Brought to you by those who are leading the forefront in today’s digital world, The Marketing Association’s Digital Day Out (DDO) has become one of the must-attend digital marketing conferences in Australasia. As the company’s largest annual conference, it reels in an audience of New Zealand’s leading marketing professionals all gathering for the opportunity to gain insights into the hottest topics surrounding digital marketing.
The #DDO2020 set Auckland’s Eden Park alive, featuring an exceptional lineup of speakers including The Walt Disney Company’s Tony Miller and Vodaphone NZ’s CEO Jason Paris to name a few. The event highlighted the brands who are leading the charge, closely examined digital marketing trends, technologies and innovations which are shaping the future of our ever-changing post-Covid world.
The Energi team had the pleasure of designing the creative collateral for this event, along with the other exciting marketing campaigns the Marketing Association is currently running. Learn more about these programmes, courses and competitions through their website here. You won’t want to miss out!
Energi’s Sizzle Reel, featuring all the projects we have been working on over the past 24 months also made its debut on the Eden Park Stadium billboards – check out a preview below!
It became pretty evident pretty early on that the quote for the day was influenced by the impact of COVID on businesses worldwide. Mike Tyson is not one someone you would generally see featured in a Marketing conference, let alone a digital-centric event but nothing else has seemed to be more apt than this.
Topic: Digital creativity: My years at The Walt Disney
Speaker: Tony Miller, Formerly VP, Digital Marketing and CRM –EMEA, The Walt Disney Company
Tony joined us via Zoom from London and took the audience through the journey of how he was a part of connecting all the customer touchpoints across Disney’s vast global empire.
Key takeaways:
- A singular view: With a behemoth the size of Disney, ensuring relevance at every stage was key to driving commercial success for the brand. Hyper personalization was the name of the game, aligning internal and agency tech systems to communicate with each other in order to create a global dashboard.
- Content Darwinism: A need for continuously optimizing content (across all channels) to ensure only the highest performing pieces are pushed out. All of this comes back to efficient tracking systems and learnings shared across the company. For Disney, social content with no faces in it results in a spike in engagement! Check out a bit more on the topic here.
- A lesson for SMEs: While of course Disney comes with a multi-million dollar budget, Tony’s advice to SMEs is to build and own first-party data. Building your databases of customers over time is key to developing an efficient marketing system.
Topic: How Covid-19 crunched two years of digital adoption into a few weeks
Speaker: Jason Paris, Chief Executive Officer, Vodafone NZ
Jason started off his presentation with a display of radical transparency that he believes is important for businesses in the 21st century – his email id for anyone to reach out to him about anything Vodafone!
Key takeaways:
- A look under the hood: The highlights of Vodafone’s journey to being COVID ready were structured across 4 key pillars – Business, Culture, Customer and Tech. Internal and external approaches to ensuring business success.
- One-way vs two-way doors: Taking a leaf from Jeff Bezos, Jason stressed the importance of understanding that most decisions are reversible decisions from which you can always come back, learn, and improve. Read more in detail here
- Stop chasing new customers: You get a more profitable business outcome from retaining your current customers vs being constantly on the drive to acquire new ones. Learn how you can best do that, fast!
- Be clear about your value exchange: Define your value exchange with your market to best understand what you as a business need to be delivering back to your shoppers. This isn’t a one-way street.
Topic: Keep It Real Online: How a government campaign became a viral sensation
Speaker: Sam Stuchbury, Founder / Creative Director, Motion Sickness. Trina Lowry, Manager – Design, Engagement & Innovation – Digital Safety, DIA
Sam and Trina took the stage to walk us through the creation of one of the most viral NZ campaigns to emerge during the lockdown. The Keep It Real Online campaign from the government tackled some hard-hitting topics of pornography, cyberbullying and grooming.
If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look below:
Key takeaways:
- Behavioural change and humour go hand in hand: Sometimes the easiest way to tackle the hardest topics is through a couple of laughs and that is just what this campaign did.
- Humor is key to ad recall: More than half of consumers surveyed rated humor as being the top factor to ad-recall
- Kiwi humour is globally loved: Thanks to Taika taking the NZ brand of humour internationally there has been a clear appreciation for this uniquely Kiwi trait. Exploit it!
Topic: How to move the social media dial and build a community of raving fans at a breakneck speed
Speaker: Melanie Spencer, Co-CEO, Socialites + The Social ClubZania Guy, Digital & Direct Marketing Manager, New World
Deconstructing the key levers of New World’s social media growth was a lesson on social media best practice.
Key takeaways:
- Build in emotional hooks: Think about what your audience cares, cries, laughs about when building content for your brand
- Two-way conversations: Good social media is all about community management and dialogue. It’s not a broadcast channel, which unfortunately a lot of brands still consider it as.
Topic: TikTok 101
Speaker: Clare Winterbourn, Founder, Born Bred Talent Australia
Clare joined us from Australia, where her agency has been busy launching 250+ OZ brands onto Tik Tok. Before you think TikTok is just for the kids, 68% of Kiwis on Tik Tok are over 18 years. The image below showcases a snapshot of the kinds of brands that have already jumped onto the platform.
