Archive for the 'Australia' Category

Here are some of our favourite online ads of 2012, as picked by Carolyn Bollaci, our Regional Vice President, Australia & New Zealand, DG MediaMind:

 

This article was originally posted in Marketing Magazine Australia.

Mazda2 homepage takeover with synchronised units

 

The creative team at JWT hit first gear with this homepage takeover ad in which robotic arms deftly deconstruct and reassemble the entire page to showcase the new Mazda2, itself newly reassembled with less weight and more power. Developed with the brand’s fun-to-drive spirit in mind, the takeover promotes the model’s new slimmed-down design and slimmed-down pricing for the ad’s audience. (View demo.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nissan Qashqai with 360-degree webcam

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OMD developed a winning strategy for the launch of the new Qashqai integrated 360-degree webcam that synergised the innovative spirit of the brand. The goal was to trigger the interest of users and encourage them to experiment with the brand using a game-style PC-mobile combination. This helped to position the brand as one that strives on technology and innovation. Consumers in Spain loved this ad, for obvious reasons. (View demo.)

 

Samsung Smart TV

 

The main concept behind the Samsung Smart TV creative was to showcase its unique user interface, together with the enriching content internet-connected TV offers. Using subtle speech bubbles, videos and hand icon representation to simulate the motion and voice control experience ‘online’, Samsung achieved strong brand awareness and recall for its new Smart TV. The success of the concept is reflected in the benchmark-breaking results of the campaign. (View demo.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

REI homepage takeover with carousel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BBDO developed a ‘gear that inspires’ strategy targeting outdoor enthusiasts who have a symbiotic and emotional relationship with their gear: they expect gear to continually evolve through technology and their gear challenges them to reach goals they’ve set for themselves. The goal was to emphasize REI’s deep understanding of this relationship and their ability to provide gear outdoor enthusiasts want and need in every situation mother nature brings their way. (View demo.)

 

CBS Volvo S60 in-stream video

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ad unit for Volvo’s all-new S60 was the perfect extension to its ‘Naughty’ campaign giving users the chance to be naughty themselves. They could drive the car over the banner leaving behind a pattern of tire marks as well as kick up dirt, gravel and oil across the screen. This was really great execution, purposefully provocative and polarising, forcing people to think of Volvo in unexpected ways. It also effectively positioned the Volvo S60 as racier and more powerful than any previous Volvo model. (View demo.)

 

Samsung ‘Take Part’ Olympics expandable ad

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Calling all Olympic Games fans across the globe. Samsung, the official wireless partner of the London 2012 Olympic Games, built this expandable banner ad to promote their Olympic Games app, ‘Samsung Take Part 2012′. The app allowed you to play games and compete with friends. (View demo.)

 

Gatorade ‘Win From Within’ synchronised banners

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Iris Worldwide developed ‘Win from Within’ as part of Gatorade’s 2012 brand campaign in a bid to build awareness and consumer education of the G-Series Pro range. Utilising Gatorade’s British Cycling and Triathlon assets, they built a range of talking banner suites to showcase the science behind the range, while integrating teasers for three new videos, to encourage interaction on specific cycling and triathlon websites and ultimately drive purchase of the range via Gatorade’s online store. (View demo.)

 

The Campaign homepage takeover and trip to win

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To promote the release of Warner Bros’ new election comedy The Campaign, starring Will Farrell and Zach Galifianakis, creative agency Substance, working with PHD, designed and built a sliver format for the MSN Sports homepage. The aim was to showcase the trailer and encourage users to vote for their favourite character by simply clicking on their face. Results were collected in almost real time and the units ‘remembered’ which character the user voted for so that on viewing the ad for a second time, they would get a ‘personal thank you’ message from the candidate. (View demo.)

 

Danone VPAID

Danone wanted to increase the engagement of its creatives on the Internet, so they agreed on testing new formats that increase its levels of interaction. The new VPAID (video player ad interface definition) interactive pre-roll was a perfect solution that converts a linear spot into something new. The user can now interact, learn more about the product and get discounts for testing. (View demo.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The takeaway into 2013 is this: when you add great creativity to cutting-edge ad technology, the sky is the limit for what you can do to engage your audience. Top agencies are getting increasingly smart about their use of media, creative and data for enhanced campaign performance. Whether it’s rich media, video, dynamic ads, mobile or other emerging media, marketers must keep experimenting, making sure they take advantage of cross-channel opportunities technology makes available.

