Browsing: online

News
Air New Zealand flies the customer friendly skies with big online overhaul
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In a recent Idealog column, David MacGregor wrote: “User experience (UX) is a central thought for marketing today. Products are just stuff. There is no shortage of replacements for yours.” When you consider that more than a third of Air New Zealand’s revenue is generated by its global websites, and nearly half the people visiting go straight to the booking search tool, UX is an especially important aspect of the increasingly digital-centric travel industry. Those figures look likely to increase, so Air New Zealand has heeded the words of the digital soothsayers and made www.airnz.co.nz more customer friendly with the most significant changes to the site’s usability in six years. 

News
Barkers goes Black in new campaign, acknowledged for e-commerce success
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Every man and his dog is trying to get a piece of the rugby pie at the moment, some officially, some not so officially. Barkers is the official formalwear supplier to the All Blacks, and to leverage its sponsorship it’s just launched the ‘Not Any’ campaign. But wait, there’s more: Barkers has also been named as the only New Zealand finalist in the Australasian Online Retail Industry Awards (ORIAs), the only awards in Australasia that recognises and rewards excellence in ecommerce retailing. 

News
Email and online video ad spend goes up, up and away in latest IAB survey
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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.

News
Digital dimes eat into analog dollars as online shopping comes of age
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The attraction of lower prices, convenience and broader product ranges is swelling the ranks of Kiwi consumers choosing to shop online, both locally and on international websites. And, according to a report on the Australian and New Zealand online shopping market published by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Frost & Sullivan, almost half of the New Zealand population will do just that in 2011, with each shopper spending an average of almost $1,400. 

News
PriceWaterhouseCoopers plugs in crystal ball, looks into media and entertainment future
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Media and entertainment organisations need to sort out their digital strategies, according to the inaugural Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2011-2015 report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers. But, as always, it’s a matter of figuring out new ways to turn a profit online, something that will require traditional media organisations to ‘shed conservatism’ if they hope to get with the digital times.

News
Super smart or super stupid? Super Liquor and Tangible launch unorthodox new brand-funded website
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Anyone who’s had the pleasure of working on a custom publication will understand there are certain promotional objectives that usually need to be met and plenty of hoops that need to be jumped through in an effort to please the client. But Super Liquor has taken a rather unique approach to this concept with its latest marketing initiative, a website called Super 10 that has been created in conjunction with Tangible Media and &Some over several months and aims to “save the world from work” with ten weekly nuggets of online interestingness.

News
Online ad spend feels effects of economic malaise, but continues on upward trajectory
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The IAB and its main protagonists have become quite accustomed to putting out press releases trumpeting rising online ad spend over the past few years. And, despite an expected decrease for the first quarter of 2011 in comparison to Q4 2010 as a result of the earthquake and generally unfavourable economic conditions, the worm is still heading swiftly upwards, with a 20 percent year-on-year increase and a total haul of $68 million, up from $26 million in Q1 2007. 

News
IABNZ lets foreigners play in Bolly Awards sandpit
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IAB New Zealand’s Bolly Awards are all about showcasing and recognising great online creative and Aveeno, Metservice, Plunket, Orcon and House of Travel all popped a few Bollinger corks after claiming victory (or a ‘special mention’) in 2010. And, to help keep the local creative juices flowing, IABNZ has decided to open its doors to entries created overseas that have featured on New Zealand websites.

News
Online juggernaut rolls on, gives radio and magazines the evils
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PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive Advertising Bureau have released the advertising spend figures for Q4 2010, and they make for pretty damn good e-reading if you’re in the digital biz, with a total of $71.11 million for the quarter, up from $67.93m in Q3 and up 26 percent year-on-year. Total spend was $257 million, up 20 percent from 2009 ($214 million) and up 33 percent on 2008 ($193 million).

News
To infinity and beyond: e-savvy young’uns peer into crystal ball
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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.

News
Fly Buys: get your points without pants
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With Kiwi consumers increasingly heading online to do their buying, Loyalty New Zealand has added another five e-tailers to its Fly Buys e-stores list, which brings the total to 23 after the service was launched late last year. 

News
The digital decade: Google AdWords blows out ten candles
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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. 

