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IAB at 30: The leaders who built digital advertising tell the story

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Sourced from The Drum

At IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting (ALM) this year, the organization marked its 30th anniversary – a milestone that lands awkwardly in the middle of a fresh identity crisis for the business it helped build.

Because yes, the banner ad really did become programmatic. Then it became mobile. Then social. Then video. Then ‘outcomes.’ And now we’re staring down an era where AI can generate the content, optimize the targeting, buy the media and write the post-campaign report, all before anyone’s even worked out what, exactly, we’re measuring.

And yet, in a room full of people whose job titles have evolved faster than their LinkedIn photos, one thing kept popping up: the IAB’s most important product isn’t a deck, a committee or even a conference. It’s the boring stuff. The standards. The definitions. The measurement frameworks. The shared language that stops a market from collapsing into a thousand incompatible ‘trust me, bro’ claims.

To mark the anniversary, The Drum spoke with some of those who’ve seen the whole arc up close, from dial-up chaos to the present day: Rich LeFurgy, the IAB’s founding chair; Wenda Harris Millard, a past chair who remembers just how naïve (and hilarious) those early years were; Scott Cunningham, who helped push the industry into its more technical, standards-led era; and Peter Naylor, who chaired the IAB in 2012 and watched wave after wave of ‘the next big thing’ hit the shore.

We also heard from IAB CEO David Cohen about what 30 years of compounding growth looks like and why, in an AI moment, the industry may need the IAB’s ‘big tent’ approach more than ever.

Start with LeFurgy and you quickly remember, this wasn’t inevitable. He traces the origin story back to something almost quaint – a trade publication editorial that basically said, this new ‘internet media’ thing needs a trade association. “It sparked an idea with me that I really thought we needed a trade association to establish the credibility of the medium,” he tells The Drum.

In April 1996, about 36 people gathered in San Francisco to map out what the thing should be and, crucially, to model it against the grown-up media associations of the day. Because, as LeFurgy puts it, the early internet wasn’t just messy, it was “absolute chaos in the wild, wild west.”

The credibility problem was existential. There were “outrageous claims… ahead of their time,” he says – the kind of lines we still hear in 2026, delivered with slightly better fonts. Agencies, understandably, weren’t buying it. They had a “wake me when it’s over” attitude.

So the IAB did something that seems obvious now and was radical then: it tried to prove the market existed.

“We partnered with PricewaterhouseCoopers to do an audit of actual spending in the fall of 1996… to show that spending was real and to provide air cover for our salespeople,” LeFurgy says.

The “sticker,” he recalls, was $276m in Q4 1996. Cohen, on stage at ALM, put the punchline bluntly: in 2024, the number was roughly $260bn – and the IAB has grown double digits for most of its 30-year run.

If that sounds like destiny, Wenda Harris Millard is here to remind you it was also… absurd. She remembers being in San Francisco in the very early days, trying to find an office, panicking about being late and calling back to New York for the “address.” The response: “OK, it’s w, w, w.”

“The reason we lived in this crazy bubble… it’s the only thing this young girl knew was when we said address,” Harris Millard says.

That’s the real point of the nostalgia: the industry didn’t just lack tools, it lacked basic shared assumptions. Which is why the IAB’s early focus on standards and measurement wasn’t admin. It was survival.

The rails: standards, measurement and the right to trade

If you want the IAB’s core value in one sentence, Peter Naylor offers it: the IAB helped make digital “as easy to buy and easy to sell as possible.” And that “easy” was hard-earned.

Harris Millard frames it as a practical necessity: “We had to focus on a lot of the standards that didn’t exist… trying to figure out the rules everybody should be trying to play by and you need some kind of a governing body for that to happen.”

Her warning is still current: “The worst thing that can happen is that individual companies run off and decide what their standards… should be… That just creates even more chaos.”

She points to measurement as a defining contribution: “The IAB took a lead role in measurement, because we promised marketers that this would be a very accountable medium.”

LeFurgy is even more explicit about what standards did in those early banner years: they reduced friction. And friction in a market trying to convince Madison Avenue it’s real is fatal.

“There was a lot of friction in the marketplace,” he says. Without standards, “700 different banner sizes” meant teams obsessed with technical negotiation rather than “creating great advertising and great media plans.”

That line matters because it’s the throughline to today: the format has changed, but the role of standards hasn’t. The glamorous world of banner sizes has simply been replaced by the even more glamorous world of AI governance, interoperability, data rights and “what counts as an impression when nobody’s looking at a screen.”

Acceleration: waves keep coming and you don’t get to stop the ocean

Naylor’s mental model of digital isn’t a timeline; it’s a coastline. “There’s been wave after wave of big innovation. We started with banners and buttons and then search and then social media. AI is obviously here right now and all in between is the rise of commerce and the rise of video,” he says.

When he wants an example, he goes straight to the moment TV began to understand the internet wasn’t just “promo.” Disney putting full episodes online triggered a chain reaction – NBC, then Hulu, then OTT becoming “streaming” as default.

His point isn’t just that things change. It’s that the IAB’s job is to stop every new wave from splintering the market into incompatible definitions.

Because digital isn’t a single channel but, in actual fact, infrastructure. It leaks into everything: retail, entertainment, publishing, commerce, creators, the open web, the walled gardens and, now, generative systems that might not need ‘websites’ in the way the last 30 years assumed.

