You can tell by the particularly un-Kiwi job title on Ross Howard’s business card (Senior Vice President of Product & Design) that BuzzDial, the fledgling tech start-up he co-founded with similarly accomplished digital media bods Tom Cotter and Geoff Devereux, is looking much further afield than the small local market. And with M-Com’s Adam Clark coming on board as chairman, Stephen Tindall’s K1W1 fund investing in the business and positive responses to the product from a number of global broadcasters, it seems to be off to a pretty good start.
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In November last year, McDonald’s launched New Zealand’s version of the ‘Our food, Your Questions’ campaign that proved so successful in Canada. As the questions have poured in over the last few months, McDonald’s has proceeded to answer them and the resultant correspondence has been collated on a website specially dedicated to the campaign.
The New Zealand student team behind a new social media platform based on horizontal scrolling hope it will be a platform for brands — and achieve the right balance between functionality and aesthetics.
Facebook is dominating Kiwi social media use, not just in the number of New Zealanders using the network, but also in the amount of time spent dwelling on the activity. The social network’s local dwell time far outpaces the next best performing channel here, Reddit.
ASB’s Like Loan promotion, where Facebook fans determine how low its home loan borrowing rate will go, is back for a second round. This time live TVCs, banners and radio streams have joined the mix as the bank tries to draw participants into a conversation.
Facebook has challenged Kiwi creatives to come up with a three month campaign that makes the most of the social network’s native functionality. That means looking past apps to newsfeed posts rich with imagery and video, according to the brief.
Contact Energy and one its agencies, JWT, are diverting from their traditional audience focus with promotions based around events. A Twitter contest to help decide the People’s Choice winner at this year’s Fringe Festival is aimed squarely at a youth demographic.
To attract South American students (and the unsubsidised fees that come with them), Education New Zealand has arranged for Otago Polytechnic to host a pair of popular Brazilian bloggers for several weeks. Caio Komatsu and Luana Mazotti, both from Sao Paolo, are the founders of the blogs Fail Wars and Puro Veneno, which are said to reach a combined audience of approximately five million people. And the organisers of the campaign believe that the pair’s keyboard-tapping hobby could help to spread Latin American awareness of New Zealand, not only as a tourist destination but also as a great place to study.
Vodafone is giving Snapchat a baptism of fire among students at Canterbury and Otago University orientation weeks. It’s a targeted test that will decide whether the telco uses the messaging platform for future promotions.
Coca-Cola shows it really does have a sense of humour — and is about more than sugar and caffeine — with a new video suggesting devices usually used for dogs could cure our social media compulsions.
What is Big Data? Well, if you believe a quote that’s been doing the rounds for a few years now and seems to be popular on the conference circuit, it’s exactly like teenage sex.
Birdseye UK is set to create food madness with the very social Mashtags, potatoes transformed into @ symbols, smiley emoticons and hashtags. Seems the humble french fry was just too straight (or crinkled) for the discerning digital generation.
BNZ is capitalising on the increasing blur between professional and personal use of social media, arming staff to get social on its behalf. That’s evident in its current bid to promote the YouMoney tool with a road trip to university campuses.
With digital an established part of the marketing mix, 2014 is the year brands should be targeting niche audiences more than ever, says Hotwire and 33 Digital’s Trends Report. And social media is one area where the explosion of channels has prompted marketers to think ‘digital by design’.
Air New Zealand is reconsidering its approach to an initiative seeking volunteers to write for The Flying Social Network after a Twitter backlash, and is considering compensation it could offer to those who make contributions.
We live in an era of social media-inspired showing off, says Theresa Clifford. So should brands be encouraging it, or fighting against it?
More than 180,000 visitors have signed up for Seek’s Facebook contest, a twist on the dated genre of the inspirational poster. The Reinspiration Project asks entrants to make new versions for the social channel instead of the office wall.
In an age where social media offers a platform where consumers can talk about anything they want, to virtually whoever they want, listening to (and acting on) the responses—the good, the bad and the ugly—is key to upping your customer retention rates, reducing churn and getting better bang for your marketing buck, says Mat Wylie.
Another year, and by now you probably think you have a pretty good understanding of social media. Perhaps so. Then you won’t mind if we put that to the test, will you? So strap yourself in as Michael Carney takes you on a journey through what you need to know as we plunge into 2014.
Pinterest is used by more than five percent of Kiwis. The demographic that uses the social channel is a tough one to market to, says Duncan Jones, but if you are in the right industry it can be an extremely lucrative one.
Jucy is rewarding hopeless romantics for their creative and quirky displays of public affection on social media. It’s launched a competition that offers a week of glamping, the sophisticate’s version of what traditionalists used to know as camping.
It’s that time of year again, when lists and predictions come spewing forth. So here’s Bka Interactive’s chief executive Barb Anderson on the digital trends she sees prevailing and developing in 2014.
Growing numbers of Kiwis are using social media to share job opportunities and secure new work, according to a recent Kelly Workforce Index survey of more than 3500 Kiwis. And employers should know staff expect to be able to use company tech to get social.
ASB is on another crusade for Facebook likes, this time with a competition to push up the value of a True Rewards dollar prize pool and give it away. It’s the reverse of the bank’s earlier Facebook app that pushed home loan rates down.
McDonald’s New Zealand has just launched the ‘Our food, Your Questions’ campaign, which allows members of the public to send in questions on any topics related to the food on the menu. The fast-food juggernaut hopes that this will help to dispel some of the myths related to way its meals are produced.
In today’s digital world it’s not as easy to protect your reputation. That’s why mapping out an online reputation management plan can stop trouble before it happens and keep you showing your best side, says Richard Conway.
We all know the those types who are first to get online and tell us what we need to know, what to try and what they think. They’re leaders in the frenzy to be first, and it’s a trend Webby Awards managing director Claire Graves says has risks and rewards for brands.
Hark, seekers of knowledge! Only a few tickets remain for next Tuesday’s event. So get yours and avoid a lifetime of bitter regret.
If you see Beyonce in concert, but you didn’t record it on your phone, did it really happen? Jo Bennett says the earned exposure of events often surpasses the live experience and this is forcing marketers to consider the value of events/experiential as an extremely powerful tool for reach.
Steinlager recently launched a fairly brave and entertaining responsible drinking campaign called ‘Be the artist, not the canvas’ that showed some creative/violating uses for marker pens, aimed to poke fun at those who over-indulge and marked a slight change in strategy for the brand. And, as brand manager Michael Taylor says, it’s gone down a treat with the punters.