The killer combination of Covid and voluntary administration decimated Virgin Australia’s marketing team to a handful but under its new private equity owners, Bain Capital, Virgin’s head of paid media, Ben Will, finally got to deploy a massively scaled and personalised programmatic ad campaign that he had been dreaming about for years – but it nearly cracked the Virgin team and its media and dynamic creative partners at PHD and Adylic in the process. It took months after launch to fine tune but they survived, ultimately lifted revenues 30% and won the MFA’s top award for real-time marketing for their efforts. But Will is worried new privacy laws will hand much of the control he currently has to "test and learn" to the walled gardens like Google and Meta, where their unknown tools and AI do all the optimisation without any visibility for advertisers.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Attention that translates into brand building plus sales punch: Digital out-of-home’s superpower
49:28

Agentic AI will reward strong brands built on trust, evidence and customer connection. Mediocre brands will perish
50:59

The CMO Awards podcast episode 16: Brand rejuvenation: CMO winners from Bank of Queensland and Uber unpack their playbooks for marketing effectiveness
48:44