Transformation: from ‘midnight banner swaps’ to AI-era compliance

Scott Cunningham’s origin story is the perfect antidote to any tendency to mythologize those early years. “Way back when, I was the guy who was at the bar on Saturday night and who had to leave at midnight to stumble into the office to change out the whole front of the website so that we had a new banner ad,” he says.

Then, someone arrived with an ad server. “I said, ‘I love you. This is great. Now I don’t have to leave the bar any more on the weekends.’”

That’s not just a funny story. It’s a snapshot of what “professionalizing the industry” actually meant: moving from human duct tape to systems, protocols and repeatability.

Cunningham later helped found the IAB Tech Lab in 2014 and today he’s focused on quality assurance and compliance because, in the AI era, ‘trust’ isn’t a slogan. It’s a requirement for the market to function.

“I joined [AAM] to help the industry put together a lot of good quality assurance programs moving forward,” he says, “because I do believe that compliance is where we need to take things.”

LeFurgy thinks the current AI disruption will be as significant as the dotcom era, but with a key difference: we’re not starting from zero any more and everyone knows enough to be scared.

Which is why his prescription sounds familiar: “Coming together as an industry so that we can create a standard so that everybody’s running on the same rails [and] we do the best thing for the consumer.”

30 years of compounding and the next job for the IAB

Cohen’s anniversary framing was simple: the IAB has been at the centre of every major inflection point because it keeps doing the same thing, over and over, in new contexts – convene, define, standardize, measure, repeat.

The shift now is that the next inflection point isn’t just a new channel. It’s a new actor in the system: AI that can create, distribute and monetize at machine speed while simultaneously raising questions about scraping, rights, provenance and what it even means to ‘trade’ attention.

Meanwhile, retail media is charging in as the newest ‘wave’ and, if the last 30 years taught the industry anything, it’s that retail doesn’t get to invent its own physics. It will need shared definitions, shared standards and shared measurement, or it’ll recreate the chaos that banners had to climb out of.

30 years on, the IAB’s achievement is not that it predicted the future, it’s that it built the plumbing that let the industry survive its own imagination.

Or, to borrow the vibe of those early meetings that LeFurgy described, digital grew up because somebody, at some point, decided the boring work mattered enough to organize around it.

Sourced from The Drum

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Brand Before Marketing: The Strategic Sequence too Many CMOs Ignore

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Performance campaigns can drive quick wins, but without a clear brand foundation they rarely build lasting customer loyalty.

The Gist

  • Brand defines the strategy; marketing executes it. Organizations that clarify their purpose, values and narrative first give every marketing channel a clear direction, reducing fragmentation and inconsistent messaging.
  • Performance marketing alone cannot sustain growth. Companies that focus primarily on acquisition tactics often compete on price or features, weakening loyalty and long-term customer retention.
  • Strong brands multiply marketing ROI. Clear brand identity aligns teams, simplifies campaign decisions and strengthens customer trust, turning each marketing investment into a longer-term relationship builder.

The pressure on CMOs to deliver immediate, measurable results has never been higher. With real-time dashboards and attribution models at their fingertips, the temptation to lead with high-performance marketing tactics is significant.

However, a critical question remains at the center of the C-suite table: Does the brand build the marketing, or does the marketing build the brand?

This article examines the fundamental sequence of growth and why establishing a robust brand identity is the necessary precursor to any successful marketing deployment.

Table of Contents

Defining the Corporate DNA

For a CMO, the distinction between branding and marketing is the difference between a company’s soul and its voice. Branding is the internal realization of a company’s “why”—its values, its mission and the emotional resonance it aims to strike with its global audience.

Marketing, by contrast, is the strategic execution of that identity across various channels to drive specific actions. Some say organizations fall into the trap of “tactical sprawl,” where marketing activities are launched in a vacuum.

Without a brand anchor, these activities often lack cohesion, leading to fragmented customer experiences and diminished ROI.

The Cost of a ‘Marketing-First’ Approach

When marketing precedes branding, the result is often a high volume of lead generation with a low rate of long-term retention. This “performance paradox” was a recurring theme in recent leadership summits.

Marcus Thorne, a veteran CMO in the technology sector, described the dangers of neglecting the brand foundation.

“We observed companies in hyper-growth phases pouring millions into customer acquisition,” he said. “Because they hadn’t defined their brand narrative, they were forced to compete solely on price or features. As soon as a cheaper competitor emerged, their ‘loyal’ customers evaporated.”

A study by McKinsey & Company highlighted that companies with strong, consistent brands consistently outperform their peers in terms of total return to shareholders.

This suggests that the “brand equity” built early on serves as a multiplier for every marketing dollar spent later.

Related Article: The Top Challenges Facing CMOs in 2026

Bridging the Gap From Identity to Execution

The consensus among global marketing leaders is that branding must act as the “North Star” for all departmental activities.

This is not merely an aesthetic choice; it is a strategic necessity that simplifies decision-making.

When a top executive advisor emphasizes the efficiency of a brand-led strategy and narrates that when the brand is clearly defined, the marketing team doesn’t have to guess. The tone of voice, the visual language and the target personas are already set. It allows for faster execution and more authentic communication.

The logical progression for a CMO-led transformation typically followes this framework:

  • Audit and Alignment: Ensuring the internal culture matches the external promise.
  • Narrative Development: Crafting a story that transcends the product or service.
  • Omnichannel Deployment: Using marketing tools to amplify that story to a segmented audience.

Practical Steps for CMOs Building a Brand-Led Marketing Strategy

Marketing leaders increasingly recognize that sustainable growth starts with brand clarity. The following practices help ensure branding guides marketing execution rather than reacting to it.

