Byron Sharp is a distinctive assets maximalist, suggesting how brands look and are recognised and embedded into people’s minds is more important than focusing on what they do differently to rival brands. Mark Ritson argues brands need differentiation to stand out from rivals and pull customers in. News Australia says you need both to drive growth – and that custom-made media that delivers engagement beyond reach is a critical multiplier.
News Australia has just wrapped up its nationwide agency engagement roadshow, Frontiers, diving deep with hundreds of agency execs across dozens of workshops to unpack how to cut through and deliver much sharper results amid a comms sea of sameness. The key is moving beyond old-school approaches of tonnage-based reach and the legacy constructs of ‘paid, owned and earned’ media.

Case studies for CommBank, NRMA Insurance, Subway and Toblerone strongly suggest the approach is working: Subway notched 3 per cent sales gains; NRMA Insurance and News Australia’s positive influence helped secure $7.2bn in government funding to fix Queensland’s Bruce Highway. Unsurprisingly, more Queenslanders now like NRMA Insurance than before.
Now News Australia wants to work with agencies and brands to build better campaigns and more case studies. But that requires a shift in approach to planning and content creation. It’s harder work, says GM of Client Growth & Experience, Renee Sycamore, but powerful results prove “the effort definitely pays off”.

The key to achieving “distinctively different” campaigns says Head of Growth Intelligence, Leigh Lavery, is to focus on three critical elements: Making content magnetic (i.e. it gets attention); momentous (i.e. contextually relevant, capturing the zeitgeist) and meaningful (i.e. saying and doing something that adds value to customers).

But going against conventional wisdom on mass reach may also be required. As National Head of Digital Strategy and Streaming Dianna Molinaro puts it: “Everyone’s got reach … but what our agency partners and marketers really care about is the impact.” Likewise, everyone has data: “It’s about what we do with it.”

Now News Australia is powering custom-made media with behavioural audience signals across the network to connect intent and content. Molinaro says data-driven relevance is where the growth gold lies.

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Marketing budgets are declining just as paid media costs are rising – meaning brands get less for every dollar spent, and fewer dollars to start with. But latest research commissioned by The Trade Desk into omnichannel versus multichannel media planning could provide sweet relief.

In short, the difference between omnichannel and multichannel planning is that omnichannel campaigns are connected by data and technology from the get-go, whereas multichannel campaigns put ads into different channels one by one. The distinction is subtle – but the disparity in results can be massive.

Across UK, US and Australian markets, the research found omnichannel ad campaigns outperform multichannel campaigns on nearly every metric by up to 90 per cent, delivering steep upside for marketing teams in improving the ROI performance of their paid media schedules.

It also found that properly linking campaigns across channels significantly reduces the mental load on consumers, and therefore ad fatigue, and drives more conversions, faster.

Versus “disconnected” multichannel campaigns, omnichannel campaigns were “one and a half times more persuasive, 50 per cent better at building emotional connection with audiences and 70 per cent better at encoding messages in long-term memory”, according to The Trade Desk Director of Marketing Research and Insights, Sara Picazo.

Brands switching to omnichannel approaches also report massive performance gains: Picazo said working with The Trade Desk, IKEA boosted conversions by 339 per cent and cut time to conversion by 10 per cent.
Likewise, Nunn Media Head of Digital and Data Lee Foster said brands taking an omnichannel approach are making lasting reductions in performance media costs – one client has cut cost per acquisition by 24 per cent, sustained over a nine-month period.

Picazo and Foster urge brands not already harnessing omnichannel approaches to test the theory themselves. But the research also has implications for the way brand and agency planning teams are set up.

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While the numbers have been improving, CMOs still have the shortest tenure in the c-suite globally. Spencer Stuart data shows CMOs in Fortune 500 companies now have average tenure of 4.3 years against a c-suite average of 4.9 years. But variance is huge: Tellingly, Forrester data shows a 75% variance in average CMO tenure across the industries it tracks, with B2B CMOs recording the lowest average tenure, while B2C record the longest.

Across the inaugural Australian CMOs of the Year finalists and winners, a list including both c-suite level marketers as well as heads of marketing reporting into divisional or other c-suite leaders, average role tenure came in at a much lower 3 years 3 months.
Yet across submissions, several marketing chiefs cited much longer role and company tenure – and delivered stronger marketing effectiveness case studies for it. Three joined us for the latest CMO Awards podcast, powered by Mi3, to reveal how longer tenure has helped them build trust and pursue bolder, more expansive decisions and work: Intrepid’s former chief customer officer and now president of the Americas, Leigh Barnes, Kennard’s Hire GM of marketing and customer, Manelle Merhi, and Patties Foods’ chief marketing and growth officer, Anand Surujpal.

The trio agreed: Tenure has seen them flip the switch on marketing as an ego-centric profession focused on delivering individual results – often, as quickly as you can – to putting the brands and business first. All of them are investing in longer-term opportunities and have the confidence to experiment, fail fast, pick up the learnings and progress. As well as sharpening their commercial aptitude, tenure has also opened doors they never would have found the handle on without embedding themselves truly as leaders within their respective organisations.

Barnes, who has been with Intrepid for nearly 15 years and took 14th spot in our CMOs of the Year, has spent the last three years orchestrating a transformation of marketing from 90:10 performance-to-brand mix, to 60:40 in favour of brand. It’s been a huge adjustment but results speak volumes: From a $60.7 million loss in 2021 to a $21.8 million net profit, and a $29 million revenue bump from first-time customers in early 2025 alone.

“For me, tenure has enabled me to be real, and that gives me the opportunity to say what I think, say when I'm struggling, say when I don't understand something, be vulnerable. But also, when I'm really confident about something, I can say that with gusto, and the business backs and supports that,” Barnes comments.

Merhi, who joined Kennards as head of marketing 12 years ago, was 25th in our CMOs of the Year list for her bold work revitalising the sales team, as well as embedding four key customer personas that are driving growth, including its latest commercial segment successes. Today, every Kennard’s branch and employee speaks the language of customer, she says proudly.

“I genuinely believe tenure allowed for the trust, for proven capability, for notches on the belt that make people want to sit, listen and be curious in return,” Merhi says.
It’s that willingness to back you that’s also helping Surujpal, an eight-year veteran at Patties Foods, to take recently acquired brand, Lean Cuisine, in a completely different direction. He’s also tasked with taking Four ‘N’ Twenty into international markets.
“It's the trust of the organisation that you've got this, you’ve done this before. You know you're going to get a few things wrong, but you're going to get more things right than wrong,” he says. “The relationship between myself, my sales counterparts, my CEO, my CFO, is really strong. We've got an incredibly strong business partner relationship.”

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