Menulog is 13 years old and after a competitive onslaught is now outgrowing UberEats and Deliveroo. For a digital pureplay business, CMO Simon Cheng is doing old-world crazy stuff like investing heavily in mass market media, using scorned ‘reach and frequency’ techniques and is a huge advocate for winning the 'mental availability’ battle as food ordering aggregators face commoditisation - and then there’s the future of 'Dark Kitchens'. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Menulog is 13 years old and after a competitive onslaught is now outgrowing UberEats and Deliveroo. For a digital pureplay business, CMO Simon Cheng is doing old-world crazy stuff like investing heavily in mass market media, using scorned &lsquo;reach and frequency&rsquo; techniques and is a huge advocate for winning the 'mental availability&rsquo; battle as food ordering aggregators face commoditisation - and then there&rsquo;s the future of 'Dark Kitchens'.&nbsp;See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

A weekly wrap of the “must-know” developments in Marketing, Media, Agency and Technology for leaders and emerging leaders in the industry. Veteran industry journalist and Mi3 Executive Editor Paul McIntyre talks each week with guest marketers who are in the know on what matters at the nexus of marketing, agencies, media and technology. Powered mostly by Human Intelligence (HI).

A weekly wrap of the “must-know” developments in Marketing, Media, Agency and Technology for leaders and emerging leaders in the industry. Veteran industry journalist and Mi3 Executive Editor Paul McIntyre talks each week...

Mi3 Audio Edition

Commoditisation and ‘dark kitchens': Why Menulog CMO Simon Cheng says building brands in social channels is too hard and worries industry is stuck on ‘creative mediocrity’

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing

The Iconic CMO, Joanna Robinson, describes commercial marketers as “customer obsessed, commercially disciplined, always data-informed and strategically curious”. Former Naked Wines CEO and Unilever marketing leader, Paul Connell, says it’s about being highly accountable, “and also being someone who’s in for the business outside of their lane”. And TPG CMO, Bec Darley adds another all-important word to the list: Profit.

“This is we know how much of the net cash that’s falling to the bottom line. Is it a term you’d expect a commercial marketer to have? Absolutely. Is it one we see a lot of? No … If marketing is truly to be seriously among our c-suite and board, understanding profit has to be part of the language of the commercial marketer,” Darley argues.

There’s absolutely no doubt marketing leaders are being asked to be more accountable for commercial outcomes. Yet they continue to carry a ball and chain around their ankles: Marketing as discretionary spend on the P&L, and the first thing to be cut when times are tight. So how do you successfully reframe marketing as revenue, not cost, and ensure you’re fiscally responsible while pursuing the growth game?

These three marketing luminaries joined us on the mics for an exploration of the strategies – formal and informal – they’ve pursued to embed an expansive mentality around marketing that beats those tired perceptions of marketing and brand investment as a lag on the balance sheet. From getting to the heart of unit economics, and truly understanding what creates value inside a business, to balancing the logic of brand – increasingly possible through tools like MMM and tech – with the magic and behavioural psychology informing why marketers do what they do, through to inviting CFOs and CEO into the pitch to see the power of creativity, these three provide a wealth of insight into how marketers win over stakeholders.

We also explore key tenets of meeting the leadership team and board on their terms, from the language required to connect, to problem solving, plus tactics for structuring teams and capability to make the most of cross-functional ways of working.

