Media Matters: Going native, fraternising with the enemy and mobile ads

Click the NBR Radio box for on-demand special feature audio: Chelsea Armitage and Nick Grant talk about the inner workings of New Zealand media.

The lab’s first experiment with Spark about what the world will look like in 2025 was reportedly a hit, although neither NZME nor Spark would reveal traffic figures for the feature that went up on the NZ Herald website on Friday.

An intriguing point about this particular piece of native advertising is that each time a browser was refreshed, the headline for the brand feature was changed – which theoretically means audiences could be tricked into clicking on the same content more than once.

NZME chief executive Jane Hastings has previously trumpeted native advertising as the company’s future, pointing to an inevitable increase of lab experiments heading into next year.

Next up, a team-up between Sky's Neon and Quickflix is a stark indicator of just how brutal the local video on demand market has become.

Last week Quickflix emailed its customers with an offer of a two-month subscription to the Sky service "on us."

Although it's tempting to see this as the first step in Sky acquiring Quickflix, the companies have been quick to insist it's merely "a marketing arrangement" – and, in any case, given Neon is an "all you can eat" service while Quickflix operates a pay per view model, they will have quite different rights to the content they provide.

What seems clear is that the struggling Quickflix must be desperate for cashflow to even contemplate entering into the deal. 

Finally the conversation switches back to advertising, referring this time to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s latest ad spend report for the third quarter. The report showed interactive advertising had its best year yet – bringing in just over $200 million in revenue – and is poised to overtake television as the meatiest slice of the advertising pie.

Mobile was the fastest-growing sector with a 97% year-on-year increase, prompting a conversation about mobile advertising – is it an effective medium for advertisers? An article in the advertising industry website AdNews has mixed views, with one industry player saying mobile phones aren’t quite at the level to be used for advertising purposes.  

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