Practice What It Means Why It Matters
Establish brand guidelines as governance Treat the brand book as a strategic filter for every campaign, not simply a design reference. When campaigns align with clearly defined brand values, marketing remains consistent and avoids fragmented messaging.
Measure brand health, not just leads Track indicators such as brand sentiment, recall and Net Promoter Score (NPS) alongside conversion metrics. These indicators reveal how the market perceives the brand and whether marketing efforts are strengthening long-term loyalty.
Unify the customer journey Ensure the promise made in marketing is fulfilled across product experience, support and service interactions. Breakdowns between brand messaging and real customer experience are where trust erodes and loyalty declines.
Invest in emotional differentiation Focus on creating emotional resonance and brand affinity rather than only building awareness through campaigns. In an environment saturated with automated content and AI-generated ads, human-centered brand identity becomes the key competitive advantage.

Conclusion: Marketing Without Branding Is Noise

The debate over what comes first is settled by the reality of the marketplace.

Marketing without branding is noise; branding without marketing is a secret. However, for every CMO seeking sustainable, long-term growth, the blueprint must always be drawn before the ground is broken.

By prioritizing the brand foundation, marketing efforts become more than just transactions. And they become milestones in a long-term relationship with the consumer through enhanced customer loyalty.

Feature image credit: MelissaMN | Adobe Stock

By 

Umesh Panchal, a seasoned sales and marketing professional with over 24 years of dynamic experience, emerges as a visionary leader propelling organizations toward unprecedented success. His robust career spans various industries, including SaaS, IT hardware, education, security, manufacturing and retail, consistently delivering exceptional results.

Sourced from CMSWIRE

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Your Marketing Dashboard Is Lying to You

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Strong metrics don’t guarantee revenue. Here’s why B2B teams keep missing the connection — and how to fix it.

The Gist

  • Marketing activity does not always translate into revenue. Strong campaign metrics and lead volume can create the appearance of success even when business growth remains flat or difficult to attribute.
  • The real problem is structural misalignment. When marketing and sales operate with different goals, metrics and ownership models, both teams can perform well individually while the business still struggles to connect activity to revenue.
  • B2B growth improves when marketing is tied to revenue systems. Shared metrics, account-focused strategies and tighter coordination across the customer lifecycle help turn marketing from a demand engine into a measurable driver of pipeline and long-term value.

In many B2B companies, marketing performance looks strong on dashboards — campaigns generate leads, engagement metrics are rising, and marketing activity appears successful. Yet when leadership reviews revenue growth, the connection between marketing efforts and actual business outcomes often remains unclear.

This disconnect creates one of the most common challenges in modern B2B organizations: the gap between marketing activity and real revenue impact.

Marketing teams often focus on campaigns, brand visibility and lead generation, while sales teams are responsible for closing deals and driving revenue. Without clear alignment between these functions, even well-funded marketing programs can struggle to produce measurable business results.

Table of Contents

Why the Marketing–Revenue Gap Happens

In most cases, the problem is not a lack of effort. The gap appears because marketing and sales are often evaluated by different metrics and priorities.

First, marketing teams are frequently measured by lead volume rather than revenue contribution. High numbers of leads may look impressive in reports, but if those leads do not convert into qualified opportunities, the business sees little real impact.

Second, marketing and sales often operate in separate structures. Marketing focuses on demand generation and brand visibility, while sales focuses on pipeline and deals. Without shared goals and data transparency, both teams end up optimizing for different outcomes.

Third, the B2B buying process has become significantly more complex. Purchasing decisions now involve multiple stakeholders across departments. Traditional lead-based marketing approaches are often too narrow to effectively engage these buying groups.

When Marketing Metrics Don’t Reflect Business Growth

Another challenge is the growing gap between marketing dashboards and executive-level priorities.

Marketing reports may highlight impressions, clicks, or marketing-qualified leads. However, executive leadership typically evaluates success through revenue growth, deal size and pipeline health. Understanding customer analytics can help bridge this gap by connecting marketing activities to actual business outcomes.

If marketing activity cannot clearly connect to these business metrics, its strategic value becomes difficult to demonstrate.

A Practical Example: When Marketing and Sales Operate as One System

In my experience building a corporate client division, one of the most effective decisions was integrating marketing and sales into a single operational flow.

When we built the corporate department, marketing and sales were not separated functions. I worked across both roles — from the first client interaction to contract negotiation and long-term account management with corporate clients.

This structure ensured that marketing insights, customer feedback and revenue outcomes were fully connected. Every new client, every market signal and every customer interaction became part of a shared understanding of growth.

As a result, marketing was never disconnected from revenue performance — it was embedded directly into the business growth process.

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Revenue

Closing this gap requires more than adjusting marketing tactics. It requires structural alignment between marketing, sales and revenue leadership.

One effective approach is shifting from broad lead generation to account-focused strategies. Account-Based Marketing (ABM), for example, allows marketing and sales teams to coordinate efforts around specific high-value accounts.

When both teams focus on the same companies, messaging becomes more consistent, engagement becomes more strategic, and marketing activity connects directly to revenue opportunities. Effective customer journey mapping helps both teams understand and optimize each touchpoint in the buying process.

Shared metrics also play a crucial role. Instead of evaluating marketing only through campaign performance, companies can track pipeline contribution, deal acceleration and revenue influence. Metrics like customer lifetime value provide a clearer picture of long-term revenue impact.

