective, and so Reynolds made sense. His creative vision is amazing.

We looked at the Immutable team and Reynolds didn’t want to shoot them in the normal business way, not at Martin Place or behind a desk. He completely changed the vision.

It’s so admirable to take something that is so reputable and bring it to the Australian market, it’s a big task and we’re excited to see where it goes.

It is quite the task, but it’s exciting. The feedback we’ve had so far is phenomenal. People are so excited and you can really see and feel their appetite. We’re taking the best of Forbes and injecting a bit of joy and some local points. We’ve introduced columns like Breakfast with a Billionaire or Beer with a Billionaire. We are focussing on philanthropists as well. Who is bettering Australia? That’s what we are looking at.

Forbes Australia hit shelves in September 2022.

Sustainability with Forever and a Day’s Apryl Yii

Liv Croagh — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 07:00:49 +0000

Lingerie brands have become social media sensations, but Australian label Forever and a Day has a significant point of difference. Founder, Apryl Yii, is focused on the brand being sustainable. And this is at the forefront of the label’s ethos.

Marketing magazine sat down with Yii to speak about sustainability and whether it’s becoming the latest buzzword.

Forever and a Day founder Apyl Yii.

Marketing: Forever and a Day has really focused on being a sustainable brand, how important is this ethos to you?

Yii: Incredibly! ‘Sustainability’ is thrown around so much these days but it’s so important. It’s become something consumers consider when shopping from brands – to consider the footprint of their purchase on the world.

The earth and its condition is a reflection of humanity and how we treat it and its negative effects have been more prevalent than ever. It’s important that we learn from industrial mistakes and be very conscious of how our consumerism affects the world. Understandably, it’s not always possible to be 100 percent sustainable in every aspect of your business or shopping practices, but certainly the culmination of small acts on the part of everyone (business and consumer) adds up to big differences. It’s this ethos that I try to apply to my business practices and continue to improve upon from manufacturing and eventually to shipping.

It’s become something consumers consider when shopping from brands – to consider the footprint of their purchase on the world.

One of the things that can alienate sustainability is an increased price point, do you see this tide changing as sustainability becomes more spoken about importance?

Absolutely, I think the demand for sustainable practices and an increased conscientiousness makes it difficult to ignore when something is priced at a fast fashion price. Customers are challenged to shop slower and think harder about the things they buy. Of course, we all want things cheaper and more accessible, but brands being transparent about how sustainable (and ethical) processes makes it easier to see the value of the goods.

It has a chain reaction – as the more educated consumers become, the easier it is for other brands to follow suit.

Do you see brands ‘green-washing’ and ticking a box of doing the bare minimum for sustainability in order to get positive press coverage?

There definitely is an aspect to that nowadays for most brands, especially really established brands that need to keep up with current demands. It’s great that brands recognise sustainability is now an important aspect of ethical business practices but the danger is unsubstantiated claims and the lack of motivation to improve their sustainability model to get closer and closer to zero environmental impact.

I also think that more credit should also be given to consumers who are actually starting to ask more questions and demanding proof of brands sustainability practices and how that aligns with their personal ethos. So with these things hand in hand, I think it’s a lot harder to just skim the bare minimum now.

When marketing, is pushing that sustainability piece very important for you and your brand’s recognition?

To some degree. As I mentioned before, sustainability is an aspect to business that all brands will have to address to some degree. I don’t think it should be heroic, it’s the same world we all live in and therefore should be trying to play our part. If a consumer were to look at our business, I’d want them to find the information and show them that Forever and a Day is doing their part to contribute to a more sustainable future.

What has been your marketing strategy so far, as it’s only launched in the last few years – do you primarily focus on digital and social media?

The marketing is primarily focussed on digital and social media through influencers and paid advertising on Facebook, Google and most recently, TikTok.

Josh Cavallo: ‘People don’t have to get football to get my story’

Sophie Berrill — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 04:58:59 +0000

Josh Cavallo on his success after coming out as gay in an A-League first.

Twenty-one-year-old soccer player Josh Cavallo walked out of the Adelaide United change rooms on the afternoon of 27 October 2021 feeling overcome with love.

He’d just told his teammates he was gay, after hiding the fact from family and friends since admitting it to himself at the age of 16.

Before coming out, his life had involved dogged self-surveillance. Whenever loved ones asked about potential girlfriends, he’d have to remember what he had told the last person. He hated having to maintain the lie.

“There were times when I was running with the ball on the field and I was thinking about the conversation I was going to have after the game,” Cavallo tells Marketing magazine.

“That’s a huge distraction as a professional athlete.”

Buoyed by his team’s support that day in October, Cavallo went to his car and pulled out his phone. He opened Twitter and pressed ‘post’ on a video just under three minutes long, which was about to make sporting history.

“There’s something personal that I need to share with everyone,” he says in the video.

“I’m a footballer and I’m gay.”

There’s something a little anachronistic about a video of a young man coming out. These days, you’d hope LGBTIQA+ people in the public eye don’t feel they owe it to anyone to announce their sexuality quite so formally.

But Cavallo wanted his emotional video to show the turmoil many people in the closet still face. And the response to the video justified its release.

