From The Australian, IAB Australia CEO Paul Fisher is predicting online advertising could reach almost 17% for the full 2009 year, up from 12.5% in 2008.  This is based on analysis of the first half calendar year where online grew at 12& against an 8% decline on total media spending in the Australian market.

Paul suggests that this 2% half yearly growth could continue in the first half of 2010, maintaining annual growth of 14% for the full 2010 year.  I agree with his sentiment that the migration of Australian advertising to the online medium is the most significant change to the advertising industry in many years.

In New Zealand the growth is more cautious, but equally significant in terms of the structural shift underway.   The local industry is awaiting the independent ASA media splits with great interest.

According to a media release put out by Nielsen in Aussie last week, one-third of Australian consumers exposed to an online advertisement are able to recall that advertisement when asked, and 41 percent are able to link the correct brand to an un-branded advertisement, according to new online advertising effectiveness benchmarks released today by market research company Nielsen.

The Nielsen research, developed over three years and based on more than 100,000 Australian respondents, for the first time provides Australian organisations with a set of reliable, local performance benchmarks against which to measure the effectiveness of their online advertising campaigns.

The Nielsen benchmarking research revealed that intention to purchase or use products or services increased by 4.9 percentage points following exposure to an online advertising campaign, and brand sentiment increased by 5.3 points.

Awareness also saw a jump following exposure to an online advertising campaign – top-of-mind awareness jumped 3.1 points while prompted awareness increased by 3.5 points. The likelihood of a consumer recommending a brand following exposure to an online advertising campaign increased by 4.4 percentage points.

“At a time when marketers are seeking to invest their resources where they will gain the most return on their investment, the Nielsen benchmarks provide further evidence of online advertising’s effectiveness. We look forward to even more data being made available from both Nielsen and others, demonstrating to agencies and advertisers how online can offer a significantly more targeted, measurable and effective medium than any other media to reach, engage and influence consumers,” said Paul Fisher, CEO of IAB Australia.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers IAB Insight Report for the quarter to June 2009 has been out for a little while.  Sorry for not posting some graphs earlier.

The good news is that New Zealand online advertising is up 6.56% on Q1/09 (Calendar) with total spend calculated at $52.49M.
Spend for a rolling year is at $199.8M bringing online closer to radio and magazines.

Display advertising grew 5.75% in Q2.  As a comparison to published television advertising revenue, online display adspend grew 10.5% in the six months to June 2009. This compares with TV which declined 13.3% over the same period.

Whilst all media and creative spend has taken a bit of a hammering over the past year, online is emerging relatively unscathed from the current recessionary period,  and future quarters should show a structural change to the media landscape with newspapers and television continuing to be hit particularly hard.

One of the ad team at Trade Me flicked me an interesting graph this morning. A daily breakdown of the August traffic to New Zealand’s largest home page, Trade Me, and runner up, YahooXtra as independently measured by Nielsen Online from tags placed on our pages.

Trade Me is New Zealand's favourite home page (August 2009)

I was surprised at the low weekend rating of YahooXtra; don’t people check their xtra mail accounts in the weekend? You would want a big discount if you advertised on their Saturday. Interestingly, Stuff.co.nz is now New Zealand’s third largest website and New Zealand’s most popular news and entertainment site, bigger than nzherald.co.nz.

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 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.

The New Zealand online industry is in good heart with all sectors of advertising expenditure recording YoY growth at a combined growth rate of 43%.

Display Advertising was up 38% against full year 2007, 20% up on same quarter 2007, but flat on Q3, as anticipated due to the traditional drop off in the last week of December.  All data courtesy of IAB PwC Insight Report 2007 and 2008. 

Already some trends are becoming evident. Display adspend growth slowed in 2008 compared to the rocket that was 2007 (the first year data on gross adspend received by NZ online publishers was provided to, and audited by, PwC) but continues its annual climb at the expense of other media sectors.