These metrics create a clearer connection between marketing initiatives and business outcomes.

Rethinking the Role of Marketing in B2B Organizations

Companies that successfully close the marketing–revenue gap typically rethink the role of marketing altogether.

Marketing stops being a standalone demand-generation function and becomes part of a broader revenue engine that includes sales, customer success and business strategy.

In this model, marketing supports the entire customer lifecycle — from initial awareness to deal acceleration and long-term customer value. This approach aligns with emerging marketing trends that emphasize integrated revenue operations.

Conclusion: Marketing Needs a Strong Tie to Revenue

As B2B markets become more competitive, organizations can no longer afford a disconnect between marketing activity and revenue impact.

Companies that align marketing and sales around shared revenue goals gain a significant strategic advantage. Their marketing becomes more targeted, their pipeline stronger, and their growth easier to measure.

In many organizations, the real challenge is not marketing performance — it is organizational alignment between marketing activity and revenue ownership.

Feature image credit: standret | Adobe Stock

By 

Mariia Golitsyna is an international B2B marketing and business growth strategist with more than 15 years of experience working with enterprise clients and global brands. She specializes in growth strategy, enterprise partnerships and the alignment of marketing with revenue in complex B2B environments.

Sourced from CMSWIRE

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Why and how referral marketing is exceeding paid search and paid social

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By Mark Choueke

Referral marketing is often an overlooked strategy. However, Mark Choueke, marketing director at Mention Me, explains why it can be an effective route for marketers and how it works to earn customer trust.

For marketers yet to turn their attention to the extraordinary customer acquisition mechanic of earned growth, referral might be the last marketing channel to come to mind.

For those already giving their customers a participating role in their brand’s success, it’s the last marketing channel they’d switch off.

This was literally true for Lindsay Newell, head of UK marketing at Bloom & Wild, one of Europe’s largest online florists. She knew the customer lifetime value the business derived from referral marketing exceeded that of both paid search and paid social.

So much confidence did the business have in its referral marketing program as a growth driver that when it was forced to ‘turn off’ marketing in May 2020 after the Covid-19 pandemic prompted the first lockdown, referral marketing was the only channel it left running.

The florist grew its UK referrals by 800%, despite promoting it at fewer points in the customer journey than previously.

Newell, meanwhile, says her team tests constantly to learn how various markets and customer cohorts respond differently to messaging and incentives through referral campaigns.

Such success stories were once rare for a marketing channel that is now fast growing into its own skin and becoming comfortable with a more pivotal, strategic status in the marketing stack.

Traditional household brands and established retailers are now joining pure play online businesses in approaching customer acquisition and experience with an ‘advocacy-first’ mindset.

This shift toward earned growth isn’t a replacement for anything. Comprehensive Referral Engineering® programs act as a valuable addition to, and amplifier of, existing marketing strategies.

Menswear brand Spoke put its first-party referral data to work across its paid social channels to target consumers that looked like the retailer’s most valuable referrers. The experiment saw a 65% increase in conversion rates, a 30% jump in ‘return on ad spend’ and a 12% reduction in the cost of acquiring new customers.

Crucially, though, none of the above speaks to the single most important opportunity addressed by a move toward earned growth.

That is that advocacy – and importantly the level of participation it encourages in those we sell to – is slowly shifting the emphasis of marketing from the brand to the customer.

Referral done properly is data-driven – but it’s customer-led.

Amplified in the past two years by the forced loss of so many day-to-day freedoms we once took for granted, consumers are hungry for autonomy and self-determination. They want a more direct role in the way they shop for (and engage with) the products and services with which they choose to identify.

Consumers want to participate; to interact, share and recommend. Your buyers’ e-commerce journeys don’t begin on screens. Increasingly they start with offline conversations; not about your brand or product, but about their interests, their passions and their needs.

What does that mean for your brand? Well, it means your best marketing in 2022 will likely happen in the most ‘un-marketing’ moments.

It means your effective media channels will include everyday occasions in your customers’ lives: chats between parents at the school gates; picnics and pub nights; weekend walks and barbecues with friends; Sunday roasts with the family.

Customer participation will become as crucial in delivering experiences that match your buyers’ expectations as personalization has been in recent years.

For while automation driven by big data has transformed customer experience capability, the spreadsheets and numbers that dominate our customer experience conversations risk becoming somewhat divorced from the end users they represent.

Abstract scores only tell us so much about our customers’ values, beliefs and versions of what a relationship with our brands should look like.

New perspectives and a shared commitment to twinning comfortably volunteered first- and zero-party data with more innovative partnerships will get brand marketers closer to the customer stories that end users would recognize, buy into and participate in.

Referral is a rare marketing discipline, carried out in the cultural mode and language of consumers – normal people who don’t share the marketer’s vocabulary of ‘funnels,’ ‘touchpoints’ and ‘conversions.’

Our businesses are drowning in third-party data (though perhaps not for much longer). Yet how much does this data really tell us about our customers? There’s an unfilled gap between the reported customer insight that much of our data promises, and the legitimacy – the purity – of customer participation. It’s a gap similar to that between reading sheet music and being in a live audience while witnessing a spine-tingling performance.

After thousands of years of retail, your customers still sell your stuff better than you do, without even trying. Now we have the expertise to understand the psychology of referral and the science to drive, track and measure it, you can give your best customers the power to grow your companies.

