Digital Day Out #ddo16 conference notes

Dan Waugh, Comvita

Marketing is about creating emotive experiences with a product or service.  Dan Waugh works for Comvita as a ICT / futurist.

Virtual reality enables you to create an emotive experience that’s better than video.  Dan showed us a real video they shot in 360 video of Manuka bee hives to get experience as a test.  They had 6 Go-Pro cameras on a helicopter.  The test shoot showed it was possible.

Mark Pascall, 3Months

The more we transact with global databases the more vulnerable we all are to hacking.  Local walled gardens of unique logins / byelaws and reputation management are challenges.

Blockchain allows a transfer of value to happen without a trusted middleman in a distributed ledger.  Rooted in Bit Torrent peer to peer distribution,   Everyone can become a node on the network.  The genius of blockchain is to associate the P2P with a ledger.  Its immutability is its strength.  The ‘experiment’ worked – it’s unstoppable too.

The insight was to store non-transaction information.  Anything that has importance to humankind e.g. birth and deaths.  You want an un-hackable record.  Insurance claims, house ownership, medical procedures, voting – are all projects going onto the blockchain now.

Ethereum is a new blockchain platform for smart business contracts that are set into the blockchain timeline.  Ether is the currency that pays for contracts to go onto the Ethereum and they execute – nobody can block them.

DAO distributed autonomous organisation the first one is TheDAO who raised $150m from the crowd. The money started being siphoned out last weekend and everyone is watching…. the contracts are being executed but nobody knows where it’s going.

IOT (internet of things) that talk to the Ethereum network enables the disintermediation of merchants e.g. AirBnB.  Users having control of their medical records could be a good blockchain application. Also cross-brand rewards loyalty cards bypassing the loyalty organisation.

A marketplace using smart contracts and enabled by bots buying and selling. IT could allow power / wealth / control to be more evenly distributed.

Richard Thompson, Kpex

New business 2015- a premium advertising exchange group owned by NZMe, Fairfax, Mediaworks and TVNZ with other inventory too. Kpex’s goal to protect premium advertising sites through programmatic.  From Mad Men to Math Men

The new competitive set is social use (100% of the room) versus print newspaper readership (5%).

He sees his path to “wrestle control back” to enable publishers to compete credibly for the advertising dollar.  Continuity plus change in media – high trust in old brands, TV is important news source and print employs most and generates the stories. Change in the old financial models not working, cultural change plus understanding the new audience habits.

He estimates that 90% of all advertising will flow programmatically within a decade of which the spend will grow 40% this year over 2015 to $21.5 Bn globally.  The shift is from buying mass audiences to buying individuals and their actions.  More focus on the “scalable audience of one” as the objective changing the message to match the audience.

It’s growing fast because buyers can buy efficiently, data and audience targeting plus avoidance of advert fraud from low quality websites.

1. Good creative is as important as ever  Many targeting points don’t mean you need lots of different creative variants.  Seek the human truth across your brand – scale and effectiveness.  Bring your agencies on the journey with you. Media agencies may lead but must bring creative agencies along.  The creative is the single biggest factor on performance.  (targeting is second)
2. Environment still matters – surround yourself with quality content to aide view-ability
3. Be smart with data and target at scale.  Many small niche audiences with low $$ wastage is good but will not scale.
4. Choose your partners wisely (self-referential!).  Technology understanding is important, how does the agency set up their trading desk; how to structure your account.
5. Know the market – it ebbs and flows and buying can be efficiently optimised to lower costs of sale.  Start of month some people are resetting their budgets – towards the end of the quarter it can get expensive as budgets get spent.

Cassie Roma, Social Media for Air NZ

Air NZ is the country’s most-loved brand and so success is engagement, reach, community size.  Goal is to be top 10 airline in social in the world (now 11th).

Show, Don’t Tell is the mantra.

Audiences growing Instagram is part of her brief.  Images are crew, influences, causes they support.  Facebook drives conversion and sales, Instagram is an oasis of brand.   Audiences love plane porn!

Facebook focus is in the story we are telling – people first and the social side of social media.   They joined Tinder as a brand for Valentine’s Day “Swipe Right, Take the Flight”.  Video push with partner from movie Hunt for the Wilder People – we support kiwi artists – they spent $250 boosting the Facebook video.

The Safety Videos now are uploaded direct to Facebook (embedded player) before they used YouTube.  Gee in the team is the Air New Zealand Fairy!

Twitter is very productive for brand, conversion and interaction – the cost per view in Twitter for video is sometimes is better than Facebook.  It’s the first touchpoint for customer service.  8 team work 24/7 in customer support on Twitter.

Use #AirNZShareMe hashtag when you fly and the team re-shares customers’ pictures.

Snapchat is the place where it’s about a real true form of communication – quick and genuine. AirNZ use MishGuru to share Snapchat but it’s quick and fast and allows deep engagement – most engaged channel.  Lots of User Generated Content UGC.   Destination features on Snapchat quickly – can post a lot and not overwhelm.

Used social media influencers – Logan – his Kiwi OE on Snapchat – managed locally.  Selfies are big and engaged stories are strong performers.

They give a big destination picture for #AirNZ/BrainTrust We know one thing about (Santa Monica) what do you know? Very successful content streams across channel.  We go where people recommend and then mention them again.

Millennials – be relevant and genuine, know what you stand for, concentrate on the experience, make digital easy, influencers, make the journey one of self-actuation and self-discovery.

#AirlineWager agreed times of day when the teams would communicate online (not what we’d say).  Ran for 2 weeks.  and #projectblackout against the Quantas Instagram feed – use black emojis to comment or like their images.

Air NZ Social Team uses these tools

• SocialBakers for benchmarking against competitors, especially advertising and dashboards
• NetBase for Social Media Analytics, sentiment and mentions
• Conversocial to manage workflow between brand and social team
• Hootsuite to monitor live mentions

Monica Bloom, Getty Images USA

Zig when others Zag.

• Know your audience – pinpoint who will help you tell a new story in another way. What are their motivations?
• What are they doing that I’m not doing?
• Is this scary? (if it’s not you aren’t zigging!)
• Can we get this done without a committee?