As the Vice New Zealand team gear up to celebrate Viceland’s first year on Sky and all the work that’s been put in to have local stories heard on Vice, we talk to head of content Frances Morton about finding untold stories, the sustainability of clickbait, agility in a competitive media environment and what’s in store in the future.
This week, TVNZ’s New Blood initiative went live, as more than 20 pieces of short-form content found a home on TVNZ.co.nz, YouTube and Facebook.
.jpg?resize=312%2C198&ssl=1 "StopPress Podcast #9: Cameron Death, WatchMe")
It’s an ever evolving media world and NZME has been doing just that with the creation of WatchMe to deliver short-form video. Two years on, we sit down with the head of video, Cameron Death, to see how the strategy has changed and where it’s going with the future.
It’s been just over a year since NZME launched the NZ Herald Focus brand and now, it’s celebrating a win at the International News Media Association (INMA) World Congress in New York. With the award recognising how the new brand has tapped into a new audience for NZ Herald, we speak to managing editor Shayne Currie about how it’s managed to do that and why news video is so important.
Last night, in a Freeman’s Bay bar, Brandworld celebrated 20 years in business with its staff, clients, friends and many glasses of wine. Alongside a trip down memory lane with a few speeches by managing director Richard Stevens and founder Bill Peake, it farewelled industry legend John MacDonald, by sharing his successes and bad calls, and remembered its former executive director Mike O’Sullivan, whose passing last year was felt across the industry. We chat to Stevens about the agency’s approach to content marketing and its enduring work.
Buying content is easy. But getting viewers to tune in so you can make money from it is a whole other channel. We chat to TVNZ’s Jeff Latch and Andrew Shaw about how they’re planning to address the latter part of this equation.
Opt-in mobile ad serving platform Postr has been pretty busy of late. After launching Skinny Collect late last year, it’s now launched a lock-screen video format, doubled its subscribers in the past six months and is expanding into South East Asia.
NZ On Air is providing funding to four projects covering seven regions throughout New Zealand after finding regional news content wasn’t reaching intended audiences in many regions.
Last year Fairfax underwent some massive changes, restructuring its editorial staff into local teams and specialist areas, shifting a large part of the focus away from newspapers and over to the digital realm. This emphasis on digital seems to have paid off, as Stuff managed to grow its audience and has now used it to leverage a partnership deal with TVNZ, where Stuff readers will be able to view One News video from the site as of Thursday, which might mean more time spent on the site and in return TVNZ gets a taste of Stuff’s audience.
Whittaker’s paid its respects yesterday to those who fell at Gallipoli by creating a quirky animated video announcing its intention to send chocolate to every RSA in the country.
Following a marathon meeting with staff today, NZ Herald managing editor Shayne Currie has confirmed that NZME has outlined a proposal to restructure its business yet again. And this time possibly eight roles will be affected by the changes.
Online ad viewability has long been an issue for publishers, with it being difficult to determine exactly how many people are actually viewing the ads served on a web page. And with interactive advertising spend hitting the $800 million mark this year, it seems more important than ever that advertisers know they’re getting the eyeballs they’re paying for. So, in response to the issue, MediaWorks has taken action, announcing today it’s guaranteeing all of its banner ads will be 100 percent viewable from 1 April, using Google’s DoubleClick product. We chat to MediaWorks head of digital sales and ad strategy John-Paul Randall about the change in functionality as well as the publisher’s other new function, which allows unblockable video ads to run across all platforms.
NZME is putting its “state-of-the-art” newsroom to use, launching a video news show next month dubbed NZ Herald Focus, hosted by some well-known media personalities. We chat to managing editor Shayne Currie about the show’s content, the strategy behind it and the decision to step into an already crowded space.
The StopPress editorial team recently took a tour of the new NZME offices and chatted to the NZ Herald’s managing editor Shayne Currie, editor Murray Kirkness and NZME digital audience engagement general manager Lauren Hopwood about why the move made sense.
Robbie Spargo, responsible for branded short-form content on TVNZ OnDemand, pinpoints five digital video trends that marketers should be looking at in 2016.
