As the marketing landscape faces “twin evil forces” of increasing uncertainty and growing complexity, the conversation dives into how agencies must move beyond simple efficiency to drive true business effectiveness. 

And they address the future of partnership, highlighting why being a proactive partner means knowing a client’s business inside out to solve complex commercial challenges rather than just selling media solutions.

You can listen to the podcast here:

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“You’re our agency, please look after this ’cause we’ve got enough to do already”.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley:

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.

I’ve often stated that in my many years of working with marketers, I’ve never met a marketer with too much budget. It always feels like marketers need to do so much more with so little. In the face of growing complexity in the marketplace – with the fragmentation of media channels and audiences – markers feel like they have to be everywhere all at once. Yet the cost of this is typically prohibitive.

Sure, AI promises that agencies can do so much more with less, but in the media world, what does that mean? To answer these questions and so much more, please welcome the trinity of experts from Starcom Australia:

CEO Matt Houltham, Chief Operating Officer Louise Romeo, and Chief Client & Growth Officer Scott McCaffrey.

Matt, I’ll start with you. Where is the pressure coming from, and as an agency leader, how do you deal with that on a day-to-day basis?

Matt Houltham:

I think you summed up where the pressure is coming from quite well in your opening. There are twin ‘evil forces’ at play at the moment driving a huge amount of uncertainty for marketers and, simultaneously, driving a huge amount of additional complexity. The combination of those things is creating a situation where budgets are constrained.

I saw a statistic a few weeks ago talking to global CMOs regarding plans for 2026; it said 70% of them had budgets that were either going down or staying flat. In that context, it’s very hard to do ‘more’ with a budget that’s going backwards. Uncertainty drives challenges around business planning, supply chain access, and competitive landscapes. Meanwhile, complexity arises from a changing media landscape, evolving consumer behaviour, and AI collapsing the funnel.

The Four Pillars of Maximising Media Budgets

Matt Houltham:

In our view, there are four key areas where brands need to focus if they’re going to get more from limited resources.

1. Audience Accuracy: Going after the right audiences. There’s a massive amount of wastage in targeting the wrong people. A Rakuten Marketing survey recently showed global CMOs admitting they likely waste 26% of their budget talking to the wrong audiences in the wrong channels. In Australia, that’s potentially upwards of $5 billion left on the table.
2. Optimised Touchpoints: Turning up in the right places. It’s never been easier to reach people, but it’s never been harder to cut through and engage them.
3. Creative Cut-Through: Being more creative. Media has a massive role in amplifying a good idea, not just distributing it.
4. Media Creativity: Finding creative ways to use the channels themselves.

Darren Woolley:

That 26% wastage figure is fascinating. It reminds me of the old saying, “Half my budget is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” Today, we have thousands of advertising opportunities, and new ones pop up every day. That is the heart of the complexity – reaching the right person at the right time in a meaningful way.

Operational Excellence: From Efficiency to Effectiveness

Darren Woolley:

Louise, it used to be called ‘having a strategy,’ but I feel marketers are really struggling with defining what they actually want. How does this change the way you bring the resources of the agency to bear?

Louise Romeo:

You’re absolutely right. When we think about how the business is operating, it comes back to the business strategy. But within the agency, we are shifting from old definitions of ‘operational excellence’. In the past, it was all about driving efficiencies – tighter processes and getting to market quickly.

Now, with technology, automation, and AI, we have to think about how operational excellence can drive effectiveness. It’s about setting up the agency to be AI-enabled or technology-enabled but also designing workflows that allow the teams to exercise better judgment quickly. The market changes so fast – a client might communicate a sudden shift, and we need to adapt the campaign immediately. We call this ‘adaptive intelligence’. The agencies that win will be the ones that can change at the same pace as the market.

Darren Woolley:

Hasn’t that always been the case, though? Or has the timeline just sped up? It feels like the 13-week planning cycle for a TV campaign is a relic of the 20^th century.

Matt Houltham:

It has definitely sped up, but it’s also more complicated. Clients are asking us to think more broadly. We are planning across PESO – Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media. We’re also being asked to operate like light consultants – helping them see around the corner, helping them use first-party data, and activating their adtech. Those [roles] weren’t the remit of a media agency five or ten years ago. Agility now underpins everything.

Navigating the Overwhelmed Client Landscape

Darren Woolley:

Scott, you work across a multitude of clients. Not all clients have the same needs – some are in different stages of maturity or different categories. How do you identify those needs?

Scott McCaffrey:

Every client is feeling overwhelmed right now. There’s too much data, too many choices, and too many decisions. Agencies that succeed are the ones that reduce that complexity and provide a clear point of view.

We do this by anchoring everything in a business outcome. We are moving away from traditional media metrics and moving toward business metrics.

Darren Woolley:

That’s a big breakthrough. Many marketers are given a budget but aren’t given the finance-level data to see what’s actually working.

Scott McCaffrey:

100%. Often, we’ll get a brief with multiple KPIs. We have to sit with the client and figure out which one is actually going to drive the outcome for their business. We’ve evolved to be an extension of their marketing team. At Starcom, we’ve had relationships for decades with some clients, which allows us to evolve alongside them.

Darren Woolley:

Long-term relationships are a sign of stability, but there’s often a fear of stagnation. How do you keep it fresh?

Scott McCaffrey:

You keep it fresh by being integrated. Because we know where the business is going (we’re in the board meetings), we can future-proof the strategy. We might wrap a digital transformation capability around a traditional client’s business. The benefit for the client is they aren’t constantly retraining a new agency. We know the business as well as they do, but we evolve at the pace of the market.

The “Trust Bank”: Trust as a Loan, Not a Gift

Darren Woolley:

We’ve discussed trust quite a bit. Scott, where do you think trust starts?

Scott McCaffrey:

You definitely don’t get trust just because you win a pitch. You win a pitch because of the skill you showed. You build trust over time through the relationship. I talk to our teams about a ‘Trust Bank’. You build up credit over time, but one mistake can erode it. You have to constantly build it back up through results and showing up the right way.

Darren Woolley:

I’ve always seen trust as a loan. No one appoints an agency they don’t trust, but they loan you that trust, and it comes with a heavy interest rate. You have to pay it back over time. The first big payback is usually the first disaster – how the agency responds when something goes wrong.

Scott McCaffrey:

That resonates. You’re almost constantly in pitch mode, because client expectations are higher than ever. If you haven’t paid off that trust loan in the first year of a three-year contract, you’re never going to be ahead.

Darren Woolley:

One of the most common reasons a client seeks a new agency is the feeling that the incumbent isn’t proactive. But agencies often mistake ‘proactivity’ for sales – offering more media to buy. True proactivity is about coming up with opportunities that drive business outcomes, not just selling more inventory.

The Reality of AI: Multipliers vs. Strategies

Darren Woolley:

Publicis Groupe was an early mover with the AI platform, Marcel. Scott, where are clients today regarding AI?

Scott McCaffrey:

AI is the hot topic in every meeting. Most clients are in the infancy stage – they don’t have a fully progressed strategy yet. They are looking to us for leadership. We’re doing tiered training for our teams because that’s where we have to start.

Louise Romeo:

We tell clients that AI is a multiplier, not the strategy itself. There’s a part in the middle where humans and technology coexist. We’re embedding these tools to deliver better results. But the pace of change is so fast that we have to constantly educate ourselves to move from mere experimentation to strategic application.

Darren Woolley:

There are two streams:

productivity and performance. I worry that if senior people use AI to get more done, where does the next generation come from? Senior media people usually start with grunt work to understand the plumbing of the industry. If AI does the grunt work, how do juniors learn?

Louise Romeo:

We see AI as an investment in talent. The tasks they do today will be different in the future. We have to re-skill our teams for critical judgment and creativity in media. That way, we move them from task output to higher-level thinking.

Matt Houltham:

AI should free up time to spend with the client – understanding their business issues or thinking creatively. It enables better insights by synthesising large amounts of data. But you still need the human in the loop to manage hallucinations or errors.

The Return to ‘M-Shaped’ Talent and Human Creativity

Darren Woolley:

Louise, how do you attract great talent to an industry that often has a negative narrative?

Louise Romeo:

It’s a wonderful industry. We focus on ‘M-shaped’ talent – people who have a craft specialism but are also great connectors across different media ecosystems. We want our teams to feel they are learning something new every day. Happy teams equal happy clients.

Matt Houltham:

The efficiency of AI is important, but the real value is in the insight. AI is great at looking at patterns from the past. However, most sales effects in advertising come from the creative idea and the message, not just the channel.

If we aren’t talking about whether creative is fit for purpose, we’re missing a trick. We work closely with creative agencies to ensure the message and the media deployment work synergistically. I’ve even seen some newer Marketing Mix Models (MMM) claiming they can now measure the creative component.

Darren Woolley:

That’s the ‘holy grail – attributing the impact of content. There’s no point in having someone’s attention if you have nothing worthwhile to show them. I like that CFOs are getting more involved and that marketers are taking a more commercial approach.

Thank you, Matt, Louise, and Scott, for joining us and sharing these insights into the future of Starcom and the wider media landscape.

The post Managing Marketing: What Being A Media Agency Partner Means In An AI World appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

In the marketing landscape, the transition from “voluntary ethical guidelines” to “mandatory legal frameworks” appears complete. As a marketing management expert at TrinityP3, we’ve seen the industry move from debating what is right to frantically assisting marketers and their agencies to manage the risks.

With the EU AI Act enforceable from August 2026 and a wave of state-level laws in the US (California’s SB 942 and Colorado’s AI Act) now in full effect, the “wait and see” approach to AI governance is officially a legal liability.

Key Takeaways: AI Compliance

• Transparency Mandates: Mandatory watermarking and disclosure of synthetic content are now legal requirements in major jurisdictions.
• Liability for Hallucinations: Brands are legally responsible for AI-generated misinformation, regardless of the vendor’s disclaimer.
• Data Provenance: New “Right to Know” laws require brands to disclose the training data sources used by their generative AI tools.
• Algorithmic Discrimination: Regulators (FTC, ACCC) are treating biased AI targeting as a violation of civil rights and consumer protection laws.
• Contractual Sovereignty: Master Service Agreements (MSAs) must now include specific clauses for AI IP indemnification and “Zero Data Retention.”

