Hopefully. After one week of playing with it, I’m impressed. The ease of keeping your profile secure from certain people and being able to easily see exactly what information is displayed to who, as well as the addition of “Hang outs” and a few other features is great.
Ecostore’s latest campaign has been pushing the ‘I’m not a guinea pig line’ to encourage consumers to opt out of using nasty chemicals often found in other baby, beauty, body and household cleaning products. Now, in what it claims is a marketing first, it’s taking that idea a step further by trying to get consumers’ entire Facebook networks to do the same.
How consumers buy stuff has changed a helluva lot in the past year and, after getting its mitts on 65 percent of the daily deal market in New Zealand, GrabOne has played a big part in that evolution. So, to celebrate its first birthday—and the sale of 91,000 movie tickets, 26,000 cupcakes, 39,000 massages and one million holes of golf—it’s made an ad featuring the consumers and merchants who made it all possible.
Vizualise NZ general manager Carl Pavletich (L) and director Rupert Deans
Even an earthquake striking in the middle of a massive international project didn’t slow down Christchurch-based digital agency Vizualise for long. But if it wasn’t for cloud computing, director Rupert Deans says continuing to work on a “major project for a US-based charity” that’s yet to launch would have been impossible.
YouTube and Ridley Scott captured the world in action to great effect recently with Life in a Day. And now Vodafone is taking a similar idea and localising it with Share Everything Day, which aims to find out what New Zealanders are sharing and how they’re using social media.
In this edition of Michael Carney’s Marketing Week, how pollinators differ from influencers, social media’s skeleton is dug up, Sky future-proofs itself by looking at use-by dates for recorded content, short and sweet marketing snippets and an event for marketers hoping to prosper from the Rugby World Cup.
There’s been plenty of discussion about the daily deal model recently, due mostly to 1-Day’s decision to can its 1-Day Out offering because it believed the model was unsustainable. GrabOne’s founder and chief executive Shane Bradley certainly thought otherwise and, one year after launching its popular experience-based site, it’s ready to take on 1-Day at its own game with a new initiative that aims to put even more crap in people’s cupboards, GrabOne Store.
If you think a ‘like to enter’ competition on your company’s Facebook page is a cunning way to grow your follower numbers, you’re probably right in the short term. But if you treat it as a loyalty database, be prepared for some repercussions.
One of Gordon Ramsay’s most popular programmes is Kitchen Nightmares, where he helps turn struggling restaurants around. Let me say right from the start, I’m no fan of Ramsay. But I believe he’s teaching us some valuable lessons when it comes to website marketing. Let me explain.
New Zealanders love free stuff. And, blow me down, they also like being entertained. So Ticketek New Zealand has decided to tap into these primal desires with the launch of Nine Rewards, a new online market research panel that offers free tickets as the kicker to get users to share their opinions.
In this issue of Michael Carney’s Marketing Week, Apple’s iCloud and the apparent quest to create online gated communities, Groupon quickly ensconces itself on New Zealand’s e-commerce scene, what Australia’s daily deal code of conduct says about the maturing of this new commercial phenomenon, Google’s attempt at sharing and a cautionary tourism tale New Zealand would be wise to take heed of.
If there is one ‘new wave’ trend engaging retailers and businesses at the moment, it’s the burgeoning pool of knowledge, insight and digital tools that shoppers are now drawing on to shop smarter and save more. And while it’s often claimed New Zealand is 12 to 18 months behind global trends, it was staggering to learn at the recent eTail Conference in Palm Springs that retailers in the USA have more like a three to five year lead on their Kiwi counterparts.
BMW’s Summer Sale 2011 campaign by DraftFCB has been awarded top spot in Yahoo! NZ’s first quarterly Digital Strategy Award.
Throughout the history of marketing, various maxims have rung true: sex sells, ‘magic’ sells and giving away free stuff sells. The incredible success of gaming, particularly online gaming, proves a new maxim: fun sells.
Aside from the number of awards its advertising has won, it’s been a fairly sorry tale for Yellow in the past few years. But, last year, in the face of some horrific finances, Yellow stumped up with a $40 million investment in the business, more sales people and a strategy that focused more heavily on digital offerings. Well, it’s just launched a new digital directory called YellowLocal.co.nz. And it’s heading down a similar hyperlocal path to that of its soon-to-launch NZ Post-run competitor Localist.
