At the recent CAANZ session ‘Who’s buying? The future of content commercialisation in NZ’, several industry commentators weighed in on whether content marketing is nothing more than an annoyance. Here’s a rundown of what Metro’s Simon Wilson, The Spinoff’s Duncan Greive, MediaWorks’ Alana O’Neill, Fairfax’s Ellen Read and former Herald editor-in-chief Tim Murphy had to say.
With banner blindness and ad-blocking software on the rise, native advertising is growing rapidly. And while there are plenty of thorny issues, Young & Shand co-founder Ben Young thinks that’s a good thing for marketers.
Australian lifestyle brand Urban List is expanding into the Auckland market and is looking to establish partnerships with businesses on this side of the ditch. The website, which was first launched in 2011 and provides content on dining, shopping, health and beauty, has grown quickly in the Australian market, attracting a following of 1.2 million unique visitors per month across Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Media agencies are increasingly using editorial tricks to spread their clients’ advertising messages. So is native advertising a con? Alex Lawson doesn’t think so.
With a total of 1.2 million subscribers across the world, the Kiwi vlogger Jamie Curry (of Jamie’s World) is one of only two New Zealanders to meet the YouTube star threshold of having more than a million subscribers. And her resonance with 13- to 24-year-olds recently caught the attention of Coca-Cola Australia, leading the drinks company to collaborate with the teen on the ‘Colour your summer’ campaign.
Back when newspapers (and, to a lesser degree, magazines) were happily floating down their rivers of gold, the church and state of editorial and sales were kept very separate. But desperate times call for what some may see as desperate measures and as publishers search for new revenue streams, many of them are increasingly offering their skills to help tell the stories of businesses. Now APN has joined that club with the launch of Brand Insight.
Niche publishers have sold their audiences based on the premise that their readers are valuable. The problem has been that this was eroded by extended audiences, interest and behavioral targeting. But native advertising allows niche publishers to sell integrated campaigns, rather than selling rapidly commoditised space, says Ben Young.
There’s been a whole heap of discussion about the rise of native advertising recently. Some see it as the future of marketing; a way to insert relevant commercial messages into editorial content. Others see it as subterfuge; the advertising equivalent of mutton dressed as lamb. John Oliver appears to be firmly in the latter camp, so, as he says in typically comical fashion, if you can insert an ad into news, why can’t you insert news into a product?
The New York Times’ Snowfall was a great example of how a major publisher can use modern tools to tell stories. And now its Brand Studio has launched what some are calling the paid-for equivalent of that project, a multi-media series on women in prison that ties in to the new season of Netflix’s Orange is the New Black.
In October last year, Getty Images entered into a partnership with BBC worldwide, which gave the stock image provider exclusive global distribution rights of the BBC Motion Gallery. And now, in an effort to illustrate what this means from a New Zealand perspective, Getty has a compiled a showreel of Kiwi footage that provides a glimpse at the nation’s cultural and historical inheritance.