By Mark Choueke

Marketing director Mention Me

Sourced from The Drum

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Podcast: the future of platforms and marketing

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By Chris Sutcliffe, 

Social platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook offer huge opportunities for marketers. They are the new de facto gatekeepers to huge audiences, and there are very few other means to reach younger audiences at scale with ease. But that access comes with trade-offs, and different platforms emerge and disappear rapidly. As part of our Predictions season, The Drum Network seeks to examine where brands and agencies fit into that environment.
To discuss that rapidly evolving landscape, and how we can ensure the primacy of brands when it comes to marketing on platforms, we’re joined by three experts from across the industry. Amy Gilbert, head of social at The Social Element; Tahir Rashid, paid media manager at UNRVLD; and Callum Gill, head of insight and innovation at DRP Group, join The Drum’s senior reporter Chris Sutcliffe to discuss all things platform-related.
The Drum Network Podcast can be found on Spotify, iTunes, Google Play and your favourite podcast app.

By Chris Sutcliffe, 

Sourced from The Drum

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The Creepy Uncanny Valley Of Targeted Online Marketing

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By Hank Campbell

Personalized online ads must work for the same reason advertising must work; it wouldn’t be a trillion-dollar industry if it didn’t work. Even supplements and organic food are only $140 billion, and those are really popular things that don’t work. Advertising is not popular at all but good luck succeeding without it.

Yet there are limits for what people accept without being uncomfortable. In robots and animation, that has long been termed the ‘uncanny valley’ – where something is not lifelike enough to look real but too lifelike to be acceptable. Some digital marketing has its own uncanny valley; where it becomes unsettling. Examples are people who say they mentioned something in the presence of their Amazon Echo and then ads on Facebook began to target them.

It’s technically impressive, but even more creepy. You feel like you’re walking around London and being monitored all of the time, except on your phone.

It doesn’t backfire on the technology backbone, it backfires on the companies in the ads, making you less likely to buy that brand even if you expressed interest in the general product. We all recognize we are under constant surveillance but resent when it becomes too obvious, according to a recent paper.

With over 1,800 online participants across three studies, the authors targeted some with advertisements for things like Nike sneakers and fabricated headphones after those were mentioned. The control groups were not digitally targeted. Then people rated how uncomfortable they felt and the authors created a Component Process Model of Creepiness.

It is pretty on-the-nose, even for the humanities, this was an online experiment using people paid through Amazon Mechanical Turk, not the normal population, but 75 percent who expressed discomfort were concerned about the manipulation and surveillance aspects of the technology. These are surveys, not behaviour, and therefore only EXPLORATORY, but on a 7-point scale for intent to purchase, the authors said a 1-point increase in discomfort meant willingness to purchase the product by half a point.

Like people who declared they are boycotting Paramount Plus because the company is buying Warner Brothers Discovery but never subscribed to either, their opinions mean little. Bud Light, on the other hand, had a very real, very dramatic turn in revenue when they sought to use advertising to do more than sell beer.

That is what needs to be considered. If someone is searching for a product, they probably want to buy it, and for most people price/value overrules the fact that they got a targeted ad after searching for it on another device. Some of us even game the system; if I see something I might like but it is from weird name in a Facebook ad, I click on it and then click back, knowing a few minutes later a company that isn’t some Chinese drop-shipper will advertise it to me.

So companies are probably still smart to target people digitally, even considering blowback. Because advertising is about, as car executives in the 1960s said, “moving the iron”, not being worried about whether or not someone is annoyed. If your recents are decent and your price is competitive, you are winning just the same.

 

By Hank Campbell

Sourced from Science 2.0

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Sick of spam marketing texts and emails? This is how to stop them

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Unwanted, unsolicited marketing emails, texts and instant messages feel like an unavoidable fact of modern life. But there are actually legal restrictions on spamming that apply to every business selling to Australian shoppers.

Clothing company Lululemon Athletica Australia just paid a A$702,900 penalty for infringing those rules when it sent more than 370,000 emails without an unsubscribe option.

This is how you can stop or report persistent marketing spam – and why we need to tighten those rules even further.

What do Australia’s anti-spam rules say?

The rules of the Spam Act are fairly straightforward.

First, the law prohibits a person or business from sending unsolicited commercial “electronic messages”: emails, texts or instant messages. That means a business must have a person’s consent before sending them marketing messages.

Second, the Spam Act makes it a rule for any person or business sending a commercial message to include an option to unsubscribe from future messages.

The unsubscribe function has to be clear and work for at least 30 days. And it mustn’t require a person to provide additional personal information, or login or sign up for a user account, to opt out.

The rules apply when the sender or recipient of the message is located in Australia.

However, there are some exceptions. The rules don’t apply to messages from certain kinds of entities: registered charities, educational institutions, government bodies and, most controversially, registered political parties.

How can you report marketing spam?

Anyone who thinks they’ve received a message that doesn’t meet the rules can complain to the regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

Even if you don’t want to make a complaint, you can still report it by:

  • forwarding email spam to [email protected] (do not change the subject line or add any text)
  • forwarding SMS or MMS spam to 0429 999 888 (standard message charges apply).

If ACMA finds a business has violated the rules, they can face hefty fines.

Last year, Tabcorp was fined $4 million for non-compliant SMS and WhatsApp messages to its VIP customers.

Telstra also paid a $626,000 penalty for sending more than 10 million text messages that did not comply with Australia’s spam laws.

The year before, the Commonwealth Bank landed a $7.5 million fine for sending millions of marketing messages without people’s consent or a working unsubscribe option. It was the bank’s second major breach of the spam rules, after it was fined $3.55 million in 2023.