The viral video

Cavallo’s phone began buzzing so much, he had to turn it off. Within the first 30 minutes, he’d received over 700,000 messages. They came from fans, strangers, LGBTIQA+ icons Lil Nas X and Ellen DeGeneres, and World Cup champions Lionel Messi and Antoine Griezmann.

“When I turned it back on, obviously this warmth of love came through,” he says.

“I had to get two phones just to balance personal life with work.”

That video has now been viewed over 11 million times on Twitter and over two million on Instagram.

With it, Cavallo became the first in the Australian men’s A-League to come out as gay. Until as recently as May this year, he was the only openly gay man playing top-flight football in the world.

Cavallo was well aware of this significance going in. One of the first things he did when he realised he liked men was to look up if any famous footballers were gay.

“I wanted to find out if there were role models, or someone I could look up to that was paving the way in that industry,” he says. “A footballer that was successful, and that was gay, and was actively playing. But for me, unfortunately, there was no one at the time.”

There had been only one high-profile player to come out during their career before. In 1990, English footballer Justin Fashanu shocked the football world when he told a newspaper he was gay. The homophobia he faced, among other factors, has been tied to his death by suicide eight years later.

Changing the game

Three decades after Fashanu, Cavallo ended the silence in the men’s game. In the meantime, the female top players have been kicking goals for inclusivity with less of a stir.

Outsports counted 38 out LGBTQIA+ players at the 2019 Women’s World Cup.

“I was honestly so happy when I saw the women’s game,” says Cavallo.

“To see how relaxed the girls are and how cool that is. I thought, ‘Wow, I wish I could do that in [men’s] football one day’. And then I thought to myself, ‘Wish? I can make that happen. I have the opportunity to make this happen in football now’.”

In the 10 months since sharing his video, Cavallo’s message of pride has directly effected change in soccer.

Adelaide United hosted the A-League’s first ever pride game in February, a sellout match with players sporting rainbow jerseys. His old junior team, Brighton Soccer Club, also put a Proud2Play logo on its jersey in honour of Cavallo’s coming out.

Over in England, Jake Daniels, a 17-year-old Blackpool FC player in the Championship league (the second tier of the English system), cited Cavallo’s courage as inspiration for his coming out last May.

“Thousands” of other closeted sports players have reached to Cavallo for advice.

“Some are ready to come out tomorrow, some aren’t ready to come out until 10 years’ time,” says Cavallo. “But to be that ear for them and to listen to them and guide them, to show them how good life is for me and how good [the changes have been], is really nice, too.”

Fielding hate online

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a homophobic backlash to Cavallo’s success. Not three months after his video went viral, crowd members yelled abuse at him during a game. The hate also continued on social media.

“For me, when I see a little bit of hate online or get a little bit of hate in person – you can bring all the hate in the world you want to me, but to know that I’m helping save lives and change lives for the better for a little kid, I’ll do that every day,” he says.

While Cavallo says the love he gets outweighs the hate, the same may not go for other LGBTQIA+ people online. After that game, he took to his social media to call on Instagram for better protections.

“To Instagram I don’t want any child or adult to have to receive the hateful and hurtful messages that I’ve received… It’s a sad reality that your platforms are not doing enough to stop these messages.”

Following this, Cavallo says he had discussions with social media platforms, including Twitter and Instagram, about changing their settings to block and monitor trigger words in comments.

Twitter confirmed its safety mode and conversation tools were already in place before Cavallo came out. But the company is in ‘constant communication’ with his team to ensure it addresses any concerns or issues.

The changing commercial landscape for rainbow community athletes

Keeping up with the zeitgeist, more brands than ever are coming out in support of the player.

Cavallo has worked with Gymshark, Ralph Lauren and car company Cupra. Details of other currently confidential endorsement deals will be released soon, he says.

“It’s important for these brands to see that there is someone in the LGBTQ+ space that can represent them,” says Cavallo.

Across the sporting professions, living openly as an gay athlete used to be a sponsorship sinker.

A Seattle Times article from 1994 speculated that tennis legend Martina Navratilova and other top athletes missed out on major sponsorships for being open about their sexuality. The same article noted how Olympic gold medallist diver Greg Louganis struggled to land endorsement deals outside of swimwear and towel manufacturers because of homophobia and discrimination based on his HIV status.

The tide seems to be turning, for cisgender players at least. (Transgender and intersex athletes are still fighting to participate in sport, let alone obtain commercial support.)

Before Cavallo came out, he had zero sponsorships. He couldn’t afford a Ralph Lauren shirt. Now, brands are taking notice of his broad appeal beyond sport.

“People don’t have to get football to get my story,” says Cavallo.

Ordinary folks who don’t follow the A-League have approached him on the street – or even come to the pride game.

“A lot of people that came to that game weren’t necessarily football fans, but they felt like it was a safe place that they could come [to] and be themselves,” he says.

Brands know authenticity and inclusivity sells, particularly among Cavallo’s generation.

“Yes, it’s great having these companies come to me and want to work with me, but they have to align with my brand and my messaging behind it,” Cavallo says.

What’s next?

As with many positive firsts, Cavallo’s coming out story has attracted a big following and, with it, lucrative sponsorships. If more male players come out, the novelty may soon wear off and the endorsement deals could become diffused.

It’s impossible to predict what’s next. And for professionals at the top of their game, it’s not all about the sponsors.

