News

Australia’s online advertising market has recorded continued growth in the most challenging economic period to impact the Australian media industry in decades, according to figures released today by IAB Australia in its Online Advertising Expenditure Report (OAER).

In 2009, digital experienced some major changes -- the rise of Twitter, the fall of the economy, shifting budgets, an explosion of new technologies. And 2010 is shaping up to be just as dynamic. But what changes and trends are poised to really take the marketing world by storm?

www.DineSmart.co.nz now has over 5000 Loyalty Card members and over 5300 restaurants listed online. DineSmart is always on the move providing new features for restaurants and for i'ts members.

The Vorb product feed continues to go from strength to strength. It recently passed the 10,000 listed products mark and currently lists over 13,000 products from 15 stores across New Zealand.

The Annual New Zealand Venture Capital Association Private Equity & Venture Capital conference is on 4 November 2009 in Auckland. Click here to see some more details. I strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the venture capital market in New Zealand.

ID's flagship online publishing product is a custom built, fully flexible suite of mediaware called IDenterprise. IDenterprise is a white label publishing platform designed to generate revenue.

ID Ltd has recently launched a brand new customer-focused, interactive website to serve the Hospitality industry www.dinesmart.co.nz. DineSmart provides a platform to its users to share their dining experiences and search reviews by cuisine and city or region.

Sun Media Limited is amongst the finalists at this year’s Sustainable Business Network Bay of Plenty awards.

NZ Online Advertising increased in Q2 09, while the number of campaigns remained static.  "This indicates that more advertisers are moving their business online but the number of campaigns placed per advertiser has declined from 2.9 in Q2 08 to 2.

It’s been peak season for the Game Player Trading Card Game (TCG) community with many international flights, iPods, Wii’s and thousands of dollars given away over the past two months at National Championship tournaments for Yu-Gi-Oh! and Magic the Gathering.

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype around teenagers. The notion that teens are too busy texting and Twittering to be engaged with traditional media is exciting, but false. To develop the best strategy around teens and media, start by challenging popular assumptions about teens.

I’m pleased to announce another phase in Vorb’s development. After a very busy 8 months of solid development we’re very close to being able to move on from the coding and focus on the content.

Gary Hogg, ID Digital Media General Manager, is moving on after 3 years involvement, to revive his previous business Hexamon Communications and establish it as an online digital strategy and placement agency still based in Christchurch.

NZ online advertising for Q1 2009 rose 7.99% ($49.26 million) on Q1 2008 ($45.86 million), according to the latest Insight Report out of the Interactive Advertising Bureau & PricewaterhouseCoopers. Search & Directories led the way with a 27% growth but Classifieds were down 8.

Social media has only just taken off, says Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang -- and his "Future of the Social Web" report says social networks and marketers will have to change their strategies. "Bad things will happen," he says. Read the full article here.

Nokia N-Gage has included GamePlayer users in its international 'Zombie Singles' competition to win a return flight to the Tokyo Game Fair.  Zombie Singles combines the social good times of Facebook and the flirtatious fun of Match.

The latest New Zealand Private Equity and Venture Capital Monitor shows the number of deals increased, but on average were much smaller than 2007. The total investment value fell by 45% to $112m in 2008. This means that the larger deals have been withdrawn from the marketplace.

Heavy discounting in dog-eat-dog market The raw numbers are not good. On April 21, Sunday Star-Times publisher Fairfax Media announced 70 job cuts and a further 10 were proposed a week later. Those redundancies were on top of around 160 job cuts announced last September.

Outlook for Newspaper Publishing in the Digital Age The global publishing industry is going through a period of turmoil, as broadband penetration rises and new devices for delivering digital content arrive on the scene.

Vorb is continuing to hum with registered users rising at an average of 5% every month this year to 17,500 users, over half of whom are subscribed to the weekly Vorb Newsletter. On average the busy Vorbii add a post to the site once every 2 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Seventy percent of European advertisers are increasing their online spend during 2009, according to research by the European Interactive Advertisers Association (EIAA).

Leading CEO stays positive Things are slowing up, even in the fast-paced world of advertising. But not by so much that media agency OMD boss Kath Watson is down in the dumps. Cautious, certainly.