We have recently organized an Ignite event at our Sydney office on June 27, focusing on sparking creative ideas amongst the agency folks.

 

To help inspire the attendees, we’ve flown in our International Innovation Strategist, Tej Rekhi, from the UK to share his experiences and knowledge at the event.  Being the visionary behind the industry’s first live dual screen rich media campaign, Tej is an expert and thought leader in multi-screen marketing.

 

If you’ve missed the event, feel free to watch the highlights of that night by clicking on the link below:

MediaMind Ignite, Sydney 2012 – Highlights on Youtube

 

You can also look at the event photos here at our Facebook

By: Carolyn Bollaci, Country Manager for Australia and New Zealand, MediaMind

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Data driven advertising is becoming big news as word spreads that it regularly smashes the campaign results of non-data driven campaigns, often by 20 percent or more. If proof is needed of the rise (and rise) of data as a critical ingredient in media buying, look no further than this week’s industry conferences. On Wednesday, several hundred advertising executives gathered at ExchangeWire’s first Ad Trading Summit in Sydney to share views on the growth in data-driven media buying. Data-driven technologies also featured big at Ad:Tech where conference slots ran headlines like ‘From Madmen To Mathmen’ and ‘What Are You Doing With All That Digital Data?’.

 

As we fast slide towards a world where all media is digital media – and print more a tantalising degustation to digital’s main courses, spliced across the multiple platforms of the web, mobile, tablet, TV and console – data is set to become as important as media itself in media buying decisions. Data underpins digital and when used intelligently, as we’re only just beginning to do, it has the power to significantly sharpen campaign performance and results across every type of digital campaign, from video to display to search.

 

Of course, many roadblocks inhibit both brands and advertisers from fully capitalising on the rivers of data currently accumulating to help better shape and direct better ads to the individuals most likely to respond to them. Limited access to transparent third party data is one most of us point to. For data to realise its value in Australia, it needs to shift from being an in-house publishing asset to being a transparent commodity, where its merits can be independently weighted and assessed, as any tradable commodity must be.

 

Advertisers and agencies also need to be able to easily and in real time mesh their own first party data with third party data as part of buying media through exchanges. Currently it is mainly advertisers’ first party data that is behind the data-driven digital advertising campaigns we see yielding impressive results. It is not a given that more open access to third party publisher’s data will lift campaign results even further but it will remove some current blind-spots and give us greater confidence that our data is as sharp as it can be to drive better ad performance.

 

Also, we all need more ad inventory to go through exchanges or trading desks, not just the equivalent of the unsold book remainders we often see in Australian exchanges. Fears that exchanges will commoditise ad inventory will not be resolved by holding back perceived premium inventory and the rich data that goes with it. Quality inventory that provides value to advertisers will rise in value just as surely as inventory that is more about reach and frequency might not.

 

Inevitably these impediments to data driven advertising and others will fall away, bringing one of the most significant evolutions in advertising since the dawn of digital itself. Most of us acknowledge this, which is why many are proselytising on conference stages like messiahs heralding a new tomorrow. As in any prophesying, hyperbole can seem thick on the ground but within the hyperbole lays some truth.

 

The shift to data driven marketing will have a major impact on our industry. It will change how media inventory is made available and purchased, and where ads are placed and before which niche audiences. It will even impact on the types of ads we as an industry produce, as data-driven campaigns enable us to dynamically develop and serve multiple creative executions to more effectively reach far more granular audience sub-groups. It will also change what we come to accept as a successful advertising campaign, and the type of skill sets we need to attract into our industry. Math whizzes will need to be tunnelled to a world that traditionally lured mostly creative types, and we will need our tertiary institutions to do their bit in training them before they do.

 

Around the world, the wheels are in motion taking us toward this world of more data-driven digital marketing but we all know we’re not there yet. This is particularly the case in Australia, where we are well behind our colleagues in EMEA and the US along an inevitable road to a data-driven advertising future. But we are on an inevitable track and one that will require much more industry dialogue and attention along the way.

 

Source: Adnews http://www.adnews.com.au/adnews/opinion-the-new-dawn-of-data-driven-advertising

MediaMind recently spoke to Mark Lomas, commercial director of Cadreon in Australia, about a campaign it ran for Goodlife Health Clubs in Australia. Using Smart Versioning’s geo-targeting technology, Cadreon improved the efficiency of Goodlife’s member acquisition by 75 percent.


