New Zealand’s leading independent agency, Sugar, have a new site. Tight copy and a clean quick load time. Good eating of your own dogfood, guys.

While on the subject of agencies, there have been a few earthquakes in Adland recently. A lot of very big pitches underway and a bunch of change, driven in part by cost-savings, increased expectations of accountability and a big decline in TV revenue. Changes with TVNZ, Westpac (Retail), Nokia (media), ALAC, TV3, etc are creating structural changes in the shape of the local industry and there is still a lot of dust to settle. And finally, good on Jason Wells for finally getting the top Wellington job at Y&R. His leadership and strategic thinking is top notch.

find out more from http://twitter.com/williecass

The dust is settling on a busy period at Trade Me. Earlier this month we took to the road to share a few stories with over 300 New Zealand marketers and their agency folk.

The Trade Me Revolution Tour showed audiences in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch the progress of New Zealand’s largest website over the past ten years with CEO Jon Macdonald sharing insights into our passion for speed, ease of use and some measurement tools. Bernard Hickey from Interest.co.nz told us that Kiwis are only interested in mortgages and interest rates, demonstrating these big numbers against the tiny numbers involved in our sharemarket, for example. Trent Mankelow and Mike Pethig shared some techniques and ads that people don’t hate. Finally Geoff Matthews from new-kid-on-the-block site, TaxRefunds.co.nz shared the perfect storm that is driving his traffic and profits sky high in only 7 months.

We were keen to show marketers who are moving online a few tricks and traps to help with their websites and that marketing those sites using a considered combination of Television and Trade Me is effective and recession-busting. We got some challenging questions and a bunch of great responses from attendees. All in all, a huge success.

A few thoughts arising from the series:
* This recession is a biggie. A real biggie. It’s going to take a long time to recover, and recover from.
* Recession is not a time for sitting on hands; simply ‘riding out the recession’ ain’t going to cut it this time around.
* Recession equals restart. And it’s time to hit the restart button. It’s a chance to take stock and regroup.
* Cut out the stuff that either doesn’t work or that you can’t measure.
* It’s a really good time to just do the stuff that works.

I didn’t retell this gem but it still makes sense today as a business analogy, more so now than ever before.

For many marketers the online revolution has been underway for a few years now. For some, it’s only just started. If you would like to see the video and presentation of our five speakers, please email me to mg at trademe dot co dot nz and I’ll send you the link.

Trade Me turns 10 - view the story on 3news.co.nz.  Some interesting statistics towards the end of the piece …

“The numbers speak for themselves. Every day around 180,000 items are listed on Trade Me, of which 60,000 are sold. There are well over two million active users, and every day almost 500,000 different people visit the site.”

I managed to get along to ad:tech in Sydney last week.  Enjoyed the key notes and many of the sessions (was reminded of a downward quality curve as day progresses graph though).  Conference-wise, what impressed me most were the four Twitter streams set up and promoted to attendees (and non-attendees) to converse, joke, comment and add insights through the entire conference. Hash tags (#) means searchable on Twitter ergo #ATSYD refers to the general conference stream, with #ATSYD1, #ATSYD2, #ATSYD3 used for the three breakout rooms running contemporaneous sessions.  At times I suspect there was more in-room Twitter participation than directed at the speaker.

Someone posted that tweating in conference is akin to passing notes in class and it certainly felt that way to me; slightly disrespectful to a speaker trying to carry the audience through a complex thought process as laptops and phones are furiously typed.  But the upside is huge.  4000 tweats got crunched down, a whole lot of attendees got to know each other via Twitter, we got to comment directly to the speakers and panels immediately following the sessions.  It was a highlight of the event and added tremendous value to the sessions.

One of the key themes this year was the movement of brands into the online conversation rather than merely being a flash sideshow.  There were numerous case studies of integrated use of social media to drive campaigns.  Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, mobile, web and WOM (word of month) combining to build communities.  The emphasis on social media to reach consumers over-shadowed search and display, despite the obvious dominance of the latter two sectors.  Being in the online display business was almost redefined as traditional media!

I really enjoyed the first keynote, Nick Brian (CEO, Mediabrands) who stated that Recession equals Restart.  Nick proselytised that it wasn’t enough for marketers to just hold off, waiting for things to improve, but rather to hit the restart button and redefine their marketing strategies - with digital innovation at the core.