“The main focus for me isn’t just about branding and endorsement deals. It’s about the messaging behind it,” says Cavallo.

“I want to make that next person’s life better and easier than what I had to go through.”

The future of AI and CX: Intrepid Travel interview

Liv Croagh — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 00:24:07 +0000

We live in a quick turnaround culture. From a quick response rate to the importance of seamless customer experience (CX). Intrepid Travel is known for being at the forefront of customer service and CX. Marketing sits down with chief customer officer Leigh Barnes of Intrepid Travel to talk about the importance of a tailored customer journey.

*Marketing Mag**: We live in a quick turn around culture. How important is an instant response? How quickly can you lose a customer through slow response?*

Leigh Barnes: Customers want the right information fast. However, there is no point responding quickly if the information doesn’t help the customer. So yes, response time is becoming more important every day.

But just as vital is the relevancy of the information provided. People will be shopping around and looking for different options. The faster and more relevant your answers are will mean they’re more likely to engage and book with your brand.

People like getting human responses; the less cookie cutter or programmed, the better. They aren’t as concerned by small grammar mistakes if they know they’re engaging with someone who is there to help them.

Marketing Mag: How important is the tailored journey that you have created?

Barnes: In 2021, Intrepid delivered more one-to-one automated email journeys than any other year. This investment allowed us to send personalised communications to customers based on their individual interests. These emails have a click-through rate almost four more than standard emails. Email is the third largest driver of our website bookings.

We’ve focused on creating tailored journeys around our customers’ wants. They’re important as it is providing customers with information they need. This could be more detail about a trip, content to help them prepare for a trip, or just a gentle reminder about the holiday. It is all about timely, personal and action-based communications. It also helps us scale, as the sends are automated, which means we’re able to provide the right information to the right people more of the time.

Marketing Mag: What are the highlights of the AI that make the CX smooth and easy to use?

Barnes: The real benefit in using AI has been the ability to feature trips in our emails based on our customers’ interests. Without it, we would typically send emails with the same trips featured to all of our subscribers. However, with Einstein, we’re able to personalise the trip content based on AI data. This is rather than having to rely on what we think the customer wants to see. This provides a much more authentic and interesting experience for each individual subscriber, which is important when you’re reaching thousands of people who have different tastes and travel styles.

Marketing Mag: How has Salesforce assisted in the fundraising campaigns on Intrepid Travel?

Barnes: We’ve used Salesforce to help understand our customers better so we can send them the most relevant information about the work we’re doing through The Intrepid Foundation.

For example, by tapping into customer data in Sales Cloud, Intrepid was able to target a COVID Emergency Appeal for India campaign to those who had previously travelled to, or shown interest in India. The campaign resonated well with this audience, raising nearly $15,000 which went towards medical supplies, including oxygen concentrators, as well as cash transfers for the most vulnerable families and meals for more than 60,000 people.

Marketing Mag: What is the new mindset in travel for customers post-lockdown? What behaviours are you seeing when booking and travelling?

Barnes: Customers more than ever are looking for indicators that they can trust a brand. They will check third party review sites, spend time going through your social channels and then take any means possible to get in contact with your brand. It’s important to meet your customer on the medium that works for them – whether that’s phone, live chat or in social media DMs.

The pandemic has highlighted the need for physical and mental wellbeing. A 2021 survey of 100 customers revealed our trips had a deep and lasting positive mental, emotional and physical wellbeing impact on our customers. It was powerful to hear comments about these long-term changes from our customers after their Intrepid trip:

“This trip was the best time of my life. Not only did it help physically but mentally and emotionally. The staff are the friendliest people you’ll ever meet, and their knowledge is unmatched. I can’t express how amazing every aspect of this trip was. Thank you for allowing me to have the trip of a lifetime.”

We’re seeing customers want to travel in a way that has minimal impact on the planet, and as a carbon-neutral B Corp certified company, we often use our social channels to inform and educate our community, travellers and staff about climate change and decarbonisation. For Earth Day 2021, Intrepid posted three separate social media posts across its customer-facing Facebook and Instagram channels, reaching 144,446 people. Our ‘Let’s talk about decarbonising travel” post had a 7.5 percent engagement rate, the second highest for that month, which shows how much this content is resonating.

Leigh Barnes is the chief customer officer at Intrepid Travel.

Preparing for a cookieless future: interview with Sean Cooper

Collin Vogt — Thu, 26 May 2022 00:54:02 +0000

Audience Group scored a major win with the hiring of Sean Cooper.

Cooper is coming over from Torque Data, a data analysis firm in which he was an equity partner. In 2015, Torque Data was purchased by Velocity, Virgin Australia’s Frequent Flyer service, to bring data analytics in-house.

Although he enjoyed working with Velocity, Cooper wanted to get back to the thing that gets him up in the morning: helping clients reach their peaks with better data usage.

The move to an independent agency let him do just that.

“I enjoy spending most of my time with clients [and] partners,” says Cooper. “I enjoy helping them solve their problems. I think that’s what I gravitate towards.”

Finding data

Right now, Cooper is helping companies make better use of data. He feels that a lot of ROI is being left on the table because of inefficient data usage.

