The long-term impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on the Australian events industry won’t be known for some time, but one immediate outcome is the rapid rise in interest in virtual conferences.

​With so many physical events now being cancelled, many organisations are turning to virtual platforms to retain at least a semblance of presence and engagement. But as anyone who has ever attended a virtual event knows, a successful experience requires more than just pointing a video camera at a presenter and pressing record.

It’s been a couple of weeks of cancellations and warnings as industries from technology to culture and sports to marketing and creative cancel, postpone or take events digital in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fisher & Paykel has come a long way since its inception in 1934 in New Zealand. This humble antipodean company has grown to be a global appliance powerhouse, and yet still prides itself on being human-centred, even while undertaking its digital transformation over the last seven years.

Salesforce’s Sydney event kicked off with a discussion around the future of marketing and what high-performing brands are doing to lead marketing now and into the future.

All the latest martech and adtech news this week from Salesforce, Confirmit, BlueVenn, Leanplum, QMS Media, Automation Anywhere, Verint and Adobe, and NetOpt

All the latest martech and adtech news this week from Habu, Databook, Aimia, WPP, Upland Software, Rakuten, Facebook and Seismic

All the latest martech and adtech news this week from Dentsu Aegis, SOCi, DoubleVerify, Salesforce, SECURITI.ai, Community, Productsup and Sitecore, and Tealium and Invoca

​Smart speakers are everywhere. They are on everyone’s phone, in their homes, and on every display stand this holiday period as the perfect gift idea.

It's been yet another year of significant mergers and acquisitions in the marketing, advertising and customer technology sphere.

​Change, disruption, uncertainty and engagement on the customer’s terms – looking at this year’s list of most-read stories on CMO, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’d actively sought out these topics as areas to focus on. Yet it’s clear the transformation of marketing from broadcast to two-way engagement, thanks to the ongoing disruptive impact of digital and connectivity, has continued to dominate marketing industry discussions and thinking in 2019.

What does 2020 hold for digital marketers, and marketing generally? We ask a raft of industry experts from the marketing technology and industry community to give us their thoughts on 2020 and beyond, and what marketers will need to know moving forward.

If there’s one lesson Luxury Escape’s chief customer officer, Jason Shugg, has learnt through the process of overhauling marketing, sales and service technology, it’s the importance of communication.

“If there are two sources of truth, there is no truth.” It’s a comment that screams common sense. Yet when you look at the state of the relationship between marketing and sales teams, it’s still not often the case, agrees Salesforce SVP and GM of Pardot, Michael Kostow.

Better claims and rehabilitation management, transparency and improved member experiences are all coming to fruition for Zurich’s OnePath life insurance business after adopting artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Southwest Airlines has edged a step closer to a 360-degree view of the customer while also lifting employee engagement after deploying a new platform to improve customer service management.

Marketers need to work harder to provide customers with transparency and an ability to control their own data as part of their ethical – and not just legal – responsibility towards them, Salesforce global CMO, Stephanie Buscemi, believes.

Being a leader is not a matter of having your name up in lights, making speeches or corralling power at the top. It’s identifying the power in other people and unleashing it, former US president, Barack Obama, believes.

Knowing consumers intimately, leaning in to brand ‘superpowers’ and digital capability, and disrupting from within have helped digital beauty retailer, e.l.f, buck category sales decline and chalk up 13 percentage point growth this year.

​It’s November so, naturally, the call out to grow a ‘mo and help prevent male suicide for Movember is top of mind. But how does a not-for-profit like the Movember Foundation harness its data to create a strategy for better personalisation, targeting, and all year round messaging? And, most importantly, how do they do this in a cost effective way?

​Differentiating Fitness First in what is a highly competitive and personal space cannot be easy, and yet Fitness First makes it looks so as it powers towards one-to-one, personalised customer experience (CX).