As media agencies strive to reinvent themselves, FCB Media’s Rufus Chuter says they need to remember the unspoken power of brand behaviour—and their role in brand building.
Since taking over as the chief executive of APN New Zealand in May, Jane Hastings has been pulling together the discrete threads that make up the conglomerate in an effort to create a seamless entity that can be used to deliver commercial partners’ messages across all the available media properties. And all new things require a name, so for this reason APN sent out a release this morning saying that its print, radio, digital and e-commerce brands will from now on be unified under the moniker NZME (pronounced ‘en zed me’), which stands for New Zealand Media and Entertainment.
In an effort to be the first to jump on a hot new story, more and more media outlets are failing to do one of the most necessary tasks: fact checking.
In an age where click-hungry online publishers are looking for their next hit, a celebrity death is basically manna from heaven. Philip Seymour Hoffman was the last major case (The Sydney Daily Telegraph got a telling off for this headline). And Robin Williams was found dead in his house this morning, so, unsurprisingly, the story has been dominating many of the world’s major news websites. So is it a case of a bottom-feeding media doing everything it can to increase its audience, or a concerned media attempting to offer a fitting tribute? Or both?
With the emergence of channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, the role of the traditional media agency is being challenged, changing and by some predicted to crumble completely. ZenithOptimedia’s business director Alex Lawson questions whether we still need a media agencies when everything can go out digitally and for free.
The first-ever Beacon Awards took place last night at the Viaduct Events Centre in front of a capacity crowd, and it was FCB Media that got by far the most exercise, with independent MBM winning agency of the year, MediaWorks TV winning media brand of the year, Maritime New Zealand taking client of the year and Nielsen’s Claire Harris accepting the inspiring individual award.
Following a competitive pitch involving two other agencies, Carat has been awarded the media planning and buying business for Barfoot & Thompson. But that silver lining comes with a fairly big cloud, because Dick Smith has left the Carat building.
It’s the height of TV promo season, as evidenced by the recent launch of campaigns for The Great Food Race and MasterChef NZ. And, as the major news and current affairs shows return to air for 2013—and one new show announces its arrival—here’s what they’re doing to drum up some interest.
For most New Zealanders, there’s been a high rate of food consumption over the past few months. And the nation’s broadcasters are hoping there will be plenty of food-related TV consumed this year as well, with TVNZ’s MasterChef NZ making a few changes to its format and MediaWorks hoping for big things with its new show The Great Food Race.
The shift to digital has disrupted many industries, but news media has been one of the most badly affected. So what are the options? And are any local publishers making money online? Sim Ahmed investigates.
TVNZ’s new current affairs show Seven Sharp got off to fairly shaky start. So 18 weeks in, how is it holding up? And what has its arrival meant for the 7pm ratings? PLUS: Comment from TVNZ’s new HONCA John Gillespie.
From the joy of winning gold at the Olympics to the tension of a high-profile murder trial and everything inbetween, a lot can happen in a year. And journalists of all stripes are there to tell those stories, as evidenced by this video, which was created by Web Vision and News Works and kicked off last week’s Canon Media Awards.
For years, pessimistic pundits have been talking about the death of TV. But TV viewership is still as strong as ever, and ad revenue is standing fairly firm. One thing that has definitely changed, however, is the integration of brands into programming and the ability of social media to light fires underneath content, as evidenced most recently by the launch of the X Factor NZ—and the way broadcasters are now working more closely with marketers and creative agencies to come up with original branded content ideas.
A record 1,389 entries encompassing more than 7000 pieces of work made up this year’s Canon Media Awards nominees. The full list of finalists is available on the Canon website in an excruciating and drop down-laden format. We’ve raked through the muck to organise the list below, for which surely StopPress will be nominated for next year’s Best Innovation in Multimedia category.
There have been plenty of changes at APN NZ of late, with the relaunch of the Herald last year and restructures of both the editorial and sales and marketing teams. And now the Herald on Sunday, the country’s best performing newspaper, is getting its turn with what editor Bryce Johns calls “a complete revamp of the paper’s look and feel, and improved content mix”.
TVNZ is currently revelling in some massive numbers for New Zealand’s Got Talent, which went from an average 5+ audience of 935,000 in its first episode to 975,000 last night. It’s got another ratings tiger by the tail with My Kitchen Rules on TV2 and, in an effort to emphasise that it is less like a simple cooking programme and more like a character-driven, drama-filled reality show, it developed a campaign in conjunction with Contagion based around the idea that ‘Some things don’t mix’.
