MFA EX Sydney saw media professionals from different levels descend upon the White Bay Cruise Terminal on Thursday for a day of people development and to drive the industry forward.
The conference celebrated what the industry has achieved and looked ahead to its future and the innovations set to create change.
This year’s content was curated by industry leaders, including Katie Rigg-Smith from WPP, Linda Wong from MFA, Chloe Hooper from Barefoot, and Dan Johns from Tumbleturn Marketing Advisory.
In her opening address, MFA CEO Sophie Madden said the conference is a day for “creating and inspiring change, and ultimately to deliver great effectiveness in everything we do, because we are the changers.”
“Each and every one of us has a role to play in that,” she added.
Sophie Madden
Madden noted that next month, MFA and fellow industry bodies will launch Ad Net Zero, a climate action plan for the media industry to support.
On the speaker line up of the day, Madden said she loved seeing the passion and commitment of the community to be changers together. “There’s no better example of that than so many of the sessions today which are true collaborations between agencies. I don’t think we’ve seen that at MFA EX before.”
She praised presenters from competing agencies for having the initiative to come together to do a session on stage and inspiring the industry to change for the better.
Mind the Gap: Tips to Bridge the Media-Marketer Relationship
Cam Luby, head of consumer marketing at Optus, told attendees he believes there is a “chasm of knowledge and understanding that exists between marketers, media agencies and creative agencies.
“If you want to be the changers like you say that you are, closing the gap is what you need to do,” he said.
Cam Luby
Luby share tips to bridging the gap, including:
• Keep it simple: Being understood is better than being smart
• You’re a connector: Look for opportunities
• Hold the jazz hands: Marketers will take risks if there’s a safety net
• Don’t focus on being right: Being interesting is better than being right
It’s Time to Break the Rules
EssenceMediacom’s Sophie Price and Jack Graham encouraged took to the stage to share their five rules for breaking the rules in the industry.
• Know the rules to break the rules
• Breakthrough the category norms
• Use data to take calculated risks
• Build a bank of breakthrough case studies
• Set up your management to prove success
Jack Graham and Sophie Price
Vision 2049: A Peek at our Industry’s Future
David Bielenberg, head of strategy, Melbourne and Gemma Dawkins, national head of digital at PHD arrived via time machine at the MFA EX stage to take attendees through the impact of AI on future work and decision-making in the industry.
Using a QR code, attendees voted on automating tasks, choosing optimisation over origination, predictive personalisation over-reactive, and user ethics over technology governance.
The keynote stressed the idea of focusing automation efforts on optimising existing tasks to make them more efficient as well as taking a user-centric approach to AI regulation by prioritising privacy, transparency and mitigating bias.
Gemma Dawkins and David Bielenberg
Bielenberg said: “It’s up to this cohort in our industry to ensure that we are making the right sense and are navigating those challenges correctly on the question of AI,” he said.
“It’s about humans and machines working together, us doing what we do best and AI doing what it does best, not AI competing against us.”
The Price Isn’t Right
Hearts & Science’s Ashley Wong and Liz Wigmore donned sparkly jackets and channelled their inner Larry Emdur as the pair welcomed contestants up to play ‘The Price Isn’t Right.’
Contestants were quizzed on the carbon costs of various daily activities, including the costs of campaigns. The first contestant was asked to rank the carbon cost of various daily life activities, such as laundry and coffee consumption. The correct ranking was revealed, with the highest carbon cost being associated with 1000 impressions in a digital campaign.
Ashley Wong and Liz Wigmore host the Price Isn’t Right
What I Learnt from Speaking to The Kindest People on Earth
Spark Foundry’s Natalie Sareff and Zach Johnston shared their findings from talking to the kindest people on earth and promote kind acts.
The duo shared their findings from talking to people across the industry, Australia and the world about channelling an industry full of kind people into a kinder industry.
• Being kind to yourself: Only once you start being kind to your can it then naturally flow on to others.
• Small acts of kindness: Start with a small act and keep at it.
• Use curiosity to dismantle personal biases.
• Make kind acts available in the industry super obvious and visible.
Zach Johnston and Natalie Sareff
The Work Behind the Work
Linda Fagerlund chief strategy officer ANZ at Mediahub showed attendees how Mediahub made New Balance cool again.
Fagerlund explained New Balance’s challenge of stagnation in the sports and running performance category while it was still growing in fashion and lifestyle.
The team conducted research to understand newer generation’s relationship with money and performance, which influenced their point of view, creative messaging, and campaign strategy.
Linda Fagerlund
The campaign done for New Balance was a multi-market strategy, impacting Australia, Taiwan, New Zealand, and the Middle East, with it leading to a 25% increase in brand preference and double-digit growth in flagship store sales. It marked New Balance’s most successful campaign in Australia.
Fagerlund highlighted the importance of consumer insights in shaping the campaign, from creative messaging to market strategy and consumer experience. The campaign aimed to rebuild New Balance’s running image while capitalizing on their lifestyle success, targeting a segment of young, progressive runners.
These runners adopted the rebrand, and New Balance is no longer just your dad’s favourite shoe.
