While print media continues to tumble and find its footing in the digital age, online advertising is on a rocket ride to the top. According to PwC’s latest entertainment and media outlook, online advertising is expected to reach $543 million in annual revenue by 2017.
Cyber security isn’t always as exciting as watching Angelina Jolie “hack” into a mainframe, a la the 1995 hit movie Hackers. Getting the public interested and aware of online best practice is a difficult task, but one that NetSafe has tackled well with a series of videos tying in with Cyber Security Awareness Week.
The community of tech aficionados who participate on the Geekzone forums are some of the harshest critics of Telecom. It’s interesting to see then the country’s largest telco tap into this pool of switched on geeks to help design a new consumer modem it plans to sell to the wider New Zealand.
While Samsung has shot a few ads in New Zealand, the local executions have been few and far between. Colenso BBDO has done a few things for the South Korean behemoth, like Peter Bromhead drawing cartoons live on nzherald.co.nz and a virtual queue to launch the Galaxy S4. And now Barnes Catmur has given the Galaxy Note 2 the full Kiwi treatment by getting actor/director Taika Waititi to do his mad thing in an online only, long-form video called ‘State of the —ATION’.
For the first time in the New Zealand market, Fiat Chrysler Group has launched under one distribution network. And it’s promising to use its additional clout to get its Italian and American brands in front of Kiwi car buyers.
Start “Wheedling” says a bright green button in an email sent to me over the weekend. Its owner and namesake uses the verb to mean buying and selling online, but in the last six months it’s taken on a new meaning in programming circles – software that fails spectacularly.
In John Drinnan’s media column last Friday, one of his topics was the rumoured move of Saatchi & Saatchi and the Media Design School’s offices to the Wynyard Quarter’s innovation precinct. That’s not happening and a correction was printed, but it is yet to appear online.
Interactive advertising saw the largest dollar figure growth of all measured categories according to the Advertising Standards Authority’s 2012 annual turnover report.
New Zealand band The Naked and Famous uses Reddit to promote new live concert film. What started as a promotion quickly grew into a question and answer session with fans and newcomers alike.
Hobbit mania has thankfully subsided (although some embers sparked yesterday after the release of a few interesting emails). And Air New Zealand is back with another new safety video, this time featuring intrepid explorer/eater/showman Bear Grylls, who traipses around the Fiordland wilderness and helps to promote the airline’s $3 million commercial partnership with the Department of Conservation.
In the ultimate show of first world problems, one in ten New Zealanders say their offline relationships suffer because of the amount of time they fritter away online, according to a survey by Canstar Blue.
Gareth Morgan’s Cats to Go crusade has led to much gnashing of teeth from the heavy petters, a vast array of feline puns and plenty of conversation, both here and, with the story featuring on Mashable and Huffington Post, around the world. And Mammoth and Sugar & Partners have decided to hitch their ‘Warmth Lovers’ campaign to that wagon by creating a contextual online ad showing that its spokescat, Prince Nikolai Stroganov III, is already pretty happy inside.
Wellington/Amsterdam digital agency Resn is renowned for pushing the envelope online, with the likes of Face Arcade, Rhizopods or the world’s first crowd-sourced feed. But it’s not all fun, games and weirdness. There are some serious issues currently bubbling away in the halls of power around internet freedom, so, along with a couple of its fellow digital dab hands rehabstudio and Stinkdigital, it has created a site that aims to get the internet to stand up for itself by threatening to take away the thing it loves most: a kitten.
Around one year ago, Mi9’s Dan Robertson put his hand up to be a representative of the ‘dark side’ on the ASA complaints board. To his surprise, that label turned out to be bang on, with advertising that would in most cases generate complaints in other mediums often flying imperiously online. And, as online advertising takes a bigger slice of the pie, he thinks that needs to change.
After almost two years of consultation and development, Nielsen has launched its new online audience measurement solution, Nielsen Online Ratings, which measures people rather than computers and claims to paint a more accurate picture of the whole online consumer and digital universe. But while the new system has already been endorsed as the official measurement currency by the Australian IAB, that’s not the case in New Zealand.
