Every month the Together team highlights five media stories that defined the month, and one great media idea we love. November felt like a culmination of various threads. The AI “agentic” story we’ve been tracking all year got a major upgrade, print and audio both posted quietly impressive gains, and the IAB Awards showed how fast digital craft – and AI – are evolving in Aotearoa.
Podcast Pulse: resonance, not reach, is the new audio KPI
Acast’s Podcast Pulse 2025 report landed with a clear thesis: podcast influence now comes from resonance – the combo of attention and trust – rather than follower counts. Resonance is defined as what happens “when attention meets trust”. Acast argues this is what actually drives action for brands.
The numbers back it up. Podcasting now reaches two in three global consumers each month. Adding video podcasts on top of audio lifts reach by 39%. Crucially, no other media in the study commands the same level of focused attention as podcasts. Eighty-five percent of daily podcast listeners have taken some form of brand action after listening – from checking a website to making a purchase. The report shows strong effects across both 18 to 34 and 35 to 54 audiences.
For NZ marketers, this reframes podcast investment. Podcasts are less “bonus reach” on an audio plan and more a high-attention creator channel that can justify brand budgets. The real unlock is in creator fit and integration. Lean in to host-read formats, multi-platform creator ecosystems (audio + video + socials + events), and measure brand impact over performance metrics.
It’s also a useful counterweight to AI content slop. Consumers are almost three times more likely to see human-created content as trendsetting compared with AI. And podcasters are explicit that over-automated content risks eroding listener trust.
You can access the study here: iab.org.nz/members-hub/acast-podcast-pulse-2025
Gemini 3 Pro launches – the agent era gets serious
Google’s Gemini 3 Pro arrived this month as its most capable model yet, with a million-token context window, stronger multimodal reasoning and more advanced “agentic coding” features. It outperforms previous Gemini models on internal benchmarks by over 50%. It also tops several public leaderboards for code and multimodal tasks.
Practically, that means AI agents which can interpret long documents, data sets and interfaces, then act: building tools, orchestrating workflows or even running complex simulations with minimal input. A “Deep Think” mode pushes reasoning even further for heavier tasks.
For NZ marketers this is less about chatbots and more about infrastructure. The agentic payments and ad-trading protocols we’ve talked about in recent months now have much more capable brains sitting behind them. Think media optimisation agents that can genuinely reason across first-party data, product feeds and cross-channel performance. Or creative systems that can design, code and test multivariate experiences in near-real time.
The immediate to-do list:
- Make sure your media, ecommerce and CRM stacks are accessible via APIs that tools like Gemini can call.
- Start exploring agent use-cases for planning and reporting, not just copywriting.
- Rethink governance: in a world where agents can transact as well as recommend, brand guardrails and compliance rules become media settings, not line items in a PowerPoint.
Magazines and mastheads: print refuses to fade
November’s Nielsen readership figures gave an indication that publisher strategies across premium editorial brands are working.
Magazine publisher Are Media New Zealand’s total readership has climbed to 1.935 million – up 23,000 this quarter and 128,000 year-on-year. Pillar title NZ Woman’s Weekly is now at 434,000 readers.
At the same time, Stuff Masthead Publishing’s subscription titles The Post, The Press and Waikato Times now reach almost 1.5 million New Zealanders each month, a 26% annual increase, while digital subscriptions are up 57%. These gains sit on top of earlier data showing Stuff reaches 3.47 million Kiwis monthly across print and digital, with The Post labelled the country’s fastest-growing national news brand.
The lesson for planners is not that “print is back”, but that premium editorial brands with clear positioning and subscription strategies are proving resilient. For campaigns targeting high-value, older, or influence-heavy audiences, these titles now offer a powerful mix: trusted environments, deep time-on-page and growing first-party data. We should be planning them as high-attention, high-influence environments, not just reach line items.
