Web Search Interest: iPad

It appears that NZ interest in the iPad is slowly building, and if other market trends are anything to go by an on sale date will be only a few days prior, triggering a massive volume of interest.

So who’s using it?

Yahoo! reported on the demographic info of users accessing the Yahoo US site via login 9 days after the launch of the device. These early adopters (unsurprisingly) skewed heavily male, affluent, and strongly interested in finance and sports — a fairly typical early adopter profile.

Two months on, Yahoo! has released further info – there’s been a 7x increase in the number of users visiting Yahoo! services from the iPad since the US launch. The user base continues to skew male, but is becoming more gender-balanced; the male to female ratio moved from 2:1 to 3:2. And the usage of the Yahoo! network properties has shifted – Flickr, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! Sports are still popular; Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Shopping, and Yahoo! Travel increased 28%, 25%, and 22% respectively.

A consistent demographic trend has emerged, in that the majority of users are in the 30–54 age range, and this holds true with data from Yahoo! international properties.

What makes all this interesting from a New Zealand perspective is that for intelligent (and nimble) advertisers many of the international trends will hold true for our market. There’s the opportunity for iPad apps – with many of the easy wins for applications signposted by other markets – all we need is NZ content. Also – the opportunity to partner with media owners to take advantage of the new platform and deliver an innovation play.

Author: Alysha Buckley, PHDiQ

We’ve  all read the articles telling us that the banner is dead and that it’s not all about the number of clicks you get, but still the answer to a brief is typically a variety of banners across some ‘targeted’ publishers. It seems to me that it’s the default option and I believe that there is a need for agencies and clients to expect more. I’m not saying every brief is going to lend itself to delivering a new approach, but at least the question should be asked by agencies, and the requirement for innovation expected by clients.

We had an opportunity to put this in action with a brief from the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) where we had to tell NZ drivers about the new Drug Driving law change. Not surprisingly we had limited information on drug drivers as they tend to have a healthy level of paranoia and distrust of authority, however, we knew that we had to ensure the message got through to a youth audience.

A basic approach would have been to build a web/micro site which had all the information on the new legislation, build some banners and targeted those to websites where our potential audience frequent (can you buy advertising on the ‘Switched On Gardener’ website?)

Problem is, teenagers don’t care about banner ad’s, they’re more savvy than that, so to get them interested we had to develop a strategy that wouldn’t sound like a Government  department telling them what not to do.

Our strategy came to life after a chat with Krafthaus about their idea for NZ’s first made-for-online, interactive teenage drama series called Beth’s Mates, which became Reservoir Hill. The strategy we developed was to use Reservoir Hill as a platform to:
•    Provide a conversation starter for our audience by weaving our drug driving message through the show
•    Learn about their attitudes towards drug driving from their engagement with the show and further dialogue with their peers

Reservoir Hill

Krafthaus did a fantastic job producing the show (here’s more information on the show at TVNZ Reservoir Hill), it was an absolute hit delivering almost 150,000 streams on TVNZ On-demand, becoming the #1 streamed weekly series and very deservedly Krafthaus won NZ’s first Digital Emmy.

The strategy worked because our audience were totally immersed into the world of Reservoir Hill, so our Drug Driving messages simply became part of the story and therefore part of their lives. Most importantly we gained a deeper understanding of our audience, further insight into their behaviour online and learning’s to take into the next series.

My key takeouts:
•    Not every brief allows or requires a new approach, but agencies and clients alike are responsible for encouraging new thinking
•    The only way to learn is to test your ideas. As long as the objectives of the test are clearly defined, you will always learn something new and in digital, nothing beats experience

Author: Craig Osborne, Omnicom Media Group

By all accounts it’s a mighty impressive channel.

Why then are we continuing to choose to destroy it?

The one lesson we can be certain we always learn from history is that we never learn from history. Back at the birth of banner advertising online the click through rate was much higher than the frankly abysmal CTR we have now come to expect thanks to a tidal wave of banner ads so boring, unintelligent and repetitive that not even obsessive compulsives are moved anymore.

Sadly, we are now making the exact same mistakes to email marketing.

Ask yourself, should we be happy with an industry average open rate in the low 20 percentile? From a database who have actually chosen to receive our various email communications? An email open rate of only 22% (roughly the current industry average) is a wake up call for all of us responsible for the creation of marketing emails, be it in the design, content curation and editing down to the copy for the subject line.