Access to cookies has made marketing departments lazy when it comes to really utilising available data, according to Cooper. They aren’t learning how to make use of the information they have. Instead, they trust Facebook, Google, and other sites with large user bases to target customers for them.

One thing he does with clients is perform a “data audit” – a review of all the data a company has. From customer profiles to addresses, etc. and mining that data for possible points of relevance.

As an example, Cooper recently performed a data audit with a utilities company.

“It had a huge amount of data in the billing system that was really potentially useful in marketing,” says Cooper.

“An example of that is, you need to let your utility company know if you’ve got a dog. So if they come to read the metre, they’re [aware]. But that [data] sits in the transaction team. You can use it as a flag; people who have dogs use more air conditioning. It’s data you didn’t know you had, and that’s hugely valuable.”

A huge part in preparing for the cookieless future is doing an audit on the data you currently have available, and more importantly, being adept at understanding what data is valuable and can be used to drive conversions.

Execute better

The second part is in executing effectively on the insights that data provides. The key to proper execution is data sharing. But data sharing has to be more carefully considered now, Cooper advises.

“Who are all the companies you could legitimately share data with?” he asks. “The consumer expectation is that, if you’ve [shared data] in a way that’s appropriate, that’s okay. If you’re at a hotel and you get hit up for a car hire, that’s probably okay. If you are upfront with someone about what you’re gonna use their data for and how you’re gonna share it, that’s great. It’s where you try and push that too far that you’re gonna have trouble.”

Cooper noted that inevitable resistance to cookies follows a pattern in marketing. Whenever a certain tool becomes too invasive in a customer’s life, there will be pushback.

It’s the same thing with cookies today, which is why making better use of your internal data is more important than ever.

Cooper referenced the old saying from John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.

With more efficient data usage, your media mix modelling can be further optimised, which makes your ad spend go further.

“If you can get to 55 percent rather than half of it, or 60 percent, you’ve actually made a big step forward,” says Cooper.
“It’s a bit harder to get a hold of this data, but it does give you long term competitive advantage.”

Key takeaways

Cooper says there’s five questions that you need to be discussing with your media agency to ensure you aren’t leaving marketing ROI on the table:

What is your cookieless strategy?
In essence, what is your strategy for reaching specific audiences once cookies go the way of the dodo?
When was the last time you did a data audit?
This is a key element in answering the previous question. The data audit is a review of all potential sources of data your company has, just like the example with the utility company from before.
What is your data platform strategy?
Your data platform strategy is how you turn raw data into organised, useful information that can guide decision making. By creating a data platform, you can turn that data into an asset that adds value to your company. In other words, build your data platform like a product.
What is your data sharing strategy?
As Cooper says, what are the legitimate ways that you can share (i.e., monetise) the data you have available? Who would your customers accept you sharing their data with? Who would they feel is inappropriate to share data with?
What is your data monetisation strategy?
In other words, how will you use this data to optimise your revenues? It could be streamlining a customer’s experience or pathway to purchase, or it could be choosing the right firms to partner with for data sharing. It could also help you identify which existing customers have needs that aren’t being met.

As discussions about privacy and data ownership continue to happen in regulatory bodies around the world, it’s essential that you start to change your approach to data usage. You need to start looking for relevant information you didn’t know you had, and find ways to monetise that data, either externally or internally.

Inside Squarespace’s new campaign: Interview with Gui Borchert

Collin Vogt — Thu, 05 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Squarespace has just launched a new Australia-specific advertising campaign that shows the site’s ability to help even the most creative entrepreneurs. Gui Borchert, senior creative director at Squarespace, shared some insights about the campaign, the creator economy, and marketing in Australia.

Borchert said the campaign was intended to show that Squarespace can help anyone monetize their ideas online. The ads feature “exaggerated” examples of product and business ideas to show that “Squarespace can help anyone with an idea.”

“These character studies play with humorous archetypes to prove that point,” saysBorchert.

“We were inspired by the highs and lows of the ideation journey that many aspiring business owners and entrepreneurs go through.

“We know [entrepreneurs] have lots of ideas, but aren’t always taking the next step to bring them to life, so we used humour to show Aussies that you can really monetise anything – whether it’s your time, content, space or product. Ultimately, it was about showing that Squarespace is there for you when you come up with that winning idea and want to put it online.”

The creator economy

The campaign is tapping into a growing market – the creator economy. The explosion of social media and online content production has led to the growth of a new breed of entrepreneur. This new market includes YouTubers, TikTokers, influencers, bloggers, and anyone else whose social presence is their bread and butter. And they need their own unique tools and allies to help make the most of their content.

According to Borchert, “Squarespace talks to anyone with an idea or business dream. They can be aspiring and existing entrepreneurs, small business owners and creatives.”

“Our new campaign naturally speaks to the needs of [the Creator Economy] – those looking to monetise their presence online and take it to the next level through memberships, selling merchandise, advice or content,” he continues.

Squarespace doesn’t just help with an online store – it offers a whole suite of tools for the new breed of entrepreneurs to utilise.

Targeting an Australian market

Borchert and the creative team at Squarespace recognised that there were unique issues to consider when addressing the Australian market.