Radio Survey 3 2025 – steady scale, shifting shapes
GfK’s latest commercial radio results released this month (Survey 3 2025) show a medium that remains structurally important in New Zealand. Across total NZ, commercial radio continues to deliver very high weekly reach, with cumulative audiences measured in the millions and average time spent listening still above 14 hours for People 10+ in major markets.
Within that, we’re seeing some interesting format dynamics. In NZ Major Markets, Network Breeze has lifted its station share to 9.6% for All 10+, up 0.3 points survey-on-survey, with particularly strong gains in 45 to 64 and 55 to 74. Coast and Channel X are also up, while youth-leaning brands like The Edge have softened slightly. At a national level, Breeze remains one of the largest networks by cumulative audience, and the rebrand of Magic to Breeze Classic from November 1 will only consolidate that position.
For marketers, a few implications:
- Audio is fragmenting by mindset, not just age. Breeze / Coast are owning relaxed, nostalgia-driven listening, while talk and rock formats play different roles in the day.
- Digital audio and podcasts should be planned with radio, not instead of it. The same GfK demos that over-index on radio (25 to 64) are exactly where podcast adoption and smart-speaker listening are growing fastest.
- Local presence still matters. With regional markets baked into the survey, local retail, automotive or government campaigns can still achieve efficient scale with smart network choices.
Read more: GfK NZ Major Markets and Total NZ Survey 3 2025 summary reports. gfk-media-measurement.com/global/en/news-center/2025/radio-audience-measurement-new-zealand-survey-reports/
IAB Awards 2025 – digital maturity and an AI inflection point
The 2025 IAB NZ Digital Advertising Awards were the biggest yet. A sold-out Shed 10 held 470 guests, entries were up 20% and the industry now generates over $2.4 billion in digital ad revenue.
We’re delighted to share that Together was named Media Agency of the Year, off the back of sustained growth in data, technology and AI capabilities. Together has been named Media Agency of the Year in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022 across IAB, Beacons or Campaign Asia. Special and dentsu took Best in Show for DB Export Ultra’s ‘Cold Call Back Service’, while NZME repeated as Media Publisher of the Year and TVNZ Blacksand claimed Creative Agency of the Year.
One of the most telling signals was the new Best Use of Generative AI category. This drew some of the highest judging scores, rewarding work where AI is embedded into experiences rather than tacked onto media as a gimmick.
For brands, this all points to a digital market that is both competitive and increasingly sophisticated. The bar is rising around:
- Connected data + creativity – the most awarded work joined smart targeting, measurement and strong storytelling.
- Applied AI – not just using models for efficiency, but enhancing customer experience and creative ideas.
- Publisher innovation – NZME and others are being rewarded for investing in digital products and formats, not just inventory.
If your digital programme still looks like isolated channel buys, this is a good moment to push for more integrated, test-and-learn roadmaps with your partners. Explore the winning work for inspiration.
Media idea of the month: Tesco – “Become More Christmas”
This year’s Tesco Christmas platform leans into a cultural truth: the chaotic, over-the-top becoming of Christmas. What makes it a standout media idea is how they’ve moved away from the concept of one “hero” spot. Instead, the UK supermarket giant has gone with multiple episodic content pieces. These lead into a much larger, behaviour-led ecosystem that taps into the messy reality of Christmas.
Why it works as a media idea
- Cultural anchoring. Tesco taps into one of the most universal festive behaviours: people gradually transforming into their heightened Christmas selves. It’s instantly ownable, giving media endless ways to “dial up” the transformation across formats.
- Behaviour-first execution. Outdoor and digital placements adapt the “becoming” journey to context. Commuters become party versions of themselves on DOOH, while retail media changes based on what shoppers add to their baskets.
- Retail + brand synergy. The campaign connects brand storytelling with Tesco’s powerful Clubcard and retail media network, creating a clear thread from attention to conversion.
Our takeaways for NZ marketers
Tesco’s approach illustrates the power of cultural truth. And how Christmas campaigns (arguably all campaigns) should work as systems, not just TVCs.
