Today we’ll take you through some of our stand-out campaigns from the last few months, which have utilised an array of our advertising offerings and targeted engaged audiences in innovative ways.

Phillips: Express Yourself

Carat has teamed up with us to give people a chance to see what they would look like with facial hair.  We developed a nifty app that allows Get Frank users to take a picture of themselves, select a beard colour and get creative. Philips wanted to demonstrate their key brand theme around men expressing themselves. They utilised site skins, a solus eDM, newsletter inclusions, mobile, display across a customised male channel (most of which we designed in-house) and Facebook mentions to get the word out about the app and the Philips Grooming Range. With Christmas looming we are also running a competition on Get Frank’s sister site, Chelsey, for women to vote for their favourite facial fur and win a Phillips Grooming product for their man. If you want to see what you would look like with a beard and go in the draw to win, check it out here and remember to share it with nadia.keane@adhub.co.nz to win the prizes above.

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A bit of crystal ball speculation and debate took place on OMD NZ’s blog a while back about advertising exchanges. Ad-exchanges provide a platform for advertisers, networks and publishers to buy and sell their inventory via real-time bidding through technology. In taking the ‘human’ portion (largely price negotiation and customisation) out of the equation greater efficiencies (mainly cost savings on paper) are achieved.

I think exchanges will have their place just as performance networks have before them. I seriously doubt they will have the ability to increase CPMs for publishers, so the old conundrum of cost / benefit still raises it’s head for any publishers wanting to fund their sites via advertising. As for additional (pay-wall, T-Shirts, Mugs, Ipads & Android apps?) funding options – they haven’t yet proven themselves a viable proposition for many publishers or users for that matter.

In the interests of full disclosure, we don’t sell cost per click advertising and don’t farm impressions out to third party networks. We specialise in delivering targeted audiences and placements for our advertisers on behalf of our publishers. We do also sell Behavioural Targeting in conjunction with contextual targeting. I don’t see us or our publishers tipping inventory into exchanges unless they can seriously improve our effective CPM across individual sites. Does it cost us more to send real people out to agencies and advertisers as apposed to Google or Microsoft’s (assuming they own or buy the biggest exchange platforms in market) cut? I actually doubt it. Especially coupled with the other selling opportunities those people have beyond standard broad-reach banner campaigns.

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From over 120 agency folk, around 15 teams and under some salubrious conditions in both Auckland and Wellington, we have again identified the smartest agencies in both regions. This year was probably the toughest yet, with a particularly difficult anagrams section that left most participants a little cross-eyed.

Comments we had from both nights were:

“Thanks for yet another brilliant BBC quiz night. So much fun and we’re stoked to have taken it out again. I hear some of the team stayed on and partied well. So sorry I couldn’t stick around.”

“Hey Adhubsters, Thanks for last night – it was fun. I think we came a close third in the end which wasn’t too bad…”

“My head hurts……”

“Ditto. I dont feel so smart now! Thanks for the good night, sir”

“Thanks for the good times last night. I’m hungover as a mo’ fo’ but it was worth it”

“Thanks for last night, great event, good to see you all and team.  Hell, I think I even learned some stuff – Texas a Spanish town until as late as 1821?  How about that.  Special thanks to Nadia please who was the super host, tracking down some calamari for me after whinging like some agency prick that I didn’t eat chicken.”

And the winners were…

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