Following the events of the past few years, most media have been busy licking their wounds—and, in many cases, focusing on survival rather than growth. But, after consistently good revenue results and signs that there is more growth to come, the Kiwi digital sector has developed quite the swagger. Liz Fraser, the chair of the Interactive Advertising Bureau of New Zealand and head of MSN NZ, opines.
Late last year, up-and-coming digital agency Young & Shand asked 150 New Zealand chief executives and marketing managers about their organisations’ spending intentions and planned commitments to digital marketing in 2011. And while the results showed there’s no doubt Kiwi businesses see digital as an integral aspect of the marketing mix, there still appears to be an unwillingness to splash too much e-cash.
At a time when cringey Christmas e-cards and PR naffery come thick and fast, it’s nice to see something that doesn’t make you want to scratch your eyes out. The latest Stella Artois retro fest to hit New Zealand screens, ‘She is a thing of beauty’ by Mother London, is a gem. And the “customised musical e-card” viral Une Superproduction Musicale that’s been released for the festive season is too. It’s part of a digital campaign to build on Stella Artois’ heritage as a premium beer originally crafted for Christmas and the vid has a retro ice-skating theme, self-deprecatingly crappy lyrics, a weird looking frontman and a personalised message from the sender to the recipient that can be sent via email or Facebook. Check it out here. We can only hope a southern hemisphere version is made next year.
It calls itself “the world’s largest online newsstand” and “the world’s premier magazine reader for iPad” and now Zinio New Zealand is offering digital versions of some of the country’s top selling magazines for just 99c during December. And, to sweeten this Christmas deal, you can get up to 25 percent off annual subscriptions from selected titles and the first 500 users to register and purchase a selected subscription in December will also go into the draw to win an iPad. Even if you aren’t trendy enough to have an iPad, the mags on offer can still be read on boring old PCs and Macs. Check out the magazines on offer here.
It’s that time of year again, when journalists and editors who can see the Christmas lights at the end of the tunnel start compiling end of year lists on a vast array of topics. StopPress is even lazier than that, however, because we haven’t created our own (yet) and instead we’ve just decided to point out lists that have already been created. Still, research suggests there’s nothing better than a good list, and these two compilations are most definitely in that category.
Those cheeky creative Wellington chappies have been in stellar promotional form this year. And in a fitting farewell to 2010, Positively Wellington Tourism’s digital marketing team and Clemenger BBDO have launched their latest trick, a digital advent calendar.
Fairfax Media has announced it will be making some sizable changes to its organisational structure in an effort to adapt and prosper in a world where convergent, digital and multi-platform media rules the day. But the New Zealand media operations, it seems, won’t really be affected.
It’s a “web-based digital asset delivery system” used by some of the world’s top agencies and publishers. And now, with the help of Dubsat, which specialises in managing and delivering digital content for the advertising and entertainment industries, Adsend has arrived in Australasia.
Back in 1989, the first threads of the World Wide Web were woven at Waikato and Victoria Universities via a router from NASA. And, for an exorbitant $5500 a month, educational institutions in New Zealand could link to the rest of the world. The first 21 years have been chronicled by Down to the Wire, a fascinating archive of our digital history made up of interviews with media experts, techsperts and commentators. And now it’s time to look at the future, launching a competition called 20:20 Foresight that asks all students and graduates aged 17 to 25 to send in their mind-boggling visions of the internet in the year 2020.
Online niche retailer Natureshop isn’t particularly well known in New Zealand. But in these modern and increasingly environmentally-conscious economic times, that doesn’t necessarily matter, because through a combination of extensive online marketing, high quality e-commerce websites and a focus on sustainability, it was named New Zealand’s fastest growing exporter, fastest growing retail or consumer products business and second-fastest growing company at the 10th annual Deloitte Fast 50 index.
The last time we heard from the Toot Group they were trying to spread the meaty truth and destroy the sausagey lies as part of a campaign for Harrington’s Sausages (in fact, the ‘Know Your Sausage’ poster made as part of the Sausage Awareness Week still hangs proudly from the StopPress walls). And now the gang is back with some more good work for The Trusty Delivery Co., a new grocery service modelled on a successful business in Australia that is aimed at busy, environmentally conscious shoppers who can’t be arsed going to the supermarket.
As the well-known Queenstown saying goes: “It’s tourist season, but, sadly, you can’t shoot them”. And to try and further increase visitors over the upcoming summer boom time, Tourism New Zealand has launched a fresh marketing offensive in China and expanded its digital campaigns in Japan, USA, Canada, UK and Germany, all of which signify a marked change of strategy following the addition of digital specialists Amnesia Razorfish to its agency roster.
The NBR gave Stuff’s digital billboard promotion a bit of grief this week after it suffered from a few technical difficulties. But the glitches have obviously been ironed out and Fairfax is now using arbitrary capitalisation to trumpet the arrival of “New Zealand’s First Interactive News Billboard” in Aotea Square in Auckland.
It’s the world’s biggest and fastest auction, it handles more micro-payments than all of the world’s stock exchanges and it was deemed fairly risky when it was launched almost exactly ten years ago, both by those responsible for coming up with it and by others. So bow down and give praise to (or, if you’re in the newspaper business, swear at) the game changing advertising system known as AdWords, a system built by a team of Google engineers and salespeople who bet big on a few core insights and won.
Trinity P3’s founder and chief ‘pitch doctor’ Darren Woolley was one of more than 30 agency management consultants and search company representatives who attended the AdForum CEO Summit in New York last week and found out where the advertising industry was heading and how the agencies were taking it there. The consultants represented more than 530 agency searches each year, or the equivalent of $9 billion in billings, from marketers around the globe looking to find agencies with the right chemistry for their needs. And here’s what he learned from the six day conflab.
The internet is celebrating its coming of age in New Zealand this year and downtothewire.co.nz, a very cool website dedicated to telling the story of a “connection that revolutionised the nation and finally laid waste to our fear of geographical remoteness” went live this morning, Monday 11 October.
Recent research shows that gaming now takes up more of people’s time online than email, video and auctions combined. It’s certainly a fast growing and deeply engaging market, but it’s still often misunderstood. And Pursuit PR is aiming to change that and help organisations apply gaming’s engaging and persuasive powers to marketing, training and social change with InGame, which director Stephen Knightly is touting as New Zealand’s first video games consultancy.
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.
Mike Walsh is what’s known as a ‘futurist’. Somewhat disappointingly, he doesn’t wear a silver boiler suit, he doesn’t employ the services of a rocket pack and he doesn’t know if the Mayans are right about the world ending in 2012. But, by focusing on nascent consumer trends in certain regions that have the potential to become mainstream everywhere else, he does know a thing or two about how the rise of the machines is completely changing the marketing game.
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.
Liz Fraser, the head of MSN New Zealand, has been elected as the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s new chairperson, taking over from the outgoing chair Michael Gregg.
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.
Matt Bale, self-proclaimed media junkie, digital zealot, part-time fictional gangster and general manager at OMD Wellington, has confirmed he will be leaving the agency in September to take on “new challenges, etc.”
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
Banner ads are often criticised for being boring, cheesy, annoying, intrusive or a combination of all four. David McGregor, writing in Idealog, went as far as calling online promotional activity “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of the advertising business”. But Orcon, Special Group, Exposure and Salt Interactive have joined forces to show that very good things can happen when the utility of the digital space is combined with the ideas of agency land.