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor &ndash; Marketing
The Iconic CMO, Joanna Robinson, describes commercial marketers as &ldquo;customer obsessed, commercially disciplined, always data-informed and strategically curious&rdquo;. Former Naked Wines CEO and Unilever marketing leader, Paul Connell, says it&rsquo;s about being highly accountable, &ldquo;and also being someone who&rsquo;s in for the business outside of their lane&rdquo;. And TPG CMO, Bec Darley adds another all-important word to the list: Profit.
&ldquo;This is we know how much of the net cash that&rsquo;s falling to the bottom line. Is it a term you&rsquo;d expect a commercial marketer to have? Absolutely. Is it one we see a lot of? No &hellip; If marketing is truly to be seriously among our c-suite and board, understanding profit has to be part of the language of the commercial marketer,&rdquo; Darley argues.
There&rsquo;s absolutely no doubt marketing leaders are being asked to be more accountable for commercial outcomes. Yet they continue to carry a ball and chain around their ankles: Marketing as discretionary spend on the P&amp;L, and the first thing to be cut when times are tight. So how do you successfully reframe marketing as revenue, not cost, and ensure you&rsquo;re fiscally responsible while pursuing the growth game?
These three marketing luminaries joined us on the mics for an exploration of the strategies &ndash; formal and informal &ndash; they&rsquo;ve pursued to embed an expansive mentality around marketing that beats those tired perceptions of marketing and brand investment as a lag on the balance sheet. From getting to the heart of unit economics, and truly understanding what creates value inside a business, to balancing the logic of brand &ndash; increasingly possible through tools like MMM and tech &ndash; with the magic and behavioural psychology informing why marketers do what they do, through to inviting CFOs and CEO into the pitch to see the power of creativity, these three provide a wealth of insight into how marketers win over stakeholders.
We also explore key tenets of meeting the leadership team and board on their terms, from the language required to connect, to problem solving, plus tactics for structuring teams and capability to make the most of cross-functional ways of working.

CMO Awards Podcast Episode 13: Combatting the belief marketing is a discretionary spend

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/fa326977-3de5-4283-9b8b-af3500c58607/clips/99e0848d-1d84-40e2-b6b2-b45500769d13/transcript

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large

In the last 20 years, KFC CMO Vanessa Rowed has worked across retail, banking, and QSR. Right now, compound market volatility makes “predicting demand really difficult” says Rowed.“That’s the biggest shift I am seeing.”

Boards and management are twitchy.

“Everything is just happening faster. At the same time, there's less margin for error … The illusion of stability is gone … It’s just complete volatility and it's the speed of volatility that people are struggling with,” per Rowed. “People are moving from asking, ‘what's happened’, to ‘what are we going to do?’

Rowed is walking the talk on velocity – it took just six days for the QSR giant to have all of its business data ingested into a first model run of the Mutinex MMM and her teams are firing up.

Mutinex CEO Henry Innis calls the broader market and civic state “the age of the erratic”. But flux presents opportunity for marketers: Organisations “are more willing to take risks to grow”, because, Innis says, they have little choice.

There’s also opportunity for marketing to move upstream by mapping what consumer and market instability means for demand forecasting and P&L impacts – questions Innis says would previously have been directed to the CFO or financial planning & analysis teams.

Rowed is seeing that play out: “I'm definitely seeing more risk taking now.” She says it’s born of necessity.

“At McDonald’s 15 years ago, we had an 18-24 month innovation process. Now you can’t wait 18 months to launch a product – it's been launched by my competitors three times. TikTok food trends come and go overnight … You’re ready to launch, then someone launches two weeks before you do and you have to pivot – that happens more frequently than you would expect.”

Hence wasting little time obtaining a sharper read on best growth bets. Rowed plugged into Mutinex upon joining KFC – with an initial model run completed in six days. “In past lives, that's taken us three, four months.”

Ex-Optus and Google top marketer Cam Luby joined pet food subscription scale-up Lyka four months ago and likewise immediately tapped Mutinex.

“When I was at Google, we would get back the equivalent of an MMM on a campaign six months after they finished ... ‘Okay, great. Thanks for the information. What do you expect us to do with it?’ … People were just busy writing history books, basically.”

Today’s MMM approach is less archaic.

“We've got the MMM updated to the end of March. We’re currently halfway through April, so the ability to make decisions about what we're going to do in the next few weeks based on what has happened in the last few weeks is … wildly different,” says Luby.

