Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher

At its core, the job of the CMO is to deliver business growth. And if Mi3’s story on marketing jobs recently and what company CEOs want in their marketing hires in 2025 is anything to go by, there is a recalibration back to topline growth rather than just pure cost cutting and efficiency, coming our way – good news for marketers, it seems.

Yet companies are increasingly favouring alternative job titles, such as chief growth officer and chief customer officer, or creating new functional structures and ways of working to set the north star and signal the need for disruptive, transformational growth. At the same time, diversity of marketing remits makes it difficult to understand what levers marketing chiefs will actually control in their pursuit of growth for a business.

In episode three of the CMO Awards podcast, powered by Mi3, three marketing and business luminaries with the mantle of delivering net new approaches to growth, share how they define and pursue that ambition: Lion co-MD and former chief growth officer and CMO, Anubha Sahasrabuddhe; SiteMinder chief growth officer, Trent Innes; and recently installed McCain growth marketing director and former Chobani GM of growth, Olivia Dickinson.

All agree putting ‘growth’ front and centre in job titles sends an unambiguous message as to a company’s intent to pursue new growth opportunities, the whole-of-organisation approach required to get there, and the disruptive nature of what is required. It’s also given each executive the power to make the hard decisions necessary to deliver sustainable growth. In Lion’s case, generational shifts around beer consumption provided a burning platform for change, while in organisations such as Chobani, pursuing agility in product innovation pipelines, again with the aim of following consumer trends, created the path to new growth – even amid fears of cannibalising existing SKUs.

For Innes at Australian hotel management software-as-a-service company, SiteMinder, growth is encapsulated in the phrase ‘win, love and grow’. “It's not just a simple case of winning them. You actually need to love them. And if you actually do that, you have the opportunity to grow with them.”

It’s this thinking that has Innes suggesting marketers too commonly fall into the trap of generating short-term demand instead of thinking about customer lifetime value. “I think marketing has fallen a bit too much into the ‘we're here to create demand’ position… Growth is not demand, it's not sales. It is a team sport, so it has to be across the entire end in business.”

Which is why Innes advises marketers to think like a CEO and to “try to get outside of your lane and think about the broader business … How does the broader business look at marketing, and what role do you play in growth?” he asks. “For marketing leaders moving forward to remain relevant, they're going to have to start thinking like that.”

Dickinson describes growth in three words: “Bold, strategic choices … we're talking bold bets, sharp focus, but really importantly, knowing when to walk away if it doesn't serve the bigger picture,” she says.

Ensuring employees understand Lion’s growth investment is about delivering for future generations is not a won-and-done job, but requires ongoing productivity hunting, is another must for Sahasrabuddhe. “That really helps change your mindset when you are faced with going through the tough choices,” she says. “And there are plenty of tough choices, but they're in service of growth, which gives you a very clear why.”

This CMO Awards podcast series is hosted by Nadia Cameron, associate publisher and editor of marketing at Mi3, plus program lead for the CMO Awards.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Nadia Cameron - Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher

Being able to convince others is the most critical skill marketers need to possess – the whole job of marketing is to influence consumers to consider then purchase your brand, after all. But as marketers progress into senior management positions, they also need to get better at getting team members as well as executive leadership and internal stakeholders onside.

In episode 2 of The CMO Awards podcast series, powered by Mi3, three leading marketing chiefs who exhibit influence in spades tell us how they’ve done it: Former Google director of marketing ANZ, Aisling Finch, Tourism Australia CMO, Susan Coghill, and Creative Australia executive director of development and partnerships and former ABC director of audiences, Leisa Bacon.

For Finch, who spent 13 years with Google, advocating for the local market to global stakeholders was a daily job. Having started with an Australia-first advocacy approach, picking and choosing the metrics that told the story she wanted to tell, she switched a blunt instrument for nuanced engagement and putting herself in the listener’s shoes.

“I found it actually quite a disarming strategy to almost go the opposite way of advocacy and say to people: ‘Okay, so we're 55th in population in the world, why are you even spending time with me?’ It’s almost that underdog card. But then you build a bit of credibility – you bring data, bring empathy… and you start to build a story. It's quite disarming and builds trust when you say, ‘interesting, we’re 55th in terms of population, but guess what, we’re 13th on GDP. And look at the willingness of consumers to spend on smartphones, or content,” she says. “Putting yourself in their shoes, being empathetic, and bringing in data without over advocating – I found that to be more effective.” That, and sharing the odd Tim Tam, she quips.

Being honest and sharing bad news early is another must CMOs agree on. Coghill, has a “no surprises” rule she applies from team to CEO, finance team, and corporate affairs. “I joke with them I am still a Catholic school girl and feel the need to confess everything and bring everybody into the tent,” she jokes. “But it has served me well, and it has kept my colleagues well informed and able to help me when and where I've needed it.”

It’s a similar philosophy for Bacon. “In media – and especially the ABC – you are so heavily scrutinised, you have to be transparent about the good and bad all the time,” she comments. “I would apply that going forward to every job I would do. Transparency builds credibility, it builds trust, but it also is just a good way of working.”
Bacon adds: “You can’t actually have influence without credibility, and you need to do things to actually build credibility”.

This CMO Awards podcast series is hosted by Nadia Cameron, associate publisher and editor of marketing at Mi3, plus program leader for the CMO Awards.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Oxford University Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz was a runaway Mi3 hit last year with a peer-reviewed paper that smashes the economics and relevance of audience reach. His analysis – based on 1,000 campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and Wavemaker data – finds blunt use of reach will not deliver business outcomes, because not all reach is equal.

Business outcomes was all the talk at the Future of TV Advertising last week, with industry backing the build of a real-time dashboard via Adgile Media to map and measure impressions delivered to hard results close to real-time. Thomaz thinks it’s a start but warns industry risks falling into a “trap” of short-term skew, essentially applying performance metrics to a brand channel.

“That worries me,” per Thomaz. “We know from decades of existing research that the long-term impact of advertising is twice the short-term impact of advertising.”

But that doesn’t mean industry shouldn’t build it.

Per Thomaz, “It's definitely the right path, and we can do this, but we cannot stop there. This is low hanging fruit. You start there, start measuring and say, ‘look, I'm getting outcomes’ … But you cannot ignore the fact that the future exists.” However, he thinks if industry builds it – and keeps building – it could pay off. “If you're eating low hanging fruit and everybody else is eating off the floor, you're golden.”

Meanwhile Thomaz thinks agencies could be the key to cracking the code on moving beyond reach and into outcomes because they have enough visibility on pool of clients and, potentially, their data. He says one big global brand owner that has in-housed most of its media is finding exactly the same thing as his paper suggests – and making major gains as a result.

Thomaz says that code is all outlined in his paper – and any agency can lift it. “They literally can just go steal the code and run.”

Now he’s working on another paper – aiming to prove the impact of different media channels and beyond – including touchpoints like “customer service and salespeople and their effectiveness in driving different outcomes” within different categories.

“This is interesting for the people that own those channels, because suddenly they're not competing just on audience size – they're competing on value derived from that audience,” says Thomaz. “That is what media owners are going to be really interested in: Can I charge more for an impression on my platform for this client because they'll get 6x the return [versus another channel].”

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.