Key takeaways:
- High usage rates in NZ: Tik Tok has already become the third-largest social media platform in NZ with Tik Tok is checked 13 times a day on average vs 9 times a day for Instagram.
- Brands need to be users not ‘brands’: If your brand is thinking about Tik Tok, approach the platform as just another user and ditch your brand loftiness – that is what results in true engagement over time.
- Commit to high levels of content: Gone are the days of a post a week, this channel expects high levels of consistent content.
- Not just entertainment but e-commerce: Tik Tok is soon launching e-commerce capability with integration into Shopify to poser your e-commerce capability, so keep your eyes peeled.
Topic: Experiential stores, frictionless shopping, and a thousand selfies
Speaker: Dylan Weymouth, Operations Transformation Lead, Noel Leeming Group
Dylan took us through Noel Lemming’s journey of doubling down on a high-quality customer service at every customer touchpoint.
Key takeaways:
- Their brand new digital store greeter Nola – If you have visited their new flagship store in Westfield Newmarket you would’ve met Nola. An artificial intelligence powered store greeter, Nola helps shoppers have a better in-store experience.
- Transferable online – Nola is available online as well in the form of a chatbot helping answer customer queries. She has already registered to handle 4 times the number of queries that a human would, allowing the brand to quickly work their way through a huge backlog of emails. But to be clear Nola works in synergy with her human colleagues in a hybrid way, so she isn’t aiming at knocking down the staff numbers (just yet).
- Selfie queen – Oh did we mention you can take a selfie with her in-store as well? Over a thousand have been clicked so far…
You might bump into Nola in more Noel Lemming stores in the future.
Topic: Unlocking the Chinese market: Consumer trends, Singles Day, and the New Retail eco-system
Speaker: Ken Freer, Founder, Flying Tiger
Ken brought alive what it takes to enter the Chinese market from the western world. Long story short its far deeper than a basic WeChat marketing strategy.
Key Takeaways:
- What channel you choose depends upon location: Every Chinese city has its own nuances based on location and size, which results in a vast network of apps and influencers that you need to navigate to find the best fit.
- A rapidly growing middle class: Growth is to be had within Tier 3 and 4 cities which each consist of 5+ million residents who all have just started flexing their buying power.
- Multi-level rewards: Chinese typically like options with anything – experiences, products, etc – just like their meals. They hate being cordoned into single choice decisions but would rather go where they have a platter of choices so as to minimise the opportunity cost with something for everyone. Keep this in mind when catering to this demographic.
- Singles Day isn’t just a day: The world’s largest shopping occasion stretches across an entire month, with shoppers loading their online baskets and wish lists with products so as to capture the best price once it emerges on 11.11
- Livestream e-commerce is HUGE: The image below illustrates what a typical livestream looks like, think home shopping channel on steroids. The KOL (key opinion leader – what the Chinese call key influencers, since acknowledging being influenced is disrespectful in their culture), set a record for clearing $150 million+ worth of sales through just a single day of broadcasting. Mind blown!
Topic: 100% Pure New Zealand presents…. PLAY NZ
Speaker: Andrew Waddel, General Manager – Australia, Tourism New Zealand
Andrew joined us from Australia and presented one of this year’s most innovative campaigns that leveraged Twitch to boost interest to travel to New Zealand. Capitalizing on the boom of gaming while people were in lockdown, this campaign allowed Australians to explore the country right from their homes. This immersive experience helped people’s minds travel since their bodies couldn’t.
Key Takeaways:
- Gamification as a storytelling tool: A proven fact in the world of advertising, this campaign elevated the creative execution to a level few others do. Watch the video below to gain a sense of the production quality.
- Gaming crosses all age groups: While gaming might differ in levels of sophistication and device across demographics, it is one of the most popular experiences across the world. 59% of people in the age group of 25 – 44 years either play/consumer content about gaming every week.
Topic: CONNECTED: Mastering the art of connection in our modern mixed media world
Speaker: Cassie Roma, Founder & Director, CR&Co
Cassie is Kiwi who has returned from a highly successful career in the US. This high energy speaker was infectious, delivering the most non-marketing session to wrap up the fabulous day. She took us through what’s happening in our minds as we navigate the world that we live in, continuously bombarded with ‘CONTENT’.
Here is what a typical ‘Communications Prism’ was visualised to look like:
But here is a more accurate representation of the sheer mass of volume that is zooming our way on a daily basis (the image isn’t clear enough? Well that’s because we would need an entire webpage by itself to encapsulate this monstrosity).
Strengthening the views from the Social Dilemma on Netflix (a must-watch if you haven’t yet) – the new currency is our ‘time’ and everyone is jostling for pole position in our day. Cortisol, oxytocin and dopamine are the key human drivers that all content is looking to exploit.
In a nutshell, Digital Day Out was a fabulously well put together event by the Marketing Association. Being in a room full of 400 people after months of coming in and out of lockdown was a refreshing change for most of us. We can’t wait for the next edition and highly recommend you and your team attend in 2021.
#DDO2020
