There was never any doubt in Nathan Low’s mind the summer Australian lamb campaign would be provocative.

Social is the ecosystem of choice for small businesses, from marketing to gathering inspiration and selling to prospective customers. So creating a social design system that could enable Sendle to live and adapt in this environment was a no brainer for its chief marketing and customer officer, Eva Ross.

It’s a truth increasingly acknowledged that human beings only have a finite amount of decision- making power in any given day. And it’s minimising the mental cost of switching from B2B to B2C decision making Zai global CMO, Andrea Linehan, was keen to avoid when she set out to orchestrate a global rebrand bringing two such teams together.

Non-alcoholic spirits brand, Lyre’s, has brought on Audience Precision to support its media strategy, planning and buying as its looks to build out a bigger global presence.

The pandemic may have been a time of digital acceleration, but it’s brought with it the tools and tenacity to enable brands to find more human connections with customers and employees. That is at least is the view of marketing and digital leaders from McDonalds, General Motors, Target US, Instacart and Salesforce, who participated in a panel discussion at the Consumer Electronics Show.

As we wave goodbye to the year that was 2021, CMO presents our top 21 stories of the year across CMO Australia based on audience engagement.

It’s been another year of pivoting and adapting for Australia’s marketing chiefs as they continued to navigate the unchartered waters of Covid-19. Which is why it was not surprising to find this a common theme pervading every one of our top 10 CMO profiles for 2021.

We all have them – the milestones and achievements we’re proud of and know are worth pursuing in the New Year, and the things we definitely do not want to do. So what is it Australian marketing leaders have on their do and don’t lists for 2022?

Many marketers talk about the experience they provide around their brand’s products and services. But for one emerging telco, the brand, service and experience can’t be separated.

SmileDirectClub, the tele-dentistry platform that connects customers to dentists or orthodontists in its network, wanted to go one step further in linking people with healthcare.

It was Natalie Dinsdale’s bondage bus that reportedly became the scariest moment of launch for Athena’s chief and co-founder, Nathan Walsh.

Amid the recent flurry of brands promoting carbon offsets, recycling programs and other sustainability initiatives, there is another, much more fundamental issue hiding in plain sight. If the purpose of marketing is to influence people to consume a product or service, then isn’t marketing itself one of the key causes of the environmental degradation so many brands are now working against?

It’s a conundrum facing many marketing leaders right now: How do you upskill marketing teams not just in capabilities necessary to the job today, but also emerging skillsets required in an age of mainstream artificial intelligence (AI)?

Like many existing brands, Fight Gear Direct had reached a certain level that required shifting the focus from growing sales to sustaining sales. Yet a lack of focus in innovation across product categories or marketing and no real desire to continue growing an audience was holding it back.

Building a global brand stretching across a B2B value chain and matrix of industry stakeholders through to the grocery store shelf is a challenge in itself. Throw in a completely new technology, the promise of significant sustainability gains, an indirect product sales model and the global pandemic, and it’s an even more dynamic, challenging task.

Four in 10 top 200 companies globally do not list their corporate values anywhere on their website, 94 per cent don’t use personalisation online and fewer than 15 per cent have accessible digital offerings.

It’s one thing for brand marketers to build a campaign proposition, creative concept and marketing plan they’re happy with. It’s quite another to orchestrate the work with speed, consistency and agility.

Chief of innovation, marketing and technology are common titles to see on an org chart. Less common however is seeing the same person’s name against all three.

​Christmas carols in the retail stores, mince pies on the shelves, festive parties in the calendar - the 2021 festive season has firmly arrived. And with it comes an array of Christmas campaigns from the world's biggest advertisers.

A new research paper by Forethought advisory is encouraging marketers to leave environmental, social and governance messaging and stories to the corporate affairs or PR teams and focus instead on attributes truly driving consumer brand choice.

With Australia poised to report its biggest online shopping event on record, one ecommerce startup is hoping its recent brand launch will help it snare a significant chunk of that business.