Whenever large entities merge, there is generally an expectation from those outside the business—and often from those investing in it—that things will change faster than they practically can. NZME’s group director digital Laura Maxwell-Hansen says that’s certainly the case at the moment as it attempts to bring “three businesses [APN, TRN and GrabOne] that have three different everythings” together, but she says its digital strategy is beginning to bear fruit, with audience numbers on the up and revenue growing ahead of the market.
Browsing: Laura Maxwell-Hansen
Changes at NZME, Bauer, TVNZ, Omnicom Media Group, bFM and The Breeze.
In keeping with an ongoing tradition, a few industry players gave us their take on the year for our annual opinion harvest. Here’s what Laura Maxwell-Hansen, the group director of digital media at NZME, thought about 2014.
At an ad-hoc conference held this morning at Ponsonby Central, TRN announced several significant changes to its offering. The key announcements, delivered via TRN’s chief executive Jane Hastings, chief content officer Dean Buchanan and commercial director Laura Maxwell-Hansen, were presented as part of the overarching ‘Change is Now’ campaign, which will serve to promote all the updates over coming months. In addition to rebranding Classic Hits, TRN has also invested in a multimedia studio and shuffled its staff.
A new management structure at Yahoo New Zealand, Contact and Triathlon NZ part ways, PRINZ announces a life member and a few fellows, MYOB names new public affairs manager, ANZ acknowledged again for the National Bank merger, Beyond Wen wins Images and Sound film prize and Purple Sherbert adds some more fizz.
DraftFCB has already won a fair swag of awards for its Driving Dogs campaign, and the accolades keep flowing, with the most recent addition being the Q4 Yahoo Digital Strategy Award.
Once again, online advertising continued its steady rise in New Zealand in 2012, hitting its high water mark in the last quarter. And as the head of Yahoo! New Zealand (which recently launched its year-in-the-making new homepage and mobile site) and the new chair of the local Internet Advertising Bureau, Laura Maxwell-Hansen is well placed to see where it’s heading next. Here’s her take on 2012.
Auckland agency Contagion has taken out the latest Yahoo! Digital Strategy Award for its ‘Not Quite As Kiwi As’ campaign for New Zealand snack brand Tasti.
In the quickly evolving digital sphere, it’s pretty tough to keep up. And while Yahoo! New Zealand has been tweaking its homepage regularly over the years in order to do just that, it hasn’t made any major changes since 2008. But now, after a year-long project, it’s launched its new, simplified, longer and de-cluttered version.
Interactive ad revenue figures have been steadily heading upwards over the past few years in New Zealand and in the latest round of figures, the sector hit its highest ever level, with total advertising spend in Q3, 2012 of $94 million, an increase of three percent from the last quarter and an increase of five percent year-on-year. But, as you’d expect in such a rapidly developing industry, there are still a few issues to contend with, including a fall in display advertising, the use of ad blocking software and discussions around the appropriate methodology for collecting revenue data.
Yahoo! New Zealand has announced a three-year sponsorship of Netball New Zealand and the Silver Ferns. And the good news doesn’t stop there for the sport, because Kia has switched its sponsorship focus from tennis and signed up as the naming rights sponsor for the Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic.
Yahoo! New Zealand’s inaugural Digital Stars Awards have been on the hunt for the country’s best emerging digital media talent and, after scrutinising 18 savvy entries, the list has been narrowed down and the five finalists revealed, representing a decent cross-section of Kiwi agencies.
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.
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.
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.
PHDIQ wins Yahoo! New Zealand Digital Strategy Award, and in doing so, finally knocks Draft FCB off its winning streak.
Yahoo! NZ and PriceMe are combining forces this Christmas to launch a new comparison shopping service. The co-branded Yahoo! PriceMe site goes live on December 1 and can be accessed at deals.yahoo.co.nz or via Yahoo! NZ.
Universal McCann’s Maybelline Baby Lips campaign has taken out the second quarter of Yahoo! New Zealand’s Digital Strategy Award.
Online spending always seems to be on the up every time the IAB releases its quarterly year-on-year ad revenue reports. Figures released for Q2 are no exception with total online advertising spend in Q2 up 19.46 percent to $84.15million. In fact, IABNZ chair and general manager of MSN New Zealand Liz Fraser is feeling so optimistic, she’s already predicting 2011 will experience an overall growth of approximately 20 percent.
BMW’s Summer Sale 2011 campaign by DraftFCB has been awarded top spot in Yahoo! NZ’s first quarterly Digital Strategy Award.
Starcom recently snatched fourth quarter victory at the Yahoo!Xtra Digital Strategy Awards, and its Emirates Luxury campaign was deemed good enough to beat out the the other three quarterly contenders—MEC with its Caltex with Techron campaign, joint team Gladeye and Zed Digital with the House of Travel mixandmatcher and Spark PHDIQ with its Unilever Sunsilk Co-creations campaign—for the overall 2010 title.
Spark PHDIQ has taken out the third quarter round of the Yahoo!Xtra Digital Strategy Awards for its Unilever Sunsilk Co-creations campaign, which the judges—Yahoo!Xtra’s Laura Maxwell-Hansen, Mohawk Media’s Helen Baxter and guest judge Gavin Pook, Red Bull’s marketing manager—felt succeeded in re-launching the brand through a range of digital channels and firmly established it as an expert in hair care.
Once again, the digital folk are cackling with glee after online advertising expenditure figures for the third quarter of 2010 from the Interactive Advertising Bureau of New Zealand (IABNZ) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) showed that a total of $67.93m went through the gates, up $4.83m on the last quarter and up nearly 18 percent year on year.
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.