Facebook has appointed experienced media man Spencer Bailey as the head of the New Zealand arm of the business. The appointment of Bailey brings an end to Stephen Scheeler’s stint as the acting head of Facebook New Zealand, and this sees Scheeler return to his previous role of head of retail and automotive for both Australia and New Zealand.
We asked some stalwarts a simple question. Here’s what Stephen Scheeler, head of Facebook New Zealand, had to say.
Every day, around two million Kiwis log onto Facebook to scroll down their newsfeeds to see what is happening in their lives. And according to Stephen Scheeler, the company’s head of New Zealand, these aren’t sporadic single visits because the average user peruses the site around 15 times in a single day. “For those two million Kiwis on Facebook, about 12 percent of their media consumption is Facebook,” says Scheeler. “Remember, eight years ago it was zero. So this has been a massive shift.” The rapid migration of audiences into the digital realm is by no means surprising, but such statistics are increasingly serving as strong impetus for brands to shift their commercial messaging to where the eyes are. So we take a look at how brands are collaborating with the social media juggernaut to spread their commercial messages.
Interactive is an expanding piece of the ad spend pie here and around the world, and Magna Global has predicted it will overtake TV in the US by 2017. Facebook is a big part of that ecosystem and it reckons it can offer both scale and granularity. So we caught up with Facebook head of New Zealand Stephen Scheeler to find out what’s happening here and how House of Travel has harnessed the social network and is moving away from traditional media.