“Tall-poppy-syndrome in particular is uniquely Australian and can come in the form of people underselling themselves and their ideas,” says Borchert. “It’s interesting because Australians actually have some of the best and most creative business ideas in the world – it’s just about building their confidence to turn those dreams into a reality. Squarespace and Australians make the perfect partners in that respect, as we enable anyone to stand out online and sell any great idea that you have.”

To help Aussies overcome the dreaded flower-clipping, Squarespace will be launching an initiative to foster three Australian businesses.

“We actually have an exciting initiative launching in May where we will be awarding three emerging Australian businesses with a grant that takes their business to the next level,” Borchert said. “So stay tuned.”

If you’ve got a growing (or percolating) online business, be sure to see if Squarespace can help you grow. For Borchert and the rest of the Squarespace team, no idea is too wild.

Interview with Pinterest’s global head of marketing Jim Habig

Liv Croagh — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Pinterest is a unique social media platform with a completely different user experience than its competitors. Marketing mag sits down with global head of business marketing Jim Habig to find out just how brands can and should be using Pinterest for promotion – and then turn those ads into direct revenue.

Marketing mag: Pinterest is unique for a social media platform; how do you think that this Unique Selling Point (USP) has benefited the platform?

Jim Habig: Simply put, with Pinterest, you can inspire the decisions of consumers. Unlike other platforms where ads distract users from reading the news or connecting with friends, commercial content can enhance the Pinterest user’s experience. People come to Pinterest looking for products and services to plan their futures and build their lives.

On Pinterest, brands are additive to the Pinner’s experience. People come to Pinterest to discover products and services for their wardrobe, for their new home or for their next holiday, and advertisers want to be discovered. There is incredible harmony between them. Pinterest is one of the rare platforms where it is truly possible for brands to engage with new customers who are intentional, open and making buying decisions.

We’re in a unique position because Pinterest is personal media, not social media. It’s a resource for people as they deliberately set out to plan their lives. Pinterest also serves as a place for people to escape news, politics and the negativity that can be found in so many places online.

With the introduction of shopping on the site, what is the long-term plan for Pinterest? Do you see it becoming a marketplace and one-stop-shop for Pinners?

Our vision for shopping with Pinterest is: ‘every time you see a product you like, you should be able to buy it or something like it’.

Pinterest has always been a shopping destination – and over the last year, we’ve introduced features to make it even easier to shop the ideas that you discover on the platform. We’ve found that 89 percent of Pinners use the platform on their path to purchase, and we’re continuing to deliver features that enable their ‘idea to purchase’ pipeline.

With our shopping ads products, retailers can surface a suite of ideas to help customers bring a fully realised idea to life. Pinterest isn’t about just finding that new look, it’s about revamping that whole wardrobe. Features like collections help Pinners visualise a whole mood, and drive larger basket sizes. Enabling our Pinners to find what they actually love by browsing products in a way that feels useful, happy and personalised drives conversions. In a sense these are the hallmarks of the in-store experience, brought online. We do this through AI-powered recommendations, dynamic catalogues and shoppable Product Pins, visual search to zoom into any object and find where to buy it, and measurement and reporting insights for retailers to determine what’s making them successful.

There’s a particular opportunity for marketers around the holidays as Pinterest is becoming the new holiday catalogue. Brands know Pinterest is where people go for inspiration and where they naturally shop; this makes it a one-stop shop for holiday planning.

How can marketers use Pinterest?

With every platform chasing ecommerce dollars, people are bombarded with buy buttons and ‘add to carts’ nearly everywhere. But Pinterest is different – it’s a platform with shopping right at its heart, not a social platform with commercial features bolted on. This means Pinners are more receptive to merchants, and we’ve created new tools and resources to help merchants fashion a more inspiring storefront and showcase their products.

As a platform where people go to plan their futures, Pinterest provides a valuable window into forthcoming consumer behaviour. We recommend marketers consider Pinterest as a taste graph, and key into burgeoning insights to shape their creative and targeting strategies.

To recognise what’s working and optimise their campaigns, we recommend marketers avail themselves of our first and third party measurement tools to gauge success throughout the funnel and account for the full return on their investment.

How should brands be using these new additions?

We recently introduced a feed optimisation playbook to help merchants hone their product feeds to see more conversions. Tools like advanced filtering enable merchants to more easily promote through product groups, and campaign budgets help drive efficient campaign results with less effort.

Do you think there is a gap for brands at the moment not utilising Pinterest?

Definitely. On Pinterest, 97 percent of top searches are unbranded, which means that Pinners are typing in a specific brand name when they are searching for ideas. This creates a huge opportunity for businesses of all sizes to be equally discovered.

Pinterest is creating an inspired ecosystem for shopping that bridges the gap between in-store and online. As people continue coming to Pinterest to shop, we’re advancing our shopping features to create a place to shop online, not just to buy. [It’s a] place for shoppers to find the things they actually love, and a place to make shopping truly fun again.

What should marketers be on the lookout for when it comes to utilising Pinterest?

Pinterest users are big-time planners. They typically start searching twice as early as people on other platforms, because Pinterest helps people get inspired. It then helps them find the products to make their ideas a reality. Pinterest continues to be a place where businesses can reach consumers who are in a future-oriented mindset. By reaching Pinterest users early when they’re looking for inspiration, businesses are able to reach consumers when they’re more open to possibilities.