The Top 10 Legal & Regulatory Compliance Issues for Marketers

1. Disclosure of Synthetic Content (The Transparency Mandate)

By mid-2026, disclosure is no longer a “best practice”—it’s the law. The EU AI Act and California’s SB 942 require that any AI-generated image, video, or audio that could be mistaken for a real person or event carry technical markers (metadata) and visible disclosures.

Compliance Risk: Failing to label a “deepfake” or synthetic influencer can lead to fines of up to 7% of global turnover under the most stringent regimes. Marketers must ensure their suppliers are embedding “latent disclosures” that persist even if the file is edited.

2. Liability for AI “Hallucinations” & Misinformation

If your AI chatbot promises a discount or misquotes a product’s safety specifications, you are legally bound by that claim. In 2026, courts are increasingly rejecting the “technical error” defence.

Compliance Risk: Marketers are being held to the same standard as a human salesperson. Regulatory bodies like the FTC (under the March 11, 2026 Policy Statement) treat AI hallucinations as “unfair or deceptive acts.” This necessitates a robust Agentic Auditor framework—using one AI to police the output of another before it reaches the consumer.

3. Intellectual Property (IP) & Training Data Provenance

The “AI Training Data Transparency Act” (California AB 2013) now mandates that developers publish summaries of their training datasets. For marketers, using a tool trained on unlicensed copyrighted material is a ticking litigation bomb.

Compliance Risk: Using AI-generated assets without verified IP Indemnification from your supplier leaves your brand vulnerable to secondary infringement claims. Marketers must demand “Clean Data” certification from every AI vendor in their supply chain.

4. Algorithmic Discrimination & Bias Auditing

Automated audience targeting is under the microscope. Regulators now use “disparate impact” tests to see if AI models are inadvertently excluding protected classes from housing, credit, or employment ads.

Compliance Risk: Under Colorado’s AI Act (effective June 2026), deployers of “high-risk” AI must conduct annual impact assessments. If your programmatic AI shifts spend away from certain zip codes based on demographic proxies, you face significant civil penalties for discriminatory practice.

5. Data Sovereignty & “Model Ingestion”

Privacy laws like the GDPR and CCPA have evolved. The issue isn’t just how you collect data, but whether you’ve allowed that data to be “ingested” to train a third-party LLM.

Compliance Risk: If a customer invokes their “Right to be Forgotten,” and their data has already been used to train a global model, you face a technical and legal impossibility. Compliance requires using Private AI Instances where data is never used to train the base model.

6. Rights of Publicity & Digital Likeness

The unauthorized use of digital clones (voice or image) of celebrities—or even customers—is now heavily regulated.

Compliance Risk: Marketers must obtain explicit “Digital Likeness” waivers. Relying on “AI-generated persons who look like” a celebrity is increasingly seen as a violation of the NO FAKES Act or similar state-level right-of-publicity laws.

7. AI-Washing & Substantiation of Claims

The FTC and ACCC are aggressively targeting “AI-Washing”—the act of claiming a product is “AI-powered” when it merely uses basic automation or manual processes.

Compliance Risk: Following the 2026 Growth Cave and Workado resolutions, marketers must be able to substantiate exactly how AI improves their product’s effectiveness. Exaggerated efficiency claims are now a primary target for consumer protection enforcement.

8. Section 5 Compliance & “Dark Patterns” in AI

AI is being used to create “highly adaptive” interfaces that nudge consumers toward purchases using psychological vulnerabilities.

Compliance Risk: Regulators now classify AI-driven “predatory nudging” as a deceptive dark pattern. Any AI system that adapts in real-time to exploit a consumer’s emotional state (detected via biometric data) is likely in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act or the Digital Services Act (DSA).

9. Supplier Accountability & The Chain of Responsibility

Many marketers are “inheriting” compliance failures from their agencies or MarTech suppliers.

Compliance Risk: You cannot outsource your liability. In 2026, TrinityP3 recommends that all MSAs include an AI Compliance Addendum. This should define the supplier’s responsibility for bias testing, hallucination mitigation, and the use of licensed training data.

10. Auditability & “Explainable AI” (XAI)

If a regulator asks why a customer was denied a service or served a specific price by your AI, “the algorithm decided” is no longer a legal answer.

Compliance Risk: Marketers must maintain an AI Decision Log. Regulatory frameworks now demand a level of “Explainability”—the ability to provide a plain-language explanation of the factors that influenced an automated decision.

AI Compliance Checklist

This provides a baseline for auditing your marketing operations.

• [ ] Watermarking: Does our synthetic content include latent metadata for detection?
• [ ] IP Indemnification: Have all AI suppliers signed an IP indemnity for their output?
• [ ] DPA Updates: Do our Data Processing Agreements specifically prohibit “model training” on our client/customer data?
• [ ] Bias Testing: Have we performed a “Disparate Impact” audit on our programmatic targeting this quarter?
• [ ] Hallucination Protocol: Is there a human-in-the-loop sign-off for all AI-generated consumer-facing claims?
• [ ] Regulatory Mapping: Does our AI use-case list identify “high-risk” systems under the EU AI Act or Colorado AI Act?

FAQ: AI Legal & Regulatory Landscape

Who is liable if an AI-generated ad is misleading?

The brand (the advertiser) is ultimately liable. While you may have a right of recourse against your agency, consumer protection agencies (like the FTC or ACCC) hold the brand responsible for all commercial communications, regardless of the technology used to create them.

What is the penalty for not disclosing AI-generated content?

Under the EU AI Act, fines for non-compliance with transparency obligations can reach up to €15 million or 3% of total global annual turnover, whichever is higher. In the US, penalties vary by state but typically involve civil penalties per violation.

Can we use customer data to train our own AI models?

Only if you have explicit, informed consent that specifically mentions AI training. Standard “use for marketing purposes” clauses are increasingly seen as insufficient for the permanent ingestion of data into a machine learning model.

AI is no longer a “Wild West.” It is a highly regulated territory. The brands that will succeed are those that treat compliance not as a “legal hurdle,” but as a strategic foundation for long-term consumer trust.

Read more on our Marketing Transformation Practice and our Marketing Technology solutions. Or contact us about a no obligation conversation to explore how we can assist with your marketing effectiveness efforts.

The post AI in Marketing: Your Guide to Legal Compliance, Data Sovereignty, and Regulatory Risk Management appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

There is a fundamental disconnect in modern marketing between what we planned to do and how we measure if we’re actually doing it.

In my role as a marketing measurement consultant, I frequently see CMOs who are data-rich but insight-poor. They have dashboards that can tell them how many people in a specific postcode clicked an ad on a Tuesday afternoon, but they can’t tell their Board if the $10 million brand relaunch has actually increased “desire” or shifted the needle on long-term commercial value.

If your measurement framework isn’t explicitly designed to answer whether you are delivering your strategic plan, it’s not a framework—it’s just a collection of numbers. Here is how to build a measurement ecosystem that actually serves the strategy.

1. Commercial Rigour: Moving Beyond the “Vanity” Funnel

The first hurdle is moving beyond vanity metrics. We’ve all seen the reports filled with “Impressions,” “Reach,” and “Engagement.” While these aren’t useless, they are often used as a defensive shield rather than a commercial tool.

Commercial rigour in measurement means ensuring that every stage of the marketing funnel is measured against its specific strategic intent.

The Full-Funnel Reality Check

A high-performance measurement framework must track the transition of a consumer from a state of ignorance to a state of high-lifetime value. This requires different “yardsticks” for different goals:

• Brand Health & Saliency: Are you “top of mind” when the consumer enters the category? This isn’t measured in clicks; it’s measured in mental availability and saliency.
• Consideration & Desire: Is your strategy successfully moving people from “I know them” to “I want them”? Measuring “Desire” or “Interest” requires sophisticated sentiment analysis and brand tracking that correlates with future sales intent.
• Driving Demand: This is where the “bottom of the funnel” lives, but even here, rigour is required. It’s not just about the transaction; it’s about the value of that transaction.

If your strategic plan says “we will become the premium choice in the category,” but your measurement framework only rewards the lowest “Cost Per Acquisition,” you are effectively incentivising your team to undermine your strategy by chasing low-value, discount-driven customers.

2. The “So What?” Factor: Overcoming Shallow Media Reports

Most media reports are autogenerated post-rationalisations. They tell you what was bought and how many people saw it, but they rarely deliver real insight into whether the strategy worked.

An agency report might tell you that your video completion rate was 75%. That sounds great. But the strategic question is: “Did those 75% of people walk away with the specific brand message we intended to land?” ### From Reporting to Insight To overcome shallow reporting, marketers need to demand a “So What?” layer in their measurement.

• The Intent Test: Did the media placement align with the strategic intent? If the goal was brand-building, why are we being reported on for short-term conversion?
• Strategic Attribution: Instead of looking at channel performance in isolation, we should be looking at how channels worked together to deliver a strategic pillar.

If your media reports don’t include a narrative that links back to your strategic pillars, they are just noise. A measurement consultant helps bridge this gap by redesigning the reporting structure so that it speaks the language of the business plan, not the language of the ad-server.

3. The Incrementality Imperative: Measuring Impact, Not Just Presence

One of the most dangerous traps in marketing is taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway. This is the difference between “Existing State of Play” and “Incremental Impact.”

If you turn off your search ads for your own brand name tomorrow, how many of those people would have clicked the organic link right below it anyway? If the answer is “most of them,” then your “Marketing ROI” on that spend is a fiction.

Proving the “Lift”

A robust measurement framework must be obsessed with incrementality. It needs to answer: “What did marketing add that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise?”

• Baseline vs. Incremental: You must establish what your “organic” or “baseline” sales look like without marketing activity.
• Experimental Design: This involves using “Hold-out tests” or “Geo-tests” where you intentionally stop or change marketing in one region to see the real-world impact compared to a control group.

Measuring incremental impact is the only way to gain true credibility with the CFO. It moves marketing from being seen as a “tax on sales” to a “generator of growth.”

4. Aligning the Measurement “Trinity”

Marketers often struggle because they are trying to use a hammer to turn a screw. They use Digital Attribution to try and measure Brand Equity, or they use Brand Tracking to try and optimise a weekend sale.

A sophisticated measurement framework aligns three distinct but complementary approaches:

A. Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) / Econometrics

This is the “Macro” view. It looks at long-term trends, external factors (the economy, competitors, pricing), and the holistic impact of all marketing channels over years. It’s best for answering: “How should I allocate my budget next year?”

B. Digital Attribution / MTA

This is the “Micro” view. It tracks the digital path to purchase. It’s best for answering: “Which specific creative or keyword is performing best this week?”

