Hard on the heels of the ‘who from Hi-5 would you do’ debate, over on the Wanda Harland channel there’s a serious poll underway to vote for whether Marmite or Vegemite is the most popular spread. Channel Drury is providing 24/7 coverage of the Broadband debate and TVDPF is tracking a drag queen stalker. You can see why television viewer numbers are dropping …
IPTV without set-top boxes (functionality built into the TV) got a step closer with Sony, Ericsson, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung et al creating the Open IPTV Forum. Their collective task is to build an end-to-end spec for Internet Television. With the 3GPP involved, I’m sure they’re keen to partner with the teleco networks to roll out IMS (broadband/mobile convergence) and advance the golden egg of Quadruple Play - voice (VoIP), video on demand (VoD), internet and mobile/wireless, all in the one subscription. And sell a whole new suite of TV screens in the process. They ambitiously intend to have a first protocol spec released by Christmas.
For offshore consumers, that means TV’s with internet and spectacular programme choice in the next couple of years. And a return path via internet or mobile. The figure of 30 million subscribers by the end of this decade has been touted.
However many in New Zealand are still waiting for duel-play service - that’s ADSL internet and phone line on the same connection. The joy of video-on-demand is only a twinkle to them.
As the rest of the world reaches for their Blackberry or Treo to surf the net, back here we are forced to programme local text campaigns with gaps in urls (www. orweget complaintsfrom. co. nz) because of prohibitive browsing costs. Unsurprisingly, if consumers click through a url from a requested campaign text, and in doing so incur an unexpected cost from their telco, they blame the advertiser.
With data charges up to $1 per mg, incurring costs of $5-10 for mobile data resulting from innocently clicking thru’ a simple, requested text must be highly annoying for unsuspected consumers with browser-capable mobiles.
So when you get a text from our mobile providers and the url is disjointed, it’s not a mistake; just another reminder of telco-pricing and stifling innovation.
IAB held its second successful ‘Thirsty Thursday’ catch up for the Wellington interactive community last night, generously sponsored by Craig from MetService. Good to see another strong turnout and a bunch of new faces. I hope you all remember to join the IAB. It was great to meet Al and his Scoop team. A couple of snippets from the evening - our chairman is pretty good at ‘Matches’, Scoop has a hot Technorati ranking, and Scopa is fast becoming the IAB restaurant of choice.
Fisher and Paykel, one of New Zealand’s best known brands, is to move a large part of its manufacturing operation to Thailand. The company is to relocate its laundry factory from Auckland with the loss of 350 jobs. Fisher and Paykel says it can no longer compete with other manufacturers which are supplying products made in low cost Asian countries.
I cringe every time I read another article like this. I understand the business rationale behind it, but every loss hurts.
Here’s a novel article from The Independent on the state of the UK ad scene. Some naive and some insightful comments from a range of industry sources.
My favourite blog … if I really had to choose one … would be http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
What’s yours?
NZ Creative Circle blog
Scoop reports …
CAANZ Media Awards - winners list
B&T announcement
‘Bloody Legends’ is a mobile-IVR application allowing mates to text a shortcode with their mates number and a character (eg nurse, surgeon, etc). Their mate then receives an humerous IVR call prompting them not to drink and drive. This campaign would not have been possible without Paul Graham and the awesome team at Land Transport New Zealand (LTNZ), the suiting team of Linda Major and Briony Small, Lisa Scott’s inhouse producer skills and safe hands, the brilliance of Annabelle Gazley in our Media team (the concept is Annabelle’s idea), the very clever creative teams who turned the concept into gold, our design and studio teams who crafted the printed collateral, the smarts of Run the Red and the patience and fortitude of both Vodafone and Telecom. There really is an army involved in making these campaigns hum.
We’ve entered a bowling team into the Wellingtonista League. These guys really play hardball. I mean even the group communications is laced with vitriol like Clemenger’s still going to have their asses kicked. But that’s life.
We’re undergunned in the face of the mighty battelions of Xero, Silverstripe, ClickSuite and Bowtron as well as the formidable Bowlingtonista crew. It will be close combat. The outcome cannot be asssumed. Wednesday will be a day of solemn rememberance. After we attend the ANZAC dawn service, of course.
Update: We nailed ‘em; a great team effort. We have the best shirts and a name. But Xero topped the points for the first round. We still have work to do.
After Round One, the points are:
1 Bowlingtonista
5 Clemenger The Spider Monkeys;
1 Clicksuite
6 Xero;
5 Bowtron
1 Silverstripe.
Freeview advertising breaks tonight. Freeview is simply another set-top box competing with Sky but without the monthly subscription. It will transit digital signals for One, TV2, TV3, C4, Maori TV, plus Radio NZ National & Concert.
After the set up costs of the box (around NZ$300) and satellite, it’s free. Oh, and it starts transmitting next Wednesday - with 24hr news the first channel to be added. That’s all. No need to look out for the TV ads now.
Freeview is good. It means I now don’t need Sky at the bach in order to watch the news or the Rugby World Cup (TV3 won
the rights to this). I can use my current dish which I had installed for Sky, due to a poor analogue signal. But I’ve still got to fork out for the box, dammit.
More importantly, this development means the freed up spectrum can be used for new communications technologies. More on this in a future post.
