Site distillation

After getting an iPhone last week I’ve been hovering around iTunes looking at different downloads and apps.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see National Bank already have an app for simple iPhone access to your accounts. I’ve downloaded the app and as you’d expect, the first page are the login fields.

This makes sense and I’d imagine the majority of their site’s visitors would use this page as the site’s gateway. So why aren’t the login fields displayed on National Bank’s new homepage? This seems strange to me.

Anyhow, whoever they target with their homepage is their business.

The observation is that by distilling your site for the mobile market you may find some fundamental user experience issues that need changing on your main website.

A good exercise if you’ve got a whiteboard and some free thinkers.

Meeting Kiwis on our terms

Watching New Zealand’s Got Talent last night (hey two kids under three leads to an exciting Monday evening at my place!) I noticed they’re using social media to create a web presence for the show rather than building a fully fledged website.

Using social platforms for a short run show that’s largely watched by younger viewers feels smart. This audience would love the connectivity and familiarity of these environments and will quickly use word of mouth to share their association.

So why on earth have Prime chosen MySpace as their platform in New Zealand? Surely Bebo has this market cornered here.

It feels like there’s been a bit too much influence from Prime’s Australian owners where MySpace is the dominant social networking site.

This isn’t the first time New Zealand’s online marketplace and infrastructure has been ignored by international publishers – to their own disadvantage.

Trade me proved years ago the advantages of tailoring your site to a NZ market and have subsequently locked eBay out.

And in March 2007 when Yahooxtra joined the NZ market they used irregular ad sizes and refused to join Nielsen’s Market Intelligence.

By ignoring our online advertising standards they missed out on a lot of advertising revenue. Fortunately they observed this mistake and have since joined MI and are amending their ad formats.

Online ad Olympics gold goes too…

This morning I heard on the radio Usain “Lightning” Bolt had won the Olympic 200m final in World record time. Wow, that’d be cool to see, I thought (forgetting about it almost instantly as I buttered my toast).

When I got to work though, I flicked onto the NZ Herald to read about NZ’s gold medal accomplishments and got reminded about Bolt’s successful run by this pearler billboard ad for TVNZ.

The race result was only 6 hours old and they’d already sorted out this ad copy, loaded it up, and got it out to people.

Timely, relevant, simple.

Three core rules for effective online advertising.

Pop quiz

Short of the birth and death notices, when was the last time you read the classified ad section in a newspaper?

Property reports for free!

Over August data gurus Terralink are opening up their valuation resources so people can register their email address and get up to three free valuation reports. A little bit of giving for a nice big prize. This is good viral marketing.

And they even have a risk model for this offer following QV’s free report offer back in 2006.

3 rules for a successful viral advertising campaign:

1. Create a product that offers real value at little or no cost to the user.

2. The offer shouldn’t appear to be contrived and the product or service needs to be so good and so useful that people are willing to divulge their contact details to receive it.

3. For a person to pass on a website link (generally by email) to friends, family and colleagues the tools or services offered have to be something the sender will be proud of.

I think Terralink meet these points with this offer. I just hope the softening property market’s ready for their conservative valuations.

Top 10 websites in NZ

While I promised myself I would never again be a beta user for another start up product (Skype 4.0 is just painful) the opportunity to use Google Ad Planner was just too good to be true. Google’s latest application presents site demographics of websites so people can plan targeted online advertising.

A friend in Vancouver put me onto it and it’s safe to say that when this application connects with NZ demographics it will become a very useful tool.

Using Google Ad Planner I thought it’d be interesting to sort New Zealand’s top 10 sites by unique visitors and compare it with some other analytic services.

