Every month the Together team highlights five media stories from New Zealand and globally that defined the month, and one great media idea we love. June 2026 was a month for sharper audience strategy.
NZ Herald gives readers more control
NZME launched their redesigned NZ Herald app, with personalisation at the centre.
The new “My Herald” feature lets users reorder their feed by topic, author or saved stories, while bringing the Herald, regional titles, Viva and The Listener into one app experience.
For NZ marketers, this is a reminder that publishers aren’t just selling audiences, they are building logged-in, preference-rich environments. That matters as cookie signals fade and trusted first-party data becomes even more valuable.
This should unlock deeper user engagement as well as more relevant advertising and targeting. More personalised news experiences should create stronger reader habits, deeper attention and clearer context.
For brands, the question becomes: how do we use premium news environments not only for reach, but for relevance, sequencing and smarter creative alignment?
Stuff digitises local news
This month Stuff Group launched Neighbourly News, a network of 18 hyper-local websites designed to give local communities a dedicated digital news home.
It builds on Neighbourly’s existing role as a community platform, moving local content into a more structured publishing environment.
This is a smart play in a market where local journalism still carries trust, but the old distribution model is under pressure. For advertisers, it creates a more scalable way into community-level relevance without relying solely on social platforms.
This is a welcome boost for advertisers trying to connect with local communities. For categories like retail, telco, government, utilities, automotive, health and banking, local context can be the difference between being seen as relevant and being ignored. The challenge is to treat local media as more than a postcode filter and use it to connect regional messages with retail footprints and community interests.
HBO Max lands in Aotearoa
HBO Max officially launched in New Zealand on 16 June, bringing HBO, Warner Bros, DC, Harry Potter, Discovery and Max Originals into one direct-to-consumer streaming offer.
For viewers, it’s another premium content choice. For marketers, it’s another reminder that the streaming market is fragmenting fast. Audiences are not moving from linear to “streaming” as a single behaviour; they are spreading across paid SVOD, broadcaster VOD, FAST, YouTube, sport passes and platform bundles.
That makes planning harder, but also more interesting. Reach will increasingly need to be assembled across ecosystems. BVOD still matters because it provides local scale, quality contexts and ad access, but subscription launches like HBO Max lift audience expectations around quality, interface and content depth. Local broadcasters and advertisers will need to compete not just for eyeballs, but for habitual viewing time. Game on!
TVNZ+ scores its biggest streaming day thanks to the All Whites
Talking of games, TVNZ have been enjoying record numbers thanks to the Fifa World Cup. The All Whites’ opening match on 16 June gave TVNZ+ its biggest streaming day ever, with almost 2.3 million streams across 24 hours. The match itself generated 555,000 streams, while 465,000 watched on TVNZ 1, putting it among the top five highest-rated football matches on broadcast TV since 2010.
Nineteen match days in (at time of writing), TVNZ reports more than 11.4 million streams on TVNZ+, 1.22 million viewers on TVNZ 1, and a 67% uplift in streams compared with the 2024 Euros.
For NZ marketers, this is the clearest reminder of the month: culturally relevant tentpole moments still matter. Fragmentation has not killed mass attention, it has made it rarer. When national pride, live sport and accessible viewing come together, audiences still gather at scale. Smart brands should be planning around these moments early, with creative that earns its place in the occasion rather than simply buying around it.
Cannes Lions: AI everywhere, humanity wins
Cannes Lions 2026 was full of AI conversation, but the more interesting takeaway was the swing back to human judgement, culture and lived experience. Attendees we’ve read reports from noted the rise of creator authority, fandom, tactile experiences and “creative judgement” as themes that outlast the technology chatter. It seems there was a sense of reset, with creativity pushing back against over-optimisation and creators taking a larger role in the industry conversation.
For NZ marketers, the point from Cannes appears not to be “ignore AI”. It is to use it in the right place. AI can help compress production, reporting, versioning and testing. But it does not replace taste, cultural intelligence or the ability to spot what people actually care about.
The strongest brands will use AI to clear space for better human decisions, not to create more average content faster. In a small market like New Zealand, where cultural nuance matters, that distinction is critical.
Media idea we love: Uber Eats and Special US build the Super Bowl inside the app
It wouldn’t be right to call out anything other than the Cannes Media Lions Grand Prix winner, especially as it’s from the US arm of our friends at Special. (Though special shout out to Together who earned a Bronze Lion and Finalists for Meadow Fresh Fantasy Herd.)
Special US and Uber Eats won the Cannes Media Grand Prix for ‘Build your own Super Bowl’ commercial, which let fans create a personalised Super Bowl ad inside the Uber Eats app, using an interactive menu of characters, scenes and “ingredients”. The campaign also won Gold in Direct.
Why we love it
It turned media into product. The app was not just the conversion point, it became the media experience.
It understood second-screen behaviour. Rather than fighting distraction during the Super Bowl, it used it.
It made participation commercially useful. Reports suggest the activation drove significant app traffic and Uber Eats’ highest-ever Super Bowl sales volume.
For NZ marketers, this is a great reminder that the best media ideas do not always sit in paid placements. Sometimes the most powerful media channel is the brand’s own product, redesigned around a cultural moment.