C. Experiments and Lift Studies

This is the “Truth” view. It uses scientific testing to validate the other two models. It’s best for answering: “Does this channel actually drive incremental sales?”

The role of a measurement consultant is to ensure these three approaches aren’t fighting each other. When they are aligned, you get a “triangulated” view of the truth that allows you to pivot your strategy with confidence.

How TrinityP3 Supports Measurement Excellence

The path to a commercially rigorous measurement framework is often blocked by “the way we’ve always done it.” Agencies are often hesitant to move toward incrementality testing because it might reveal that some of their activities aren’t as effective as the “last-click” suggests.

At TrinityP3, we provide the independent oversight required to build a Marketing Effectiveness and Measurement framework that is purely focused on your commercial success.

We help organisations:

• Audit current reporting: Identifying where vanity metrics are hiding a lack of strategic progress.
• Design bespoke frameworks: Aligning your KPIs directly to your 1-year and 3-year strategic plans.
• Implement Incrementality testing: Moving your measurement from “correlation” to “causality.”
• Integrate data sources: Ensuring MMM, Attribution, and Brand Health tracking provide a single, unified story.

Your Next Step: The Marketing Effectiveness Assessment

Is your current measurement framework helping you win, or is it just helping you justify your job? Most marketers are operating with at least one “blind spot” in their data—and usually, it’s the spot where the most important strategic decisions need to be made.

To help you identify where your measurement is failing your strategy, we invite you to take the Marketing Effectiveness and Measurement Assessment.

This diagnostic tool will help you determine:

• If your metrics are focused on commercial impact or tactical vanity.
• Whether you are accurately measuring the “long” (brand) and the “short” (performance).
• If your reporting is providing real strategic insight or just data dumps.
• How prepared you are to prove incremental value to your Board.

Take the TrinityP3 Marketing Effectiveness Assessment here.

Measurement should be the wind in your sails, not the anchor dragging behind your ship. By bringing commercial rigour, incrementality, and strategic alignment to your data, you stop “reporting on the past” and start “engineering the future.” The time to fix your framework is before the next quarterly review, not during it.

Read more on our Marketing Transformation Practice and our Marketing Effectiveness solutions. Or contact us about a no obligation conversation to explore how we can assist with your marketing effectiveness efforts.

The post The GPS of Strategy: Why Your Measurement Framework is Probably Driving You Off-Course appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

He explores how AI is changing consumer behaviour, the importance of understanding audience language, and the challenges marketers face in measuring success in this new landscape. 

The conversation also touches on the future of agentic commerce and the need for authenticity in AI-driven marketing strategies. This is a rapidly evolving field and this conversation represents and important touchpoint in the evolution in search for brand and marketing.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud, Podbean, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Amazon Podcasts.

“The information about agencies on the internet is largely opinion, very rarely factual, and there’s lots of it”.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley:

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing podcast, please like, review or share this episode to help spread the words and wisdom from our guests each week.

AI is having a major disruptive impact on all aspects of business and particularly marketing. One area that’s been significantly changed in the past 12 months is SEO, search engine optimisation, with the rise of GEO, generative engine optimisation. Some have predictably predicted the death of SEO, while others are spruiking the opportunities of focusing on GEO.

To help us navigate our way through the disruption and better understand the role of AI search, please welcome to the Managing Marketing podcast, Associate Director, Strategic Media Solutions at MONKS, Jarrod Allen. Welcome, Jarrod.

Jarrod Allen:

Thanks for having me, Darren. I sort of joined the industry in the era of digital. I do really think that AI is transforming kind of everything; it’s really impacting how we operate processes and platforms. A particular area that I’ve been looking at is this topic of generative engine optimisation, which I think really is going to become a new key tool when it comes to branding and marketing.

The Evolution of the Search Ecosystem

Darren Woolley:

For as long as the internet’s been around, and particularly Google, they dominated search and SEO with over 90% of all search terms. SEO was very much the domain of getting your keywords and then backlinks. Google always said they couldn’t tell you what to do with SEO because then people would hack it, but it seemed that that happened anyway.

Jarrod Allen:

Yeah, it’s interesting you say that. I think what we’re seeing now is even more secrecy because you’re not just looking at Google’s algorithm. You’ve got to start factoring in how all these different LLMs are operating—ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity—all of these have a slightly different algorithm and they’re changing all the time.

A lot of these are black boxes, but we have interestingly seen the rise of these AI search platforms in the last 12 months. We’re starting to see this whole new ecosystem of content that’s becoming super important in the world of GEO. While content’s always been key for SEO, how we really see GEO is this increased importance on how others are talking about you versus how you’re talking about yourself.

Usage Data and Monetisation

Darren Woolley:

It is interesting how quickly the uptake’s been with people using generative AI and AI search. I read recently that ChatGPT has got the biggest penetration into the market, probably because they were the first ones that sort of came out.

Jarrod Allen:

One of the things that frustrates me most at the moment is no one clear source of truth where I could sit down and look at the total usage here in Australia or globally of what percentage share of search and market do each of these different platforms have. Depending where you look, I’ve seen Google still has 92% to 98% market share, which is inclusive of traditional search as well as Gemini and AI overviews.

Darren Woolley:

Another piece of data I saw showed that in people that were actually using the professional end, the high-cost version was actually less than 5%. The paid version was less than 20% and 80% of people were using some sort of free version of a lot of these LLM chatbots.

Jarrod Allen:

Absolutely. And look, if you’re not paying for it, you are likely the actual source of payment; they’re using your data somehow. We have started to see the monetisation of these platforms as well. Perplexity has always had some kind of beta testing for ads, and ChatGPT formally announced their advertising programme this year. It will be interesting to see how that landscape of paid ads within these AI platforms evolves. Over time it will become part of the general user behaviour.

Clicks versus Higher Conversions

Darren Woolley:

Is it okay to think of GEO in the same way as we think of SEO? How would a marketer who was getting quite a lot of traffic to their website before with SEO go about looking at GEO?

Jarrod Allen:

There’s been a few people that have gone out and been like, “this is the death of SEO”. It’s not. SEO and GEO are so closely related. Naturally, if you want to show up in any kind of AI search, you need to have that really strong and robust SEO practice.

When you look at traditional SEO, you’ve been focusing on what’s Google’s best practice, versus the world of GEO where you’re focusing on multiple different environments. Instead of trying to drive people towards a link and a click, you’re actually now trying to build a branded prompt. How do you get referenced and then recommended by an LLM?

What we’ve seen is that AI search drives about 75% fewer click-throughs, but the people that do come through have around a 4.4 times higher conversion rate. You’re probably going to get less people through your website, but the people coming through are more likely to convert because they’ve done a lot of that upfront decision-making within the LLM.

Conversational Search Intent

Darren Woolley:

When you’re asking for something transactional, you’re less likely to get an AI summary. When you’re asking for information or an answer to a problem, that’s where the AI summary comes up. Are keywords still an important part or is it more just topics that the AI is linking for?

Jarrod Allen:

People are searching differently and particularly when you are using an AI LLM, people are able to have that conversational search. You ask one thing and then you ask further refining questions to get this more qualified and tailored answer.

Broadly speaking, we’re trying to understand all these different types of search intent—research, inspirational, decision-making, purchase intent. It moves away from what the keyword specifically says to what’s the actual intent behind what someone’s searching for.

Darren Woolley:

People used to do shorthand Google searches, like “pitch consultant Sydney”. Whereas now it’s “can you recommend…?” and that then becomes more like a question that the AI will answer.

Jarrod Allen:

One of the key recommendations we have is really focusing on the language your customers and your audience are using and trying to build that into your content. If you’re wanting an LLM to reference your brand, you need to be incorporating the language that your ideal customer is actually using. It’s a lot easier for the LLM to match that content together.

Measuring Success and Sourcing Content

Darren Woolley:

What should marketers be thinking about and what are the challenges they should be putting to their agency around measuring success?

Jarrod Allen:

The very first thing is understanding visibility in AI search. Across a key prompt for your category, how often are you showing up? If you show up 70 times out of a hundred, you’ve got a visibility of 70%.

There are a heap of different platforms that have emerged for this, like Peak, Adobe’s LLM Optimiser, and Profound. These tools let you understand visibility and sentiment, but more importantly, you can understand the content sources they’re pulling to generate their answers.

Different industries perform differently, but generally, Reddit is a key source, along with YouTube and LinkedIn for B2B. If you see you have low visibility because the LLM is pulling information from Finder and Reddit, that gives you a playbook to build content that lives across those spaces.

Agentic Commerce and the Human Element

Darren Woolley:

MasterCard have just announced they are introducing agentic commerce and the ability to have AI go and purchase for you. Where do humans fit into this?

Jarrod Allen:

We’re starting to get to the point of having industry-wide protocols that are actually going to enable this agentic future. I assume there will be set buying parameters, like only buy this product if it hits a 25% discount. Marketers will need to ensure their overall strategy makes them the considered brand so they are discovered and recommended in that AI search space.

Darren Woolley:

How can brands avoid the fake trap? We’ve seen a rise of AI generated users and what some call “AI slop”.

Jarrod Allen:

We view AI as something that should be used to augment a real human rather than replace one. To do that properly, you need to set up the correct guardrails and governance. Generally, our understanding is that AI-generated content ranks lower within these LLMs than human-created content. Humans creating content is still paramount here.

Darren Woolley:

Exactly. Jared, we’ve run out of time. SEO is not dead, but GEO is different to SEO. The benefit is if you get it right, you’ll get better qualified visitors to your website. Before you go, what’s your preference for an LLM? What’s your go-to?

The post Managing Marketing: Navigating The State Of Play Of SEO and GEO appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

However, for most marketing leaders and their teams, the reality is far more grim. It has become a recipe for burnout, a driver of strategic drift, and the primary cause of the “Effectiveness Gap” currently plaguing the industry.

The pressure is relentless. Marketing departments are being swamped with a tidal wave of demands: more channels to manage, more data to analyse, more content to produce, and more “urgent” requests from stakeholders who view the marketing team as a glorified service desk. Yet, budgets are being squeezed, headcounts are frozen, and the expectation of “performance” has never been higher.

At TrinityP3, we are seeing a recurring pattern across commercial organisations of all sizes. By trying to do everything, marketing teams are effectively achieving nothing – at least nothing of significant commercial value. It is time to address the productivity paradox and move from a state of being “busy” to a state of being “impactful.”