What is the number one thing you consider marketers are missing when it comes to using Pinterest for their clients?

Too often marketers use Pinterest for the very beginning of a customer journey or the very end, and neglect Pinterest’s unique ability to connect the full funnel. Pinterest provides a unique opportunity for marketers to guide the shopping journey – from the earliest glimmers of an idea through to an eventual purchase. Pinterest users are uniquely suited to this path, because they come to the platform open minded but undecided, and often leave with a purchase decision. In fact, 83 percent of weekly Pinners make a purchase based on content they see from brands on Pinterest.

To take advantage of this behaviour in a key seasonal moment, brands should use Pinterest insights to inform their campaigns, to anticipate the needs of Pinners and to generate content according to the seasonal searches that are happening on the platform.

I also want to highlight that we recently introduced our Verified Merchant Program in Australia, which builds trust with Pinterest shoppers by presenting a marketplace of high-quality merchants and products that inspire Pinterest users. In exchange for quality products, accurate metadata, inspirational content and reasonable shipping and return policies, merchants receive various benefits such as enhanced distribution within shopping surfaces, a badge that builds Pinner trust, and a Shop tab on their profile that makes it easy for Pinterest users to discover their products.

Looking into a crystal ball, what’s the five-year plan for Pinterest? Will we see it becoming an even more immersive shopping platform?

Pinterest has been on an 11-year journey and it feels like we’re just getting started. We’ve gone from a visual discovery engine to a true inspiration platform that emboldens Pinners, creators and advertisers to create content that is unique to them and truly brings them joy. We also foster a positive, safe and inclusive online community, where everyone is encouraged to be their true authentic selves and inspire one another to take action on great content and ideas.

This past year, we’ve released incredible new products, initiatives and partnerships – from Idea Pins, to launching our Creator Code, to a global partnership with Shopify and expanding shopping to even more countries like Australia. Over the next five years, we will continue to grow as a key destination for Pinners looking for inspiration and product ideas, creators looking to grow their brands and build a business, and advertisers looking to genuinely engage with their audience.

We’re changing the way we inspire the world – from helping Pinners collect and discover the things they love from all over the internet, to bringing the most inspiring people – and all their passions, knowledge and talent – directly onto Pinterest.

Mr Yum’s Kim Teo

Liv Croagh — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Before COVID, Mr Yum was a nice-to-have order and pay mobile menu. Now, with social distancing and hospitality restrictions, it’s a cornerstone of hospitality venues. Marketing mag speaks to co-founder and CEO Kim Teo about how the needs of the product have changed, and what we can expect in the future.

What was the direction of Mr Yum prior to the outbreak?

Mr Yum was founded in late 2018 and was created with the simple idea of bringing menus to life with photos of every dish.

Mr Yum’s digital visual menu quickly evolved into a web-based menu where customers order and pay via their phone by scanning a QR code.

When COVID hit in 2020, we were a 100 percent in-venue table-ordering solution, so when we went into lockdown and venues’ revenue was cut to zero overnight, so was ours.

Our tiny team banded together to build delivery and pick-up features for the platform in just nine days. We worked around the clock to help hospitality businesses quickly adapt and keep their kitchens operating and staff employed.

There has been a lot of growth in less than two years. In the past 12 months, the team has grown from 12 to more than 100 full-time employees across four countries, and Mr Yum now has more than 13 million users worldwide.

Can you explain more about how the all-on-one CRM (customer relationship management) platform works?

Faced with the challenges of rapid expansion, we knew it was time for our tech stack to evolve beyond a collection of disconnected business systems that we’d previously used. This scale at pace was what led us to start working with HubSpot.

HubSpot’s CRM platform was critical to unifying our business data, which enhanced agility and better equipped the business to scale. The all-on-one CRM platform gives us a much-needed single source of truth and insight into customer journeys. This is so important when you’re navigating a period of rapid growth and international expansion.

Using HubSpot breaks down potential internal silos to offer a single, unified view of Mr Yum’s growing customer base. It powers all of the business’s sales, marketing, support and project management activities, making key business information transparent and easily accessible to multiple departments.

Co-founder and CEO, Kim Teo

What are the six tools consolidated via HubSpot?

To support booming growth, we consolidated six tools in our tech stack via the HubSpot platform, helping to significantly reduce workflow processes and drive efficiencies while we scaled our workforce by more than 800 percent in less than a year. The six tools included ActiveCampaign, Calendly, Pipedrive, Unbounce, Teamwork and, in some cases, Typeform.

How did this reduce workflow?

Finding the right technology partner was at the heart of our expansion. We knew we needed a change and our move to HubSpot has gone hand in hand with the growth and maturity of the business. Embracing HubSpot allowed our business to consolidate a tech stack of disparate systems into a single unified platform.

With the old systems, the business had little visibility into customer journeys, end-to-end conversion rates or end-to-end costs. Now, account managers can run their entire day from a single platform and stay across every aspect of the business.

When you’re doubling the size of your team, as we’ve done, then every second person in the business is new. You have to have the right systems in place to help people to do their job from day one.

How important is it for businesses and brands to be tech-savvy as we enter the next stage of the pandemic ?

Though hospitality as an industry has been traditionally slow to embrace technology, changes brought on by the pandemic are being quickly embraced.

