2025 in Focus: The State of Digital, Marketing & eComm in Australia

Your future incremental growth, in an era of conversational commerce, machine shopping, and agentic AI, will at its foundation require winning a whole new search competition. What are the elements of victory here, and what do you need to do to get ready. John Andrews, Co-founder and CEO at Cimulate, (with a C) comes to the podcast with a lot of answers, some guesses, and excitement about the questions and to come in this fast-moving space. Rob Gonzalez joins as co-host for a conversation on the new generation of search you won’t want to miss.

In this episode of Unpacking the Digital Shelf – The APAC Edition, Teresa is joined by Amanda Green, General Manager of Digital & Innovation at Treasury Wine Estates, to explore how the business is reimagining its approach to product content management to meet the evolving needs of today’s digitally empowered shoppers across diverse markets. Amanda shares how Treasury Wine Estates is navigating the complexities of delivering local relevance at scale, building a product content strategy that supports both global consistency and regional nuance. From leveraging social platforms to strengthen product credibility in China, to harnessing the power of ratings and reviews to establish product authority within generative engines, Amanda offers a window into the strategic levers shaping TWE’s digital content management approach. If you're grappling with the complexities of managing product content across multiple markets - and looking to future-proof your digital product content approach - this episode is for you.

With years of experience Leading ecommerce at Bic and Johnson and Johnson, Jennifer Elmanshi, now President at Potoo, wears the battle scars of the Buy Box wars. She stops by to share the war stories, the new tactics to come in the age of AI, and best practices for monitoring and organizing for rapid response to win your rightful place back.

Digital Commerce Global recently came out with their 3rd annual deep-dive benchmark study on how brands are managing their retail media strategy (or, not.) The study’s author, Gregor Murray, VP of Strategy, Digital Commerce Global, returns to the podcast with all the key results that point towards the urgent opportunities for instituting organizational, financial, and measurement rigor in this critical but complex part of your digital commerce success strategy.

I found our conversation today about the AI-transformed future of commerce with Matt Ezyk, Sr. Dir. of Ecommerce Engineering at Hanna Andersson, both urgent and comforting. Urgent in that he strongly believes that consumer journeys and product discovery will be upended by conversational commerce and brands need to prepare, and comforting in that those in ecommerce and digital have spent their careers being upended. And have built the mindset and skills to manage through it. Matt walked us through his approach to riding this transformation wave armed with curiosity, discipline, and a test and learn mindset.

In this episode, we break down the key findings from the 2025 Digital, Marketing & eComm in Focus report — a comprehensive look at the evolving digital landscape for Australian brands. We explore the growing complexity of the digital shelf, the rise of retail media, the quick commerce revival, and the ongoing tech challenges brands face in managing product content. With insights from over 220 industry professionals, this conversation is a must-listen for anyone navigating omnichannel growth in a rapidly changing Australian market.

Every six months, the ecommerce education consultancy Allume Group consolidates the output of expert conversations, annual reports, and the latest data to create their Allume Insider report, or AIR. It’s chock a block full of the most current insights into the present and future of ecommerce. Andrea Leigh, Founder & CEO of Allume Group rejoins the podcast with the takeaways from their latest research.

Our guest today, Swagat Choudhury, Global Director of Perfect Store Online at Mars has been steeped in the evolution of digital commerce for almost 20 years, 17 of that at Diageo. Today’s conversation about where digital commerce is going, and global plus local transformation has as its core a really crucial reminder that the fundamentals of commerce have remained the same: using a loop of influence and conversion to drive results. According to Swagat, the exciting difference of this next AI-fueled era will be the ability to unleash so much more data to drive the next best action, both for the consumer and for the marketer.

In chaotic times, trust becomes a premium value in the choices a consumer makes. That’s why so many brands invest heavily in creating brand experiences on the world’s most watched canvases, at the Super Bowl, the Oscars, the Olympics. But the most valuable real estate for your brand experiences may be where your consumers spend the vast majority of their time - in digital experiences often on the PDP. Roald Van Wyk, Global Creative Commerce Lead at IPG, is issuing an urgent and compelling call that creative briefs, and the processes they fuel, must change to ensure that your brand is building trust with the best creative across every screen, and every interaction.

Across brands and retailers, we are starting to see the long-standing silos that stand in the way of efficiency, growth, and accountability start to crumble. Today’s guests from Kroger are living proof of the power of this, with the media maven Jenny Holleran, VP at Kroger Precision Marketing having the important conversations and the united front together with Jorge Alfonso, Head of Digital Merchandising at Kroger. They share a deep commitment to a seamless, unified omnichannel experience for consumers that drives growth for both Kroger and for their brand partners. It’s a sibling rivalry in the best way possible.