The “Everything is a Priority” Trap

The fundamental issue in marketing operations today is the failure of prioritisation. In many organisations, the word “priority” has lost its singular meaning. When everything is a priority, nothing is.

This lack of focus stems from several key structural and cultural issues:

1. The In-House “All You Can Eat” Buffet

The rise of in-house agencies was intended to drive cost-efficiency and brand consistency. However, an unintended side effect has emerged: because the “cost” of using the internal team isn’t always transparent or directly billed to a department’s budget, internal stakeholders view it as a free, infinite resource. This leads to a flood of low-value requests—the “can you just make this logo bigger” or “we need a flyer for this minor event” tasks—that clog the system and distract from high-value strategic work.

2. The Tactical Treadmill

Marketing technology has made it easier than ever to do things. We can send an email, post to social media, or launch a digital campaign in minutes. This ease of execution has created a tactical treadmill. Teams are so focused on the output (the number of assets delivered) that they have entirely lost sight of the outcome (the business result). They are running faster and faster just to stay in the same place.

3. The Lack of a “No” Framework

Most marketing departments lack a formal governance structure for evaluating requests. Decisions on what work to take on are often based on “who shouts the loudest” or “who is highest in the hierarchy” rather than what will drive the most commercial value. Without a robust framework to say “no” (or “not now”), the team becomes a dumping ground for every half-baked idea in the building.

4. The Fatigue of Incrementalism

When teams are swamped, they default to incrementalism. They do what they did last year, only faster and cheaper. There is no mental “white space” left for innovation, strategic thinking, or deep work. The result is a sea of “beige” marketing that fails to cut through in a crowded marketplace.

Moving Beyond Survival: The Path to Marketing Prioritisation

To break this cycle, marketing operations must undergo a fundamental shift. We need to move away from a “service desk” mentality and towards a “strategic partner” model. This requires a ruthless focus on Marketing Prioritisation.

At TrinityP3, we help organisations implement a high-performance operations model built on four key pillars of prioritisation.

1. Strategic Alignment: The Value Filter

Every request that enters the marketing department must pass through a “Value Filter.” This requires an agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a “high-value” activity. Does this campaign align with our three-year growth strategy? Does it serve our most profitable customer segment? If the answer is no, the task should be deprioritised or discarded entirely.

2. Operational Transparency and Capacity Mapping

You cannot manage what you cannot see. High-performance teams have a clear view of their “True Capacity.” This involves mapping out the available hours of the team against the complexity of the tasks. When a stakeholder asks for a new project, they must be shown the “trade-off.” If we do Project A, we cannot do Project B. This shifts the conversation from “why aren’t you doing my work?” to “what is the most important thing for the business right now?”

3. Process Optimisation (The “How” of Marketing)

Often, the feeling of being “swamped” isn’t caused by the volume of work, but by the friction of the process. Redundant approval layers, poorly defined briefs, and endless “meetings about meetings” eat up a significant portion of a team’s productive time. By optimising the marketing prioritisation process, we can often “find” 20% to 30% more capacity without adding a single new head.

4. Resource Allocation: Right Person, Right Task

Not all work belongs in-house, and not all work belongs with an expensive creative agency. A key part of marketing operations is determining the “Right-Sourcing” model. This involves identifying which tasks are core to the brand’s intellectual property (keep in-house), which are high-value creative/strategic tasks (top-tier agency), and which are “commodity” tasks that can be outsourced to lower-cost production hubs or automated through technology.

How TrinityP3 Supports Marketing Transformation

The challenge for most marketing leaders is that they are too close to the problem to see the solution. When you are drowning, it’s hard to design a better boat.

TrinityP3 acts as an independent partner to help you navigate this transition. We provide the objective data and the strategic frameworks needed to reset the relationship between Marketing and the rest of the business.

Our Marketing Prioritisation and Transformation services are designed to:

• Audit your current workflow: Identifying the “friction points” and “value leaks” in your current operations.
• Design Prioritisation Frameworks: Creating custom “Value Filters” that align with your specific commercial objectives.
• Optimise In-house Agencies: Helping internal teams transition from “order takers” to “strategic assets.”
• Benchmark Performance: Comparing your operational efficiency against industry best practices to identify areas for improvement.

We help you move from a reactive culture of “doing more” to a proactive culture of “doing better.”

Your Next Step: The Prioritisation Health Check

Is your marketing department a well-oiled machine or a chaotic engine room on the brink of failure? Most leaders suspect it’s the latter, but they lack the diagnostic tools to prove it and the roadmap to fix it.

To help you gain clarity on your operational health, we have developed the Marketing Operations Process Effectiveness and Efficiency Assessment. This tool is specifically designed to highlight the issues that are currently swamping your team.

By taking the assessment, you will explore:

• Whether your team’s work is truly aligned with business strategy.
• If your “in-house” model is actually saving you money or costing you effectiveness.
• Where your processes are failing and creating unnecessary friction.
• How well your team is currently prioritising high-value tasks over low-value “noise.”

This is not just another quiz; it is the first step in reclaiming your team’s time, focus, and strategic impact.

Take the TrinityP3 Marketing Prioritisation Assessment here.

The myth of “doing more with less” is a dangerous one. It leads to a marketing function that is broad but shallow, busy but irrelevant. The brands that win in the next decade will not be those that produce the most content or run the most campaigns; they will be the ones that have the discipline to focus on the right things.

The era of being swamped must end. The era of strategic prioritisation begins today.

Read more on our Marketing Transformation Practice and our Marketing Prioritisation solutions. Or contact us about a no obligation conversation to explore how we can assist with your marketing effectiveness efforts.

The post Why ‘Doing More with Less’ is Killing Marketing Effectiveness appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

Yet, for many commercial organisations, the reality is far from the promise. Instead of a high-performance engine, many marketers find themselves managing a “Franken-stack”: a disjointed, expensive, and overwhelming collection of tools that consume more time than they save.

At TrinityP3, we see organisations of all sizes struggling with the same fundamental paradox: they have more technology than ever before, but they are finding it increasingly difficult to deliver effective marketing. The “MarTech Mirage” is the belief that the next piece of software will finally solve the underlying strategic or structural problems of the business.

It is time to stop “collecting” technology and start integrating and optimising it.

The Four Horsemen of MarTech Dysfunction

Why is it so difficult to get the MarTech stack right? In our work auditing and optimising marketing technology for global brands, we consistently see four recurring issues that stall performance.

1. The “Shiny Toy” Syndrome (Strategy-Last)

The most common mistake is a “tech-first” approach. A CMO sees a demo of a new AI-driven personalisation tool or a predictive analytics platform and buys it before defining the specific business problem it is meant to solve.

Technology is an accelerant; if you apply it to a flawed strategy or a broken process, it simply helps you fail faster. Without a clear strategic roadmap, organisations end up with a stack built on “vendor hype” rather than business requirements.

2. The Integration Nightmare: The “Spaghetti” Stack

Many stacks are built incrementally. One department buys a CRM, another buys a social media management tool, and the media agency brings their own ad-tech.

When these systems don’t talk to each other, you create data silos. You might know what a customer bought in-store, but your email system doesn’t, so you send them a “10% off” coupon for a product they just paid full price for. This lack of integration leads to a fragmented customer experience and significant operational friction for the marketing team.

3. The Capability Gap: Ferrari in the Garage

We often find organisations paying for “enterprise-grade” software but only using 10% of its features. This is the “Capability Gap.”

Buying a Ferrari is pointless if you don’t have a licensed driver or a track to race it on. Too often, the investment in the licence for the software is not matched by an investment in the people and training required to operate it. The result? You are paying premium prices for what essentially becomes an expensive version of a basic spreadsheet tool.

4. Technical Debt and Redundancy

As stacks grow, they accumulate “bloat.” Over time, organisations find they have three different tools that all have “email capability” or two different analytics platforms doing the same thing. This redundancy isn’t just a waste of budget; it creates “technical debt”—a layer of complexity that makes it harder and more expensive to upgrade or change systems in the future.

From Accumulation to Optimisation: A Strategic Roadmap

The goal should not be to have the biggest stack, but the most effective one. High-performance MarTech is about Technology Integration—ensuring every piece of the puzzle serves a strategic purpose.

The Foundation: Strategic Capability Mapping

Before touching the software, you must define the mission. Success begins by mapping your Strategic Marketing Requirements to specific technical capabilities. If your strategy prioritizes “Customer Lifetime Value,” your requirements might include predictive churn modeling and automated loyalty triggers. By creating this “Requirements-to-Feature” blueprint first, you establish the criteria for what stays and what goes. Without this, an audit only identifies what is redundant; with it, you identify what is irrelevant.

Action 1: Conduct a Brutal Audit

Armed with your strategic blueprint, evaluate what you already have. This is a mapping of how software is used, who uses it, and—crucially—if it actually fulfills the requirements defined in the Foundation step.

• Identify Redundancies: Where are you paying for overlapping features that serve the same strategic goal?
• Assess Utilisation: Are the tools that match your “North Star” being used to their full potential?
• Evaluate Costs: Is the commercial output of the tool aligned with its cost to the business?

Action 2: Define Your “North Star” Architecture

Stop thinking in terms of individual tools and start thinking in terms of your “core” architecture. Usually, this revolves around a central Source of Truth (CDP or CRM). Your stack should be a hub-and-spoke model; if a tool cannot share data seamlessly with the hub, it creates a silo that undermines your strategic requirements.

Action 3: Focus on the “Human” Element

The most sophisticated MarTech is useless without the right talent. Organizations must align their design with their technology.

• Skill Alignment: Do you have the data scientists to interpret the “North Star” analytics?
• Process Integration: Do your creatives understand how to leverage automation tools to speed up production?
• Agency Synergy: Is your agency roster augmenting your internal capabilities or complicating them?

Action 4: Prioritise Value Over Features

Don’t be seduced by a long list of features. Focus on the Use Cases that drive the most significant business impact. If personalizing your email subject lines drives a 20% increase in revenue, master that before attempting real-time web personalization that requires a massive, unproven data overhaul.

How TrinityP3 Can Help You Master the Stack

The complexity of the MarTech landscape means that an internal perspective is often clouded by “the way we’ve always done it” or by the persuasive sales pitches of software vendors.

At TrinityP3, we provide an independent, objective lens to help you navigate Marketing Technology Integration. We don’t sell software, which means our only incentive is your performance.