So what’s going wrong? It isn’t rocket science to work it out.

Consumers see their email inbox as a very personal space. It has become one of the main places they go to receive and share news with their friends and family networks (social networking trends aside). Emails that offer them no relevance or context to their personal circumstances have no chance of competing with those that do and unlike a traditional direct mailer or flyer in their letterbox, an email can be disposed of in an instant without even needing to open it.

Worse still, annoy a consumer with one too many irrelevant, valueless emails within too short a space of time and they will quickly forget that they signed up to receive your spam and in an instant assign your senders address to that black hole from which no one ever comes out of; the ‘junk’ folder. And once you’re in there, you ain’t ever coming out baby – no matter how much you lift your game, it’s game over – well done you’ve just ensured they will never even see your emails in their inbox ever again.

Lets be honest, consumers seldom ‘unsubscribe’ from email lists they’ve subscribed to. They do however, ‘assign to junk folder’ with ruthless indifference if you fail to provide value and relevance, something that is of personal interest to them – after all you are in their inbox, their personal space.

Make it entertaining, or inspiring, or valuable content, or all of these things, just don’t make it straight advertising, and don’t do it more than you need to. If you’re emailing your subscribers more than twice a week, you’re probably already staring at the inside of some of those 78 percenters junk email folders.

Across the board open rates are declining and as an industry we should be concerned about this. Email has proven to be a very effective tool in communicating with consumers, however we are abusing their privacy, their right to quality and relevant communication from us, at our peril.

Author: Greg Whitham, Ogilvy

I was recently in Sydney for an exclusive business briefing day with Apple.  We were being taken through Apple’s new iAd platform and all the new apps being developed.

One can’t help being impressed by what Apple have done.

iPad is even more impressive (writing this article as we speak on iPad)  I digress..

One of the highlights for me was SQUARE

SQUARE essentially works across iPhone, iPad and Android phones.

It’s a free app that enables you to accept credit card payments on your device.

Yes you weren’t seeing things.  Accept credit card payments on your iPhone.  No merchant account needed,  free sign-up.

This has so much potential.  Especially for Trademe and other eBay-esque related sites.

Here’s how it works

What’s next ?

Who knows, but expect to be amazed.

Square website

Author: Mark Addy, JWT

This is especially true of advertisements that appear in mobile applications. Of the 1,000 or so smartphone users surveyed, 52% claim they have acted on an advertisement in an app and 18% have made a purchase directly from an ad in an app in the last month.

Respondents reported that advertisements on mobile devices are both engaging and welcome, with 53% saying they were willing to share their location to receive more targeted advertising, and 76% said they would prefer to download a free, advertising supported app instead of paying and upfront fee for the same app.

This is great news for social gaming apps like Foursquare, which enables users to unlock special deals from advertisers based on their locations. It also bodes well for Apple, whose mobile app advertising platform iAd will launch in the northern summer with the iPhone 4.0 OS.

“People have a completely different perception of mobile content and advertising when they are on-the-go compared to when they’re at home or in the office,” said David Staas, senior vice president of marketing at JiWire. “With almost 40% of the on-the-go mobile audience saying they are more likely to engage with an ad that is relevant to their current location, this is an opportunity brands and agencies are more rapidly embracing.”

The report also found that 40% of those surveyed spend an hour or more per day using their mobile apps, the most popular of which is Facebook, and have an average of 22 apps on their mobile devices. (Interestingly, a recent study by Retrevo Inc., a consumer electronics and review site found that 48% of those surveyed check Facebook or Twitter during the night, or as soon as they wake up).

On-the-go mobile advertising has the potential to achieve one-to-one, real-time marketing that consumers actively engage with – certainly something to watch with interest.

Author: Matt Scott, DraftFCB

It would seem like every second person on Manhattan is connected to some type of smart device either a blackberry or iPhone or Apple iPad. Everyone in town is using the super powered 850 MHz band network pushing pulling content across the 1,600 cell sites in metro New York updating their social profile with more and more personalised data.

In my last post I spoke about the advent of location based social networks such as Gowalla and Foursquare which have allowed marketers to pursue ambitions of targeting consumers in a much more direct way than was previously possible. The technology available to support these developments has evolved almost in parallel, allowing new social networks to develop apps to support their ongoing usage and growth.

