Inside ACAM: Australia’s leading CMOs tackle AI
The Australian Centre for AI in Marketing launched this week and, as two of its four founders tell Mumbrella, the "absolutely overwhelming" reaction from senior CMOs is a sure sign that the industry is in need of AI guidance.
Louise Cummins, former CMO of World Vision, believes artificial intelligence is the biggest disruptor ever seen in the marketing world.
“I was a marketer when the internet came out,” she recalls. “I was a marketer when social media came out. I was a marketer at MGM studios and DVDs came out, and I was there for mobile phones. This is the biggest shift that I’ve seen.”
Cummins struck on the idea for the Australian Centre for AI in Marketing (ACAM) after doing an AI course at RMIT at the start of 2024.
“I could actually see this is a really big seismic shift,” she tells Mumbrella. “Over the course of the year I started to embed more AI pilots within World Vision and take my team on the journey — but I could hear from the rest of the industry that there was a lot of fear and uncertainty.
“I could see how AI could turbocharge the industry – but I also could see this incredible reluctance.”
ACAM aims to provide marketers with a pool of research and knowledge around AI, including scholarships, free training sessions, and ‘low-bono’ consulting. The mission statement of the centre is to “help create a future where every marketer confidently understands, embraces, and benefits from AI.”
Douglas Nicol is former strategy partner at The Works. While there, he set up an AI think tank that Cummins attended. She approached him afterwards with the idea for ACAM. Like Cummins, Nicol had seen the fear and confusion around AI in the industry first-hand.
“I think people are quite confused about all the different technologies, and all the different platforms,” he says. “They get stuck in a rut trying to learn hundreds of different platforms and what they can do, instead of taking a step back and saying, ‘How can we regain the soul of great marketing?'”
Cummings agrees this is the overlooked aspect of AI. While the overriding fear is that human creativity will be usurped by robotic efficiency, Cummins says it’s the grunt work that can be handed off to the machines.
“I do believe that this has an opportunity to get rid of all the stuff that congests marketers, so that we do have time to get back to why we actually came into marketing — which was to do really good marketing, to put customers first. We seem to get dragged down by a lot of admin, and I see this as a great opportunity to get rid of that.”
The other two founders of ACAM are Jodie Sangster, former CMO of IBM, and Rochelle Tognetti, former Deloitte CMO and partner. Cummins said one of the biggest reasons Sangster was brought on board is her legal training and expertise in data privacy. Ethics and governance frameworks are already being implemented into ACAM’s work.
The founders mention bias in AI training data and the significant carbon footprint of computation as two areas of concern, and say ethics is central to their approach.
Louise Cummins
“That’s at the core tenet of who we are is,” Cummins explains. “We call ourselves pro-purpose: with the ethical implementations of AI, we’re offering scholarships for females — because we can see there’s a divide between women not sort of actively going into AI as much — and we’re also wanting to do low bono support for not-for-profits, so that there is true inclusion within all sections of the marketing community.”
Nicol calls this a “once in a generation moment where we can actually offload a lot of the process attached to marketing.”
He says this will allow stronger focus on customer insight, better strategy, and better value propositions. “Marketing has become mired in process and stakeholder management,” he says. “Many marketers have lost the focus on delivering growth, and delivering a lower cost of sale.”
A major role of ACAM is to reframe the way marketers view the burgeoning AI revolution.
“If the frame is ‘technology’ you get scared, and it’s quite threatening,” Nicol says. “If the frame is ‘better marketing with better results’, people get excited.
“I think in the round tables and in conversations with our ‘pioneers circle’, it’s very clear that we need the frame not to be just technology. So yes, we’re going to spend a lot of time looking at technology but it has to be a bigger frame: regaining the soul of good marketing.”
Douglas Nicol
Nicol said this realignment is crucial. “The more we talk to marketers, the more they go, ‘You know what? We have lost our way in many instances.’ We need to be ambitious on resurrecting great marketing.”
The ‘pioneers circle’ Nicol referred to is a think tank of sorts, featuring CMOs and top-level executives from companies including Woolworths, IKEA, Nine Entertainment, The Iconic, Menulog, Bluescope, Mirvac, and Red Cross.
“We’ve got this incredible group of CMOs who are all at different stages of [AI] adoption,” Nicol says.
“Some are at the very early stages and some are really quite sophisticated and this group will be sharing amongst themselves and also with our community their progress, what are the challenges they face, what are their victories, what are their failures? The more we share that, as a marketing industry within that world of marketing and AI, the more we all look forward.”
ACAM currently has its first benchmarking study out in the market, with results due next month.
“There’s 21 different dimensions across people, culture, technology, risk, compliance and a whole bunch of different factors,” Nicol says, “in order to really start to benchmark. We’ll be able to segment and score different types of stages of learning and engaging with AI. That’s going to be quite in depth, and that’s something that will be an ongoing thing. We’ll add questions to it, we’ll keep it updated and it’ll be very useful for industries to benchmark how they’re going versus their competitors.”
Jodie Sangster, Louise Cummins, Rochelle Tognetti, Douglas Nicol.
This scoreboard is important for encouraging “ambition and confidence” around AI.
“If your competitors are getting highly proficient with the deployment of AI in the course of good marketing, you’re going to get left behind,” Nicol says.
“We’re all about demystifying, all about building that shared knowledge base, so that we move marketing forward.”
One way to demystify the process is to simply take time training the new tools. Cummins says the major mistake she sees is people “dipping their toe in the water” and being disappointed or frustrated if the results aren’t immediately up to scratch.
“The misconception is it’s going to be perfect day one,” she says. “You actually have to teach the AI. Obviously, number one is getting the information architecture right and that’s the biggest pain point for a lot of marketers. But two, is actually taking enough time to actually, really teach the AI – rather than just, you know … they’ve just said two words to it, and they haven’t got the right stuff. ”
Cummins equates this approach to throwing a legal book at a baby and saying, ‘why didn’t you learn’?
The announcement of the centre this week was met with a “phenomenal” response, Cummins says. “In just a couple of hours, the amount of people reaching out saying, ‘I need this.’
“It really made me realise that what we’re doing is really right, for right now. I’m very hopeful about the future. I’m excited about where this can take us.”
For more information, visit acam.ai
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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