Q. What was your key goal for this campaign?
A. The key goal of the Goodlife campaign was to reduce the cost per acquisition of new customers.


Q. Tell us about the challenges of the campaign.
A. Goodlife Health Clubs has 40 gyms spread widely around Australia. Most content/sponsorship display campaigns run nationally, which means around 70 percent of impressions or ad spend is wasted – because no-one joins a gym that’s 50+ kilometers away. So, in conjunction with MediaMind we set up a highly relevant, geo-targeted creative campaign that only served ads to users within a five-kilometer radius of each Goodlife Health Club location. Creative was customized by location, so if a user was near a Goodlife gym in the Sydney CBD, they would see a pop-up asking them to sign up to a free three-day pass to their local Goodlife Health Club at Shelly Street in Martin Place, just two minutes away.


Q. Where did the campaign run?
A. It was all about serving relevant, informative creative messaging to the right users. With limited contextual and location specific environments at our disposal, we relied on audience targeting, profiling and prospecting to find the right users. The approach was to use the qualified nature of the audience and empower the smart creative messaging to create the required level of relevance to induce action.


Q. How did you come up with the creative concepts?
A. We always try to consider campaigns from a user perspective and make it useful to them. Pusher the digital creative agency and Universal McCann Brisbane worked collectively with the client to ensure this relevance was addressed in both message and offer. For gyms, location is one of the most important factors, the other being experience. The creative message developed used dynamic location feed to ensure it was location relevant, whilst the creative call to action was a free three day trial pass to ensure prospective customers could first experience their local gym. The combination was both relevant and enticing.


Q. Was there anything particularly challenging about the campaign?
A. The Goodlife campaign was technically really simple, which is a credit to MediaMind. Essentially you build your data into an Excel spreadsheet and upload it into the MediaMind platform. We then just put in our campaign timing and that’s it. It’s really easy.


Q. How did the campaign perform?
A. Really well. I can’t go into the numbers in detail, but I know Goodlife’s online acquisition activity is running 75 percent more efficiently, significantly reducing their cost per acquisition position and generating far greater volume of new member sign-ups online than ever before.


Q. And click-through results?
A. By using intent-driven, geo-targeted creative with MediaMind technology and the Cadreon system, we’re achieving about the same cost-per-click that you see with search. That’s almost unheard-of for display advertising.


Q. Any other thoughts?
A. Geo-targeting is not a new tool — in fact, it’s one of the oldest forms of digital targeting we have. In saying that, brands could build far more relevance into their messages by ensuring they empower their local assets and find some initial common ground with consumers. With geo-targeting, they can deliver ads that are relevant and useful to a consumer and help cut down on the swathes of wastage in this industry. That can only be a good thing.

We recently spoke with Scott Ries who relocated from MediaMind’s LA offices to work with the team in Australia. 

How do you find the Australian digital advertising industry compared to the U.S.?

The main difference is that the ad formats and features running in Australia are a few years behind what’s running the U.S. right now. That’s not because Australian creative teams don’t know how to make great ads, it’s because the significantly lower broadband speeds in this country place file size restrictions on what local publishers can accept. Slower downloads means the consumer won’t see the 30 meg HD video that many U.S. advertisers want to run. But creative agencies here are just as advanced as any in the U.S. or the world. Take Soap creative shop, for instance. It’s building ads for Warner Bros. International, Fox International and others, and those ads are running globally. Soap is far from the only Australian agency I could name that’s doing great creative work on a local and global scale. Everyone here knows what they need to do, and can do, creatively and technologically, to do great digital advertising, but publisher restrictions on file sizes do limit what’s possible in this market. Hopefully that will change when the national broadband network is eventually complete.

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Have you ever pondered buying a new product for so long that you find you can no longer make a decision about it? This is called “analysis paralysis” – and while it may be inconveniencing you personally it could also be affecting the results of your online advertising campaigns.


The theory is simple and the research backs it up.  Users are approximately 30 percent more likely to act after seeing an ad the first time than they are when they’ve been exposed to it more frequently.   So users will make up their mind about your ad within the first few seconds of seeing it – and it will take more than just blasting repeats of the ad to change their mind. 