While in New York I thought I would try Yelp which was founded in 2004 that features customer reviews and ratings on every imaginable local business in town. Sure there are the usual restaurant ratings, but you’ll come here to find favorite dentists, veterinarians, gardeners and, yes, even real estate agents, not that I can afford to stay in this town for very long. Apparently more than 31 million people have visited Yelp in the past 30 days and Yelpers have written over 10 million local reviews, over 85% of them rating a business. In addition to reviews, you can use Yelp to find events, special offers, lists and to talk with other Yelpers.

Every business owner (or manager) can setup a free account to post offers, photos and message to registered users. You can Yelp on your phone or use Yelp for iPhone, Yelp for BlackBerry, Yelp for Palm Pre, and Yelp for Android

Another mobile app I tried was TagWhat, a free network where you can create-and-share location based messages in mobile augmented reality (AR). Tagwhat is essentially a way of displaying information in the mobile device, at the user’s location, over the live camera view of the mobile device. OK maybe not explained very well, try again, it’s placing data over real life where you can interact with maps to place text, urls, photos, or videos.

By following others in Tagwhat, users are able to merge the AR worlds of others’ with their own to form a completely unique social experience. Beyond a status update or a location check-in, Tagwhat is a cool new way of reaching your connected friends, communicating, socializing, delivering information, entertaining, and sometimes even learning.  Tagwhat’s approach is attempting to deliver higher quality interaction with brands, companies, customers, students, viewers, fans, and visitors.

The tagging is a little more elaborate than on Foursquare, which is what you’d expect since they’re designed to do different things. On Tagwhat you can embed WebPages, images, and other elements as well as just text. But the principle is the same. The travel side of the application takes the concept of checking in and flips it. Instead of tagging the place you’re at, TagWhat allows you to tag the places you’re going. Your flight information gets linked to your airport location, your reservation confirmation gets linked to your car rental location, your room data gets embedded at your hotel location, and so on. It’s a geo-tagged travel organizer that pins all your information to a map and, when you get where you’re going, displays it as a digital layer.

Social media-based brand communities are taking shape by design and chance it would seem in NYC as love for the convenience of mobile devices that enables ‘always on’ accessibility and portability is growing and very much absorbed into people’s lives.

Author: Adam Good,  AIM Proximity / Clemenger Group

“Being Wellington-based means that I understand the specific challenges facing Wellington clients and the role the DLG has to play in advancing the uptake of innovative digital thinking”, said Mr Osborne.

Craig is joined by two other senior Digital Strategists in Jo Gilchrist (thinkingdigital.co.nz) and Ben Pujji (Aim Proximity/Clemenger BBDO). The Wellington members of the DLG will provide opportunities for knowledge-sharing through local events and regular updates on the DLG blog.

In addition to the Wellington sub-group, the DLG welcomes four digital practitioners – Mark Addy (JWT), Alysha Buckley (PHDiQ), Vaughn Davis (Y&R) and Greg Whitham (Ogilvy Interactive) – who bring a wealth of knowledge and international experience to the group.

These largely related to ownership of any and all material posted onto users’ and brands’ Facebook pages, in essence what the terms of service sought to clarify was that content posted onto Facebook pages become the property of Facebook.

This was not, as many suggested at the time, Mark Zuckerberg’s first salvo at world domination but rather an attempt to avert legal action against Facebook when users and/or brands sought to remove content from the Facebook platform only to find it was still being held  on Facebook page backups.

What those same brand keepers that hurriedly pulled all their content off Facebook in December should have been more concerned about was whether or not their Facebook pages met the other terms and conditions of the Facebook platform, as many still do not.

As a guide, the following should be considered when using Facebook to promote your brand or service: http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

With respect to using Facebook to run promotions you should also ensure your campaign complies with Facebook’s promotions guidelines: http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php

Note also that, the same as any brand, there are clear guidelines provided as to how you may (and how you may not) refer to Facebook within the context of your brand or campaign outside of Facebook. These can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/manage/promo_guidelines.php

There is nothing overly onerous within the Facebook terms & conditions however those that choose to ignore them do so at their peril – it is not unheard of for Facebook to remove fan and user pages that ignore them.

