It’s been a big year for the marketing industry, with people and brands finding their feet again after covid disruptions. News Corp has been at the forefront of the return to normalcy, and Mediaweek spoke to News Corp Australia managing director, client product, Pippa Leary about where the industry should be focussing its attention moving forward.
With headlines predicting an economic downturn off the back of Covid, it’s easy to be concerned about what’s over the horizon. Focussing on what the last 12 months or so have delivered, however, means that Leary has a much more positive outlook.
“This last year was an amazing bounce back, even bigger than we had imagined. If you look at the financial results of any of the media companies, they were all really good.
“FY22 was an incredible year, but it was also disruptive – now the smart players are looking at FY23. They know there are going to be some headwinds, but they need to start thinking beyond that to what the future really looks like.”
Despite the better than expected results, Leary admits that “the headwinds are going to be really challenging.” No matter what comes though, she says that marketers don’t need to shrink down to weather the storm.
“What’s going to happen is that marketers are going to want to stop spending, and the first thing they’re going to do is say, ‘we’ll cut our brand and we’ll put it all in performance’. It’s honestly the opposite of what they should be doing.
“In downturns, marketers should be going, ‘now is the time to up our brand spend, and take our competitors’ share’. Only by building a really strong and differentiated brand do you take yourself out of being commoditized. No one wants to be commoditized – where people are choosing whether to buy just on how expensive or not you are. This is the time everyone should be running towards brand, not away from it.”
When asked what key areas people in the industry should be focussing their attention on, Leary had one simple answer: Outcomes.
“What my team does is take the audience engagement that our journalists create, and then we turn that into client outcomes. We have to know what outcomes the clients want, and we have to know how to guide people through the funnel from notice, to want, to desire. The end result doesn’t necessarily have to be buy, but it has to be the outcome that the client is after. It’s shaped like a funnel: it starts wide, and it gets really narrow.”
Bringing client outcomes to life takes both technology and the skills to use them effectively. Leary says that there is one major trend for the industry to pay attention to at the moment.
“Headless commerce is a game changer – you want to be able to have technology where you can really focus on client outcomes. But it’s not just the tech, you’ve got to have the skills and the capabilities, and they’re completely different when you get to the pointy end of the funnel.
Looking ahead, Leary says that the next 12 months will see News Corp focus on the middle and lower aspects of the metaphorical funnel.
“You will see us release headless eCommerce in video, so you’re going to see one-click headless shopping in ads that can be trafficked all over the world. You’re going to see us go really hard in eCommerce with a laser-like focus on client outcomes. We will build technology to ingest clients’ catalogues, and then surface that in an automated way throughout the content in our network. It’s very exciting.”
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