Nice touch by Google to honour the anniversary of Sir Ed’s Everest summit today with this depiction of their logo.

The PwC IAB Insight Report for Q1/08 is out. Here’s a slidedeck on graphs and tables if you’re sharing the report findings.

Topline Q1 ‘08 compared to same quarter ‘07*:
Total Market: up 67.2% from Q1/07
From $25.82M to $45.86M
Display Advertising: up 68.3% from Q1/07
From $6.59 to $11.54M
Classified Advertising: up 52.4% from Q1/07
From $12.42M to $19.19M
Search & Directories: up 93% from Q1/07
From $6.82M to $15.13M
*all figures are normalised to allow for new entrants to the reporting process during the measured period.

So the big stories are:
- Total market is up 67% Year on Year for Q1.
- Search is up almost 100% Year on Year, based on calculated figures (not actual supplied).
- Display is up 68% from Q1/07 but down 11% since Q4/07 - this seasonal drop was less than anticipated by the industry (see table below).

My view on the display advertising decline from Q4/07 to Q1/08 is that January was a difficult month to secure bookings, despite the early traffic lift after the statutory holidays finished.

Pleasingly, the uplift in February and March was solid and finding good quality available inventory during March was tough - the biggest month ever for adspend by a few publishers.

December is a good time to be buying display spots for January given the lessened demand on inventory in our peak holiday season.

With time on their hands, consumers are online browsing for personal products (iPods, music, travel, clothing), properties & cars, selling their unwanted Xmas presents and finding a date so they don’t spend next New Year alone!

I’m sure they’re even reading the odd bit of news (is there ever any big news at that time of year?).

The last of my three posts about Trade Me’s recruitment campaign. We sent out 15,000 irreverent napkins (actually 14,500 - I think I’ve still got 500 in my car boot) around the local cafes. This is your best chance to apply for a hot job at Trade Me off the back of a napkin.

They let me rant in the IAB Newsletter this month …

The Australian IAB/PwC Online Ad Expenditure report for the quarter ending March ‘08 was released last week.  It shows growth in Search and Classified from the fourth quarter of 2007 but a decline in Display advertising of 9.6%.  Anecdotal feedback suggests we should expect to see a parallel result when our domestic figures are released later this month.

If the New Zealand market holds up in similar fashion, the industry should be quietly pleased with the shallow drop of the summer break and the strength of the post-January bounce back.  However we should not neglect to delve further into the display decline.

It would be easy to just put this revenue dive down to January summer holidays but this hides an issue that has held back the industry and our share of total adspend over this period.  Simply put, we have failed to convince advertisers that people still surf over summer (and not just at the beach).

The lift in Classified advertising indicates listings growth for properties, jobs, cars and dates over this period – perhaps due to the increased personal ‘on-internet’ time available to consumers or their increased buying activity during the summer months.

The Search bods know this, which is why they increased their adspend to reach these people while they’re in the mood for investigating online purchases, reviewing brands and making buying decisions.

Continuing the education theme of last month’s newsletter, I believe that the Display advertising folks can do more to prepare for the ‘09 summer season.  We need to publish traffic results to educate edgy advertisers that consumers really do continue to use the ‘net over the holidays and hold advertising rates to demonstrate our belief in this.

Research into buyer behaviour over this period will throw up online transactional behaviour that favours advertisers in seasonal categories such as travel, clothing, fast food, for instance.  We should take advantage of this before Q4 bookings start getting planned.

Now, to be clear, a decline in display advertising expenditure during this quarter should absolutely be expected, regardless of the volume of annual growth.  But we shouldn’t just wring our hands & wind back our January forecasts.

Just as advertising in a recession logically favours measurement-obsessed online media, so should advertising in times of lighter media consumption. The Search and Classified segments know this. It’s time for the Display advertising publishers to make a case and collectively pitch it.

… good old fashioned spam.  My Wellingtonista colleague, Llew, takes on the newspaper system via the mail system.  I’m taking bets on who will break first - Post or Paper?

You really can’t beat Wellington on a good day and what a lovely morning I enjoyed today.

First I bumped into Andre Russell, newly from Provoke (who was off to feed the ducks by Te Papa) and we shared coffee at Mojo. Then I visited Elements again. They had flat mushrooms. And they kindly made my favourite brunch - brushetta with pesto, grilled flat mushrooms, goats cheese feta, chopped mint & flat leaf parsley, with grated potato hash browns on the side. Divine.

I made time to drop in and chat to Michael McCormack. I bought a couple of his pieces last year. He’s showing some lovely new works in his Island Bay Gallery and has an exhibition coming up soon. I’ve borrowed one of his images below. I hope he doesn’t mind.

The harbour is calm - going diving/fishing tomorrow if it stays like this.

Normally I’m camped in a hotel room in the City of Sales on a Thursday night so hanging in my favourite city was a novelty this week. I got along to Circa Theatre to watch ‘The American Pilot’, thanks to Chapman Tripp. There were mixed reviews after the lights came up. Some thought it a little slow with a simplistic plot. To me, it was deliberately paced, with intelligent observations of American foreign policy, their lack of assimilation into offshore lands and the resultant heavy handed reactions. Plenty of humour, skillful acting and great timing with cleverly orchestrated sound effects (well done to Marmalade Audio). A lean-forward kind of play. You should get tickets and support Circa.

A good summary of past media consumption and interesting projections of future players and product.  I didn’t agree with Second Life’s weighting in our future.

Thanks to Grant at eclicks.co.nz for the link.

An extension to the theme.  I lobbed a couple of my own ties on the wall, given that I won’t need them at Trade Me.

15 hot jobs at trademe.co.nz/careers.

Trade Me is on the hunt for 15 great people so we’ve planted a few novel initiatives around town.  Keep an eye out.  Oh and please tell your friends to apply - they’ll go quickly.

The recently released Aussie Q1/08 results show 34% growth in classified advertising in the last three months to March ‘08 with display advertising up by 26% and search/directories advertising up by 31.5%.

What annoyed me about this article was the ill-considered reference to classified advertising “gaining share at the expense of general advertising (which includes banners and video ads)”. That’s plainly stupid. Obviously, they’re different advertisers. Classified includes private and agent real estate/automotive/jobs listings (the previous bastion of the back half of your newspaper). Display advertising revenue comes from budgets that used to pay for those tired old 40×7’s & half page proportionals that run in the ‘papers, plus direct mail, flyers (the bits that fall out of your newspaper when you shake it), outdoor, mags and the classic 30sec TV & radio spot.

They are, however, astutely predicting a drop in financial sector display advertising (which makes up almost 25% of online display revenue in Aussie) suggesting that financial services clients are dropping media budgets by some 20% this year. A good time to start to lift revenue on ‘performance-measurement’ media, I would have thought …

Topline Stats Aussie online for first quarter, 2008:
Total Online: A$385M (up 30.8%)
Classified: 27.7%, A$106.5M (up 34%)
Display: 24.6%, A$95M (up 26%)
Search/Directories: 47.7%, A$181M (up 31.5%)

The report is here