Michael Fox set up online shoe company ‘Shoes of Prey’ after leaving Google in April 2009. Like many others, he believed he had a compelling business idea: to sell customisable women’s shoes and do it entirely online. And to level out the playing field against all the major retailers, Fox crafted a way of creating huge online buzz.
It was revealed by the Herald yesterday that New Zealand Post seems to have designs on the directories business, after it snaffled Yellow’s ex-director of sales Greg Murphy and three other national and regional sales managers. But, not one to lie down in the face of adversity *ahem, Google, ahem*, Yellow is still trying to up the ante and has announced the launch of its new, locally developed iPad and iPhone apps.
NZ Fashion Week has finished for another year. And, away from all the preening, strutting and Blue Steeling on the catwalk, a new Kiwi-conceived social media tool was making a name for itself behind the scenes, with the free iPhone photo app Snapr being employed to stream and geo-tag live photos from the runway straight to the NZFW website.
The Nielsen Company has been signed up for another five years as the preferred provider of research services for the print media industry. But all is not as it once was: Derek Lindsay, chairman of the snappily titled Print Media Industry Research Review Group (PMIRRG) and managing director at DraftFCB media calls the new deal a complete relaunch of the consumer insight and print readership research service in New Zealand and he believes the host of new innovations soon to be on offer will prove to be a bit of a fillip for New Zealand’s publishers.
With the Social Media Junction 2 conference line-up now confirmed for 16-17 November 2010 at SkyCity in Auckland, it’s timely to discuss one its key themes: content marketing strategies. And, more specifically, the difference between doing social media and doing it right, a topic conference keynote speaker Lee Odden will delve into.
Gladeye and Zed Digital have been handed joint winner accolades for the second quarter round of Yahoo!Xtra’s Digital Strategy Award for the House of Travel’s mixandmatcher Facebook app, a campaign that gained 17,000 Facebook friends, 279,613 entries, half a million wall posts, 50,000 comments and thousands of comments posted directly onto the brand’s page.
A group from New Zealand cloud software developer Genesis Interactive claim to have come up with a “possible world first”, a tool called Comet SEO that aims to simplify the search engine optimisation (SEO) process for Kiwi companies.
With a pesky global financial crisis, the Rugby World Cup sucking up the corporate cash and the six year relationship with Air New Zealand as naming rights sponsor coming to an end, necessity has dictated a few new, cost-effective marketing tactics in the tenth year of New Zealand Fashion Week (NZFW).
As Air New Zealand’s young, slightly more controversial upstart brand, grabaseat has always been given a bit more marketing rope than its parent. It’s certainly come up with some slightly unusual promotions in its time and it openly claims to do things in a way “that sometimes offends, sometimes makes you laugh, sometimes makes you cry and sometimes is just plain dumb”. But whatever grabaseat does, there’s always someone out there who will tell them how to do things better, apparently. So instead of fighting against the haters, it has decided to harness the creative power of the masses with the grabaseat billboard website.
For its latest customer service trick, ASB has fully embraced social media, gone completely virtual and launched a real-time, secure, person-to-person banking application on Facebook, something it claims is a world-first.
With more and more visitors to New Zealand researching online—and with the Rugby World Cup just around the corner—there is a big opportunity for increased business across a range of different sectors. So how do you move up the search chain and tap into that demand? First Rate’s Grant Osbourne offers a few digital tips for tourist operators and, by extension, other small business owners and marketers who are hoping to enhance their online presence.
Pfala via Flickr
Stuff.co.nz dominated the digital categories at this year’s Qantas Media Awards and it appears as though the advertisers have responded, with Fairfax Media claiming it has “significantly outperformed the market” in terms of its display advertising revenue, “almost doubling” the 38 percent increase achieved by the market since last quarter. But there are a few Fairfax figures that aren’t quite so forthcoming.
Speaking at the Inbound Tour Operators’ Council (ITOC) annual conference in Blenheim recently, Doug Chapman, executive director of client services at specialist digital agency Amnesia Razorfish, told delegates marketing was in the midst of a revolution thanks to the internet. And, with a raft of new technologies and hundreds of new social sites to take New Zealand to a travel-hungry world, it is a revolution Tourism New Zealand is well-positioned to take advantage of to reach potential travellers in a cost-effective way.