Why Lululemon was fined

In its latest case, announced this week, ACMA found Lululemon Athletica Australia failed to provide an unsubscribe option in thousands of messages sent between 1 December 2024 and 5 January 2025. (The company is a local subsidiary of global “athleisure” brand Lululemon, based in Canada.)

As a result, Lululemon here in Australia was fined $702,900. It also agreed to take steps to ensure future compliance, including appointing an independent consultant to review its procedures, training personnel, and reporting on compliance to ACMA.

Which messages are covered by the Spam Act?

Interestingly, Lululemon initially argued its messages were not subject to the anti-spam rules.

The rules only apply to commercial messages: when one of the purposes of the message is to advertise, promote or offer to supply goods or services. This won’t include purely factual communications about a good or service you’ve purchased, such as delivery updates, payment reminders, notices of product faults.

Lululemon pointed out that its messages contained factual information, sent for transactional purposes.

Importantly, however, they also contained links back to Lululemon’s website and social media pages. The links had titles like “shop accessories”. That was enough to trigger the Spam Act rules.

ACMA noted its enforcement action against Lululemon was the fifth in 18 months against a business that “incorrectly treated messages as non-commercial”.

Tighter rules are overdue

The line between factual, marketing and entertainment content is increasingly hard to discern online.

However, as ACMA’s recent actions make clear, the Spam Act is clear on this point. A message may have multiple purposes – but if one is to advertise, promote or offer goods or services, the rules will apply.

Still, the kinds of messages captured by the spam legislation are a mere drop in the ocean of digital advertising we encounter everyday elsewhere online including our social media feeds. Ads are tailored and targeted to each of us in real-time, using vast amounts of data.

Back in 2022, the federal Attorney-General’s department recommended updating Australia’s privacy laws to adapt to modern digital advertising.

If implemented, those changes would give consumers more choices to opt out of the broader range of targeted advertising we see. It would also improve transparency about the use of profiling in advertising, and add restrictions on using sensitive information.

The current Spam Act has been in place since 2003. The online advertising ecosystem has shifted dramatically over the past 20 years.

While ACMA’s recent enforcement actions demonstrate the continued relevance and need for education about anti-spamming laws, updating those laws is now long overdue.

Feature image credit: Miguel A Amutio/Unsplash, CC BY

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Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer, Faculty of Business & Law, Queensland University of Technology

Sourced from The Conversation

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What’s the Best Way to Get Customer Feedback in 2026? Hint: It’s Not Email

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By Rob Pegoraro

Marketing types are turning to different tools to assess our satisfaction, and not all of them will leave you feeling satisfied about your privacy.

LAS VEGAS—The customer-satisfaction business is no longer oblivious to what may have long been obvious to many customers: Getting spammed with customer-satisfaction surveys probably won’t leave the recipient feeling particularly satisfied.

A conference here, hosted by a company that specializes in collecting and analysing customer feedback, made that clear: Customer experience (CX) research needs to move beyond the email survey. “We are more than survey people,” said Sid Banerjee, CSO of Medallia, in the keynote that opened the Medallia Experience conference.

“It’s tiring consumers out,” said Andrew Custage, head of research insights, in a panel at the show. Of course, Medallia had survey data about survey fatigue: 51% of consumers said they’d noticed more requests for feedback, and 36% said they felt too many companies were hitting them up for their thoughts. A slide shown during the panel showed that the company’s survey response rates have slipped from 10.5% in Q1 2024 to 8.6% in Q3 2025.

Custage’s fellow panellist Judy Bloch, a VP and industry executive advisor at Medallia, added that surveys can also fail to surface useful insights: “We’ve gotta expand beyond the surveys; they simply don’t tell us the full story.”

(Credit: Fahmi Ruddin Hidayat/Getty Images)

 

One solution for the survey-fatigue problem is to instrument sites and apps to measure customer journeys (as in, track your usage) much more precisely, then leverage AI-based tools to glean useful insights from all that data.

In another panel at the conference, Aimee Civera, head of “workplace solutions marketing engagement technology” at the investment firm Vanguard, called these heatmaps, session replays, and other forms of customer path analysis “tremendously helpful” for understanding customer interests. For example, she said, that increase in understanding helped Vanguard fix a problem with sales drop-offs on its site: “Now we’re seeing double the amount of sales leads from our website.”

Multiple speakers also endorsed feeding transcripts of customer calls and chats into analytical engines to surface patterns of what works and what doesn’t in a firm’s CX.

“EX”—employee experience—can also be a useful source of CX data, because customer-facing employees can run into problems on their side of the same systems that annoy customers.

“EX is the smoke to the fire that is CX,” said Samantha Scott, senior director of business experience at Verizon Business, in another panel. “If there’s something going on in front of the customer,” she said, “the employee’s going to be the first one to tell you about it.”

(Whether management will act on the resulting insights is another question: All of these customer insights did not stop Verizon from ratcheting up add-on fees last August.)

Surprise: People Don’t Hate Notification-Based Surveys

Or companies can try to hit up their customers for feedback outside of email. Two executives with the grocery-store firm Albertsons Companies outlined how they’ve opened a surprisingly successful survey channel via push notifications in the mobile apps for Safeway and Shaw’s.

“It’s the device push that generates the highest response rate,” said Henrik Christensen, senior director for customer and market intelligence.