Our approach helps brands:

• Streamline the Stack: Identifying and removing redundancies to save budget and reduce complexity.
• Select the Right Partners: Managing the RFI/RFP process to find vendors that actually fit your strategic needs.
• Bridge the Skills Gap: Assessing your internal team and agency roster to ensure you have the capability to drive the technology.
• Maximise ROI: Turning MarTech from a “cost centre” into a genuine driver of commercial growth.

Whether you are looking to implement a new stack from scratch or—as is more common—trying to make sense of the one you already have, we provide the framework to ensure your technology serves your strategy, not the other way around.

Your Next Step: The Technology Health Check

Is your MarTech stack a competitive advantage or a strategic anchor? Most marketers suspect it’s the latter, but they lack the data to prove it to the C-suite.

To help you get a clear picture of where you stand, we have developed the Marketing Technology Stack and Practice Assessment. This diagnostic tool is designed to highlight the friction points in your current setup and provide a roadmap for optimisation.

By taking the assessment, you will gain insights into:

• How your stack stacks up against industry best practices.
• Where your biggest “capability gaps” lie.
• Whether your technology is actually supporting your customer journey or hindering it.

Take the TrinityP3 Marketing Technology Assessment here.

The MarTech Mirage is real, but it is avoidable. By moving away from a culture of “software collection” and towards a disciplined approach to “technology integration,” you can finally turn the promise of MarTech into a reality. The time to stop buying and start optimising is now.

Read more on our Marketing Transformation Practice and our Marketing Technology solutions. Or contact us about a no obligation conversation to explore how we can assist with your marketing effectiveness efforts.

The post The MarTech Mirage: Why More Technology Usually Means Less Marketing Performance appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

Joel shares how he helped spearhead the explosive growth of Jim’s Group with their digital presence and franchise recruitment strategy. Which now achieves over a $1b annual turnover from over 5,700 franchisees across more than 50 divisions in Australia, NZ, Canada, and the UK. 

From AI tools, failing, and harnessing real authenticity, to letting go and trusting the network to inspire people, Joel shares Jim’s Group’s unique recipe for success. 

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud, Podbean, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Amazon Podcasts.

Do you have brand guidelines? Do you have limitations in what you can and can’t do for the quality of the content or the type of content?

No, I’ve got none.

Transcription (Edited):

Anton Buchner:

Hi, I’m Anton Buchner, Business Director at Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy. Welcome again to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media and advertising with industry thought leaders. Today, I’m talking with one of Australia’s top franchise executives, the CMO of Jim’s Group, Joel Kleber. Joel is an innovator who has spearheaded the explosive growth of Jim’s Group with their digital presence and franchise recruitment strategy, especially around utilising advanced AI systems and tools. I didn’t realise the group has over a billion dollars in annual turnover, with 5,700 franchises and 50 divisions. It has seen great success in New Zealand, Canada, Australia and the UK since Jim Penman started it in 1982. So, it is with great pleasure that I welcome Joel Kleber to the podcast.

Joel Kleber:

Thank you, Anton, for having me on; I appreciate it.

Anton Buchner:

I’m looking forward to delving into your marketing mind and lifting the hood a bit on the Jim’s Group. I didn’t realise you joined the group back in 2011.

Joel Kleber:

Yes, 2011. It was my first job when I moved up to Melbourne to start my law commerce degree. I had a mate working out here who moved back to Warrnambool and mentioned they were always looking for people. I applied, despite having a two-day-a-week law clerk job, and I’ve been here ever since.

Anton Buchner:

Nice, you liked it so much you stayed.

Joel Kleber:

Some people say it’s like a cult sometimes; you come in, get “Jimified”, and stay for a long time.

Taking the Reins and Early Strategy

Anton Buchner:

Classic. You took the CMO reins in 2019. For people who might know the Group but not you personally, what did you see from a marketing perspective when you took over? What was the Group doing?

Joel Kleber:

Back in 2019, we were doing nothing on social media or with video. People used to hear great business advice and lessons internally from Jim all the time, and I wondered why we weren’t putting that stuff online. At that time, video was a bit more expensive and prohibitive regarding pre-production costs. I started offering my opinions on the Jim’s Group as a brand. It didn’t really have a unified brand; everyone knew divisions like Jim’s Mowing or Jim’s Cleaning in isolation, but no one really knew the story of the Jim’s Group and Jim himself beyond a book given out in training.

I was getting into Gary Vaynerchuk at the time and thought we should take that model:

hire a couple of full-time videographers, film everything, and put it online. I started that in 2019 without much of an idea of what I was doing; looking back, I’m actually pretty embarrassed by some of it. However, it started bringing new franchisees and prospects into training. Since 2019, we’ve grown from 3,600 franchisees to 5,700. We had been stagnant for ten years, and the only thing we did differently was relentless video content on multiple channels alongside the Jim Penman brand separately. We haven’t changed much in the system or how we operate internally; it was just a heavy video content approach that was transparent about what we do. It was an accidental strategy, but it was what the business needed.

Counteracting Negativity with Transparency

Anton Buchner:

It’s fascinating. As an outsider, I’ve followed the Group since the 80s, seeing Jim’s face on the side of vans. It seems obvious now, but as digital channels arrived, you started putting as many videos up as you could. What was the specific thread or type of content that you were looking to produce?

Joel Kleber:

It was all based on transparency. In 2019, I was inspired because there were many bad stories around franchising. Other brands were getting bad press, and we were being lumped in with them, with people assuming Jim takes 30 or 40 percent, which we obviously don’t. Franchising is generally a low-trust industry. Whenever there’s a bad franchisee story, it’s all over “A Current Affair,” but you never see the good stories where someone changed their life.

I thought we needed to counteract that negativity by being transparent. Everything about our fees, how our territories operate, and our contracts is now online. I wanted to be as transparent as possible with nothing to hide. We started a Facebook live stream called “Ask Jim” with my webcam. It answers questions like “Is Jim real?” or “Why doesn’t he have a beard?”. Every week, prospects could ask anything and the actual CEO would answer in a live video format.

Humanising the Brand: The “Ask Jim” Initiative

Joel Kleber:

When we started “Ask Jim,” franchisees remarked that they had never seen him like that before; it made him look human. Franchisees were sending prospects to watch it as part of their research. People would come into training months later and tell Jim they decided to become a franchisee after watching four or five episodes. Jim realised that answering questions cost him nothing but time while bringing in more franchisees.

We still do “Ask Jim” every three weeks at our new franchisee training. Jim sits on a stage with 60 to 100 new franchisees and answers their questions, which we then repurpose. During the lockdowns, it became a vital communication tool. We would get 400 to 500 live viewers because people had no idea what was going on. Even today, franchisees who have been around for ten years jump in to ask questions or make suggestions. In a low-trust industry, we decided to front-load our trust and put everything out there.

Anton Buchner:

That’s great to hear. In a franchise model, you are trusting the person who turns up. If that trust flows from Jim through to the franchisee, it’s awesome. Some businesses just put “transparency” as a value on the wall while covering things up. I love that you actually do it.

Joel Kleber:

I agree 100%. People talk about being transparent or “authentic,” but then they want to cut franchisee interviews because “legal has to approve it”. I don’t have that problem here. Jim says things online that you probably wouldn’t usually put out, but we do it. People love the honesty. Even if they don’t agree with Jim on everything, they know everything about the business, whereas other brands are ultra-controlled and chopped up 50 different ways by legal.

Embracing AI and Digital Tools

Anton Buchner:

I admire the stories. It brings me to how you’ve done it. I’ve done a lot of interviews regarding the development of AI and tech platforms over the last couple of years. How are you creating your video content? Are you using AI tools? What have you learned?

Joel Kleber:

I have an internal videographer, Charles, who does all the editing. We also have an offshore editor team in the Philippines who handles short-form content, producing eight to ten reels a day. I use AI tools like repurpose.io and OpusClip to repurpose content for Jim’s personal brand. OpusClip is great because I can take a long-form podcast and get 20 reels in ten minutes, five or six of which are usually really usable.

We have a really lean team for our output. I have this lean team because I have a lot of trust from the franchisees and Jim himself. I don’t need approvals or storyboards; I just document what I want and put it out there. Other businesses have so many approvals and people needing to tick things off, but I’m lucky that Jim and the franchisees trust me because of the results.

For ideation, we use Claude and ChatGPT. Occasionally we use Gemini. We can upload videos directly into Gemini to get feedback on why a video might have flopped. I follow many AI people on X and LinkedIn to stay updated. You just have to give it a try, experiment, and see what happens. Jim teaches me that just because we’ve always done something one way doesn’t mean we should continue that way. You have to be willing to try something new.

Jim and the Digital Avatar

Anton Buchner:

Does Jim get involved in the AI side of things?

Joel Kleber:

Yes, our AI avatar, which we made with Delphi, actually went viral on news.com.au. I’ve made a digital Jim using Delphi AI. I even had him talking to his own digital clone on YouTube, which was quite funny. We also use ElevenLabs to clone his voice. We can put a script in and get a voice clone that sounds exactly like him to use for marketing assets without him needing to be physically involved.

Even though he’s 73, he’s very forward-thinking and tech-savvy. Back in the late 80s, he developed a franchise management system called “Franchise” that was quite advanced. He listens to two audiobooks a week, and lately, he’s been listening to books about AI. It’s actually a bit annoying for me because he’ll come to me with a list of 20 things his own chatbot should do based on those books, and I have to try my best to implement them.

A Culture of Innovation and Calculated Risk

Anton Buchner:

It’s good to keep pushing.

Joel Kleber:

You’ve got to be willing to fail. I think many marketers are afraid to fail, but you learn so much more from it. Jim encourages this; if we fail, we ask what we learned and move on. Many marketers don’t have that leeway. If I make a mistake, I don’t get in trouble; I’m probably encouraged to keep going.

We see a lot of conservatism across the board, from corporate to mid-market. We aren’t seeing many big risk-takers. It might be old-school thinking where people feel they have to invest millions in a big ad, which is risky. My approach is to create content, tell stories, and if something fails, just cut the video and produce something else.

I still get in trouble with franchisees sometimes. If Jim says something openly—like that you can pay a restraint of trade fee and walk away with your clients—some franchisees don’t like it, even though it’s true. When we first started, I had problems with risk-averse franchisees telling me I couldn’t say certain things. However, the results in franchise sales outweighed those concerns. I’ve been at Jim’s for 15 years because I don’t have the restriction of getting 50 approvals. I have a lot of freedom.

