Nokia's Ovi Store - The First 5 Months

“2009 has sure gone by quickly and being mid-November, 2010 is rapidly approaching. For those of you who are mobile developers or are following the various mobile application stores available in market I thought I would give another update regarding Ovi Store and where we are since we launched about 5 months ago. The following stats are from 26 May through 31 October:

• Available on over 100 different Nokia devices (60+ Symbian S60 devices)


• Active users from over 180 countries


• Developers from 65 countries are distributing content


• 8 countries today have local content, local language support and mobile billing: UK, Spain, France, Germany, Singapore, Australia, Italy, Russia. By the end of Q1 2010 there will be more than 20 countries.


• Top 10 Ovi Store Markets by performance in alphabetic order: Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Russia & UK


• In almost all of the top 10 Ovi Store countries, 5800 XpressMusic and N97 are the #1 and #2 devices for Ovi Store activity and consumer engagement


• On average, each registered user has downloaded at least 8 items from Ovi Store


• In October, the number of content items downloaded was over 70% higher than in Sept.”

Read more here

New Moon's Record Breaking Success Predicted (last week) by Online Trailer Views

“After months of building anticipation and expectations, Twilight Saga: New Moon will sink its teeth into box offices this weekend with the highest view count of any film this year. The vampire romance grew by 9% this week to reach nearly 20 million views. This is nearly twice the views of the first installment in the series, which scored 10.1 million views the week of its release. This also tops view counts for this year's blockbusters. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen generated 5.9 million views the week of its release and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince conjured up 7.3 million. New Moon has also set a record for the Top 10 Online Film Trailers Chart: it's the first film to maintain first place for every chart appearance. Impressive!”

Read more here.

Esquire Magazine Launch an Augmented Reality Edition

“Esquire magazine has embedded special markers on certain pages of the magazine including the front cover. By downloading a piece of software and utilizing the webcam on your PC you can access this additional content. All you have to do is hold the marker up to your camera and it will bring up new content using the software you installed. This may just be a short video clip starring the person on the page or it may include some interaction. For example, the front cover has multiple videos to watch depending on how you tilt the page. Another page sees someone change clothes as you rotate the page.”

Read more here on The New York Observer.

New Research on Social Media Use

“This year we changed tack and focused our efforts on understanding how digital is changing the way that consumers interact with brands.

What did we find out? Experience matters. A lot. So much so that experiences are becoming the new advertising or marketing. And these experiences are having an inordinate amount of impact on how consumers perceive a brand and ultimately purchase products. Moreover, we also found that consumers are actively engaged with brands across the entire digital spectrum. Consumers may be in control but so are brands which are so deeply embedded in the culture that consumers can’t imagine not making them a part of their world — on Facebook, Twitter or even their own blogs.”

Read more here.

Radio Survey T2 Commentary

The twice yearly radio audience measurement surveys are now out. Perhaps the most widely discussed issue in radio audience research, not just in New Zealand, but around the world, is the reliability of the ‘hard copy’ diary. Emerging technologies such as personal people meters and ‘quite smart’ phones are still being talked about but the hard copy diary remains. As of late 2006, paper diaries remain the currency in all major radio markets including the U.S, U.K and Australia.

Basically - each survey is required to collect a minimum sample of 12,000 radio listeners. A diary is pre-printed with all known radio stations within a listed region, with the twenty four hours of each day divided into quarter hours. Diaries are placed, in person, in randomly selected households (excluding those who work in radio) with anyone over 10 years of age who is willing to record their radio listening for a week. Over the week the respondent is requested to indicate the radio station listened to for each period of 8 minutes or more or each quarter hour.

The topline results* this round are below. Should you wish to know results for your particular demographic please contact your media planner:

Initial Top Line Results: National

• Overall a stable survey result for radio with Time Spent Listening (TSL) and Cume audiences remaining consistent within the last 12mths with National radio delivering 2.21 million listeners per week.
  
• Interesting to note was that TSL has also increased in a somewhat fickle demographic known as the ‘iPod generation’ (All People 18-34), up 20mins to 17hr 37mins per week.

National Breakfast

• The top ranked station is Newstalk ZB* – although Classic Hits and Radio Live have both increased their Breakfast Station Share significantly.
  
• Newstalk ZB also maintains its status as the most listened to breakfast show in New Zealand (All People 10+ Cume Audience).

Auckland

• Newstalk ZB remains the Number 1 station in Auckland*.
• Interestingly “Other”** came in at no.2 indicating just how fragmented the Auckland market is.
• Huge growth for Mai FM in this market - becoming the highest All People 18-34 Cume Audience 70,400. The Rock is still the Number 1 Youth brand (All People 18-34).
  

Wellington

• A positive survey for the Wellington market - more people are listening longer.
• The battle for Number 1 Station in Wellington remained tight, with ZM just managing to hang on to the No. 1 spot from The Breeze No.2 and Newstalk No.3.
• The Breeze more than doubled its Station Share against All People 18-34, moving it into third place within this competitive demographic.
• Strong growth for The Rock, which increased both Station Share and Cume Audience against all 4 of the main demographic groups.