With the massive changes currently taking place in the Australian publishing scene at the moment and the steady move of readers from print to digital around the world, the newspaper business is at a crossroads. So what is the rationale behind the Herald’s change to tabloid? Will New Zealand readers soon be paying for online content? And how is APN preparing for the future? We chat with APN’s chief executive Martin Simons.
New domains including .app, .blog, .cloud, foo, .lol, .mail and .sucks could soon be part of the fabric of the internet. And today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the governing body of the domain name system, opened up about the nearly 2,000 applications it received for new domain extensions.
The old adage says reputations take a lifetime to build and only 15 minutes to destroy. And with the emergence of social media and online reviews, never has this saying rung truer for our travel and hospitality industries.
With customers embracing the internet and social media in ever-increasing numbers (the Banking Ombudsman has just released a new guide for online banking), Canstar has embarked on its first review of the New Zealand online banking market and ASB, a bank renowned for its digital chops and social focus, has been named the best of the lot.
The second Engaged Web in New Zealand Report, which saw Intergen assess the five most visited New Zealand websites from ten different sectors to measure their level of customer engagement, has just been released, with the highlights being that 90 percent of websites increased their level of engagement since last year, companies are focusing less on the primary corporate websites, New Zealand’s news and media websites are the most engaging and the shopping and classifieds, and banking and finance sectors have made the biggest improvement.
Total online advertising spend in New Zealand for Q1 2012 totalled $79 million, up $11 million year-on year. But that figure is down almost $10 million on Q3 2011. And over on TV, total television advertising revenue for the March quarter rose four percent to $125 million, up $4 million on the first quarter of 2011.
The National Business Review is shaking up its online subscription model by offering individual companies and all their staff a flat-rate fee of of $249+GST per quarter to gain access to its online content.
In late 2010, FMG shacked up with Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington, embarked on a bit of a brand refresh and ramped up its advertising, both to position itself as risk advice specialists with an in-depth understanding of the unique issues New Zealand farmers face, but also to try and move it further into the mainstream insurance market. And it’s taken a fairly novel, and some might say fairly un-rural approach to attract customers: a YouTube channel that was launched mid last year.
The results of a survey into value perceptions of some of New Zealand’s leading brands were released yesterday at Westfield’s Retail Breakfast Seminar in Auckland. And Pak ‘N’ Save was deemed to be the best value brand in the country, followed by TradeMe, Bunnings and Mitre 10.
The online realm is a rather fluid and exciting space at the moment. Companies large and small are chopping, changing and innovating in the quest to find the most effective model and close the gap between eyeball numbers and ad dollars. And MSN, with its parent company ninemsn, is set to embark on some big changes, with a new corporate umbrella brand called Mi9 that will encompass all of its brands, new ad exchange technology that basically creates a stock-market for online inventory, an increased focus on behaviourial targeting and a renewed effort to bump up online news numbers with a portal overhaul.
Google released its take on the modern consumer consideration process recently and called it the Zero Moment of Truth. And, judging by the latest online advertising revenue figures for New Zealand, marketers are paying attention, with search and directories cash rising by 53 percent year on year.
New Zealand’s passion for the RWC has already been shown through the massive TV ratings. And, not surprisingly, the major online publishers are also sitting pretty, with Nielsen Market Intelligence data showing the aggregate average daily unique browser numbers for all New Zealand websites in the sports category in September increasing by 58 percent to 332,837 compared to September 2010 (210,408) and 62 percent compared to March this year (205,688).
Gamification, the use of game concepts to engage users, may be the new buzzword in digital marketing, but if you’re hoping to ride the merry wave to the top, marketers need to do their homework first.
As a kid, I used to love playing Where’s Wally (although in Germany we’d call it Where’s Walter). But every now and again, I just couldn’t find that red-striped shirt, hat and nerdy glasses. It would drive me crazy. I knew he was there somewhere on that jam-packed beach, but I just couldn’t see him. Today I don’t play Where’s Wally anymore. But every so often I play a variation of it: ‘Where’s the login’ or ‘Where’s the email address’ or ‘Where’s the link’. And just as back in the Wally-days, it can get very frustrating.
We’ve seen Rob Fyfe and various staff prancing about in the nude, the puerile puppet of indeterminate provenance and the All Blacks and Richard Simmons in the safety videos. And now we welcome Mason & Jason, “the truly inseparable sheep twins”.