Supercars names Head of Communications

Jay Pleass has joined construction group, Built, as Head of Group Corporate Affairs. He was General Manager Government Relations and Public Affairs at Ventia. Prior to this, Jay held senior communications roles at LendLease, Ethical Strategies and within the government sector. 

PR & Communications agency Compass Studio, has added three new clients to its roster: Modus Brewing, home of non-alcoholic beer brand NORT, Australian swimwear label, Budgy Smuggle and global first aid brand, SURVIVAL. The new partnerships span beverage, fashion and safety, and mark a period of growth for the agency.

Compass Studio will work with independently owned, Australian brewery Modus Brewing to tell the story behind NORT, the non-alcoholic beer range founded by Jaz and Grant Wearin.

The agency is working with SURVIVAL to share news of its first aid kits with the media, alongside the brand's founding story.

Compass Studio is also supporting Budgy Smuggler with its Father's Day campaign, Budgy By You, which uses new technology to print customers' own drawings directly onto swimwear, giving their customers the chance to create personalised gifts this Father's Day.

Emma Butler, PR Account Director at Compass Studio, says: “These three partnerships show the breadth of stories we love to tell, an innovation-led beverage brand, a beloved Australian fashion icon reinventing a seasonal campaign, and a business that has quietly saved lives for almost four decades. We're looking forward to bringing each of these stories to the media over the months ahead.”

PicturedL-R: Emma Butler, Eliza Boland, Annika Jones, Holly Betts, Natalie Dean-Weymark, Amber Chan, Luke Dean-Weymark

Thinkerbell has launched Hi-Vis, a new offering that audits and improves how brands are seen, understood and recommended by AI models.

The agency rolled out the technology to address what it refers to as ‘the zero-click era’, where people ask AI directly what to buy, where to go, or who to trust. It settles on a shortlist before a human ever sees a brand name.

Dan Monheit, Chief CX Thinker at Thinkerbell, said: “Marketers have spent a century learning how humans choose brands. Now there’s a second decision-maker in the room, and it’s already read everything.

“The truth is that the machines have very human taste. They trust brands that are famous, talked about and coherent, and they’re suspicious of brands that make big claims with little to back them up.”

Hi-Vis assesses brands across three pillars:

• Fuel: what you say about yourself on channels you control
• Fluency: how easily AI can find, read and understand you
• Fame: what others say about you in places you don’t control

It then produces a single Hi-Vis Score, benchmarked against competitors across the AI platforms customers use.

Chief Tinker, Tom Wenborn, said: “This is where most GEO and AI-SEO thinking gets it wrong, it treats AI visibility as a tech problem to be schema’d into better results, but the models are built to weigh third-party evidence over self-promotion.

“The brands winning in AI recommendations are the ones with cultural presence, the ones journos quote, communities discuss, and real people vouch for. Which means the answer to the biggest technical shift in marketing is still the old-fashioned one… be genuinely famous.”