From a media perspective, Luby’s using the MMM to determine lost causes, where growth is left on the table – and what increasing ad investment will deliver in hard sales.

"[It provides] opportunity to recognise where your losers might be before they really hurt you. You can move to those a lot faster, and quickly optimise,” he says.

“A big one for me – as in just this week – is understanding what possibly is left in the tank: If we needed to drive a greater business result than what we're currently seeing, what more opportunity is there? Just very quickly understanding what is the max efficiency of all the channels that we're using ... We've now got the confidence to make a decision. We're going from 30,000 a week to 40,000 a week. Let's action that. Here's what we expect out of it. It gives you that confidence to move incredibly quickly and then see the results flow through in a very short time.”

He’s also using AI-powered functionality within Mutinex’s MAITE to unpick seasonality impacts on brand versus performance investments, plus handle reporting and presentation legwork ahead of board meetings: “I've got a board update that's coming up. So I said, ‘Can you please make me a table that does this, this, this, and this’ – copy paste, done. There's my table."

As well as growth bets, KFC’s Rowed will tap MMM to cut new product insights faster – with a live example in the last quarter.

“We launched a product and there were signs within a week that it wasn’t driving the incremental demand we needed. Historically, we would have waited until the end of that four-week promotional period, then analyse it three months later. But within one week, we said ‘this isn’t working’. We pivoted, reallocated media and creative, adjusted the plan mid-flight – and while we didn't hit the sales target that we needed to, we prevented loss. For me, that's just as important.”

Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large
In the last 20 years, KFC CMO Vanessa Rowed has worked across retail, banking, and QSR. Right now, compound market volatility makes &ldquo;predicting demand really difficult&rdquo; says Rowed.&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the biggest shift I am seeing.&rdquo;
Boards and management are twitchy.
&ldquo;Everything is just happening faster. At the same time, there's less margin for error &hellip; The illusion of stability is gone &hellip; It&rsquo;s just complete volatility and it's the speed of volatility that people are struggling with,&rdquo; per Rowed. &ldquo;People are moving from asking, &lsquo;what's happened&rsquo;, to &lsquo;what are we going to do?&rsquo;
Rowed is walking the talk on velocity &ndash; it took just six days for the QSR giant to have all of its business data ingested into a first model run of the Mutinex MMM and her teams are firing up.
Mutinex CEO Henry Innis calls the broader market and civic state &ldquo;the age of the erratic&rdquo;. But flux presents opportunity for marketers: Organisations &ldquo;are more willing to take risks to grow&rdquo;, because, Innis says, they have little choice.
There&rsquo;s also opportunity for marketing to move upstream by mapping what consumer and market instability means for demand forecasting and P&amp;L impacts &ndash; questions Innis says would previously have been directed to the CFO or financial planning &amp; analysis teams.
Rowed is seeing that play out: &ldquo;I'm definitely seeing more risk taking now.&rdquo; She says it&rsquo;s born of necessity.
&ldquo;At McDonald&rsquo;s 15 years ago, we had an 18-24 month innovation process. Now you can&rsquo;t wait 18 months to launch a product &ndash; it's been launched by my competitors three times. TikTok food trends come and go overnight &hellip; You&rsquo;re ready to launch, then someone launches two weeks before you do and you have to pivot &ndash; that happens more frequently than you would expect.&rdquo;
Hence wasting little time obtaining a sharper read on best growth bets. Rowed plugged into Mutinex upon joining KFC &ndash; with an initial model run completed in six days. &ldquo;In past lives, that's taken us three, four months.&rdquo;
Ex-Optus and Google top marketer Cam Luby joined pet food subscription scale-up Lyka four months ago and likewise immediately tapped Mutinex.
&ldquo;When I was at Google, we would get back the equivalent of an MMM on a campaign six months after they finished ... &lsquo;Okay, great. Thanks for the information. What do you expect us to do with it?&rsquo; &hellip; People were just busy writing history books, basically.&rdquo;
Today&rsquo;s MMM approach is less archaic.
&ldquo;We've got the MMM updated to the end of March. We&rsquo;re currently halfway through April, so the ability to make decisions about what we're going to do in the next few weeks based on what has happened in the last few weeks is &hellip; wildly different,&rdquo; says Luby.
From a media perspective, Luby&rsquo;s using the MMM to determine lost causes, where growth is left on the table &ndash; and what increasing ad investment will deliver in hard sales.
"[It provides] opportunity to recognise where your losers might be before they really hurt you. You can move to those a lot faster, and quickly optimise,&rdquo; he says.
&ldquo;A big one for me &ndash; as in just this week &ndash; is understanding what possibly is left in the tank: If we needed to drive a greater business result than what we're currently seeing, what more opportunity is there? Just very quickly understanding what is the max efficiency of all the channels that we're using ... We've now got the confidence to make a decision. We're going from 30,000 a week to 40,000 a week. Let's action that. Here's what we expect out of it. It gives you that confidence to move incredibly quickly and then see the results flow through in a very short time.&rdquo;
He&rsquo;s also using AI-powered functionality within Mutinex&rsquo;s MAITE to unpick seasonality impacts on brand versus performance investments, plus handle reporting and presentation legwork ahead of board meetings: &ldquo;I've got a board update that's coming up. So I said, &lsquo;Can you please make me a table that does this, this, this, and this&rsquo; &ndash; copy paste, done. There's my table."
As well as growth bets, KFC&rsquo;s Rowed will tap MMM to cut new product insights faster &ndash; with a live example in the last quarter.
&ldquo;We launched a product and there were signs within a week that it wasn&rsquo;t driving the incremental demand we needed. Historically, we would have waited until the end of that four-week promotional period, then analyse it three months later. But within one week, we said &lsquo;this isn&rsquo;t working&rsquo;. We pivoted, reallocated media and creative, adjusted the plan mid-flight &ndash; and while we didn't hit the sales target that we needed to, we prevented loss. For me, that's just as important.&rdquo;