Just as the financial crisis of 2007/08 caused a retail revolution with the adoption and acceleration of eCommerce, Mr Yum is helping the hospitality industry adapt to today’s new normal, to now become ‘bricks and mobile’.

Businesses won’t go back to old ways of working.

The pandemic has encouraged increasing mainstream adoption of streamlining technologies and realising their full potential will be key to success in future.

Whether increasing productivity, reducing errors or using data to personalise the customer experience, return on investment from technology can be substantial and can be the difference between success and failure.

Looking to the future, what’s next for Mr Yum?

Our mission is to create the best growth toolkit for hospitality and entertainment in the world. This toolkit is more than just QR code ordering, but encompasses a suite of features, including payments, loyalty, marketing, customer insights and more integrations than any other order and payments solution in the world.

Mr Yum builds products for the future, for hospitality’s needs not only today but for what will be needed to help restaurants recover from the past 18 months and enhance the trajectory of that recovery.

Mr Yum will continue to roll out our all-in-one loyalty, reward and discount program that enables customised marketing for all venues, no matter how small.

In-depth work on the consumer experience is already underway, focused on providing a personalised customer journey including smart reordering and bespoke recommendations and upsells based on AI-based profile matching.

How can brands and businesses capitalise on what the future looks like?

Some things you can’t control – such as COVID – but being adaptable and nimble, and being prepared to seize opportunities that present themselves is going to put a business in good stead in the years ahead.

Interview with Nigel Mendonca, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Smartsheet

Liv Croagh — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Nigel Mendonca is the Vice President, Asia Pacific, at Smartsheet. He joined the business in January 2020, with over 20 years’ experience working in sales and general management roles across technology companies in both Australia and Asia. Nigel is responsible for leading Smartsheet’s APAC business operations and establishing Smartsheet as a market leader in the collaborative work management space.

Marketing Mag sits down with Mendonca to talk about where Smartsheet has come from, where it’s going and how these tools help to keep teams that are working remotely connected and collaborative.

Find out more by downloading Smartsheet’s eBook.

Collaboration, remote working and Havas Village: Interview with Anthony Freedman (Havas)

Liv Croagh — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When it comes to the digital revolution, creative agencies have been at the forefront. Marketing speaks with Anthony Freedman from Havas about the Havas Village model, collaboration when remote working and the changing shape of agencies.

Havas has created the Havas Village model, which promotes collaboration between media teams and creative teams. Do you think that such an approach is the way forward?

Collaboration as a principle of success is not new. Figuring out how to facilitate it is more difficult than one might first assume. There’s a surprising amount of competition within holding companies, multiple brands that offer the same services, agencies with different skillsets and profit and loss (P&L) fighting over revenue from a common client. Havas’ Village strategy sought to address this, and started to roll out in 2013, well ahead of any other network. The notion is quite simple; it’s about assembling best in class agencies. This represents all of the marketing communications skillsets that a brand might conceivably have need of. All under one roof, operating with one P&Ls, led by a single country leader and with a culture that fosters collaboration. And then being able to create cross functional teams that are assembled around a client’s needs. This is rather than the client needing to arrange its needs around the agency’s vertical brands or capabilities.

Marketers are under a lot of COVID-related pressure to deliver ROI and to digitise. How has this translated in the agency world and how have you met these challenges?

I think marketers have always had to prove return on investment (ROI). I am not sure it’s something that has arisen from the pandemic. As a result, agencies have to be accountable to the strategies they develop and the campaigns they create. I think the key thing is to be clear at the outset what the campaign is being created to do. Ensure that there are measures in place to capture the impact of the campaign and a forum to review, optimise and improve as the work rolls out.

In terms of the increased pace towards digital transformation, it’s not a new shift. But is one that has undeniably sped up as we have all been forced to transact more remotely. I think for some agencies this has been a boom that supported them during 2020 and even 2021 whilst other areas of the communication mix such as experiential, were impacted. For others who are less well prepared to assist clients in this space, it’s not been as advantageous. Most large networks now have capabilities in this space. Certainly, the move from Havas to aggregate its digital, data and consulting services under the Havas CX brand in 2020, has received a warm reception and fast start from clients and potential clients.

What was your experience of leading a team during COVID? What insights have stuck with you?

I feel we have all learned a lot about what’s possible remotely. Far more than any of us ever believed possible, and also what we lose as creative businesses, not spending time in an office environment on a regular basis. Personally speaking, being based in London with responsibilities in both Australia and the UK, I found that initially I was more familiar with working remotely because I was used to working with a team in Australia with whom I wasn’t always face to face. But over time I also began to realise that my regular travel to Australia meant I was rarely if ever, not physically in the office with them for a period of time longer than 3 weeks.

That time in the office I came to realise was essential for me to feel how things were going, rather than just being told. It’s about being immersed in a market and absorbing the context rather than reading about it. It’s connecting with people informally and catching up without scheduled meetings. There’s an importance of spontaneity and serendipity, the value of a five-minute chat whilst making a cup of tea, vs the 30 minute Teams call in its place. Of course, we also learned a lot of about work/life balance, resilience. The obligations of an employer in the modern world, mental health, community and so much more.

What are your thoughts on in-housing versus outsourcing or using specialists? Do you see this evolving?

