Edition One: Enero Investor Newsletter

I want to open this update by acknowledging and responding directly to your feedback: you want to know more about what is happening at Enero and inside our agencies, across the work, the strategy, the clients and in particular, how we are approaching artificial intelligence (AI). This newsletter is our effort to do that more regularly and more directly, starting with the market conditions that are shaping the decisions we make.

Global advertising spend continues to grow, forecast to reach approximately $1.39 trillion in 2026, up 11.5% on the prior year according to WARC. But that growth is not evenly spread. The money is moving into digital, with retail media, social, search and online video capturing the bulk of new investment, as audiences and buying systems continue to shift in that direction.

Meanwhile, the Australian advertising market grew approximately 5% in 2025, with the United States (US) growing around 9% in 2025. But the headline numbers do not tell the full story. The biggest structural event of the year was consolidation, with two of the top four global holding companies merging to form the world’s largest marketing conglomerate, even as collective holding company revenues fell approximately 1%.  The advertising market is growing, and for leaner, independently led operators, that gap represents an opportunity.

The performance gap between the major groups tells that story clearly. One delivered organic growth above 5% with a record operating margin of approximately 18%. Another reported a revenue decline of 8%, a 23% decline in operating profit, and cut its dividend in half, and is now mid-way through a multi-year restructuring.

The difference, in most cases, comes down to AI. The groups pulling ahead have embedded it into how they operate, while those treating it as something to adopt later are losing ground. Retail media, first-party data, and agentic AI products are where growth is concentrating, and independent specialists are winning work that would previously have defaulted to the large networks.

Across the Enero Group, our response had been prepared well in advance of these changing conditions. Enero identified the market’s trajectory early, developed a clear transformation plan and moved rapidly to implement it across all three agencies, investing in AI tools and capabilities to improve productivity and better serve our clients’ evolving needs. We secured a Claude Enterprise licence with Anthropic, established AI governance and infrastructure at group level, and implemented agentic capability into how our agencies deliver for clients. Our AI program moved from strategy in Q2 into active execution in Q3 and Q4, and we are already seeing tangible benefits in productivity, client outcomes, and competitive positioning.

Hotwire Global established its AI Lab in March 2025, ahead of most competitors in the sector, bringing products like Spark to market and guiding our own AI strategy and implementation. Orchard adopted agentic by default, embedding AI into every team’s operating model. BMF have invested and implemented proprietary tools for clients which improve speed to market and productivity as well as enhancing the human-led creativity that makes it Australia’s most effective creative agency.

In this edition, we share the partnerships, client wins and transformation plan that reflect our progress in practice, across each of our three agencies.

Enero continues to be a focused group of three high-performing, independently led agencies, serving ambitious clients across the technology, healthcare and consumer sectors. We believe the group is well positioned to continue building on that momentum, and we look forward to keeping you informed as it develops.

Thanks,

Ian Ball, Enero Group, CEO

• BMF was appointed lead creative agency to Asahi Beverages following a competitive pitch, seeing the agency take on full strategy and creative responsibilities across brand and campaign for Victoria Bitter, Hard Rated, Solo and Solo Energy; some of Australia’s most culturally resonant consumer brands. The win reflects the breadth of BMF’s capability across a complex multi-brand brief, showcasing its deep expertise in Australian brands and consumers. The appointment comes as the agency reaches a new high in its effectiveness story. BMF’s ‘Shop ALDI First’ campaign for ALDI Australia was awarded one of only six Global Best of the Best Grand Effie Awards globally, making the campaign the most effective retail campaign in the world for 2025. It is the culmination of a long-running partnership with ALDI Australia, built on one of the most consistent effectiveness records in Australian advertising, with the latest chapter of the ALDI Prices platform now live across television, digital, out-of-home and radio.

  That body of work also took BMF’s CEO Stephen McArdle to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where he presented on Building a Culture of Effectiveness, unpacking what it takes to build the conditions behind sustained creative excellence and the lessons behind some of the world’s most effective and awarded work. BMF was also named AdNews Creative Agency of the Year, and launched the sixth iteration of its award-winning ‘Off Season’ campaign for Tourism Tasmania, inviting Australians to become a winter person across a fully integrated national campaign.

