Once again, oOh!media is proud to sponsor the Marketer of the Year category in the YouTube NZ Marketing Awards 2024, championing excellence and leadership in the industry.
Fee Cortis – Head of Marketing, Blunt
How have you incorporated sustainability and eco-friendly practices into your marketing initiatives?
At Blunt, sustainability is in everything we do. This year, we’re proud to have achieved B Corp certification – the only umbrella brand in the world to do so. This certification underscores our commitment to continual improvement across all areas.
We’ve revamped our packaging, eliminating all plastic and switching to FSC-certified card stock. For trade marketing, we’ve adopted recyclable POS substrates to ensure our in-store activations are more sustainable and circular.
Collaborating with local artists, we create beautiful canopy designs, and proceeds from every sale support Forest & Bird.
We also promote our ethos of “buy once, buy right, and repair-before-replace” through social media, encouraging consumers to make thoughtful, sustainable choices.
Creativity for impact is a big focus for oOh! and we strive to work with brands and clients to maximise their out of home campaigns. What are some of the most innovative and creative campaigns you have executed this year, and what are you most proud of?
I am most proud of our 60-second hero brand film. It’s a dynamic expression of our purpose: Engineering Joy.
Shot from above in one take from a drone, it captures our iconic umbrella canopy shape. It features Kiwi-based world champion hip-hop group IDC, set against a highly choreographed backdrop depicting weather patterns and rain.
This brand film was a first for Blunt, and even 12 months later, it continues to outperform industry benchmarks.
Anna Tompkins – Global Head of Marketing, Zuru Group – Rhodes Pet Science
How have you successfully integrated out of home media with other marketing channels to create a cohesive and multi-faceted campaign?
While Rhodes Pet Science predominantly relies on digital marketing channels, Bonkers incorporated an element of DOOH advertising into the US market launch. We took over the Nasdaq building in New York’s Times Square. Our Zuru design team created a 3D billboard for Bonkers – a high-tech display using LED technology to create a three-dimensional visual effect. We filmed the creative development process and the in-market instalment and amplified this through TikTok.
Here on home turf, we use the national DOOH network across New Zealand to drive visibility of our brand Nood and we lean on our friends at Tracksuit to help us measure its impact.
What metrics and tools do you use to measure the effectiveness and ROI of your marketing initiatives?
In the past few months, the Rhodes Pet Science portfolio has launched three new brands and pushed Nood into the US market. Nood has been sold into 15 international markets.
The ultimate reflection of the success of our marketing programme is the significant growth of our brands, including:
- Fastest-growing cat treat brand globally.
- Delivering the highest percentage of new shoppers to the dog treat category in Walmart.
- Driving 19% of cat treat industry growth in the US with only 1.7% of shelf space.
- #1 most-liked pet treat brand on TikTok globally.
- Nood delivering leading value and volume growth across the world’s largest retailers.
James Kyd – Executive General Manager Brand and Marketing, Xero
How have you integrated digital technology into your marketing campaigns to enhance audience engagement and campaign effectiveness?
It is at the cornerstone of our performance marketing and B2B marketing activities.
From ensuring we have a digital presence in all our campaign activity right through to better understanding our customer profiles and behaviours to enhance targeting, we are looking at all avenues. We embrace the ability to use stronger measurement and testing disciplines with digital platforms and are always looking to lift CRO.
For customers, we embrace technologies like CRM and CDP to build more intuitive and relevant customer experiences and messaging at all touch points possible.
Sarah Williams – Brand and Experience Chapter Area Lead, Spark/Skinny
What metrics and tools do you use to measure the effectiveness and ROI of your marketing initiatives?
We track all the standard stuff such as brand strength, consideration and campaign performance. We also have a series of agreed financial principles for tracking the ROI of our short-term marketing efforts.
But perhaps the most interesting is our work to understand the ROI of our long-term brand-building initiatives. To achieve this, we’ve emphasised driving engagement and collecting data on consumers interacting with our brand marketing activities. Once this data is collected, always in line with our privacy policy, we collaborate with our data science teams to understand the commercial impact of that engagement over time.
It’s really rewarding following this measurement and being able to quantify actual ROI on our brand activity in both the short and long term.
Creativity for impact is a big focus for oOh! and we strive to work with brands and clients to maximise their out of home campaigns. What are some of the most innovative and creative campaigns you have executed this year, and what are you most proud of?
For the launch of our Spark Game Arena Live event, we created New Zealand’s first ever CGI billboard experience to draw the attention of this group. It was difficult to execute, as we filmed people’s reactions to something that wasn’t there to start, and then had to build backwards to make sure the film made sense and created cut-through. It certainly worked, attracting over 1 million views on TikTok in the first 24 hours with only a small spend on media to boost.
Luke Rive – Director of Marketing, McDonald’s NZ
How have you incorporated sustainability and eco-friendly practices into your marketing initiatives?
Consumers expect sustainability and eco-friendly practices. Our marketing initiatives clearly take this into account, mainly in areas such as product sourcing, packaging and media placement decisions (ie digital).
Our recent ‘Ordered from here’ campaign highlighted the NZ origin of our products and the farms where they are sourced.
As a business, we know 99% of our emissions are from the supply chain for our input products. Of these, beef farming is the biggest contributor and NZ is one of the top 10 beef exporters to the McDonald’s world. This is why you see us at Fielddays and working with the beef sector to improve the sustainability of beef farming in NZ.
How have you successfully integrated out of home media with other marketing channels to create a cohesive and multi-faceted campaign?
OOH is a key media channel for us and plays a strong role. As well as innovative campaigns with OOH elements (Kiwiburger, Driver Tax, Add Ons), we have also integrated OOH media across many other campaigns.
We use the dayparting capabilities of digital street furniture to hit the changing menu needs of our customers and have used behavioural targeting for site selection and OOH placement.
Mighty Hot McSpicy also used an interesting OOH approach. The insight was that spice is subjective, so we encouraged people to share their thoughts on the new burger in the Maccas app. These comments were then pulled through into OOH formats via an API and dynamic creative.
Katie Mills – CMO, NZME
How have you integrated digital technology into your marketing campaigns to enhance audience engagement and campaign effectiveness?
We’ve been conscientious about blending digital technology across creative, channels and campaign management, allowing us to be light on our feet, responsive and delivering relevant and effective brand content and moments.
For our largest music station, ZM, we’ve harnessed AI design technology in the dogfight for attention to create ever-changing key talent assets. This allows us to create endless messaging to capture the zeitgeist reflecting the dynamic and fluid preferences of our audience.
For a national brand like the NZ Herald, we have been able to use our investment in content personalisation tools to target regional audiences and content – this has delivered excellent results.
We’ve used car and smart speaker technology by optimising voice search for all our audio brands. This strategy has been hugely successful for our biggest music brand ZM where the voice search command is also our brand tagline “Play ZM”.
We are also deep in the exploration and use of AI tools for the creation of audio assets, including large language models, software to develop natural-sounding speech synthesis and text-to-speech software.
This was first published in the 2024 September-October NZ Marketing Magazine issue. Subscribe here.
