MSIX a conference dedicated to the only correct way to do marketing

Is science now leading marketing and advertising? Or has it just caught up to what we have always instinctively felt to be true? We like to believe we know how advertising works and that quoting the marketing scientists before us will convince clients to hand over their dollars. But, is an overreliance on the science available endangering creativity? In this session, DDB Managing Director, Strategy & Innovation Leif Stromnes and Chief Creative Officer Ben Welsh share their combined personal experiences of almost 60 years in advertising and offer thoughts on why creativity should always remain slightly mysterious and misunderstood. Agree or disagree, it promises to be a lot of fun.

With the advent of big data, we’ve become enamoured by machine learning and AI. But we have implicitly neglected to think about cause and effect. Without cause and effect (aka science), it’s not possible to develop good and reliable policy. Ujwal will talk about effect sizes, for example, in the context of causality.

In a world of increasingly complex marketing tactics, options and opportunities, how can marketers ensure they’re making the right commercial decision? Henry Innis and Dr. Seyed Lajevardi talk through how to predict the commercial returns of marketing activity using advanced predictive analytics techniques. Using real world examples on household brands, they explain why data integrity is so critical, how to leverage what you have to know more and how you can translate historical data into predictive ROI across the marketing mix.

Trying to grow your brand in a world of tightening budgets, more fickle audiences and tougher economic conditions? Then how about removing customer choice, deliberately neglecting touch points and ignoring the future?

To get a competitive edge today, marketers need to take every advantage.

In this lighthearted, informative presentation, Dan Monheit explores how playing to biases and heuristics can pay major dividends for brands. Drawing on seminal research from Nobel Laureates, he’ll illustrate how initiatives that fly in the face of conventional wisdom could be just what the doctor (read: CFO) ordered.

Over 18 months Antony worked on an innovative and award-winning behaviour change program for people on community corrections orders. Conceived by the Victorian Department of Justice and implemented in conjunction with food charity Fareshare and Jesuit Social Services, the program sought to leverage court-ordered community service as a platform for education and re-integration into the workforce. Antony’s experience was at the coalface, spending more face-time with participants than any other individual within the program. In his presentation for MSiX he takes the audience through the good, the bad and the uplifting, before discussing how this experience can inform the creative approach using examples from the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team.

You would imagine that over the past four decades a lot has changed in marketing communications but, not everything has. Advertising effectiveness has remained locked in time. Back then, ninety plus percent of advertising was ineffective at changing the relative trajectory of the brand. That remains the case today.

There can be little doubt that the origin of the waste is the intuition based big idea. Its the “Big Idea Wheel of Fortune.” The communications message that is, “what we say” was and still is based not on the mathematically derived drivers of consumer motivation but instead, best guesses and gut instinct. Businesses literally gamble tens of millions, hundreds of millions and in some cases, billions of dollars on intuition-based hope wrapped up in the creative agencies’ Big-Idea Wheel of Fortune.

Prophecy Thoughts & Feelings is a scientifically proven marketing science-based method for identifying the rational and emotional motivations for category and brand-specific consumer behaviour. It is these motivational drivers that should form the foundations of the creative brief and the big idea.

The advertising industry’s stain of wastefulness has been stubbornly resistant to change. Even in the face of clients’ direct demands and threats of termination, like the problem gamblers’ syndrome – the erroneous belief that following losses will surely come wins, creative agencies habitually return to the Big-Idea Wheel of Fortune.

Will a machine ever possess the ability to be truly creative? Can a machine ‘create’ autonomously without human influence? Damian Madden will teach you how computational creativity works and how having a deeper understanding of the creative process of machines can help your own creativity in this guided look inside the world of AI art, its limitations and machinations.

Utilising new research, Damian will demonstrate how changing audience behavior patterns have given rise to a new future where the technical and traditional must come together to create new artistic movements.

We all know creativity builds our brands and reputation, wins awards and attracts new customers. Academic research shows how creative advertisements increase our attention, our motivation to process and are more memorable than regular (or less creative) ads.

However, our new research presents a second unknown effect. The creativity impairment effect. Investigating the impact of creativity, we demonstrate how creative ads impair the memorability of other regular ads, especially competitive ads. So creativity has a second important effect. In addition to facilitating memory, it also impairs our memory of regular and competitive advertising.

Accelerating changes in the world due to transhumanist technologies such as artificial intelligence, genomics, implantables, bionics, digital humans, and brain-computer-interfaces give us an opportunity to target and acquire users in new ways.

Including:

• Using artificial intelligence to completely tailor content to people as they walk by
• Targeting digital humans living in virtual worlds created by Facebook and other tech giants
• Planting messages directly in people’s brains using brain-computer-interfaces

For what purpose will this powerful technology be used for? How will marketers use it?

Transhumanism is about overcoming limitations of human biology using science and technology.

Join us as we explore how transhumanism and artificial intelligence is impacting marketing.

Are there any new frontiers to be explored with behavioural insights, or is it now just low-hanging fruit?

While behavioural insights has steadily been building on the easy wins of its early days, Dr Rory Gallagher argues that it is now being used to tackle increasingly complex challenges in nuanced spaces.

Join Dr Gallagher as he unpacks the lessons to be learned from past successes and failures, and where we can go from here.

The afternoon tea session will include a workshop where attendees are sorted based on their star sign (10 x groups). They’ll be asked to share with the broader group;

• 3 interesting things they’ve learnt
• A ranking of how much they wish to share these things (1-10)
• Finally, they’ll be asked to present a 1 minute pitch for an idea they want to implement in their business to foster marketing sciences

It’s hardly news that marketers leave money on the table. That’s been a frustration since the earliest days of measuring marketing. But even in 2019, as digital-ad spending surpasses 50% of all ad spending, nine out of ten marketers say they are leaving big money behind because they’ve failed to develop the capabilities they need to know what’s working. How can they establish true causality and where else can these principles be used to generate value?

For over 10 years the Gruen series has been educating Australian on how advertising, PR and marketing works. They’ve been dissecting our industry and presenting it in bite sized, digestible chunks to Australia. In this session the tables are turned where we get to find out what the panelists themselves have learned from appearing on the show.

Using the ‘empty chair’ technique the MSIX audience will take it in turns appearing on the panel asking the pointed questions to the panel.

Delivered by Thinkerbell’s Consumer Psychologist, Adam Ferrier.