We interviewed Nathan Cook, Regional Marketing Director APAC and Head of Media APAC & EMEA for Tempur-Sealy International, one of our incredible judges for the Festival of Media APAC Awards 2025. Nathan opens up about what defines an exceptional campaign, offering his perspective on industry trends shaping the present and the future. He also shares the kind of innovative work he’s looking forward to this year and provides essential guidance for 2025 award entrants.
What is your favourite media campaign of the last 12 months and why?
Aldi Australia has capitalised on the pain points in Australia relating to the higher cost of living throughout 2024 and communicated in a very simple way the benefits of shopping at Aldi first. For Aldi the idea isn’t to capture 100% of the grocery buyers’ weekly shop, but rather buy the core staples at Aldi first, then do your top-up shop elsewhere. This is an evolution from previous rational comparison shopping where they compare the cost of items in the Aldi trolley to the competitors showing a percentage saving. This departure from rational to emotional is very salient and speaks to a consumer truth that Aldi doesn’t have everything you need, but you will save more if you shop at Aldi first. True to the message, Aldi has then paired a strong creative with traditional channels, not trying to be too smart with media execution, rather focussing on heavy weights in traditional channels like TV to provide high reach. The media strategy also comprises of multiple bursts of activity resulting in being the cornerstone of their marketing communication this year, whilst tapping into the consumer truth about the limited Aldi range, calling it out to become a positive.
What separates a good campaign from an award winning campaign?
A campaign should always have an objective and importantly a way to validate the outcomes. This is an essential element that should be considered mandatory before a client approves any activity. For a campaign to be award winning, it needs to take it to the next level and all the stars need to align. Like a good campaign you need an objective that can be measured, the outcome should show successful results, to step beyond this thought it should also have a purpose that is a natural fit for the brand and a consumer insight that is relatable. By connecting a successful campaign with aligned values (purpose) it will create memorability in a consumer’s mind and hopefully drive greater advocacy long term.
What advice would you give agencies or brands?
Back up your entry with real results. It is great to craft a beautiful written entry, but this will only take you so far. To move from an entrant to a finalist you need to support the entry with real data that shows that a meaningful change has occurred and this change was a direct result of the media, isolating other macro factors. There is no point trying to sell a story about 10% growth YoY when macro factors grew the category by 10 or 15%. Also don’t try and retrofit a consumer insight. If the idea was simple and it worked, it is better to speak to the simplicity, rather than try to make up a story.
What one thing would you like to see change in the industry over the next 12 months?
We have become too data obsessed in recent years which is to the detriment of many brands. The idea of hyper targeting sounds great, but the challenge has become that many brands don’t know who their real consumer is, so to create custom audiences increases the cost of media, reduces effectiveness and ultimately media is blamed for not driving results, when it is likely that targeting should be put under greater scrutiny. With more granular data also means more middlemen between the platform and the end message. This further compounds the challenges with customised audiences, mark ups and arbitrage where no incremental value is delivered to anybody except those in the middle. In the past agencies and vendors where critical of clients pushing everyone to a race to the bottom of the well. This new dynamic extends beyond this to a point where clients are challenging agencies on value due to inflation, agencies and tech companies are then squeezing every last drop from the vendor and this will ultimately lead to the well drying up completely, which isn’t good for vendors or brands. We need to eradicate the lack of transparency in middle ground, allowing vendors to receive more money to create better content, allowing brands to pay less to reach more people and grow the business.
What emerging trends or innovations have you observed in media campaigns this year?
AI has been in the shadows for a couple of years now, hailed as a positive change. I’m seeing more open criticism of AI, much of which is from trade press and commentary around how it will devalue the creative process. On the other side, I’m seeing clients stepping back from AI products and programmatic trading with media buying as they have recognised the shortcomings of AI in this space, in particular the AI learning curve being linear, which isn’t a
true representation of consumer behaviour. As such many clients have realised they have made expensive mistakes at the cost of “letting AI learn for a few months”, which eats up valuable budgets and sets them back even further. It is good to see some common sense coming back in and more reliance on humans to do thinking and buying of campaigns.