Brand Guidelines and Franchisee Empowerment

Anton Buchner:

What about your brand? Do you have guidelines or limitations?

Joel Kleber:

We allow franchisees to use social media quite liberally. Many franchise brands restrict this or want to approve everything, but we are the opposite. We provide guidelines, such as being compliant with WH&S and ensuring work quality is high, but then they can do what they like.

Because of this, we have franchisees with massive followings. One guy has 240,000 followers in pool care; another mowing franchisee has 100,000. Our pool care franchisee alone has generated 1 billion organic views on TikTok. If we had required approvals for everything, we never would have had that. Some of what they create isn’t typical corporate material, but it generates massive reach for nothing, and that should be encouraged.

Our brand guidelines are per division. Franchisees also police each other. If a franchisee sees someone doing the wrong thing on social media, I’ll hear about it within five minutes. I then add that to a Notion page of “good and bad” examples. Every few weeks at training, I do a 90-minute social media and AI session where I show these examples. We also have a franchisee intranet with around 500 videos from franchisee interviews over the years.

We have extremely creative franchisees. One guy goes live on TikTok from his dog wash trailer for every groom and wash, and he gets three to four bookings a day from it. While there are challenges with franchisees creating content we wouldn’t personally put online, the positives far outweigh the negatives.

“Nuggets of Gold”

Anton Buchner:

That freedom encourages people to be themselves. Humanity in business is rare today, and that authenticity only comes from people being themselves. Seeing a franchise owner who clearly loves what they do shines through when they are solving problems for a customer. This leads to advocacy and recommendations.

Joel Kleber:

Absolutely. Prospects often message franchisees directly on social media to ask about the business because they trust the local franchisee more than corporate accounts.

Anton Buchner:

If you could leave people with one “nugget of gold,” what would it be?

Joel Kleber:

Be more transparent about what you do online. People want authenticity, which is often the opposite of the controlled, prim and proper image businesses put out. Transparency has been the biggest factor in our growth. Also, take more risks. I am a “non-marketer” and I’ve managed to grow the group by 2,100 franchisees. I don’t think someone from a traditional marketing background could have done what I did because I didn’t know any better and was allowed to try ideas and fail. One idea, like “Ask Jim,” can change an organisation.

Anton Buchner:

Those are three nuggets of gold wrapped in one. Take the risk. Don’t over-research everything; put something in the market and if it sells, it sells. In the digital world, people can get analysis paralysis.

Joel Kleber:

I’ve never gone through the process of business cases and budget allocations. You need the data from actually putting things out there to get feedback and adjust.

Anton Buchner:

Joel, thanks very much for coming in. One more question: what is the next category Jim’s is going to get into?

The post Managing Marketing: Revealing The Truth Behind Jim’s Group’s Success appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

We are moving into an era of data-first, privacy-first marketing. This is not merely a technical checkbox; it is a transformational challenge that dictates how brands, agencies, and consumers interact in a world where the “horse has literally bolted” on traditional definitions of privacy.

The Perfect Storm: Why “Marketing as Usual” is Over

For years, the industry operated on a “collect data at any cost” mentality. That era is ending due to three converging forces:

1. The Regulatory Catch-up

While Europe’s GDPR set the gold standard over a decade ago, Australia has remained significantly behind. However, the Australian Privacy Act is undergoing major changes that will have significant strategic implications for how brands handle consumer data. This isn’t just a minor update; for many, the effort to become compliant will mirror the significance of the “Year 2000” (Y2K) technical overhaul.

2. The Death of the Third-Party Cookie

Google remains the last major browser allowing third-party cookies, and even they are phasing them out through the Privacy Sandbox process. The ability to track users across the web without their explicit, granular consent is vanishing, forcing a return to first-party relationships.

3. The Consumer Trust Deficit

Frequent data breaches and “creepy” advertising—like seeing ads for hiking shoes for a year after you’ve already bought them—have eroded consumer trust. Consumers are increasingly aware that they are being “listened to” and tracked, leading to a demand for transparency that governments are now beginning to enforce.

Moving to Privacy by Design

Adrian Treahy argues that the solution isn’t just “in-housing” your data and hoping for the best. It requires Privacy by Design—an approach where every aspect of the business, from the call centre to the media agency, considers the value of every trust interaction.

This shift changes the definition of a campaign. It moves marketing from an executional task (sending emails) to a value-creation task centered on understanding total lifetime customer value through a privacy-compliant lens.

The 7-Step Action Plan for Marketers and Agencies

If you are looking to navigate the next 12 months, here is the “shopping list” of strategic priorities to ensure your marketing remains viable and your brand remains trusted.

1. Prioritise First-Party and Zero-Party Data

Stop thinking of data as just an “input” for a recipe. You must prioritise zero-party data—information that consumers intentionally and proactively share with you. This requires creating meaningful transactions where the user sees a clear value exchange for their information.

• Action: Integrate your Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) at all levels of the organisation, ensuring data silos (like the call centre) are broken down.

2. Embrace Radical Transparency

Consent shouldn’t be a fine-print afterthought; it should be a value proposition. Look at Apple: they have turned privacy into a point of differentiation and brand leadership.

• Action: Build strategic marketing where transparency is front and centre, driving the strategy rather than following it.

3. Technical and Operational Readiness

Many organisations self-rank at the “entry-level” for technical readiness. You cannot simply buy a “machine that goes ping” and solve the issue.

• Action: Move to server-side tracking and tagging. Since you can no longer rely on the browser to track data, you must have systems in place that allow for privacy-compliant analytics based on your own first-party data.

4. Utilise Data Clean Rooms

When sharing data with partners or media publishers, the old ways of file-sharing are too risky.

• Action: Explore the use of Data Clean Rooms—secure environments where multiple parties can combine data for analysis without either party seeing the other’s raw PII (Personally Identifiable Information).

5. Pivot to Contextual Advertising

Tracking users around the internet is not only becoming technically difficult; it is becoming socially “creepy”.

• Action: Invest in contextual targeting. By aligning your ads with relevant content in real-time, you drive relevancy without destroying brand trust through invasive tracking.

6. Implement Robust Data Governance

Minimise the data you collect. If you don’t need it for a specific, transparent purpose, don’t take it.

• Action: Adopt a Consent Management Platform (CMP) that allows for granular control. Prepare for a future where consumers can not only view their data but easily delete it at will, similar to GDPR requirements.

7. Strategic Collaboration

This is not a challenge that marketing can solve in a vacuum. It requires cross-functional training and compliance alignment across the entire business.

• Action: Agencies must move “upstream” to talk strategically about privacy-first marketing, rather than just waiting for an executional brief.

How TrinityP3 Can Help

At TrinityP3, we understand that the move to a privacy-first model is a transformational challenge, not just a marketing one. The complexity of data silos, fragmented MarTech stacks, and underutilised technology can feel overwhelming.

We provide the strategic framework to help you:

• Assess your current Data & Privacy maturity.
• Align your MarTech stack with your privacy obligations.
• Bridge the gap between marketing, technology, and legal compliance.
• Navigate the transition from third-party reliance to first-party data ownership.

You can explore our full range of Data and Privacy services here to see how we help brands turn privacy from a hurdle into a competitive advantage.

Your Next Step: The Privacy Health Check

Are you ready for the regulatory changes “coming down the pike”?. Most organisations are not as prepared as they think.

To get an immediate sense of where your brand stands, we invite you to take our Data Privacy and Security Health Check. It’s a quick, diagnostic tool designed to highlight your vulnerabilities and identify where your focus should be for the next 12 months.

Take the TrinityP3 Privacy Health Check here.

The era of “marketing as usual” is over. The time to start building a privacy-first foundation is now.

Read more on our Marketing Transformation Practice and our Data Privacy and Compliance solutions. Or contact us about a no obligation conversation to explore how we can assist with your data and privacy compliance efforts.

The post Why Privacy-First Marketing is Your New Strategic Frontier appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

For many CMOs, the fundamental question—“Is our marketing actually working?”—remains as difficult to answer today as it was in the era of John Wanamaker. The tragedy is that while we have more ways to measure activity, we seem to have fewer ways to prove effectiveness.

Commercial organisations of all sizes are currently struggling with what we at TrinityP3 call the “Effectiveness Gap”. This is the space between the digital metrics that marketing teams celebrate (clicks, impressions, likes) and the commercial outcomes that the CEO and CFO actually care about (market share, margin, and long-term business growth).

To bridge this gap, we must move beyond the “reporting” mindset and towards a genuine Marketing Effectiveness framework. This is not just about choosing a better software platform; it is about a wholesale transformation of how marketing is valued, measured, and optimised within the business.

The Five Pillars of the Effectiveness Trap

Why is it so hard to get right? In our work with global brands, we consistently see five recurring issues that prevent organisations from achieving true marketing effectiveness.

1. The Strategy-Measurement Disconnect

The most common point of failure occurs before a single dollar is spent. We often see a “Grand Canyon” sized gap between the high-level business strategy and the tactical measurement plan. If the business strategy is to “premiumise the brand,” but the marketing KPIs are focused on “lowest cost-per-acquisition,” the measurement system is effectively incentivising the team to undermine the strategy. Without mapping metrics directly back to strategic pillars, you aren’t measuring success; you’re measuring drift.

2. Metric Myopia: The Vanity Trap

In the digital age, we’ve become obsessed with what is easy to measure rather than what is important to measure. High “engagement rates” feel good in a weekly report, but they rarely correlate directly with sustainable profit. When marketing becomes a game of “optimising the numbers” rather than “optimising the business,” effectiveness suffers.

3. The “Finance Wall” and the Language Barrier

Finance speaks the language of capital allocation, risk, and ROI. Marketing often speaks the language of “brand health” and “reach.” When a CMO cannot explain how a 5% increase in brand awareness will lead to a specific commercial outcome, the CFO views marketing spend as a “cost to be cut” rather than an “investment to be managed.”

4. The Attribution Fallacy

Many organisations are still clinging to “last-click” or “multi-touch” attribution models that are fundamentally flawed. These models over-value short-term, bottom-of-the-funnel tactics, leading to an “attribution bias” that starves long-term brand-building activities of necessary funding.

5. Fragmented Data and Siloed Insights

The modern marketing stack is often a patchwork of disconnected platforms. Without a “single source of truth,” marketers are left trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces—and the strategic context—are missing.