Initial Top Line Results: Christchurch

• Newstalk ZB is now the Number 1 Station in Christchurch*, the Rock is Number 2, followed by More FM.
• Against All People 18-34 The Rock continues to dominate followed by The Edge then More FM and ZM
• More FM reclaimed its Number 1 position against All People 25-54
  

Now the survey results are out the various radio stations will be singing their praises and many rightly so. Your Carat media planner are the impartial experts in this area and are always on hand to analyse the results and make full recommendations to best meet your business needs and specific target markets.


*Based on All People 10+share, Mon –Sun 6am–12mn unless specified otherwise
** “Other” defined as all other non surveyed stations in the Auckland market

Thanks to Joleen Salisbury - Client Service Manager, Carat Wellington

The Demographics of Social Media Users

"Over the course of the year, there have been countless reports - some more substantial than others - but all with the same message: Generation Y is just not interested in Twitter. The reports generally cited members of this demographic as saying Twitter was "pointless" and "narcissistic."

Apparently, that's beginning to change. Well, maybe not their perception of Twitter, but certainly their use of it. Today, Twitter is now the second-youngest of the top four social networking sites. Its median age is 31. MySpace's is 26, LinkedIn is 39, and, as noted above, Facebook is 33."

Read more here.

The latest National Readership Survey is out!

The latest National Readership Survey conducted by Nielsen was officially released last Friday. There were some obvious winners and unfortunately plenty of losers. One thing was certain, the results offered compelling insights into how our consumers were behaving.

Be my guest.
Entertaining guests from home are becoming more frequent where long lunches and fancy dinners are now merely treats on the side. As pockets tighten so does our food palette. On the bright side, our strive to rekindle the joys of cooking is eminent with foodie titles experiencing pivotal growth. Titles such as Cuisine is up by 4% and the Healthy Food Guide with a staggering increase of 14% year on year.

DIY is in our blood.
It’s what Kiwi’s do in their spare time. Whether it’s extending the deck or cultivating the vege gardens, weekends are always brimming with projects and round trips to your local. Hence it’s no surprise that the DIY & gardening genres are undergoing a well earned readership increase. NZ Gardener was up by 20% in readers while Your Home & Garden held strong with a 8.9% rise.

We’re being picky.
Gone are the days when POS stands caught every shoppers attention, to be honest it still does – it just needs to work three times as hard. We’re choosing our weekly gossip fixes wisely, we can no longer splurge like we use to. If Bradgelina isn’t adopting another kid or Tom making Katie cry, then we don’t care. It’s these harsh realities that we’re seeing the women’s weeklies taking the hardest hit with Woman’s Day and NZ Woman’s Weekly dropping 11% respectively and New Idea down by 9.5%. Even the TV Guide is showing worst for wear dropping 17% in readers.

Supporting our Communities.
Overall, community newspapers are standing strong and delivering on local content. These free publications are receiving well deserved respect with an average growth of 2%. Specific regions of interest are Wellington with an average of 5% increase and Christchurch with a healthy average increase of 8%. Auckland and Hamilton remain steady. The national paper Sunday Star Times lost significant numbers in Auckland and Dunedin by 10% and 33% respectively however gaining ground in all other regions. Overall Sunday readership in Auckland has declined by 9% - could well be the DIY projects!

Other key trends emerging:

• Techy titles such as PC World and NetGuide have suffered a hard blow (15% and 23% drop respectively), this would reflect our reliance to research over the net rather than via hardcover.

• Either NZ couples are opting for a longer engagement, not getting married or it’s all about hand me downs – whatever the scenario, wedding mags are not relishing in growth. NZ Weddings is down by 16% whilst Bride & Groom has fallen by 9%.

So what can we take out of this? Well having a clear understanding of these dynamics and insights can really help define the way we work with our clients & publishers. It’s about collaboration to amplify these trends and make it work in our favour.

Pauline So, Client Service Manager - Carat New Zealand

Google’s Eric Schmidt on the web in 5 years time

Key Points from this Article:

• “Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.

• Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.

• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.”
  
  

Google on their own development:

• “We're starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video.

• Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.

• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.

• We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?

• It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.”

Read more here.

Online advertising is now 15 years old

“Four of our then-clients placed ad banners as part of that first campaign, MCI, Volvo, Club Med and 1-800-Collect. (The other two advertisers were AT&T and Zima.) Keep in mind, this was 1994; the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was less than a year old (soon to be replaced by Netscape Explorer), and Web access? Purely dial-up, 24.4kps if you were lucky, meaning these ads took a while to load. The online U.S. population? Two million, if that.

These "original six" were the first brands to take a leap of faith and place advertising in the unchartered "cyberspace" territory. But several didn't know they were taking it until after the fact. Corporate America was still largely unfamiliar with the graphical web, so we didn't even try to sell the concept. We decided to commit agency media and development dollars to place client banner ads on HotWired without clients' prior consent or knowledge. The way he saw it was if they liked it, they would be happy to pay us and if not, that was OK too; but at least the agency would get a running start at exploring this new exciting medium that was on course to change all of our (professional) lives.”

Read more here.