Author: Greg Whitham, Ogilvy

I suspect that digital agencies of record are destined to become history. Not overnight but as the industry matures and digital becomes a well understood and used part of the communications and marketing fabric. There are two things driving this.

Accepting that different clients are at different stages –driven by their individual and organisational levels of digital understanding – they have generally sought out specialist digital agencies once they have taken a few steps in the digital world and realised they need expert help. They seek confidence and look for people who give it to them. They appoint the specialist to their roster and, for a while at least, get what they need.

However, as clients become more sophisticated digitally, they see that their digital initiatives are not well aligned to the rest of their activity. They see that the digital AOR is a parallel and separate relationship that is producing work that is not creating enough synergy with the rest of their marketing and communications. They look to reshape their roster and merge digital more effectively, and efficiently, into the channel mix. While they are doing more digital than ever, the digital AOR goes.

What’s really happening is the lead AOR is being given responsibility for digital because, and this is the second driver, it has been busy getting its digital act together. The proviso is that they really can deliver good digital.

That’s where specialist shops come in. I think they will live on, though their role will change.

As digital becomes part of the marketing and communications fabric, specialist shops have come in two forms – the independent and the in-agency. The former will find it tougher as clients look for synergy. Independents will still exist but their happy space is likely to be at or near the cutting edge, a place that most clients do not frequently go, or working with smaller clients. In-agency specialist shops will thrive if they can deliver great work by being both savvy digital operators and part of the fabric.

The role of specialist digital shops will change. At the big end of town, independents will work with AORs, rather than with clients, as their highly specialist skills, or extra capacity, are needed. In-agency teams will also work more within the AOR structure as the lead AORs get more digital smarts.

Does this apply to New Zealand? In my opinion, yes, even more than larger markets. Our market is so compact that synergy is vital. Clients need every dollar to count more than once. For their part, agencies have some things to prove to keep this lead role. Most importantly agility, collaboration with specialists when they are needed, use of metrics and developing holistic ideas that can live coherently across different channels rather than just looking the same.

This evolution is at its sharpest in the digital space but applies to other specialist skills like retail advertising and direct marketing.

What do you think?

Author: Tony Gardner, Saatchi & Saatchi DGS

One of the biggest gatherings of digital influencers, commentators and practitioners descended upon Adtech Sydney last week. A healthy mix of keynote presentations, workshops and networking – the event was clearly the digital event of the year.

Despite a sizeable reduction in numbers at last year’s event, the insecurities caused by the GFC appeared to be lifting in spring like fashion this year, with delegates and participants feeling much more positive about the whole area of digital and its pivotal role in leading business performance, whatever side of the client/agency/vendor table you are.

Unilever and HP CMOs were more than happy to tell all to packed auditoriums in intimate detail, oblivious to the Twittering, blogging and iPhone video recording their every word. In fact the speakers may have felt that they were participating in something big (if not a little cool) but even the smoothest of presenters could not really have been prepared for the rawness of the live tweets  – played back to them live on stage. The new rules of conference participation are a long way from polite applause, casual questions and a one way presentation!

One group of marketers I didn’t expect to be quite so optimistic was the Australian Banking community. But despite their recent challenges and of course, reasonably clear bill of health, four of Australia’s major banking brands were well represented in a ‘Track 3’ panel presentation. Senior Digital execs from Citi, Ubank (a new direct bank from NAB), Commonwealth Bank and Suncorp all took part in the Unexplored Pioneers session, designed to explain how the financial services industry in Australia have ‘shaped and influenced the digital media space’.

Despite the start of 45 minute session lacking a clear agenda, it was clear all of the panellists felt comfortable in each other’s presence under the Chairmanship of the jovial Michael Weeding from Citi. Although one couldn’t help but wonder how much information these banking titans were really going to be prepared to offer up, given the competitive nature of their industry.

My scepticism was soon blown away with UBank, one of Australia’s newest banking brands, and its Head of Online, Monty Hamilton, leading the charge to explain the integral role that social media plays in their marketing and operational strategy. Clearly less encumbered by the other larger banks, UBank had the enviable task of discussing their successful ‘challenger’ approach, led by an impressive social media strategy.

As a direct bank lacking a branch network, UBank started the discussion off by outlining how they have ensured that in some way “Social media and networking platforms help to compensate for the lack of face to face engagement”. In fact UBank now receive a regular stream of between 50-100 service and product enquires each week most, surprisingly, described as “positive exchanges”.