He didn’t specify that rate, but his colleague, Michael Flatt, senior manager for customer and market intelligence, said about 50% of app users opt in to receive notifications about new surveys, even though this option will compound notification overload: “The customer doesn’t even have to have the app open” to get these push nags, Flatt noted.

In-app surveys also yield more constructive feedback than quick surveys conducted via touch-screen terminals at checkout lines, which Christensen said suffer from a “proximity bias,” in which people standing in front of a cashier feel compelled to accentuate the positive.

Albertsons has since added the option for customers to leave video reviews via its app, which Flatt said has proved insightful for surfacing problems like strawberries sold way too late.

(That panel didn’t get into other ways Albertsons gathers intelligence about customers, which are explained with striking clarity in its privacy policy: “Cameras and other location-aware technologies” to monitor in-store traffic and spot problems like theft or spills—plus, in some states, feed into facial-recognition systems.)

All of these other channels, Flatt said, allowed Albertsons to back away from email surveys, which, in addition to poor response rates, had one other problem in practice: Email tends to be overwhelmingly negative.

This panel, like the others I watched, ended with a QR code shown on the screens at the front of the room—an invitation for attendees to, yup, complete a survey about their experience.

If you’re itching to fill out a survey, meanwhile, consider taking part in PCMag’s Readers’ Choice. Tell us how you feel about your ISP, the income tax apps and services you use, and the PCs you use or manage at work.

Feature image credit: Teera Konakan/PCMag

By Rob Pegoraro

Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.

Sourced from PC Mag

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An agency guide to working from home effectively

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By Jamie Clifton

As an inbound marketing agency, Bolt has been fortunate enough that all our team are working from home during this time. This transition hasn’t been without its challenges and has taken some getting used to for everyone involved. Trying to run a business and keep all your employees, clients and customers connected takes real adjustment.

After a few weeks of working from home, it’s safe to say we’ve learnt a lot in a short period of time. Here are Bolt’s key takeaways from working from home effectively:

Hannah Benton, creative lead:

I’ve really enjoyed building my little home office on my dining table, but there are challenges. The dog doesn’t understand I’m not at home and available for playtime or door opening duties constantly. I have to refill the kettle a lot and there are still not enough hours in the day. But the positives are that I still feel connected to the team. Living alone means I really value time on calls with the team and seeing their faces (I do that TV presenter thing where I wave at everyone, cringe). There’s no commute anymore and we get to share more dog pics!

Tom Wright, apprentice web developer:

Good communication is key, even more so at home. As there’s so much distance between people, you can’t just shout across the room. Keeping everyone up to date about what’s happening in the company and our general daily lives really helps to keep motivation high. It means everyone is in the know about client goings-on which is needed when working on large projects.

Ellie-Paige Moore, inbound digital lead:

Flexibility has never been an issue for us here at bolt but working from home for the foreseeable future just adds that little bit more. You see a lot of comments and views of people saying to treat the day as if you were in the office which is definitely still something you should do. But if you need to do a little bit of cleaning that you were going to do in the evening and have a spare minute, I say go for it! It takes our eyes and minds away from the screen for a short while and it does give you that flexibility. So even if you’ve worked your full working day, you’ve been able to do those little jobs around the house meaning your evening is fully dedicated to yourself and relaxation.

Jamie Clifton, head of commercial and strategy:

My main takeaway is walking and talking. Usually, in office-style meetings, you might see people sitting around desks, slumped in a poor posture and yawning because they didn’t sleep well the night before, for example. It’s not necessarily people being disinterested but they’re not in their most engaged position. I’ve seen clients, the team and myself be more enthusiastic when walking and talking during conference calls. The way that we convey ourselves is better when standing up and we come up with more ideas. Are walk and talk meetings the future?

Thomas Coughlan, inbound marketing executive:

Having Cloud storage in place has made working from home a lot easier as all our work is accessible for everyone when they need it. It’s meant that there’s no work left in the office as we can access it wherever we are. Having work saved in Google Drive has meant that storage can be saved on my laptop. Using Google Sheets and Docs allows us to work in the same documents without having to be sitting next to each other. This means we can still collaborate on projects by jumping on a call and working on a document.

A downside of working from home though is with more people working from home, the internet can sometimes be slow or cut out completely for a minute or two which isn’t great when most of the work is done online.

James Coughlan, head of operations:

Having a dedicated workspace and great music is what helps me when working from home. Your own area to work away from distractions reduces the dreaded procrastination, as well as making sure I keep my work-life balance separate. Music also helps me zone into the workspace I’ve created and keeps me on point throughout the day.

Ella Mawer, digital designer:

A positive take away from working from home is that I can skip the commute to work every day. Travelling to work for one hour ten minutes takes up a lot of time and is costly with the money I spend on fuel. Having zero commute has freed up my morning and saved so much money. Usually, time is wasted travelling but now I can use it more effectively, like completing a morning workout, carrying out household chores and getting an early start to the day. I’m completing my daily tasks earlier and having more time in the evening when I’ve finished work to wind down, relax and have more time with loved ones.

Laura Greenhalgh, copywriter:

Wear whatever you want! We’ve all heard it somewhere that we should wear what we’d wear to the office while working from home. It’s supposed to be good for routine and get you in the work mindset but for most people, it just isn’t realistic. You should put on whatever you feel comfortable and productive in. Whether that’s the same pair of joggers all week, your gym leggings, pyjamas or dressing gown – wear it!