Moving Towards a Marketing Effectiveness Framework

True marketing effectiveness is the result of aligning Strategy, People, Process, and Technology. At TrinityP3, we help organisations move from “reporting on what happened” to “predicting and driving what will happen.”

Action 1: Map Metrics Back to Strategic Intent

Before looking at a dashboard, you must map your measurement framework to your business strategy. This involves identifying the Strategic Levers (e.g., Increasing Penetration, Improving Retention, or Defending Price Premium) and assigning specific metrics that prove those levers are moving. If a metric doesn’t provide evidence of strategic progress, it should be relegated to a “diagnostic” level or discarded entirely.

Action 2: Define a Unified Measurement Framework

Effectiveness requires a tiered hierarchy where every level supports the one above it:

• Commercial Metrics: The “Boardroom” KPIs (Revenue, Market Share, CLV).
• Strategic Outcomes: The “Effectiveness” KPIs (Brand Salience, Consideration, Price Sensitivity).
• Tactical Metrics: The “Efficiency” KPIs (CPA, Reach, Conversion Rate).

Action 3: Bridge the Gap with Finance

Marketing effectiveness is a “team sport” that includes the CFO. Marketers must learn to talk about “Customer Acquisition Cost” (CAC) and “Life-time Value” (LTV) in ways that align with financial reporting. TrinityP3 often acts as the independent “translator” between these two departments.

Action 4: Balance the “Long and the Short”

A robust effectiveness programme must account for the “delayed” impact of brand advertising. This involves moving beyond simple attribution and embracing Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) or Econometrics to look at the total business ecosystem—including price changes and competitor activity.

Action 5: Align Agency Incentives

Are your agencies incentivised to drive your business growth, or to spend your media budget? Effective marketing requires an agency roster where remuneration models and KPIs are strategically aligned with your commercial goals.

How TrinityP3 Supports Your Transformation

Implementing a measure of marketing effectiveness is a transformational journey. TrinityP3 provides the expertise to:

• Audit Strategic Alignment: Ensuring your measurement plan actually rewards the execution of your business strategy.
• Develop Custom Effectiveness Frameworks: Tailored to your specific industry and organisational maturity.
• Facilitate Marketing-Finance Alignment: Building the commercial credibility of the marketing function within the C-suite.

We don’t sell software, and we don’t buy media. This independence allows us to provide a truly objective assessment of what is working and what is simply a waste of resources.

Your Next Step: The Marketing Effectiveness Assessment

The first step in any transformation is understanding your starting point. Our Marketing Effectiveness Measurement Self-Assessment helps you identify the specific issues holding you back.

This diagnostic tool asks the hard questions:

• Does your measurement framework explicitly track your strategic objectives?
• Is your definition of “effectiveness” shared by your CEO and CFO?
• Do you have a clear understanding of the long-term impact of your brand spend?
• Are your agencies being measured on the right outcomes?

Take the TrinityP3 Marketing Effectiveness Assessment here.

Marketing effectiveness is the ultimate competitive advantage. Those who can prove their strategic value to the business will lead the next wave of growth. Don’t let the “Effectiveness Gap” define your brand’s future.

Read more on our Marketing Transformation Practice and our Marketing Effectiveness solutions. Or contact us about a no obligation conversation to explore how we can assist with your marketing effectiveness efforts.

The post The Effectiveness Gap: Why Marketing Measurement is Failing the Commercial Test (and How to Fix It) appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

From her early days at Myer to her impactful role at Priceline and beyond, Amanda shares insights on customer obsession, community building, and the evolution of marketing in a rapidly changing landscape.

Amanda has not just embraced the challenges of these categories, businesses and marketing, she appears to relish them. From retail, to banking, to wellness and beauty, she has not just survived, she continues to thrive.

You can listen to the podcast here:

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In banking, normally you want the customers to love you more, you know to create a love mark, I was going in to make them hate you less.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley: 

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing podcast, please like, review, or share this episode to help spread the words and wisdom from our guests each week.

Resilience is a term that gets bandied around in a world of increasing complexity and demand, which is particularly relevant if you’ve built a career in marketing. Marketing leaders will often find themselves following career paths where they move from category to category: consumer packaged goods one day, retail the next, and insurance after that. But they’ll also move from organisations where marketing is seen as a strategic business partner right through to the “colouring-in department” in the corner, and everything in between. Overlay that with the ability of marketing to somehow invent the next hot thing, promoted with huge dollops of FOMO, and you have a career that is challenging at best and exhausting and even crushing at its worst.

My guest today continues to not just embrace this challenge; she appears to relish it. From retail to banking to wellness and beauty, she has not just survived, she’s thrived. Please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, my long-term friend and marketer extraordinaire, Amanda Connors. Welcome, Amanda.

Amanda Connors: 

Thank you, Darren. Great to join you today.

The Foundations of Marketing at Myer

Darren Woolley: 

This is a conversation that’s a long time coming because we have known each other for probably more years than either of us will admit. But it’s been fascinating watching as your career has progressed through all of the different iterations and different categories and having conversations along the way that I think need to be shared. So let’s start at the beginning. What was it that attracted you to marketing, and how did you actually get into marketing?

Amanda Connors: 

Well, my first big gig was at Myer, and I was attracted because I loved fashion at that time. I thought, “You know, I want to work in fashion.” That was way back in my early 20s and it was interesting. I was studying marketing at the time. But what I really found was that I was so fortunate to work in retail at that point in time because Myer was such an amazing training ground. I mean, in my early 20s, just the scale, the execution, and the commercial discipline that I learned back then was something that really put me in a brilliant position.

And I think to have that scale and that expertise, everything opened up for me when I was there. I was studying my marketing degree part-time at Chisholm, which then turned to Monash. But at that time, under the different CEOs and managing directors, we really had retail training. So we went across to Babson University; we learned about the eight ways to win in retailing. I had at that stage, I think, an $80 million budget—and I even complained when that got cut back! I think at that time, Darren, was when we met each other. You were at Mattingly in the creative department, and Mattingly back then was our ad agency.

So, from a young age at 20, being promoted very young but learning the disciplines of retailing, understanding the customers, understanding the market and the trends, and being able to work across all kinds of areas in marketing—whether that be loyalty, catalogues, promotions, events, sponsorships, or Melbourne Fashion Festivals—it was such an incredible grounding. It taught me to be customer-obsessed, market-obsessed, commercially sharp, and constantly evolving. That’s what set the foundation for me.

The Fast-Paced Discipline of Retail

Darren Woolley: T

he thing I noticed—you’re absolutely right, that was my first job in copywriting. I’d come from medical research into copywriting at Mattingly, and my first client was Myer. It was not just the volume of work. We were working on 70 to up to 100 press briefs a week and radio on top of that, including the infamous Myer bargain basement: “Ladies, we’ve got bags galore!” That was the start for me. But what made it work was the discipline. I think the routine, the rhythm, and the discipline of that process were so important, not just for you as the client for the agency, but also for the agency. The agency fell into this rhythm of being able to produce large amounts of very good quality work that actually moved sales, but in a way that was largely not stressful. I mean, there were stresses, but they were the exception rather than the rule, weren’t they?

Amanda Connors: 

Look, I think you’re so right, Darren. And you think of the volume. It wasn’t just the volume; it’s the quality of work. You think about the spend on press, on magazines, on catalogues, and then TV commercials, sponsorships, and events. So you think about where you had to adapt to move fast and deliver quality. Given retail, you knew if that press ad or that catalogue didn’t work, you would find out Monday morning. You would be there Monday morning with the CEO and the MD calling a “war room.” You’d have all of the advertising up on the wall and you’d walk through: Is it working? What are the sales results? What’s coming up next? Do we need to adapt? Do we need to change? That is discipline. It’s about being strategic but being fast, moving really fast.

This is so different to my friends working in FMCG, because that was really slow. You’d have to present it to the board. With retail, it was week in, week out, as well as looking a year ahead because you’re planning Christmas 12 months out or the next fashion launch 12 to 18 months out. I think that’s what made me so fast, so adaptable, and gave me perseverance. If something didn’t work, I persevered, went back, found out what wasn’t working, and did the research, but was able to turn on a pin. So even though retail is supposed to be not so strategic, it did teach you about adaptability and change.

Repositioning and the Evolution of a Brand

Amanda Connors: 

I’ll come to another point, because I was there when Myer transformed itself. Every year we’d have a different position. I’ll never forget we went from a really upmarket magazine with big sponsorships at the races, and then because we had discount department stores and department stores were dying, we did a big retail tour around the world. I remember visiting all the best retailers and coming back and saying, “Okay, we’re now going to be a shopping mall and not a department store.” We opened the Myer Sports area; we decided not to do homewares and furniture anymore because furniture just wasn’t profitable. We were going to do faster fashion and really go after the youth market. We created destinations like Nike Town and tried in-store concepts.

Now, that didn’t work. So then we repositioned again under a different managing director and we became “stack them high, make them fly.” Across each level, the department store became a discount department store.

Darren Woolley: 

Yeah, the “store within the store,” it was called.

Amanda Connors: 

We lost customers. We were part of Coles Myer at that stage and really the Myer brand was dying because we tried to change but we’d lost what we were anchored in, which was what our customers wanted and what a department store was. We were trying to just be competitive and the sales went up, but the brand health tracking went down and the feedback from customers was an outcry. It was interesting repositioning just about every year. That wasn’t just marketing; that was everything from ranging to stores to really the whole essence of the brand.

Shifting to Strategic Branding in Banking

Darren Woolley: 

Because you went from what was a branded retail with Myer to Westpac, wasn’t it? And that feels like a big shift to go from retailing, but I guess there are also similarities in that it’s very much consumer focused. Whether the consumer is a business person or a person, it’s still talking directly to the consumer.

Amanda Connors: 

Yes. And I was really excited about that opportunity, though it was so much slower. I thought it would be a lot more strategic. When I went there, the banks were actually bringing in a lot of real strong marketers that had either been in ad agencies or had worked in FMCG. I followed a GM, a bit of a mentor of mine, who moved across to be head of marketing there, so I went to head up brand and sponsorships.

Going in there, it was again so financially driven and driven by accountants; it wasn’t actually focused on the customer. I used to laugh because normally you want the customers to love you more, to create a “love mark.” I was going in to make them hate us less. Of course, it was a great opportunity for me because that was the first time they’d ever put a brand strategy together. I also worked with you at the time in looking at our agency relationships and what we needed. I brought in a really good research and brand consultant and started a whole repositioning of Westpac to actually have customer segments, to be really clear about what the purpose was, to be clear about the storytelling, and to change all the visual identity. We also did sponsorships and started brand health tracking rather than just customer experience tracking. It was a great opportunity using some skills I learnt very young in retail about being customer focused, rather than just product focused, which was what banking was at that time.