News
Legend of the SEEK: Helen Souness on knitting, testing and risk-taking
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Helen Souness is the Kiwi marketing director responsible for managing SEEK, the hugely successful online trans-Tasman employment brand. She’s based at the company’s Melbourne HQ but regularly returns to New Zealand to develop and test campaigns and jumped back across the ditch last week to host a series of local marketing workshops and forums for SEEK’s diverse bunch of large and small advertisers, where she provided plenty of insights around how it became a celebrated employer and consumer brand.

News
Fisher & Paykel looks inside to showcase its innovative streak
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Listen to any social media evangelist yabber on for a few minutes and you’re likely to hear the words honesty, authenticity and openness mentioned. The thing many of them seem to overlook is the fact that as long as there is competition, many companies will presumably continue to be dishonest, fake and secretive. After all, it’s what business was originally founded on (oh, and greed). There are exceptions, of course, and, to be fair, the rise of social media has forced a number of previously PR-driven, corporate speaky companies to get real with their customers. Which is a very roundabout way of getting to Fisher & Paykel’s new campaign, Inside Stories, a feelgood marketing initiative that aims to show what really goes on behind the scenes with stories that are told through the eyes of its staff, rather than through its appliances.

Opinion
If the shoe fits, share it
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Michael Fox set up online shoe company ‘Shoes of Prey’ after leaving Google in April 2009. Like many others, he believed he had a compelling business idea: to sell customisable women’s shoes and do it entirely online. And to level out the playing field against all the major retailers, Fox crafted a way of creating huge online buzz.

News
TV vs online: who’s winning the best bang for buck battle?
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While the anatomy of TVC and online advertising mediums has been much discussed, a direct comparison of advertiser value is more elusive. But with so much video now consumed online (and online content consumed via TV and other screens) and more advertisers placing TVCs there, directly comparing the value of each medium comes into question. So, which one offers the best bang for buck? And how does one go about comparing value?

News
Put that in your Fyfe and smoke it
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The editorial in last week’s Listener, ‘Turbulence Ahead’, was based around Air New Zealand’s proposed trans-Tasman allegiance with Virgin Blue and how it seemed as though the national carrier was on its way to becoming a budget airline, which, according to the writer, contradicted the ‘premium carrier’ tag it was using in its marketing. Turns out chief executive Rob Fyfe was so incensed by the article that he felt the need to respond on camera in an effort to draw attention to the facts.

News
The internet: it’s popular
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In case you hadn’t noticed, that digital internet thingee has become relatively popular of late. And the second bi-annual survey by AUT’s institute for culture, discourse and communication (ICDC), along with a few other esteemed research outfits, have offered up a range of percentages to prove it. 

News
TVNZ to NZ Herald: “Good on ya’, mates”
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The geeks inherited the Earth (well, the StopPress comment wall) after the nzherald.co.nz announced a “strategic change in direction by moving away from page impressions as a predominant measure of a site’s success and towards metrics that provide greater transparency to advertisers”. The comments flowed, the debate raged and the acronyms came thick and fast. A few doubts were raised about the motivations behind the site’s new approach to measurement, but the Herald also had plenty of friends, including a few in high places, like the national broadcaster.

News
Words and images used to explain things
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Unless you’re scared of large, uninterrupted blocks of text, why would you read a story about one boring thing, when you could read a story that deals with a whole range of exciting things? That’s right, you wouldn’t. Or would you?

Opinion
The curse of the foreign eyeballs
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Here at StopPress we get our fair share of disgruntled murmurings about, well, lots of things really. Just recently someone approached us about some alleged dodgy online advertising practices and our ears pricked up. The source wished to remain anonymous but claims online media agencies are placing ads on websites that are not necessarily being viewed and accessed by the target demographic for those ads, yet clients are still paying for these ‘foreign eyeballs’.

Opinion
TradeMe: now with Spam
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Hey, look, it’s the newish incarnation of eBuzz from Marketing Week, and it’s a weekly melange of digital marketing news that will be of interest and relevance to Kiwis. Facebook, Twitter, TradeMe and the Anti-Spam Law: what’s the dilly? Social media: called to account Google gets buzzed Where do Kiwis shop online?

News
First Rate finds search engine soul mate
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Search marketing agency First Rate, the first Google Analytics accredited company in New Zealand, has been appointed as the exclusive licensee in New Zealand and Australia of the search engine marketing (SEM) technology SearchIgnite.

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