Sam Blevins, graphic designer:

Working from home has had its challenges. From sharing workspaces with family to relying on messaging or phone calls for communication instead of the usual face-to-face interaction we’d have in the studio. With that said, I believe we’re pulling together and working as efficiently as we can to ensure morale remains high.

So there you have it, bolt’s key takeaways from working from home. Communication is a major issue that’s required a lot more effort from the team to stay as connected as possible. Comfort and flexibility are everything. Whether that’s being in your pyjamas, listening to your favourite playlist or breaking up with the day with the washing up – you can keep your mind focused and productive. Plus, there’s no commute which means we’ve all got time to spare and money saved up!

By Jamie Clifton

Sourced from The Drum

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They Quit an Influencer Marketing Startup and Built Their Own. Now They’re Projecting to Make $3 Million

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BY MARIAPAULA GONZALEZ

Storytime aims to turn influencer marketing into a scalable, city-by-city marketplace for local businesses.

When Aris Yeager and Philip Davis quit their jobs at influencer marketing software company Lefty to start their own business Storytime in 2024, they weren’t sure whether they were about to raise venture capital—or get sued.

The co-founders had met one year earlier, when Davis hired Yeager as an influencer marketing specialist on his team at Lefty. While working for the Paris-based startup, they saw how luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Sephora manage influencers with huge budgets, 100-person teams, and software that costs about $1,500 a month.

At the same time, Yeager was running into friction as he engaged with local brands as a content creator. The 25-year-old had begun cultivating a flamboyant internet persona—known as Louis to his audience—about three years earlier while attending Northeastern University. Today, he has roughly 3 million followers across TikTok and Instagram and regularly commands five-figure brand deals.

Yeager tells Inc. “there was no easy way” to communicate with the brick-and-mortar businesses he visited daily. That sparked an idea: “I was like, ‘Okay, this needs to be more automated—this whole space.’”

As the U.S. head of growth at Lefty, Davis, 27, wrestled with that inefficiency from the other side. The company’s software worked well for global brands, he says, but fell short for fast-growing, location-based businesses trying to drive real foot traffic. So, when Yeager brought him the problem, they built something that did.

Lefty’s co-founder and former CEO Thomas Repelski wasn’t too thrilled when he found out, though, according to Yeager. “He was like, ‘Yo, you’re building in the same space? What the hell?’” he recalls. “I thought we were gonna get into legal trouble.”

Instead, their ex-boss became one of their earliest investors.

Betting on the power of hyperlocal influencers

About a year and a half ago, Yeager and Davis launched Storytime, an influencer marketing platform that connects local content creators with 450 businesses across 1,000 New York City locations, from restaurant chains to jewellery brands to coffee shops. The startup has so far raised about $1 million in pre-seed funding that values it at $15 million. And while Storytime only began monetizing last April, Davis expects to make anywhere from $2 million to $3 million in revenue by late summer.

For brands, the set-up is simple. After downloading the app, they can tailor campaign details, select reach tiers for influencers, and set offer amounts. Storytime takes over from there.

Any Instagram user with at least 2,000 followers can apply to join the platform as a creator, but not everyone gets accepted. Only those with strong local reach—which Storytime measures through audience city demographic data it collects via Instagram’s API—actually make the cut.

Here’s how the math works: a creator with 50,000 followers might draw 5,000 views on a post, but if only 10 percent of that audience is in New York, that translates to about 500 local views, according to Davis. Meanwhile, a smaller creator with 5,000 followers could see 2,000 views per post, with half that audience based in New York—or roughly 1,000 local views. “Their local reach is actually going to be twice as high as the much larger influencer,” he says.

Small business success stories

Most businesses pay a flat monthly fee to use the Storytime app. It costs as little as $150 for 15 Storytime creators per month for smaller brands, while larger brands pay about $5 per influencer collaboration, or roughly $2,500 for 500 collaborations.

That predictable pricing appealed to Ana Luisa, a jewellery brand accustomed to expensive influencer partnerships with murky returns. Storytime allows the Brooklyn-based company to keep its influencer spend under $500 each month and reward creators with gifts ranging from a $30 store gift card to a custom, solid-gold charm bracelet.

Ana Luisa measured a 30 percent increase in internal foot traffic metrics during its first two weeks of working with the startup. Eve Gertzman, the brand’s marketing director, says those gains have held steady in the slower seasons: “For us to be able to maintain pretty strong levels of foot traffic, even in these cold New York weathers, we can heavily attribute that to Storytime.”

For Joe and the Juice, Storytime’s value extends beyond foot traffic. Global brand manager Raania Hammoudan says the platform gives her the ability to dictate how local creators post about Joe and the Juice, including which products they feature, during campaigns like its collaboration with tennis star Novak Djokovic last fall. “That is so valuable to us,” she says.

The bigger picture

The shift towards brands working with hyperlocal influencers has been building for about two to three years now, according to creator economy expert Keith Bendes. “The more reach is harder to achieve organically without paid media, the more you’re trying to niche down to find the loyal pockets,” he says.

The question now is whether Storytime’s local-first model can scale. Yeager and Davis say they’re planning to expand into new cities, including Miami, in the near future. The co-founders are also planning to enter industries beyond food and beverage and add more features like paid campaigns across TikTok and Instagram.

The marketplace they imagined almost two years ago is just getting started. “My vision with it is to make it a ClassPass for creators,” Yeager says. “Every single business that’s on ClassPass, I believe could be on Storytime.”

Feature image credit: Getty Images

BY MARIAPAULA GONZALEZ

Sourced from Inc.

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