Innovation is one of those terms that gets bandied about. But it was clear during the COVID-19 crisis that ‘innovation’ was what marketing leaders and their teams needed to embrace in order to pivot and adapt to the rapidly changing consumer and market conditions.

Commercial kitchen equipment provider, SilverChef, has created its first dedicated executive-level customer role and appointed Wotif Group’s former digital marketing leader to it.

Chris Taylor has confirmed his departure from the National Heart Foundation after nearly three years as its first national chief marketing officer.

Want to know how to disrupt the CMO playbook? How brands such as Audible are balancing human intuition and data science? Or why marketing chiefs from the likes of RMIT, Realestate.com.au and Hexagon are turning to agile ways of working? These are just some of the sessions from our recent CMO Momentum 2020 virtual event, and they’re now available to you on-demand for the next 30 days, thanks to our sponsor, Sitecore.

Growing emphasis on soft skills, empathy and team resiliency, along with better data and customer behavioural insight, are just some of the ways modern marketing leaders are looking to strengthen the commercial muscle of their functions right now.

There’s no doubt marketing leadership has undergone massive transformation over the last 5-10 years with the rise of marketing technology, data and digitally driven marketing tools and insights, a push to personalise and be more customer experience-led, and more. So what does it take to ensure you remain a future-fit CMO?

Australian forex broker, Pepperstone, has appointed Sportsbet’s former data products leader, Tony Gruebner, as its chief marketing officer.

In the midst of the strife of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen a flourishing of innovation across Australian marketing and customer teams as they strive to keep up with rapidly changing customer needs and expectations, acceleration of digitisation and connectivity, and the customer retention imperative.

At this week’s CMO Momentum virtual conference, four marketing chiefs from areas as varied as the university sector, airlines and real estate shared their insights and experience on working in an agile way in the marketing remit.

A rebrand, retail network expansion and digital acceleration are all firmly in the sights of KYHA Studios recently installed CEO and former Tabcorp and William Hill marketing chief, Claire Murphy.

It’s just a week until our CMO Momentum 2020 virtual event debuts, and we’re delighted to confirm our final tranche of brilliant speakers in our line-up!

Of the many trends in marketing content that have emerged through 2020, one of the most common has been displays of empathy. But how well those messages landed probably had more to do with how people felt about the brands to begin with rather than the quality of the communications themselves.

In honour of this year's unique CMO50 2020 virtual event and the unprecedented challenges marketing leaders have had to navigate, we wanted to ask our CMO50 alumni what they'd learnt about being a CMO, as well as about their customers, from this time of crisis.

The ABC’s director of audiences, Leisa Bacon, has taken the number spot in this year’s CMO50 list among a list of familiar and new faces in the top 10 this year.

The battle lines between creative, brand-led marketing and CX, data-driven marketing have been drawn for some time and were in the spotlight during this year’s CMO50 judging.

One of the paradoxes of the COVID-19 crisis is the positives it’s created out of negatives. It’s something ABC’s director of audiences and this year’s CMO50 number one, Leisa Bacon is very conscious of.

Pausing a high profile, multi-million-dollar campaign in-market soon after launch, and just as it was getting great traction, was both a heartbreaking but very necessary decision, for Susan Coghill and Tourism Australia. And it was just the first of many pivots in 2020. “Within a matter of weeks, we had created an entirely new domestic unit within our business and launched an entirely new campaign to galvanise the nation to support the tourism industry in its recovery from the impacts of devastating summer bushfires,” Coghill told CMO. “Exhausting and motivating at the same time.”

While the software industry’s products may be virtual, physical activities still play an important role in forging connections with customers. So when the COVID-19 crisis hit Australia, Microsoft Australia’s CMO and communications director Pip Arthur and her team found themselves quickly readjusting to the new reality.

Simon Cheng is the first to admit the period leading up to him joining the Menulog food delivery business was challenging. Consecutive quarters of negative year-on-year decline had seen morale and confidence in the business fall to record lows.

In the telco world, you can't spend a dollar without a clear sales return. So taking a step back and seeing what Melissa Hopkins has achieved at Optus over the past three years, the telco CMO realised the major shifts and impacts marketing has had not only on the organisation, but on the brand in the wider marketplace - and the bottom line.

“Finding the nuggets of gold in customer experience data” is vital to achieving innovative marketing that fills a customer need, says Monash University CMO, Fabian Marrone. Equally, systems and processes that allow scalability and consistency in message, motivation and action are a must. But don’t forget that third all-important ingredient. “Creativity will get you through anything”, Marrone says.