I read a piece last week from David MacGregor called – Ban the Banner. It got me thinking – is the space and delivery to blame, or the creative execution? Ironically when you visit the link above you’ll notice three ad-units flickering and “doodling” away around David’s article and that certainly seems like overkill. But what of single ad units on a page, lovingly positioned in large formats like 300×600 pixels? Surely this is akin to the full-page press and magazine ads that made “Mad Men” famous back in the fifties. There are numerous examples of fantastic banner advertising produced overseas, but our creative fodder locally seems to be resigned to micro-sites and “viral” video pieces.

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We’re building our mobile offerings across adhub sites, with FLICKS, BBC.com & Sella leading the way in iphone apps. Sella recently launched what is certainly the most useful trading application in New Zealand today and we’ve run some very successful campaigns for major brands on both FLICKS and BBC.com’s .mobile sites.

The following are Adam Cahill’s (of ClickZ) top 10 points for creating value and relevance with your customer

s from a keynote he attended with Emily Nagle Green, president and CEO of Yankee Group:

1. Mobile increases consumer expectations of connectedness. We tend to evaluate new opportunities with a tipping point mentality, asking ourselves “when is the opportunity big enough to take seriously?” The statistics already tell us that mobile has reached that point, but I loved how Emily reframed the issue away from hard facts and toward a very clear picture of the way behavior has changed as a result of the powerful computers we carry with us in our pockets and purses. Simply put, we expect more, all the time. Instead of thinking about whether mobile is big enough, we should be thinking about what expectations we’d actually be failing to meet without a thoughtful approach to mobile in place. Read the rest of this article.

Here’s a copy of my latest article in May’s AdMedia:

It seems a little redundant to say it, but new media really isn’t new when it comes to online advertising. It’s been around for 13 years or more, but there are still a number of brand categories that aren’t investing in the medium in any meaningful way.

I recently spoke at a marketing event put on by the IAB NZ. The theme was… well it was the title for this article actually. During the presentation I covered what I consider to be the most influential online marketing opportunities available to us today: Display, search and social. There are key elements or platforms within each that stand out as immediate shots in the arm for many NZ brands.

For display it’s really about reaching large, engaged audiences online in a number of measurable ways under all sorts of content guises. The Internet has around 26%* of all media consumption in this country and 48%** of them are majority household shoppers.

We heard the most astounding thing in our office the other day. One of our sales guys was talking with a retail marketer who literally said: “We’ll get around to advertising on it, when everyone’s online.” This should be music to any retailer in the meat/grocery category, because while these guys wait for the other 12% of Kiwis to come online (88%** of them are already there) they’re leaving the door wide open.

Like other forms of brand advertising – display is your opportunity to influence people’s purchasing intent, putting your product or service top of mind above your competitors in an environment in which they can actively act or research (via search or directly from your site or an e-tail store) or engage (via branded content – think advertorial – or social media). It seems like many local brand marketers are still nervous about online advertising, but when you think about it, it’s far less risky than many other forms of advertising – at least someone physically has to visit a site in order for it to generate an advertising impression.

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