It’s Halloween tomorrow, and plenty of Kiwi brands are jumping on board the ghost train. Some campaigns are spookier than others, but Contact Energy’s ‘Trick or Treat’ pre-roll ad on YouTube takes the opportunity to let viewers choose their own adventure. PLUS: the rise of Halloween as a retail event in New Zealand.
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The vast majority of ads are an annoyance, and that seems particularly true of the largely ad-funded online realm. How else do you explain the fact that several hundred million people use ad blocking software? But D&AD and BETC Paris have tried to prove that people don’t hate advertising, they just hate bad advertising, with a web browser extension called the Ad Filter.
Online video is booming here and around the world. And Fairfax is looking to get a bigger slice of the audience—and the ad revenue—that’s heading that way. So it’s released a campaign based on recent research from Colmar Brunton that promotes its popularity as a video platform and the effectiveness of pre-roll advertising in an era of rampant time-shifting.
On 25 May, after screening the first episode of the second season of House of Cards, MediaWorks made all the episodes for the show available for online viewing via its on-demand service, 3NOW. The new season of the popular Netflix show will be available for 28 days from the release date, giving binge viewers four weeks to squeeze in all 13 episodes. But does this move make sense, given that television has traditionally relied on keeping viewers hooked all the way through? And what is TVNZ doing in this area?