Page 64 - The EDIT | Q1 2017

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My take on New Zealand
When you think about 2017 so far, what were the most exciting things that have happened in your market till date?
Mergers. Locally, there are two significant mergers on the cards between our biggest media players. The NZME/Fairfax merger would see more than 90% of New Zealand’s major newspapers, half the country’s radio station and two biggest
news websites under one umbrella. Meanwhile the Sky/Vodafone merger would see one of our biggest telcos join with our pay TV operator. The latter has been shot down by our competition regulator and the expectation is now the NZME/Fairfax merger will be thrown out too. Fairfax have indicated if this happened
they would be entering “end game” territory and without a merger it
is unlikely both companies would survive.
What factor is most driving change in your market at the moment?
How is the industry responding to it?
From my perspective in content
and PR, clients are expecting the same kind of accountability they have with other traditional or
even digital media channels. This
is challenging for PR where there
are so many variables and many
are out of our control. In this sense, modern day PR is becoming less about media relationships and
more about having a layer of paid storytelling (influencers, native, media partnerships) to guarantee salience with editorial being the cherry on the top. This means we can give clients a baseline expectation on the coverage
they will receive and report on it in the way they are used to with their other channels. It also means PR and content agencies need access to great strategic and planning resource. We are lucky
to have such access here at PHD New Zealand where there is full integration between Spark PR & Activate and the broader agency.
What do you think will be the biggest comms challenge speci cally for your market in the next 12 months — and what will you do to overcome it?
It’s election year in New Zealand. With that will come populist politicians jumping on the media-bashing bandwagon, calling unflattering stories “fake news” and hoping it sticks with the constituency. The impact of the “fake news” phenomenon is yet to be seen here and internationally it seems to have had more a positive impact on the media than a negative one. But with the credibility of the media constantly being questioned it will be interesting
to see if this translates to paid channels and whether it will be less beneficial to “borrow” the credibility of a publisher and even more difficult to tell a brand story in an authentic way.
THE EDIT ISSUE 054 | Q142201176