The humans are digitising. And the adspend is following suit. Hell, you can even get fridges that connect to the internet these days. So, given that it’s still considered by many to be a rather intimidating, mysterious realm, it’s not surprising to find that the marcomms community can’t get enough of that educational digital stuff. As such, the Marketing Association/Jericho’s Brainy Breakfast gathered together a few of the country’s successful digital exponents to offer some of their insights and tell marketers how they can convince their corporate gatekeepers to fully embrace digital marketing.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau of New Zealand (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) have released the online advertising expenditure figures for Q2, 2010. And whaddya know, yet more massive growth, especially—and surprisingly—in the often-lambasted display advertising category.
It’s a mysterious realm for most, but in this digital world, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is also an extremely—and increasingly—important one. And New Zealand-based SEO specialists now have a chance to showcase their talents in the inaugural SEO Challenge.
After more than 200,000 votes from the public were tallied for this year’s People’s Choice NetGuide awards, the winners have all been crowing, with Stuff.co.nz picking up the top prize and tvnz.co.nz winning best media site.
The big agencies all seem to be talking about killing off their digital silos and moving them closer to the central nervous system. Yet there are still plenty of new, small digital shops offering their specialist services. And now there’s another new player on the local digital marketing scene after Market United (MU) announced its arrival on Auckland soil, adding to its offices in Sydney and Perth.
A host of students, creative marcomms boffins and not-for-profit community groups gathered at the floating pavilion at Auckland’s Viaduct last night as the yMedia Challenge gongs were handed out. And Massey University’s ‘Designasaurs’ took home the $5,000 prize after its work with Natural Health Practitioners New Zealand was awarded top honours.
In this edition of Michael Carney’s Marketing Week: How marketers in restricted categories can use social media and still meet their regulatory obligations The Consumer Guarantees Act gets a spruce up as it gets with the digital auction programme Google TV: another paradigm shift? The fibre optic cult: does the investment actually pay dividends? Digital goes legit at the Brainy Breakfast
It’s all about the people. Hey, look, here are a few who have just got fancy new jobs.
Of course, the main reason for holidays is to inspire jealousy, so family, friends and, if you’re feeling so inclined, your arch enemies, can now be sent a personalised greeting card at the push of a few buttons thanks to the launch of Send a Card for iPhone by New Zealand Post.
This country’s diminutive stature has, according to legend, made us the perfect testing ground for technology firsts. And while it seems we always have to wait before we get our delivery of the newest gadgets, there have been a host of cool techie developments of late, from sandwich ordering to iPad apps, and crowdsourced language studies to dancing digital cows.
Usually our bragging is completely unfounded and based entirely on lies. But not this time: Nielsen has shown that StopPress is still at the top of the table when it comes to the percentage of visitors who have used a mobile phone to access the internet for the month of July. And, by extension, it would seem that you tech-savvy information hounds obviously have your hands on the lentils/fingers on the pulse when it comes to mobile usage.
New technology has meant that consumers are engaging with media in ways that George Jetson would be proud of. Of course, given the feverish enthusiasm for the iPad, there’s already quite a bit of interesting data about it and while the consumers love it, publishers are also rightly excited about the revenue—and creative—possibilities offered by the new medium. So who’s buying two of Apple’s most popular devices, the iPad and the iPhone? Nielsen surveyed more than 64,000 mobile subscribers in the US to find out.
It may be a relatively unsexy side of the digital marketing world. But there’s no doubt email is powerful (read this if you don’t believe it). And the Jericho Email Marketing Metrics Report for 2010, which crunched tens of millions of permission-based commercial emails in New Zealand, has shown that email drives massive readership and clicks—especially on Mondays.
Come with us now as we tap into the unending desire for flagrant industry-related people watching.
Online video has been an integral part of marketing campaigns for years, and a video going gangbusters on YouTube and other video sites is like the Holy Grail of marketing. Support, content, timing and knowing your audience are all elements that have to be included in the mix. But what’s often glossed over is the above-the-line support that is typically needed to get the ball rolling.
For months the New Zealand tech retailers have been displaying a range of iPad paraphernalia for sale in their stores and, as of today, they actually get to sell the object all that paraphernalia is associated with. But after all the hype, all the talk of publishing revolutions and all the feverish Tweetbooking about Jobs Almighty and his newest hero product, there seems to be a surprising dearth of local applications available on the day of the iPad’s release in New Zealand.
42BELOW is the latest company to jump on the augmented reality bandwagon with a new point of sale project it’s calling Fat-boy. And spokeshuman Jacob Pearson says the vodka gang is pretty proud of its new toy.