Over the summer, Lipton took a four storey canvas slide to some of the country’s summer hotspots, like Homegrown Wellington, Otago Uni’s O-Week, and Sounds in the Sun. And the digital and social aspects of the sLIPTONslide campaign have earned PHDIQ Yahoo! New Zealand’s 2012 first quarter Digital Strategy Award.
Amateurs regularly seem to think they can foot it with the big boys. Usually they can’t, but technology is helping even things up a bit and Panasonic and Auckland digital shop Tango have launched a cool interactive campaign/social experiment to see if the new Lumix cameras do as they claim and allow anyone to shoot like a pro.
According to Nielsen’s Online Retail Report, the number of online shoppers in New Zealand has now reached over 1.6 million (49 percent of the total population aged 18+), an increase of 122,000 on the previous year and more than double since 2004.
Kiwis of all ages are prolific users of social media but, according to a recent Colmar Brunton survey, it’s not just to keep up to date with family and friends. Nearly 60 percent of Kiwis follow at least one brand and over one third (37 percent) say a social media presence makes a brand more appealing to them.
We wrote about Colenso’s win of the Tourism Fiji account back in early April, and the island nation has added another Kiwi agency to its roster after Auckland-based full service web agency Sparks Interactive was named as its new website partner.
Mitch Olson is founder of game design studio, Gamedojo, which, in partnership with NZ Marketing and our sister title Idealog, is hosting the Gamification Lab in Auckland next month. He is also co-founder of the hugely successful social game world SmallWorlds and knows how to go beyond buzzwords and hype to create a business case for gamification for your brand.
The MA’s Digital Day Out Event last week was an opportunity to see how advertisers and consumers are interacting via social networking sites, the internet, TV, mobile devices, tablets and instore digital signage. And what may be involved in the future if those relationships hope to be strengthened.
Many have been anxiously awaiting the announcement, and it has cometh: digital streaming service Spotify is officially available in New Zealand and Australia, opening up its catalogue of more than 16 million tracks and bringing Spotify’s availability to a grand total of 15 countries. So what’s the deal? And why are brands like Coca-Cola getting involved?
MSN NZ announced a few big changes to its business last year, including the launch of real-time bidding (RTB) system Microsoft Advertising Exchange, something akin to a media stockmarket that allowed advertisers and publishers to buy and sell digital inventory. And the bet seems to have paid off, with MSN reporting significant local uptake of the system and a big recent increase in revenue.
The second Engaged Web in New Zealand Report, which saw Intergen assess the five most visited New Zealand websites from ten different sectors to measure their level of customer engagement, has just been released, with the highlights being that 90 percent of websites increased their level of engagement since last year, companies are focusing less on the primary corporate websites, New Zealand’s news and media websites are the most engaging and the shopping and classifieds, and banking and finance sectors have made the biggest improvement.
Y&R NZ has been appointed as the creative agency for Quickflix Australia and New Zealand and will start immediately on developing separate campaigns for both markets. And Quickflix is certainly going to need some help in this market, as it seems to have largely gone under the radar since launching with a call to the government to regulate content rights because they hinder broadband uptake.
May not be a picture of painting spiderbots
Robots, social media, spray cans and three of the world’s leading design creatives are coming together in Auckland this month at design conference Semi-Permanent as part of Orcon’s Spider Art, which is believed to be the world’s first art painted by Twitter-controlled ‘spiderbots’.
Yahoo! New Zealand has announced the arrival of a new awards baby called the Digital Stars, an initiative that aims to find and reward the best young media planners and buyers in New Zealand.
Too many brands have been severely punished for failing to do their homework. So tread carefully and learn to navigate the maze of ever-changing Facebook page rules.
The National Business Review is shaking up its online subscription model by offering individual companies and all their staff a flat-rate fee of of $249+GST per quarter to gain access to its online content.
In a world where political correctness often seems to rule, taboos are plentiful. Thankfully, busting them is still an integral part of good comedy. But there’s still potential for embarrassing social mishaps with every attempt at edgy humour. So, to help provide some guidance as to what is and what isn’t appropriate, the NZ International Comedy Festival gathered together an elite team of stand-up comedians, sit-down mathematicians and Colenso BBDO digital folk to try and solve a riddle that has plagued mankind for centuries: when is it too soon to joke about something?