Those who blurt out spoilers without considering the consequences of their actions have become widely reviled species that are simply met with groans and sighs of disgust from those in their company. And the new Netflix spot educates viewers on the etiquette that viewers must exercise when in the company of fans of particular shows.
As the year hurtles toward a deadline-driven close, top ten lists of things Kiwis did the most during the year will inevitably stream in. And in keeping with its tradition of breaking down the most popular videos into regions, YouTube has again provided a list of the ten clips that Kiwis were most drawn to over the last year.
NZME has since the beginning of this year released over 12,000 videos, which have accumulated 42 million views, and the media company is looking to further consolidate its video offering with the launch of a production studio called NZME Vision and a new content hub dubbed WatchMe. Rolled out earlier this week, the WatchMe website has already been populated with a collection of comedy shows; a combination of established and upcoming talent, all produced through NZME Vision. StopPress chats to NZME about why it’s making this move.
Burger King, the New Zealand Fire Service, Icebreaker and James & Wells bask in the limelight on the first day of spring.
The Japanese are well known having produced some of the best scary movies in popular culture. But what they aren’t known for all that well is producing scary films for the purposes of promoting health products. As strange as this might sound, Japanese ad agency Tokyu has developed a new short horror film with the aim of maximising the number of calories the viewer burns through while watching.
The local industry is currently a little obsessed with conflating different foods together to create a delectable (and some very questionable) hybrids. We’ve had Whittaker’s chocolate milk, Cadbury’s Vegemite atrocity and St Pierre’s sushiwi. Internationally, brands are also dabbling in the art of fusion, but now DC Shoes has taken it beyond cuisine to create a new hybrid sport by combining surfing and motocross. In a new video commissioned by the brand, motocross daredevil Robbie Maddison is shown riding a customised motorcycle across the surface of the Pacific Ocean, before dropping in on a wave (undoubtedly annoying the surfers waiting in the lineup).
Wellington or Wellywood as it is affectionately (or scathingly) known remains the film capital of New Zealand, while Auckland is the TV capital, according to information released by Statistics NZ on the screen industry revenue from last year.
The creative process is difficult enough to explain, let alone visualise. Yet, this is exactly what 8com director Michael Humphrey has attempted to do in a video promoting and exhibition of artist Dick Frizzell’s work.
We’ve all seen the rolling hills, smiling faces, water sports scenes, kiwi birds and rustic charm that have populated the nation’s tourism video canon over the years. And while these representations sure do help to sell the flights that drive one of New Zealand’s biggest industries, everyone that lives here knows that they aren’t 100 percent true most of the time.
Buzzfeed got a group of people together and made a video of them sampling chocolate from five different countries. The aim was that the participants had to guess the chocolate’s origin according to the taste. And yes, you’d be pleased to know, Pineapple Lumps got a well-deserved mention.
According to Google’s statistics, more than a million advertisers are using Google platforms to advertise. And with the proliferation of video over the last few years, YouTube is increasingly becoming a vehicle that brands use to spread their messages. The problem, however, is most of these one million advertisers are small businesses, which simply don’t have the budget to invest in production companies or advertising agencies to produce content for the channel. Quite often this sees businesses with little other option but to develop amateur videos that do not belong in the public domain. One company that has identified this gap in the market and is now offering brands with cheaper video alternatives is Tandem Studios.
As the popularity of the these guys on YouTube attests, humans are partial to slow motion. And, with the help of Camistry, Burger Fuel decided to slow things down for its Christmas party.
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.
Following on from last year’s campaign featuring a pair of Brazilian bloggers sharing their experiences of studying in New Zealand, Education New Zealand has now launched a new campaign called ‘A new adventure every day’, which has a collection of five average foreign students starring in a series of videos that showcase what New Zealand is like.
In June this year, Google Creative Lab unveiled The Cube, a six-sided digital video platform that can be used to simultaneously tell different stories in the same digital space. And in a pair of innovative campaigns, Google Play and Sony are showcasing how the platform could potentially be used for branding.