Quarterly analysis is useful for forward planning.  We’re starting to see that Q1 drops on previous quarter, due to light January revenues.  Q2 is the biggest growth quarter (up 30% in ‘08 and 44% in ‘07).  Q3 gives solid growth as new marketing spend is released and wisely chooses online over traditional offline media.  Q4 remains flat on Q3 due to Xmas (odd, given the growth in interactive retail advertising last year) before dropping back in Q1.

In the Oct-Dec quarter of 2008, spend from Government campaigns was up 3% (this growth is unlikely to continue in 2009) and finance sector online advertising were down by a whopping 5.8%, demonstrating the impact of finance companies going broke combined with a reluctance by trading banks to advertise mortgage rates as credit tightened.  The automotive sector drop of almost 1.8% was partly seasonal but also recession-related.

It is expected that the financial sector will bounce back to be the leading industry category in the Jan-Mar first quarter of 2009 due to increased mortgage & card activity, travel will hold up as airlines invest to move national and international seats (along with the national launch of Jetstar), government spend will decline slightly as the keys to the various coffers are progressively locked away and telecommunications sector advertising will remain steady but expect big growth in Q2 due to a lift in mobile spend and continued agressive broadband investment.

A final note, on search.  This online sector progressively declined quarter by quarter from $15.13M in Q1 down to $14.57M in Q4/08.  I wonder if this is why Google is not replacing its New Zealand Country Manager?

Graph from ASA 2007 Industry Turnover Statistics.
1.  Any guesses as to which sector will be the biggest growing medium when the adspend figures for 2008 are released?
2.  And what about the percentage growth over 2007?

There’s a fierce battle brewing in the automotive world.  But this time it’s not the war of the wagons or a melee between marques.  It’s much more sinister than that.  In the almighty chase for kiwi eyeballs, there’s a scuffle for second in the chase for automotive website traffic.

A bunch of brands trail Trade Me Motors (460,509 Unique Viewers) by an almighty margin.

Autotrader (30,588 UVs) and Turners (26,458 UVs) for the week to 18th Jan 2009 take 2nd and 3rd place respectively.

Further back in the pack with less than 20,000 unique viewers that week was aa.co.nz/motoring and in fifth position with 18,534 UVs was the NZ Herald motoring section - a paltry 4% of Trade Me Motors traffic.

Page impressions for that same week make interesting reading, with Trade Me Motors serving 50,344,001 pages vs 117,001 pages for the motor part of the NZ Herald, that’s 0.2% of the TM Motors traffic!  Again for comparison over the same period, average session duration for TM Motors was 22.28 minutes vs 2.56 minutes on nzherald.co.nz/motoring.  Ouch.

As the year progresses, expect to see campaigns and announcements from the pack - chasing the scraps of 100,000 odd weekly viewers.  Publishing can be a tough business as AutoTrader discovered last year.

As an aside, a quick delve into the archives reveals the fastest car ever listed on Trade Me Motors was a McLaren F1 and among the top searched terms on Trade Me in 2008 were Skyline, Hilux, Evo and RX7.  Says something about New Zealanders.  Aye, mate.

Ok - here’s a thorny question for advertisers. If you are buying banner advertising on New Zealand websites, do you prefer to buy domestic or all eyeballs? All includes international traffic as well. Are you even advised of the split between local and offshore traffic on the sites your ads are running on?

I wonder if the publishing community needs to agree a compulsory standard for pre- and post-reporting of traffic used for advertising purposes? Or am I alone in thinking that offshore viewers are much less likely to buy your products and services?

It’s great to see Stuff’s new ‘no waste’ ratecard [pdf] specifying domestic eyeballs. Trade Me’s sites [pdf] only have a small percentage of offshore viewers (checking out property, jobs and cars back in NZ and hopefully coming back home soon), unlike the News Sites that have a large offshore audience. Unless you’re trying to target a global audience, offshore traffic should be factored into calculating effective CPM rates.

Many sites including Trade Me are able to offer country targeting if you do need to tap Aussies, Americans, English or others.