Here are 10 lessons from social media as provided via Twitter from @servantofchaos

1. Don’t believe the hype
2. Use subtle branding i.e. you don’t want to appear lame
3. Social media is not free … You are putting your reputation on the line
4. Learn from other people’s mistakes
5. Be quick ..New ideas are only unique for a short time … It’s the zeitgeist baby!
6. They won’t come. You have to use social media
7. Constantly reinvent … Your social media beast develops a life of its own. Sounds like a teenager!
8. Keep path to trial simple
9. Understand how your audience uses social media
10. Be brave … Social media is not for the faint hearted

The Institute of Directors is running an Aspiring Directors dinner series in Wellington.  I’m thinking of rocking along.  Will have to dust off the dinner jacket though.  I can definitely make the first two: 8th & 25th June.  These cover Requirements of Directors and Competencies.  Unfortunately I can’t attend the final one on 8th July which is on Marketing Yourself but reckon I’ve got that one covered!   There are some who say he …

Anyway, there are a few people I know who should consider coming too … Damas, Alex, Christine, Ben, Nigel, Matty B.  The Zoo (and other local/central govt entities) needs you.  Numbers are limited to 16 so get in quick.  Please let me know if you’re attending.

Hi Michael,
 
Here is a press release about an initiative ad agency DraftFCB has created to help do our bit in the current economic environment. After hearing the talk and listening to the ideas that were generated at last weeks job summit we have decided to take some action. John Key said at the summit “Each of us can do something that could save someone’s job, create a new job for another person or help someone else find a new job as soon as possible” and we have decided to do just that.
 
While what we are proposing may be a drop in the ocean looking at the wider picture it is a significant contribution for a company of our size and could have a real benefit to the recipient. And if more companies’ that are in a position to take some action then we may see a real difference.  If you would like to speak to someone about why DraftFCB had decided to do this and how it will work then our CEO, Bryan Crawford would be happy to talk to you.
 
Cheers
Lwindi

Read the media release.  Good on you, DraftFCB.

The New Zealand Advertising Standards Authority today released the Industry Turnover Statistics for 2008.  These figures show advertising dollars for each major New Zealand medium and percentage of growth or decline in the past calendar year (2008).  The industry is flat on NZ$2.317 billion dollars ($2.335B in 2007).

It’s no surprise that Interactive enjoyed a big lift, rising 2.4% to 8.3% of total advertising turnover in 2008; up from 5.9% in 2007.  This represents a 43% rise in gross adspend within the Interactive sector (figures provided quarterly to, and audited by, PwC).

What was anticipated, and indicative of the current advertising market, was that no other major media saw a rise in market share.  Interactive is now substantially bigger than Outdoor, and expected to topple Magazines within the next twelve months, making Radio the 2010 target!

Television went backwards by $8M, Newspapers by $66M and radio by $6M.  It’s definitely a tough environment for traditional media, right now.

Graph from NZ ASA website.

 Courtesy of Gordon White’s twitter, Advertising Age reports that LinkedIn traffic “skyrockets” as executives lose their jobs and seek to reconnect with lapsed networks.  The other place that these people go are the job sites.

Ad Age reports that LinkedIn is adding one new member every second and a few other interesting stats - and suggests that LinkedIn might not be able to monetise this traffic.  Great update on LinkedIn, thanks Gordon.

In the mysterious world of the Internet, sometimes the most obvious statistics get hidden amongst the plentiful jargon and myriad of metrics.  NBR commentator, Chris Keall, has this week highlighted the phenomenal size of Trade Me’s membership, asserting that the answer to the question: ’How many New Zealanders use Trade Me? is simply ‘All of us’. 

His explanation of how UBs (Unique Browsers) are calculated is pretty accurate.  However the measure still to be cracked is a calculation of how many people either share the same pc/internet connection, or gather around computer screens as the auction nears closing, auto-extends with bids frantically placed by multiple parties and tension rises.   If it was a magazine or newspaper we would calculate this as ‘readership’, but for computers connected to the Internet, we assume one IP address means one computer and one person.

Perhaps counting UBs is a relatively conservative measure of how many unique viewers are spending time on websites such as Trade Me?