Max Boer, Sarah Heitkamp and Linda Fagerlund
Sarah Heitkamp from Zenith also shared insight into how it built a proprietary data set from scratch for Aldi’s 2023 Christmas campaigns, scaling it to 500,000 households and helping target budget shoppers effectively. Heitkamp said this campaign resulted in a 36% increase in market share and client satisfaction.
Multiplayer Mode
Havas Media Network chief strategy officer Mitchell Long to attendees on a video game journey for his presentation on collaboration between agencies.
“We all know collaboration isn’t easy, in fact sometimes its really hard and that’s okay,” he said. Long cited a survey on industry collaboration that highlighted a fundamental lack of trust between agency partners.
Mitchell Long
“But the reality, our partner agencies are often in fact competitors for that same marketing pie means that working together is often a process of repeated deliberation. The question is: will this other agency screw me over or can we build something great where the money and the credit will be fairly treated?”
Long shared three “industry cheat codes” to help improve collaboration between agencies.
• The Truth Bomb: Radically resets the relationship by aligning agendas between agencies.
• The Seeing Stone: Lays down agreed rules of engagement between agency partners.
• The Love Potion: Strengthens personal connection and integration between agency partners.
Your Client CEO Is Just Not That Into You
Brittany Meale and James Graff from OMD helped attendees better understand their client CEOs, highlighting that only 10% of CEOs have marketing experience and CEOs only spend 3% of their time with customers.
Meale and Graff emphasised the need to simplify marketing jargon and metrics to better align with CEOs’ needs. They suggested that by focusing on creating better customer experiences and demonstrating clear business impact, media agencies can elevate their role and show value to CEOs.
James Graff and Brittany Meale
Is Media Really For All?
PHD’s Philippa Moig, OMD’s Angus McLeod, Asier Carazo from Atomic 212, and Pawena Kaniah from iProspect teamed up for a frank, challenging and enlightening conversation about the current state of diversity within the industry and in the work produced.
As members of the MFA’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Advisory Council, they spoke about the actions needed to take to improve diversity and representation in media planning and buying.
They also shared their own personal experience of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Asier Carazo and Philippa Moig
Moig spoke about being a mother of two First Nations children, one of whom is neurodivergent. She said: “For my baby girl, I am hell bent on making sure she grows up in a world where she knows her Aboriginality and neurodivergence are her absolute sources of superpower, and never to be her sources of shame.”
Kaniah shared that finding her feet in the industry was not an easy task. She said: “I walked into this industry as a highly opinionated and confident girl but somehow, something in me muted.
“I started wearing the same clothes as everybody else because I already stood out quite literally. I still go into rooms and look around and the first thing that comes to my brain is ‘how the hell am I still the only one in the room?’.”
Pawena Kaniah
McLeod talked about losing his hearing and suffering a brain injury after he was attacked in 2022. As a person living with a hearing impairment, he said: “if I’m in a room where I can’t speak or don’t have the courage to speak, sometimes I’m left in the dark.
“Not because of choice, but because of something completely out of my control… I’m not the only with issues consuming media, and whilst this has been a challenge as a media professional it’s made me acutely aware of not only the possibilities but also the importance of accessibility of media.”
Kaniah concluded the discussion by telling attendees: “The power is with you – make accessibility features a non-negotiable when it comes to creating and responding to briefs because we can do better.”
Pawena Kaniah, Angus McLeod, Asier Carazo and Philippa Moig
Friendship Bracelets: 2024’s Breakthrough Media Channel
The phenomenon of friendship bracelets was the focus of this next MFA EX presentation, with Marine Turner from EssenceMediacom taking attendees through the social trend and why it’s a new anti-budget media channel.
Marine Turner
Turner outlined the criteria for effective media channels, all of which apply to friendship bracelets as an example that allows for the expression of various brand assets across different audiences:
• Conveying multiple cues at scale
• Facilitating immediate feedback
• Allowing for personalisation
• Supporting complex and nuanced messages
Turner explained how friendship bracelets facilitate immediate feedback through a built-in exchange mechanism and have an engagement rate of 100%, regardless of whether the participants are strangers or familiar.
Bend It Like Bender: Shaping the Future of Media
Futurama served as the centrepiece for the session on shaping the future of media, presented by This is Flow’s Catherine Rushton, Scott Laird from GroupM, Initiative’s Kate O’Loughlin and Robin O’Connell from LinkedIn.
The four used characters from the animated series – Bender, Fry and Leela to illustrate and unpack the different career pathways in the industry.
Catherine Rushton, Kate O’Loughlin and Robin O’Connell and Scott Laird
Don’t Let Your Bucket Overflow
Health and performance expert Olly Bridge rounded out MFA Sydney with an re-energising presentation on the importance of prioritising self and well-being among attendees.
Bridge shared his experience as a coach to high performance athletes and related those experiences to media industry people, or corporate athletes, at their peak.
He encouraged people to make changes to their day to improve their physical and mental wellbeing, among them doing small things like switching up between sitting and standing for 20 minutes throughout the work day.
“If you want to be that changer, if you want to make sure you’ve got that energy – you’ve got to make sure you break up your seating time.”
Olly Bridge
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Top image: MFA CEO Sophie Madden