Monty did go on to explain that the nature of their operation and the strong support from senior management had made the use of Twitter and face book easier to integrate – with even the CEO helping to grow the followers to 2,400 and 4,600 respectively.

These numbers were presented with little reference to his competitors but when you compare a new brand like UBank to the global might of Shell and it’s 3,600 Twitter followers, it highlights the sound judgement of the Ubank team to “be where our customers are and want them to be”. In fact Hamilton went on to explain that the growing need for banks to engage customers in the most appropriate channel for them rather than avoid it.

It was also interesting to hear UBank talk about their use of Skype which was nicely framed in the whole “enabling conversations across platforms” with Monty highlighting the positive reaction that customers have when they are able to communicate this way at any time of day or night. Again the other larger banks seemed to noticeably look on in envy.

Ubank’s positive start clearly set the discussion bench mark high but with Harry Lowes, an ex-wine marketing executive, jumping in to discuss how he is leading the digital charge for CBA we quickly jumped to the larger side of town.    In fact everything about CBA is big, branch network, number of customers, the list goes on…but Harry kicked off by outlining that their biggest challenge was ensuring that digital operations and communications were “adding value to customers rather than simply about having a presence.”

Clearly a bank with ambition, Harry was quick to show a very glossy 2013 vision for the bank in the form of a video designed to showcase where they see things progressing.

Harry Lowe was quick to highlight the key contributing factors to the bank’s digital strategy if only to avoid cynical questions from an already vocal audience about a rather fanciful video…

Harry’s main points were:

1 Customisation
Ensuring that content is customised for a number of different touch points.
2 Always on internet
Meeting the needs of a constantly connected customer
3 Cross platform functionality
Customers don’t just operate in one environment, so the bank can’t either.
4 Centralised financial management
How we can the bank remain relevant and meet the needs to customers
5 Community
The growing trend for customers to seek and share opinion and information regarding their financial situation within a range of communities

Despite such an ambitious vision, Harry was the first to admit that one of the biggest challenges (and this was very much supported by the rest of the panel) was the need to have a single customer view in their CRM systems. This was something that Michael Weeding at Citi echoed and despite the obvious need, they also had this at the top of their priorities. Despite their enthusiasm none of them said anything that made me feel this was something that would happen soon.  So while the central use of the banks data was seen as a medium term focus for their IT teams, it certainly held an immediate marketing requirement.

The one area that all of their teams were very much focused on was defining the role of social media, and finding a way to compete with their more nimble financial services competitors. Maybe the fact that CBA have hired a Head of Social Media is a sign of how seriously they are taking it.

There was a word of warning however from many of the participants at the event who operate in the corporate space that interaction with customers on social networking platforms was a long term investment and not just a need to fulfil a trend. An opinion also strongly supported in another session with the Telstra Director of Relationship Marketing, who only see themselves ‘touching the surface’ with social media today and expect it to have huge influence on their business in years to come.

Murray Howe of Suncorp briefly commented on their “cautious approach to social media given the Queensland approach to community and a strong branch network”, choosing to connect with customers at a branch level.
Murray then took the discussion in another direction, choosing to highlight Suncorp’s successful use of search. Suncorp’s investment and volumes in this area reflects three key areas:

1.    Consumer behaviour
1/3 of their customers engage online, 1/3 buy online, 40% of their online sales come via search for insurance products.
2.    Accountability
3.    Competitive pressure

The last point was illustrated by Murray revealing that he has  seen a 300% increase in competitive use of search in 2009, resulting in Suncorp competing to a level that now sees them as one of the top 20 spenders in search in Australia.

SunCorp have recently centralised their search spend across the portfolios of banking, insurance and wealth products to create greater buying power. With one agency handling a lot of automated work to introduce the development of dynamic landing pages to reduce cost , speed to market and overall effectiveness.

Murray wrapped up by emphasising Suncorp’s focus on relevancy over creativity, a contraversal point of view but one that the others seemed to understand but not necessarily agree with across the board.

Overall this was a very informative session and it’s not often that you get given access to the inner sanctum of bank marketing in such a comprehensive way, I just wonder if CBA will front up next year to give an accurate assessment of where they have got to in achieving their ‘hyped’ 2013 vision?

Author: Matt Scott, DraftFCB