	 ‘Age of the erratic’: How KFC’s Vanessa Rowed and Lyka’s Cam Luby are using MMM to navigate extreme volatility, bury dud products and replace them with better, faster

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/fa326977-3de5-4283-9b8b-af3500c58607/clips/1a94bb74-77e8-42ef-8bff-b443005ce033/transcript

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing

Numbers are increasingly stacking up that sticking to your brand narrative and creative platform knitting year after year pays outsized dividends. And it might just be the ticket to avoiding AI slop.

But it takes a wealth of market sensibility, consumer contextual input, creativity, fresh thinking and strategic nous to sell in such bold work in the first place – then keep at it. It’s equally true tenure and commanding influence inside an organisation plays a sizeable role in orchestrating a longer-term marketing and brand game plan and builds buy-in for the long-term vision, not just the next execution.

Two leading Australian CMOs have been over indexing on these compounding brand building and campaign benefits and have just celebrated five years of compounding success: Suncorp Executive General Manager of Brand and Customer Experience, Mim Haysom, and Tourism Tasmania CMO, Lindene Cleary.

Suncorp’s ‘One House’ campaign was the most highly awarded work in the country in 2021/22, including a Cannes Lion Grand Prix for innovation. It’s the foundational piece of Suncorp’s multi-year brand platform shift from recovery to resilience, a consistent thread that’s since been realised through work such as ‘Resilience Road’, strengthening five existing homes in Rockhampton to better combat extreme weather. The third piece launched last year was ‘Haven’, a data-infused tool providing personalised advice on help owners understand their potential extreme weather risks and how to be more resilience down to the individual property level.

While the brand and industry kudos have flowed, the work has importantly also driven change at the regulatory level. From $0.97 cents in every $1 going on recovery, the figure’s dropped to $0.93, seeing more money spent on prevention instead. “Four cents might not sound like much, but that's a big thing to move the dial on,” says Haysom.