• Orchard’s specialist positioning in regulated digital and complex environments has seen the agency win two new clients. The agency was appointed by Precision Group to lead its customer experience (CX) strategy and digital experience design across its retail and commercial property portfolio, with six new sites launching in July. That same depth of capability saw the agency appointed by Ryman Healthcare to shape the digital experience for one of Australia’s most respected aged care brands. The wins come as Orchard reaches a new milestone in its credentials, as it was named a HubSpot Gold Solution Partner in Australia and Opal AI certified on Optimizely’s AI platform, where it is building agents and agentic workflows on behalf of clients, alongside winning Optimizely’s Customer Partner of the Year for the second year running.

  On the health side, Orchard has expanded its relationship with Merck into the United States and is leading strategy and execution behind ‘We Won’t Weight’ for Lilly, one of Australia’s most significant disease education initiatives. The campaign addresses obesity and overweight, conditions contributing to more than 200 co-morbidities and affecting more than two-thirds of Australians. Beyond client work, Orchard is developing two proprietary AI tools and a performance media offering to close the loop between brand and outcome: one that improves brand visibility in AI-generated answers, and another that uses synthetic personas to strengthen client communications.

• Hotwire won a strong class of new clients including Docusign, bunq, Finovate Europe, MoneyLIVE Summit, and VeSync, alongside new partnerships with Morning Consult, giving clients access to a proprietary dataset spanning more than 80 million consumer interviews across 4,000 brands in 40 countries, and with Lilypath to integrate AI-driven authority insights into executive communications programs. Hotwire’s proprietary AI platform, Spark, continues to demonstrate measurable commercial impact, with Spark-attributed deals doubling the odds of pitch success in the US and improving a raw win-rate by 15.4 percentage points globally.

  Hotwire Global’s ongoing partnership with the House of Beautiful Business expanded in FY26, co-publishing The Agentic Organizations report at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the third in the series, surveying 900 global business leaders on how agentic AI is reshaping work and consumer behaviour. In May, Hotwire Global sponsored and participated in the Agentic Agora track at HoBB’s World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens, expanding its influence across Europe. At Cannes Lions, Hotwire Global co-hosted the Axios Expert Voices roundtable alongside its client Sam’s Club, co-hosted the PRovoke Media Innovation in the Age of AI Chief Communications Officer Roundtable, and participated in the PRovoke Media Agency CEO Roundtable.

  Hotwire was named one of PRovoke’s 40 Best Tech Agencies in the World, 100 Best Agencies in the US, 70 Best Agencies in the UK, and was ranked second among Tech PR Firms and 16th among Top PR Firms by O’Dwyer’s. Hotwire also ranked 13th among the Top 25 US B2B Marketing Agencies and 5th among US Demand Generation Specialists in the Financial State of the Agency Marketplace report.

• Enero (and our agencies) are well advanced in an ambitious transformation, combining outstanding human talent with leading-edge AI and technology capabilities. Implementation of our strategy is well underway and already yielding measurable value, both to our financial performance and to our clients.
• Our AI implementation is focused on two domains: agentic capability that drives agency efficiency and improves client value, and effectiveness capability that deepens insights and delivers better client outcomes in key focus areas:
  • Market leading client tools and capabilities including Spark, Ignite and Radiate, which generate revenue and strengthen our competitive position in pitches and technology leadership
  • Individual Agency AI “plays” for both efficiency and effectiveness, aligned with their business strategy and client value propositions. Examples include agentic code development to accelerate website builds, a Digital Arts Studio enabling AI retouching, digital image sourcing and automated workflows, and agentic copywriting that produces rapid tone-of-voice aligned drafts for human review, and synthetic personas and audiences to rapidly test, evaluate and iterate brand and marketing campaigns for enhanced effectiveness.
  • Functional Agents across head office functions including finance, people and culture, and legal. An example being ‘Elle’, our legal agent deployed for contract reviews and other repetitive tasks
  • A group-wide secure operating architecture that includes governance, dashboard KPI tracking, a comprehensive AI skills library, and acceptable use policies and standard operating procedures
• Our AI implementation reflects a deliberate strategic approach. By automating and accelerating the repetitive, we free our highly skilled practitioners to focus on their craft: the work that requires critical and strategic thinking, outstanding creativity, deep contextual understanding and subtle judgment, delivered through trusted client relationships.