Tourism New Zealand’s 100% Pure campaign has come under renewed fire recently after our Dear Leader’s interview with Hard Talk. But as TNZ’s general manager marketing communications Justin Watson said in a recent interview with NZ Marketing, the campaign was never intended to be an environmental promise. It was about the whole experience. Recently, with the help of its agencies Razorfish and Assignment Group, it launched 100% Pure You to try and attract more ‘active considerers’ to the country and it’s just gone live with some new online trickery that’s being featured on popular German and Australian news and travel websites. See the birds, dolphins and underwater marvels here.
APN has been focusing on upping the Herald’s game in the digital and mobile space of late, and it’s done a very good job, with a well-received and award-winning iPad App and mobile site and more on the way soon. As a result of this focus, some brands in its stable have been left behind in this regard and The Listener is a prime example of that. Well, now the website has been completely redesigned by the in-house team to bring it into the modern media era. But the advertiser-funded strategy remains—for the moment, at least.
There’s a stack of digital marketing surveys coming out of the United States and Europe these days. But what’s happening in our own backyard? Well, here’s your chance to find out. If you want to gauge how your digital approach compares to that of your marketing countryfolk, complete this quick survey from the Kookmeyer Institute and you’ll get sent the full results. Click here to get amongst it.
We told you about New Zealand’s Webby Awards finalists and official honorees a while back. But we missed one out: local graphic design and interactive design studio Supply, which was nominated in the IT Hardware/Software category for the Netsafe Scam Machine.
First Brent Smart left his managing director role at Colenso BBDO for a plum posting at the BBDO mothership in San Fran. Now Adam Good is following suit, with the AIM Proximity Auckland chief executive and Clemenger Group Australasian director of digital innovation resigning from his posts to take up the role of executive vice president of Proximity Worldwide.
Last year Alt Group sent out chocolate keyboards as Christmas gifts for its clients. Pffff, chocolate keyboards, Whittaker’s probably said, because at the time it was in the middle of a lengthy mission to create the world’s first ‘chocolate website’.
You may still have to pay for the sandwich, but Subway’s latest Subcard App, which it says is the first national loyalty card available on mobile in New Zealand, means you can now do it without opening your wallet.
The MYOB Business Monitor Internet survey of more than 1000 local businesses of various sizes across New Zealand examines the wide-ranging ways businesses now use the internet. And, according to latest results, the biggest e-transformation the digital world has led to is in where Kiwi businesses now choose to advertise.
Australia’s CREATIVE magazine has swung its steel-capped boot and connected with Resn’s soft exposed junk for a third consecutive year at the Hotshop Awards, with the Wellington agency beating off stiff competition from interactive luminaries like Pusher, Three Drunk Monkeys and Whybin/TBWA/Tequila to once again take the illustrious title of best Digital and Interactive Agency in all the lands Down Under.
Everyone loves a deal. And the Great New Zealand Deal Wars have been spiced up considerably after the arrival of a few new players recently. Now Positively Wellington Tourism is kicking off WellingtonWednesday.com, a site that offers up some of the hottest tickets in town to draw attention to its events culture. But with a reverse auction format and only the cream of the Wellington crop on offer, the creators say it differs from the other deal sites on the market.
Winter is on the way and I find myself wondering about the media community’s craze with ‘premium content’ online. Industry executives are constantly debating the rate at which TV ad dollars will move to the web, but when it comes down to it, the advertising budgets can’t move in significant ways until the marketing and media communities fully understand and get what people are actually watching online.
Westpac and Colenso have been working on the Impulse Saver iPhone app for a while now and after successfully battling through the numerous technical and security issues, launched it around the same time as the earthquake with a few full page ads in the Sunday papers. Not surprisingly, the campaign was temporarily put on ice, but the cutesy banking gimmick/impressive technological innovation that, as the name implies, allows users to add some dosh to their savings account at the push a button, has gone live once again.
We New Zealanders like to think of ourselves as fairly tech-savvy bunch of early adopters, and while there is no doubt the digital realm is rapidly expanding here—both in terms of overall internet use and as an advertising medium—a study of 50 of the country’s most popular websites to see how they took advantage of interactive tools such as blogs, social media and online communities has found many of them are still stuck in the Web 1.0 era and are not doing enough to engage and interact with their customers online.
Emirates appears to have gone on a bit of a media spending spree recently and it’s been rewarded with more than just additional passengers after Starcom’s online campaign took out Yahoo!Xtra’s fourth quarter Digital Strategy Award.
IAB New Zealand’s Bolly Awards are all about showcasing and recognising great online creative and Aveeno, Metservice, Plunket, Orcon and House of Travel all popped a few Bollinger corks after claiming victory (or a ‘special mention’) in 2010. And, to help keep the local creative juices flowing, IABNZ has decided to open its doors to entries created overseas that have featured on New Zealand websites.