For Tourism Tasmania, debuting the ‘Come Down for Air’ platform, then commencing the multi-year ‘The Off Season’ program to drive visitation during the quieter winter months has also demonstrated similarly compounding benefits. It’s played a pivotal role in growing winter visitation year-on-year to record levels in 2025. It is a statewide initiative that requires the whole organisation and its stakeholders to move together.

“There’s a reason we're doing it in the first place, and that’s to get people here. But it’s also making sure we’re getting the right people here who will actually come and spend money, value what we offer in Tasmania, respect what we offer and really understand it,” says Cleary, adding visitation is up 10 per cent since the launch in 2021. 

Tune into this latest CMO Awards podcast episode to hear more about how these two dynamic CMOs sold, and kept the focus on, compounding brand building. 

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor &ndash; Marketing
Numbers are increasingly stacking up that sticking to your brand narrative and creative platform knitting year after year pays outsized dividends. And it might just be the ticket to avoiding AI slop.
But it takes a wealth of market sensibility, consumer contextual input, creativity, fresh thinking and strategic nous to sell in such bold work in the first place &ndash; then keep at it. It&rsquo;s equally true tenure and commanding influence inside an organisation plays a sizeable role in orchestrating a longer-term marketing and brand game plan and builds buy-in for the long-term vision, not just the next execution.
Two leading Australian CMOs have been over indexing on these compounding brand building and campaign benefits and have just celebrated five years of compounding success: Suncorp Executive General Manager of Brand and Customer Experience, Mim Haysom, and Tourism Tasmania CMO, Lindene Cleary.
Suncorp&rsquo;s &lsquo;One House&rsquo; campaign was the most highly awarded work in the country in 2021/22, including a Cannes Lion Grand Prix for innovation. It&rsquo;s the foundational piece of Suncorp&rsquo;s multi-year brand platform shift from recovery to resilience, a consistent thread that&rsquo;s since been realised through work such as &lsquo;Resilience Road&rsquo;, strengthening five existing homes in Rockhampton to better combat extreme weather. The third piece launched last year was &lsquo;Haven&rsquo;, a data-infused tool providing personalised advice on help owners understand their potential extreme weather risks and how to be more resilience down to the individual property level.
While the brand and industry kudos have flowed, the work has importantly also driven change at the regulatory level. From $0.97 cents in every $1 going on recovery, the figure&rsquo;s dropped to $0.93, seeing more money spent on prevention instead. &ldquo;Four cents might not sound like much, but that's a big thing to move the dial on,&rdquo; says Haysom.
For Tourism Tasmania, debuting the &lsquo;Come Down for Air&rsquo; platform, then commencing the multi-year &lsquo;The Off Season&rsquo; program to drive visitation during the quieter winter months has also demonstrated similarly compounding benefits. It&rsquo;s played a pivotal role in growing winter visitation year-on-year to record levels in 2025. It is a statewide initiative that requires the whole organisation and its stakeholders to move together.
&ldquo;There&rsquo;s a reason we're doing it in the first place, and that&rsquo;s to get people here. But it&rsquo;s also making sure we&rsquo;re getting the right people here who will actually come and spend money, value what we offer in Tasmania, respect what we offer and really understand it,&rdquo; says Cleary, adding visitation is up 10 per cent since the launch in 2021.&nbsp;
Tune into this latest CMO Awards podcast episode to hear more about how these two dynamic CMOs sold, and kept the focus on, compounding brand building.

The CMO Awards Podcast Episode 12: Compounding benefits – playing the long game in brand and campaign strategy

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/fa326977-3de5-4283-9b8b-af3500c58607/clips/f7a1d395-340d-44b0-8578-b4410074c811/transcript

Commoditisation and ‘dark kitchens': Why Menulog CMO Simon Cheng says building brands in social channels is too hard and worries industry is stuck on ‘creative mediocrity’

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