A new study by McKinsey & Company has confirmed advertising is a driver of economic growth. And while this is not anything that hasn’t been reported before (specifically the 2007 seminal report by Maximilien Nayaradou that found that ad spend was a driver of growth), what is of interest in this report is its specific research and reporting on the contribution of digital marketing towards GDP.
The IAB recently dropped the Bolly from its awards and renamed them the IABNZ Creative Awards in an effort to bring them in line with other international IAB competitions. And the first winner of the newly modified awards is Special Group, with the Mash-up banner for Four.
In what’s being called a world first, Tequila\ is taking ANZ Bank’s fundraising campaign for the RSA into the realm of social media by allowing Kiwis to donate funds to the Poppy Day Appeal via SMS and rebadging their Twitter avatars with the familiar poppy icon in the corner.
Aegis recently announced its official arrival on the local scene after the merging of Carat and Mitchells. And now it’s announced the local launch of bespoke consumer study, the Consumer Connection System (CCS), which provides insights into how consumers choose and use media in an effort to better connect them with brands.
DraftFCB’s What’s My Number? campaign for the Electricity Authority won big at the RSVP and Nexus Awards recently and it’s added to what could be a big haul this year by taking out the 2011 Yahoo! New Zealand Digital Strategy Award in Auckland last night.
We heard a dirty little rumour yesterday that recruitment companies were on the loose looking to place some of Ogilvy’s digital staff because its entire inhouse development team had been shut down. This got the spidey senses tingling, so we had a chat with executive director Paul Manning, who called BS on it and, slightly ironically, took the opportunity to announce the addition of experienced digital creative director Andrew Berglund to the team.
The digital boffins/idiot savants at Resn in Wellington work for one of the rare few Kiwi companies that can claim to be based in New Zealand and do work for big brands all around the world. But now, after what they say was a formal approach from the EU to “help bail them out of their fiscal conundrum”, Resn has decided to go global and set up its first satellite office in Amsterdam.
Yesterday, the Fijian government banned inbound tourists as flash flooding wreaked havoc. But, after a global pitch thought to have received more than 60 submissions, it’s thought Colenso BBDO will now be responsible for trying to get more of them to visit after beating out agencies from New Zealand, Australia and the US to become the new global agency for Tourism Fiji.
For many outside the ad industry, arguing over who was the first to come up with an idea could be perceived as petty. But when ideas are the lifeblood of this industry and often have a tangible effect on an agency’s reputation—and, if it helps to win awards, momentum—provenance is important. Recently we’ve seen some controversy over the creation of personalised OHBaby! magazines for Huggies. And it looks like we can add another interesting case to the list: Colenso BBDO’s Doggelganger website for Pedigree and Whybin\TBWA Sydney’s Dog-A-Like mobile app for the same client in Australia.
As of tomorrow, New Zealanders will have another option for viewing, with Australian movie and TV subscription service Quickflix launching and ISPs Slingshot and Orcon unmetering the new offering.
Launched pre-Google and pre-Facebook, nzgirl was one of the first kids on the online block with its first release all the way back in December 1999. Since then it’s had a few incarnations and we’ve ventured into clothing and merchandise, retail stores and an advertising network. But the one constant amongst 13 years of change has been that it keeps on keeping on. And through all the twists and turns I’ve taken it on in pursuit of the holy digital grail, the site itself, which was relaunched today, has continued to perform.
TVNZ Ondemand launched on 20th March 2007 as Australasia’s first catch-up television service. Five years on and the TV industry is nigh-on unrecognisable and while all major broadcasters face plenty of challenges coping with the rapid change, TVNZ’s ‘inspiring New Zealanders on every screen’ philosophy means there are also plenty of opportunities for the growing online platform.
As Tequila\’s creative director Ross Howard wrote in a past issue of NZ Marketing, there’s a fine line between creative theft and creative inspiration. And a recent release from Kimberley-Clark’s Huggies brand about a campaign offering new parents personalised OHBaby! magazines got us wondering about the rather thorny issue of creative IP.
Local ad network Adhub is claiming first place in a couple of eyeball races, with new sites Gloss, Beauty Bible, GardenNZ, FashionNZ, My Netball, The A List and View New Zealand soon to be added to its existing list of online properties like FLICKS.co.nz, Realestate.co.nz, allblacks.com, BBC.com, Lonely Planet and E!Online. The new sites come online on April 1 and, according to Adhub’s managing director Josh Borthwick, create the largest household shopper (1,486,335 monthly UBs) and entertainment/lifestyle (618,570 monthly UB’s) channels in New Zealand.