Mailchimp kicked off its first ever event in Australia this week with FWD: Sydney, diving into the future of email marketing. With an a-list panel of speakers, including Neil Patel (Co-founder of NP Digital), Joe Brumm (Creator and Writer of Bluey), and Byron Sharp (the godfather of marketing), here’s everything you missed.
1. Email is still a powerhouse
As a marketer who’s followed Neil Patel for the best part of 10 years, I’ve used his tips and tricks to tackle SEO and email trends. I was massively excited to hear what he thinks of email. With “email is dead” dominating headlines, it doesn’t surprise me that Neil reports engagement across marketing channels is fluctuating (and in many cases dropping). But not email. Email remains a constant channel that agencies should look to leverage more. It’s also free from the changing platform algorithms that social and SEO are subjected to.
2. Clean data is the key to effective marketing
The biggest takeaway from Neil’s session is the importance of having clean data for effective email campaigns. There’s no point in sending out weekly emails to someone who deletes them every week. Clean your data and create a community of engaged and interested audiences who want to hear from your brand.
But clean data isn’t just for email. It’s essential across the board, and something we at Tangram see every day. Once you have good, clean data, you can automate, personalise, and make smarter decisions. To explore how you can Do More with Data check out our 2025 trends playbook that looks at how agencies can unlock better insights with the right data in place.
3. AI is raising the bar for creativity
Next up we had Joe Brumm (Creator and Writer of Bluey), Jeremy Jones (Global Head of Creative at Intuit Mailchimp Wink) and Zach Kitschke (Global CMO at Canva) discussing Automation, Imagination, And The Future of Ideation. No huge surprises here but AI was the hot topic.
Zach Kitschke covered how to avoid creative repetition with AI-powered tools like Canva’s Magic tools. Agencies should be using AI to accelerate creativity with processes such as storyboarding. With AI tools available to everyone, the bar for creativity has been raised. Agencies should welcome this as an opportunity. Encourage creative teams to experiment with AI for storyboarding, junior account execs to use AI for capturing actionable meeting minutes, and finance teams to leverage AI for real-time budget tracking and forecasting. The key isn’t just using AI, it’s knowing where it can add the most value.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t have a clue who Joe Brumm or Bluey is. With no kids myself, I was definitely in the minority, but it was fascinating to hear how Bluey has reinvented children’s TV. Joe shared a story about using ChatGPT to generate a script, but the result fell flat. Bingo told Bluey the lesson, rather than taking her on a journey. With Bluey, it’s all about showing the character’s experience and letting the audience feel the story, rather than just being told. Creatives in agencies must take heed of this.
4. Data without strategy leads to distraction
Alita Harvey-Rodriguez, Founder of MI Academy took to the stage next to show how businesses are Turning Data Into Impact. We know that businesses need to focus on the right data to make meaningful business decisions. More data and more dashboards can lead to more distractions. Alita highlighted the importance of finding a single source of truth in reporting, something we see agencies deal with every day. We recently helped dentsu Australia utilise its data, creating real-time dashboards on supply, forecast and profitability.
One of the biggest takeaways from Alita’s session was that she focused on how businesses need to stop with the short-term mindset and focus on a future proof mindset, playing the long game and seeing the full picture. Music to my ears as that’s just what we covered in our 2025 Future Proof Your Agency playbook, giving agencies the blueprint for tackling 2025.
5. Be cautious with bold predictions
The final session (and the one I was most looking forward to!) was with Professor Byron Sharp, Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and author of How Brands Grow. I first heard of Byron around 2012, when How Brands Grow just came on to the scene and was shaking up how marketers were thinking. Before “loyalty” was the word on everyone’s lips and now we were thinking about “new” and “light” customers. Now 10+ years on, I was very keen to hear his predictions for the future were. My biggest takeaways from his session? Prediction is really hard. This is worth keeping in mind when people make bold claims about the future of agencies. Whether it’s AI replacing creative teams or agencies becoming obsolete, we can all agree radical predictions often miss the mark.
Author: Aisha Noor
Tangram’s Marketing Director, Aisha, has worked with some of the country’s leading tech and finance brands, from Commbank to Salesforce. She’s passionate about crafting meaningful email campaigns that use data to guide personalised customer journeys.