Google	Alexa	Nielsen Online
Trade me	Google.co.nz	Trade me
NZ Herald	Yahoo	Yahooxtra
Stuff	Trade me	NZ Herald
Westpac	google.com	MSN.co.nz
MSN.co.nz	Live.com	Stuff
ASB Bank	You Tube	Air New Zealand
Yellow	Bebo	ASB Bank
Air New Zealand	Facebook	Westpac
Xtra	Wikipedia	National Bank
TVNZ	Blogger	Metservice

Seeing the sites compared like this I think of Benjamin Disraeli’s “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” quote. Trade me are the only site who could look at all three measures without complaining. All the data is processed through different parameters so it’s hard to say one’s right or wrong.

Google’s data is missing a date and is presented as a collection of “New Zealand” sites which removes the international players like YouTube, Facebook and Bebo. They also conveniently leave out MSN and Yahoo!

And Nielsen’s data is collated from their members so most global players are missing. Nielsen often negate this issue in their PR by making industry or session time comparisons which does a nice job for forming the basis of a 300 word article in the technology section of national newspapers.

Alexa is a slightly different proposition with their data coming in from people who’ve downloaded their toolbar along with a mix of other ambiguous measures which are loosely explained on their site.

So which one’s right? It’s hard to tell but Google is the one that stands out for me. Google Ad Planner combined with Analytics and Trends are an excellent suite of products and their wealth of data is unmatched. If they can accept Yahoo exists and get their channels and geo-targeting sorted I’m sure they’ll be the best comparator down the track.

Musical cheers

In our office we have commercial radio running when we all forget our iPods. The last three songs have been:

1.“I kissed a girl” – an annoying song now annoyingly connected to ZM’s mash up.
2.”In the air tonight” – a reborn song now intrinsically linked to Cadbury’s random Gorilla TVC.
3.“Baby come on” – a song now inextricably linked to Telecom’s latest TVC (the woman at the end gets too much airtime).

The emotional connection between music and advertising has been a winning formula for years. I just don’t remember having so many connections at one time.

What do they know?

iGoogle’s latest update has moved the tab navigation to the sidebar. I can see this fitting in nicely with their reader, but what do they know that we don’t? Have we seen the end of the tab as a site navigation tool..?

Richard, meet Risk…

This week’s freeze on Hanover Finance funds has indicated two things to me, New Zealanders don’t understand financial risk, and we put way too much faith in celebrity brands.

Members of my family along with thousands of other investors have found themselves caught out by the massive volatility of New Zealand’s financial services sector. Whether they get their money back down the line is entirely unknown and the feeling of helplessness is difficult for many to deal with.

With our 20/20 hindsight we’re now reflecting on how this could be happening. Despite the Retirement Commission’s tireless work in raising New Zealander’s financial literacy, it appears evident that many people don’t understand the financial risks they’re taking when they get guaranteed 9.95% annual returns.

What “Mum and Dad” investors also missed was the risk behind the face of the company. Richard Long was a newsreader on TV One for decades. After his early retirement he was bought back to the screen as the front man for Hanover Finance. For the last few years he’s leveraged his trusted, worldly, fatherly image to position the Hanover brand with New Zealanders.

It’s probably a moot point, but can you imagine what this situation with Hanover’s done to Richard Long’s personal brand? You’d have to be mad to have your brand associated with him now.

I wonder if Richard understood the risk he was taking there.

“M” ads meet mainstream

The NZ Herald’s freshly launched mobile version will make things easier for people with iPhones to read their daily news fill. It’s great to see the mainstream media being quick to embrace this new interface.

You’ll notice the display ad and text ads framing the article. Interesting.

Trade me also launched their mobile version last month in anticipation of the iPhone 3G launch. We spoke with Trade me about featuring some tactical text link ads here but they declined as they don’t feel their audience is ready for this yet. Fair enough. I guess they make their real money through other means.

The NZHerald on the other hand do need the ad revenue to justify this new extension and obviously think their audience is ready for ads on their mobile version. Unfortunately the ad server technology isn’t. This is what happened when I clicked on the text link:

Still, we’re getting there, and someone needs to start it.

Ad Protocol

Keeping advertising online simple

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Author Archives: Mike P