The research is striking and clear evidence that it’s crucial to target users with the right offer on the first exposure. The first exposure is likely to achieve a conversion rate close to 0.13 percent before dropping to 0.08 percent after the second exposure.  Check out the analysis below which shows how quickly conversion rates drop off.

 

Perhaps the most important learning here for marketers and advertisers is that they need to make sure they serve their most successful and attractive offers to the right audience straight up. 


Matching audience and ads can be easily done using tools including automatic creative optimization, which uses historic data to serve the most relevant ad.   Also keep in mind that dynamic ad formats do a better job at grabbing users’ attention – rich media use in financial ads can more than triple CTR and increase conversion rates, while video can boost CTR by 300 percent and increase conversion rate by 21 percent. 


Everybody wants to make a good first impression, by being aware of what ads you are offering to your different audiences from the first interaction; you can enhance your chance of instant conversions.  To download the full research, click here.

We encourage leading digital teams to enter the Digital Zenses Master and Agency of the Year Award contest. Prizes include a trip to SPIKES ASIA 2011, and an XBOX 360.




The contest consists of a ‘warm-up’ period and a ‘game period’ during which your knowledge will be tested in the areas of digital basics, consumer behavior, search & social media, measurement, digital creativity and digital media trends.


Click here to get tested and good luck to all!

Tourism Australia’s objectives were to engage New Zealanders online, sharing with them Australians’ favorite experiences. Kiwis were then invited to visit www.nothinglikeaustralia.com where they could immerse themselves in over 29,000 unique experiences. Instead of running all creatives evenly distributed, Tourism Australia utilized MediaMind’s Smart Versioning Automatic Optimization algorithm to identify and then to serve the most appealing ad the majority of times in order to encourage a high level of response.


See for yourself!





Download the Tourism Australia Case Study here.

iMedia Summit 2010

 

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Earlier this month, MediaMind’s own Vanya Jakovljevic presented at the annual iMedia Summit, held at Cypress Lakes in the picturesque wine region of the Hunter Valley.

 

Attended by more than 200 of the most influential marketers and digital media professionals in Australia and New Zealand, the Summit showcases the latest international and local research as well as serving as a place for those in the industry to catch up and network.

 

Vanya spoke to more than 50 attendees over two days, with a seminar titled: Courting the Consumer; spending quality time with your audience. Vanya focussed on the merits of a cross-channel campaign in reaching consumers in such a media dense environment, concluding that technology can add ‘spice’ to a campaign that still maintains traditional marketing values.

 

At the crux of his presentation, Vanya made the point that we have an overreliance on ‘the click’ – only one in 1,000 people click on a banner ad, and half of all display ad clicks come from only 6 percent of the online population.

 

It was only fitting that members of the audience tweeted about Vanya’s presentation, with ‘SarahPea’ publishing the point that you should not “just put a TVC online, build for the digital space’, and later on tweeting a quote by Hugh MacLeod from Vanya’s presentation that states ‘If you spoke to people like advertisers talk to people, they would probably punch you in the face.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other presenters at the Summit included Google (Science, Creativity, And The Social Web), AdMob (Engagement On The Google/AdMob Mobile Platform), Procter and Gamble (Successfully Bringing World Class Branding To The Digital Environment), and Sony Music (Stories From The Front Line: Digital Transformation In Real Time).

 

How long have you been with Spark PHD?
I joined the Spark Group in January 2007 to set up PHDIQ – so over 3 1/2 years.
 
What is your idea of a perfect work day?
A decent run at dawn, with a coffee on the way to work sets the tone. Catching up on overnight emails and reviewing the RSS feeds across multiple sites that I follow – looking at new trends and approaches that others are undertaking. A catch up with the team on new briefs and challenges – hopefully involving something that we haven’t seen or done before. A quick lunch, an afternoon strategy session with a client and then a couple of hours of clear air time to work through my notes and devise next steps.
 
How do you seek inspiration, or when does inspiration find you?

As a runner I spend a lot of time by myself, thinking through different issues, challenges and opportunities. It’s this solo time that I find gives me space and clarity to develop my best concepts and ideas. 
 What was/is your favourite brand experience that has been served by  MediaMind? Why?

The Vodafone Internet on your Mobile expandable mashup was a great example of contextual placement that was able to demonstrate why you would want to access the internet on your mobile phone. Pulling from the real time content from the page and into the mobile phone clearly demonstrated both product benefits and differentiation of the mobile experience from the online experience. 

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