I think broadly that agencies services are split between origination and implementation. Origination for me is about thinking both strategic and creative. I feel that this is where the real ‘intangible’ value is delivered by agencies and I think it’s something that agencies do very well because they have people and an environment that attracts and enables this sort of thinking in a way that most client companies would find harder to achieve. Not all but most. It’s also arguably an expensive resource that most clients need intermittently rather than all of the time. So, whether it makes commercial sense to employ that team internally on a full time basis to provide this sort of ‘origination’ is also a key consideration.

The implementation side of things, where it’s about rolling out a campaign, is much more a functional process that I think can sit well within a client organisation if that’s the way they want to approach it. There are undoubtedly benefits that could be cost and time saving and that’s valid. Equally there is a burden of recruiting, retaining and managing that team. Of ensuring the right technology and infrastructure exists to facilitate their work. I think ultimately, the future of agencies will be the flexibility to accommodate and facilitate different ways of work, whether all agency side, some in-housed plugged into an originating team based at the agency, or some other variation beyond that.

Considering the rapid changes all around us, from VR to AR and mobile social, what excites you about the next stage of marketing?

Perhaps it’s that which is most exciting… the fact it is rapidly changing which means learning new things and evolving to keep pace. It’s trite to say but social media effectively did not exist 15 years ago. Few brands even had a website just over 20 years ago. Equally there are fundamentals that remain ever relevant. Creativity, the power of an idea, the importance of understanding what it is to be human, emotion, relevance, role and entertainment. Being able to target more precisely, measure more accurately and optimise scientifically, doesn’t matter at all if those other things aren’t given equal weighting.

What do Australian consumers want from their brands and where should marketers be focusing their efforts?

Havas has been running an annual global study called Meaningful Brands since 2009. It surveys almost 400,000 consumers each year on how they feel about brands and what it takes, to become a brand that truly matters. The shocking headline from that study is that 75 percent of brands could disappear overnight and consumers wouldn’t even notice.

In April 2021 we conducted a further piece of research through our insights team Havas Labs. It was to understand what Aussies think about marketing and how we break into the 25 percent of brands that truly matter.

In terms of headline findings, we firstly saw that peoples’ perceptions of brands are heavily influenced by how good they think the product is – or put another way, consumers don’t distinguish between brands and products. When considering the most important attributes of brands between Functional (what the product does), Personal (how the brand makes me feel) and Collective (the broader role the brand plays within society), people continue to place Functional as the most important. They key point in relation to this is that too often marketers only want ‘purpose led comms’, underestimating the power of Functional.

Secondly, while the industry has extolled the virtues of brands with purpose and their importance in recruiting new consumers, consumers are divided on whether this is actually motivating. Only around 1 in 2 people agree that they’re more likely to purchase from brands who make the world a better place and that they have a responsibility to do so. Around the same proportion say that price is more important than a brand’s ethical/sustainability practices.

Thirdly, the number one Collective benefit Aussies place the most importance on is whether a brand is Australian made/owned.

As marketers we hear a lot about purpose-led and values-led to connect to consumers; what do you think about this?

I think there is a growing acceptance that more and more people expect brands and business to positively contribute to society and to operate with values that reflect the times we live in. Embedding that into the way an organisation works and finding ways for both their people, customers and consumers to be aware makes sense. But it feels to me that many are failing… either to genuinely embrace and execute their purpose, or to communicate that in a way that is relevant and appealing to their audiences.

The most recent Meaningful Brands study clearly illustrates this point and was in fact headlined as the Age of Cynicism. It tells us that across the globe, consumers are surrounded by what they perceive to be broken promises – at all levels of society – and we are starting to see the impact of this mistrust on brands. Consumers expect brands to play a more positive and collective role in society, however, the more brands claim to play this role and leave promises unfulfilled, the deeper the cynicism grows. With only 39 percent of brands in Australia being seen as trustworthy, compared to 47 percent globally, the only way to rebuild this trust and positively stand out, is with action not words.

Marketing comes down to storytelling. What are your favourite stories being told?

I personally am drawn to ideas that are fame generating and combine spin, sociability and spectacle. Work that primarily earns an audience and leverages the power of people and popular culture. I think one of the best recent examples of this would be ‘Stevenage Challenge’ from Burger King in which the brand became shirt sponsors of a club called Stevenage FC, playing in the lowest tier of British football, knowing that would in turn make them shirt sponsors of that team within the video game FIFA. They then created a movement, with rewards, to entice players into using that team when playing the FIFA game online.

What’s next for Havas?

Havas for me remains unique in being part of a global entertainment and media company. It means our sister businesses are in music, film, TV, publishing, gaming, live events and so on. As Vivendi, we are immersed in popular culture if you allow it. I think it permeates the culture of the agencies within Havas and the way in which they think. I don’t mean that the benefit is about preferential access to entertainment properties or talent for clients. Although that might be part of it, but more a mindset about understanding popular culture and finding ways for brands to be a part of it and what their customers are interested in or passionate about.

In an era where it’s easier for consumers to avoid advertising through ad blockers, second screens and subscriptions to ad-free environments, finding ways to reach people through being part of popular culture or the things they’re interested in (not just an interruption to them), seems to me an ever more important dimension to the way that agencies should think.