Darren Woolley: 

But it’s interesting what you said about the pace, going from retail where it was week in, week out, to banking where it slows down because there’s not this impetus to meet the numbers on a day-to-day basis. Banks are not measuring the number of clients that visit their branches on a day-to-day basis in the way retailers do.

Amanda Connors: 

I found that interesting and not as dynamic. You have to put together four or five board papers and you spend your whole time putting papers together that might take three to six months to be signed off because it’s highly regulated. And that’s a good thing as well. If anything, I’ve always said that every major growth chapter in my career has required me to outgrow my previous version of myself.

Even though it was slower, it did get me to look at customer experience tracking, the competitive nature of the business, and the highly regulated industry that it was. It gave me more strategic thinking time and allowed me to harness my skills more commercially and strategically than in retailing. Sometimes in retail they say we were “cowboys” or “cowgirls” back then, just driving sales each week and sometimes not thinking about the brand, whereas financial services is disciplined. For me, it created a stronger, more strategic, commercially driven marketer.

Transforming Priceline and Building Communities

Darren Woolley: 

And it’s interesting because at the end of that process, you then jump back into retail, but very different retail. API, Australian Pharmaceutical Industries, had this retail brand called Priceline, which I remember at the time was “down and dirty” and discount. But during your time there, particularly around your focus on building community and loyalty, it really changed its brand positioning and reputation, didn’t it?

Amanda Connors: 

Well, it did. What attracted me there again was the opportunity to really make my mark. Each time I’ve gone in somewhere, it’s because it’s needed transformation, a focus on the customer, or to build e-commerce. Priceline was very different. It was pharmaceutical, beauty, and a franchise, which meant higher complexity. Pharmaceutical was highly regulated, beauty was consumer and fashion-driven, and the franchise industry meant you had owners of the business who you had to bring along on the journey.

That was an incredible opportunity for brand reinvention. I thrive on change and the chaos that comes with it. I moved across to this “$2 shop” that used to sell statues and toilet brushes, and it was trying to move from that to be a pharmacy. Pharmacy is about credibility and trust, and you’re not going to trust someone who sells toilet brushes and statues.

Going in there, I really focused on the customer. Women are the ones who were making all the health decisions. Wellness was a trend that was quite niche at that point, so I tapped into it because wellness and health are so important together. Priceline moved to a beauty and wellness destination, which was a real point of difference because Chemist Warehouse had just been introduced as the discount competitor.

I had to bring everyone on that journey of positioning to women about healthy beauty. I had to get suppliers on board like L’Oréal. When I first presented to them, they were not interested in being part of Priceline because they thought it was too much of a $2 shop. Two years later, they were beating down our doors because market share was going through the roof.

I also worked with the pharmacists to get them from behind the counter to think about customer service and vitamins. I put in place trackers so we could present to the board every month to show how brand health and customer experience were tracking against sales. Then we looked at developing a loyalty programme. It was Club Card at that stage, and we looked at creating a movement, not just a card—a loyalty movement about personalisation, creating desirability, and really getting to know those customers. In the end, we developed the Priceline Sister Club.

It ended up becoming about 40% of the business’s sales. It grew from just a magazine and a card to a strategic loyalty programme that created retention and upselling. Then we overlaid the Priceline Sisterhood, which was a cause-related marketing programme supporting women’s health issues. I founded that, and it’s still alive today. It was about creating an ecosystem: repositioning the brand, loyalty, cause-related marketing, and a whole visual identity for the stores. I used to call it “Bunnings for chicks” back then because that’s where you went to get all your stuff for a makeover.

Darren Woolley: The three roles you have talked about so far: Myer was management looking at sales often at the expense of brand; Westpac had products but no clear brand distinction; but the biggest challenge would have been API and Priceline. You joined an organisation that was a distribution point for retailers signed up for a discount brand, and you turned it into a valued brand that women trusted. Didn’t the Sister Club and the Sisterhood end up being one of the biggest women’s communities in Australia with millions of members?

Amanda Connors: 

We had seven million members. We won two ADMA awards, which was hilarious because we were up against Woolworths, and we got runner-up for this little small budget business in the first year.

API was what I called the “blue side,” all about the distribution of drugs and traditional pharmacy thinking. I went in at a time where all health was positioned to blokes or written by blokes. I’ll never forget how menopause was handled. There were ads from big drug companies featuring women in refrigerators. I had to have the conversation, and because I loved research and facts, I used that to convince them. My retail colleagues told me if I wanted to present any strategy to the pharmacists or leadership team, I must present facts because they are scientists. I researched the hell out of everything—quantitative, qualitative—to get the insights to get them over the line.

I put some of the franchisees on a panel and asked them who their main customers were. They said women. Women are the primary carers for their partners and children across all life stages. Once I got the pharmacists over the line, we could build the story and the segments.

I think where Priceline has gone wrong recently is that they lost their differentiated position. Chemist Warehouse came out and went after low-cost prescriptions and health. They shattered that whole thinking by selling in a warehouse environment. Priceline had its point of difference in beauty and wellness, but then I think it started chasing Chemist Warehouse and lost its differentiation.

Wellness, Founders, and Global Expansion

Darren Woolley: 

But isn’t the irony that Priceline and API got bought by Wesfarmers, which had Bunnings, and Bunnings did the same thing to hardware that Chemist Warehouse did to pharmacy? The great sleight of hand that Chemist Warehouse pulled was creating the illusion of being a warehouse when they were often just high street stores. They owned the category by painting them gaudy colours, in the same way Bunnings did with their big green and red boxes.

You left Priceline on a high because it was growing and you had taken the high ground from a marketing positioning point of view. But then you changed to Endota Spa, a brand that felt more gentle and relaxed. What was the attraction of Endota?

Amanda Connors: 

Meeting Melanie Gleeson, who still today inspires me. Her leadership style and her wanting someone to partner with her to create something from a “cottage business” was incredible. What really attracted me was the clear purpose. It didn’t need repositioning; I had to keep the heart of that brand. “Endota” is an indigenous word meaning beautiful. The values are all about intention, connection, and truth.

I knew the wellness economy was coming—it’s now something like a 5.2 trillion dollar business. I told Melanie, “What you’ve built is so powerful; we just need to harness that and commercialise it.” I did the brand identity, set up the marketing, and helped with the loyalty programme. We took the awareness from about 40% to 80%. I drove the commercial side, including creating our own green gift card using the Malachite stone symbol. I worked with Blackhawk to create Endota’s own gift card which is now in every supermarket. Now Endota is going to be an international brand.

Darren Woolley: 

It was your step into taking an Australian brand and setting it up for a global role.

Amanda Connors: 

It was. Each point in my career, I’ve had to grow a version of myself. Working with a founder was new for me and can be tricky because that’s their business, their heart, and their soul. My skill set had to change; it wasn’t just about board papers and budget sign-offs anymore.

Darren Woolley: 

Would it be fair to say you also have to become part therapist?

Amanda Connors: 

Yes, and adaptability is key. There were franchisees in this model too, but unlike the pharmacists who were scientists, these franchisees were often therapists. Presenting a repositioning—taking their social media away, consolidating websites, and moving to a branded house—to an emotionally led franchise network was very different to presenting to scientists.

It also set me up for my next role working for a global business, doTERRA. They were driven from the US and at that stage didn’t fully understand the Australian market. Their story of co-impact sourcing and helping communities was incredible, but they didn’t really believe in marketing to get that story out. I put together a business strategy, product strategy, and digital strategy for the Australian market. I was there for 12 to 18 months, did what I could, and then got tapped on the shoulder for the Total Beauty Network (TBN).

TBN was amazing, working with a founder on four brands. I looked after NPD (new product development) for all four Australian brands, selling across pharmacies and department stores globally. I set up a visionary collective of health-conscious beauty brands. We had “Designer Brands” for the mass market, “RAWW” for the youth surf culture, and “Inika” as the prestige 100% natural brand. Inika became the first plastic-neutral brand in the world. I also set up their e-commerce business which I grew by 355%; it ended up being a real revenue driver. It was such a great challenge because you have the “dupe” market, indie brands, and celebrities all competing.

Leadership and Navigating Change

Darren Woolley: 

How do you make sure you navigate your way through all this complexity and technological change?

Amanda Connors: 

I thrive on change and I am always really curious. I have a growth mindset; I don’t have that scarcity mentality where I think change is scary or I’m not going to be relevant. You’ve got to be adaptable, brave, and relentless. You’ve got to be relentlessly customer focused to survive and thrive.

If you’re going to create chaos through change, you’ve got to create clarity in that chaos. Define that strategic truth: know what your purpose is and know what your brand purpose is. Move quickly; you can’t take three to five years anymore. Get the insight and move on it. Align your leadership, bring people along on the journey emotionally, and then execute relentlessly.

It’s like driving a race car: you’ve got your plan and you’ve trained for it, but the driving conditions will change. You’ve got your vehicle, you know your destination, but you have to adapt.

Darren Woolley: 

That’s a really good metaphor because race car drivers are only as good as the team that keeps the car on the road. Everyone that’s worked with you speaks highly of your selfless leadership.

Amanda Connors: 

I absolutely believe in that. I did my MBA to refine my leadership and strategic strength, but it’s the people I’ve learnt from—consultants, agencies, and my team—who have been my real MBA. I listen to my team; I set the direction and give them the rope to do what they need to do.

You also need to be anchored in the past just enough to not make the same mistakes. There’s a reason why the rear-vision mirror is small and the windscreen is big; you need a big vision for the future. You need your team of drivers, and maybe eventually you become the coach and stop driving yourself.

Darren Woolley: 

Amanda, this has been a terrific conversation. We have totally run out of time, but thank you so much. It’s been absolutely inspirational hearing these lessons: the curiosity, the relentless discipline, and the focus on the consumer. Thank you for sharing it today on Managing Marketing.

Amanda Connors: 

Thank you, Darren. It’s been a joy, as always.

Darren Woolley:

As is my want, I have a question and that is, you’ve got all this amazing experience and all these fantastic runs on the board. So what’s next, Amanda?

The post Managing Marketing: How To Thrive With A Diverse Marketing Career appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.