Following on from the recent news that Carat took the Sovereign Insurance account off OMD without a pitch, the agency has further bolstered its client list after being appointed to manage strategy and media buying for Bendon brands like Lovable, Elle MacPherson Intimates, MacPherson Men, Davenport, Pleasure State and Stella McCartney Lingerie across New Zealand.
The Block is going off in Australia at the moment as it reaches the final stages of the current season, and MediaWorks is doing its best to ensure the same thing happens for the first season of the New Zealand version, launching a full-scale marketing assault created by the inhouse team that’s been pretty difficult to miss.
News of three senior defections at Fairfax in Australia surfaced yesterday, following on from last week’s news that it planned to cut 1,900 jobs—or around 20 percent of its staff—as part of a restructure aimed at facing up to the challenges of digital publishing. News Ltd is also set to cull staff, although it has said the number is “significantly less” than Fairfax (its own press appears to be looking on the bright side of that decision). And while New Zealand’s newspaper biz is still doing it tough at the moment, Fairfax NZ chief executive Allen Williams told the NBR it was a “case of two different markets, in two different timeframes”, so going tabloid and putting up paywalls wasn’t on the agenda–yet. Add in the Leveson enquiry in the UK and it’s tough out there in media land, so it was interesting to see the results of the 5th annual Oriella Digital Journalism Study, which showed the world’s media were cautiously upbeat despite continued uncertainty in the global economy and “digital technologies have affected the practice of journalism less markedly in New Zealand” than elsewhere.
ZenithOptimedia has once again gazed into its crystal ball and released its global adspend forecasts, including predictions for the New Zealand media marketplace. And both the global and local trends make for interesting reading.
New Zealand’s largest life insurer Sovereign, which is part of the ASB group of companies, has appointed Carat to manage its media strategy and buying, taking the account from OMD without a pitch.
The switch is about to get turned off on TVNZ7 this month, but one of the channel’s best and most popular shows, Media7, has been kept alive after NZ on Air gave it funding and MediaWorks agreed to screen it.
Over 2.6 million New Zealanders tuned in to watch series three of MasterChef New Zealand, with an average 590,000 Kiwis aged five-plus watching every week making for a nine percent increase on season two and a 14 percent increase on season one. And the producers have had to clear up some confusion when a bit of social media Chinese whispering took hold after some unmentioned goings on in the final came to viewers’ attention.
The buzz about mobility just keeps getting louder but many clients are still working out what the rapid uptake of the technology means for their business and how they can use it to their advantage. So out-of-home media company Eye is aiming to make things a bit easier for them and get their content onto consumers’ phones with the new technology-agnostic Amplify platform, “the world’s largest mobile enabled digital out-of-home network”.
A total of 225 entries were received across 13 categories for the 2012 edition of the Magazine Awards. And after the judges had their wicked way with them all, they ended up choosing 144 finalists. Some category finalists will be announced at the Gala Awards Dinner on June 28.
Continuing Tangible Media’s strategy of special issues and brand extensions seen with the likes of NZ Weddings Planner, Everyday Dish and NZ Rugby World’s First XV, next in line is the hunting market.
Not surprisingly, Fairfax’s proposal to outsource 66 Australian editorial jobs, including some sub-editing, to New Zealand didn’t go down too well with its staff or the national journalists’ union and led to a 36 hour unprotected strike among staff from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review, The Sunday Age, The Sun Herald, the Canberra Times, the Newcastle Herald and Wollongong Illawarra Mercury that finished this morning. News Ltd also recently announced the possibility of up to 400 editorial jobs getting the chop and while the local industry reported some pretty solid numbers recently, some of the big Aussie mastheads are thought to have had their biggest ever drops in circulation in March, so it’s obviously a tough time to be in the newspaper game, both for journos and for publishers. But as if all this wasn’t enough, an article we read recently in Wired shows editorial staff might have another fight on their hands due to the rise of robot reporters, which the chief of pretty frickin’ amazing US company Narrative Science has predicted will be writing 90 percent of the news in 15 years. Let’s hope Gina Rinehart doesn’t get wind of this technology. We demand another strike. Hasn’t anyone seen I, Robot?
MediaWorks TV has confirmed it will be not be renewing its output deal with CBS and is instead shifting the funds into the creation of local content. And Sky’s free-to-air channel Prime has taken over the rights and signed up for its first ever output deal.
Newspapers, according to the latest readership and circulation figures, are still holding on and, in some rare cases, adding readers. So why, when the commonly held view is that newspapers are dead—or at least dying—does New Zealand appear to be bucking an international trend?
After the defection of TVNZ’s ex-head of sales and marketing Paul Maher to MediaWorks recently, general manager of media solutions Jeremy O’Brien has taken over half of that role and been announced as the new head of sales.