This year’s inaugural CMO Awards weren’t just a showcase of Australian marketing leaders doing an excellent job of marketing stewardship and effectiveness. We also introduced the Best Growth Initiative of the Year award, supported by Publicis Groupe, to single out and recognise strategic growth initiatives led by marketing teams.

In this podcast episode, we bring together Jenni Dill, CMO of inaugural award winner, Arnott’s Group, with Cath Brands, CMO of highly commended Flintfox International, plus inaugural judge Ty Hayes, former Curtin Uni CMO and founder of Growth Generators, to delve into what it takes to unlock growth that delivers business-grade impact. From first identifying the opportunity, to how they freed up capacity and gained cross-functional buy-in to make it happen, these marketing leaders from very different B2C and B2B worlds shed light on the programs of work that led to success – and importantly, where they had to rethink and pivot.

For judges, Arnott’s Gluten Free was a clear winner for Best Growth Initiative of the Year award for its gluten free effort – the most incremental launch the FMCG has had to date. Today, gluten-free biscuits make up approximately 10 per cent of the total biscuit market, with an impressive annual growth rate of 40 per cent. Remarkably, Arnott’s has driven 82 per cent of this growth in the past year alone, chalking up $40 million in sales.

“When we got into it, what people really wanted was our biggest, known, loved icons, but gluten-free versions with no taste trade off. So that pretty quickly set our true north,” says Jenni Dill. “That meant a multi-year journey to invest in new bakeries, establish new ways of working, new methods of baking, new ways of going to market, new locations on shelf. It really was a concerted effort, but we also wanted to make sure we weren't waiting two or three years to do something. So we had to get an MVP in the market. We had to start with our simpler products that were easier to get taste equivalent matches to in a gluten-free version. And then everything we did from a marketing perspective, had to make sure that everything was as incremental as it could possibly be.”

At Flintfox, meanwhile, the growth opportunity was to take an Australian-made pricing solutions offering into the German, Austrian and Swiss markets.

“The team and I had two goes at this,” Cath Brands admits. “In the first attempt, we did it the lazy way – we put a translate button on the website, did some contextual translation of what we did and decided to buy some LinkedIn media. Turns out that that's not how you go to business in Germany. That's not how the Germans play the game.”

Take two required an all-encompassing approach: Native product extension, translation and new integrations with SAP, identifying nuanced user and macro conditions, building a market presence from scratch and a go-to-market approach. The result was winning two really big customers in Germany last year worth millions.

For Ty Hayes, however different this year’s winner and highly commended brands may be, each identified strategic, innovative, approaches to drive significant net new revenue. “That was either attacking a new category or creating a new category, or entering a new market,” he says.

They also demonstrate what Hayes sees as the top three things every growth initiative of substance needs: “Insight, foresight and experimentation”.

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Byron Sharp is a distinctive assets maximalist, suggesting how brands look and are recognised and embedded into people’s minds is more important than focusing on what they do differently to rival brands. Mark Ritson argues brands need differentiation to stand out from rivals and pull customers in. News Australia says you need both to drive growth – and that custom-made media that delivers engagement beyond reach is a critical multiplier.
News Australia has just wrapped up its nationwide agency engagement roadshow, Frontiers, diving deep with hundreds of agency execs across dozens of workshops to unpack how to cut through and deliver much sharper results amid a comms sea of sameness. The key is moving beyond old-school approaches of tonnage-based reach and the legacy constructs of ‘paid, owned and earned’ media.

Case studies for CommBank, NRMA Insurance, Subway and Toblerone strongly suggest the approach is working: Subway notched 3 per cent sales gains; NRMA Insurance and News Australia’s positive influence helped secure $7.2bn in government funding to fix Queensland’s Bruce Highway. Unsurprisingly, more Queenslanders now like NRMA Insurance than before.
Now News Australia wants to work with agencies and brands to build better campaigns and more case studies. But that requires a shift in approach to planning and content creation. It’s harder work, says GM of Client Growth & Experience, Renee Sycamore, but powerful results prove “the effort definitely pays off”.

The key to achieving “distinctively different” campaigns says Head of Growth Intelligence, Leigh Lavery, is to focus on three critical elements: Making content magnetic (i.e. it gets attention); momentous (i.e. contextually relevant, capturing the zeitgeist) and meaningful (i.e. saying and doing something that adds value to customers).

But going against conventional wisdom on mass reach may also be required. As National Head of Digital Strategy and Streaming Dianna Molinaro puts it: “Everyone’s got reach … but what our agency partners and marketers really care about is the impact.” Likewise, everyone has data: “It’s about what we do with it.”

Now News Australia is powering custom-made media with behavioural audience signals across the network to connect intent and content. Molinaro says data-driven relevance is where the growth gold lies.

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Marketing budgets are declining just as paid media costs are rising – meaning brands get less for every dollar spent, and fewer dollars to start with. But latest research commissioned by The Trade Desk into omnichannel versus multichannel media planning could provide sweet relief.

In short, the difference between omnichannel and multichannel planning is that omnichannel campaigns are connected by data and technology from the get-go, whereas multichannel campaigns put ads into different channels one by one. The distinction is subtle – but the disparity in results can be massive.

Across UK, US and Australian markets, the research found omnichannel ad campaigns outperform multichannel campaigns on nearly every metric by up to 90 per cent, delivering steep upside for marketing teams in improving the ROI performance of their paid media schedules.

It also found that properly linking campaigns across channels significantly reduces the mental load on consumers, and therefore ad fatigue, and drives more conversions, faster.

Versus “disconnected” multichannel campaigns, omnichannel campaigns were “one and a half times more persuasive, 50 per cent better at building emotional connection with audiences and 70 per cent better at encoding messages in long-term memory”, according to The Trade Desk Director of Marketing Research and Insights, Sara Picazo.

Brands switching to omnichannel approaches also report massive performance gains: Picazo said working with The Trade Desk, IKEA boosted conversions by 339 per cent and cut time to conversion by 10 per cent.
Likewise, Nunn Media Head of Digital and Data Lee Foster said brands taking an omnichannel approach are making lasting reductions in performance media costs – one client has cut cost per acquisition by 24 per cent, sustained over a nine-month period.

Picazo and Foster urge brands not already harnessing omnichannel approaches to test the theory themselves. But the research also has implications for the way brand and agency planning teams are set up.

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