The New Zealand IAB has today released final figures for 2009 &, as expected, the amount of money being invested in online advertising by NZ businesses has continued to grow.

Total NZ online spend for 2009 was NZ$213.89m, which represented a 10.06% growth over 2008 (NZ$193.15m). Not a bad result, given most businesses slashed their advertising budgets due to the recession. Clearly the increase in online advertising has been at the expense of offline as marketers have to do more with less.

No big surprises in that Search and Directories led the way with year on year growth of 31.64% in 2009. This represents 37% of all interactive spend in 2009, up from 31% in 2008, and edges New Zealand a little closer to the Australian figure of 50.9% being spent on paid search advertising.

Display advertising grew 7.67% to $64.30m from $58.12m and accounted for 30% of all interactive spend in 2009. Classifieds decreased from $75.32m to $71.43m, reflecting the decrease in job advertisements.

2009 Total Ad Spend by Channel vs. 2008

In previous posts I’ve lamented the fact that in New Zealand search marketing doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.  Fortunately that’s starting to change. Kudos to the New Zealand Marketing Association who, for the first time, have introduced a new category for “Best Use of Search Engine Marketing” in the 2009 RSVP Craft Awards.

According to the Marketing Association’s RSVP & Nexus Awards website this new award is for the best use of Search Engine Marketing to promote a website by increasing its visibility in search engine result pages through the use of search engine optimisation or paid search advertising.

Judges will look for:

• demonstrated use of search best practices
• integration with overall marketing mix
• campaign outcomes in terms of results, traffic and ROI

At SureFire we’re delight to have been selected as a finalist for our TVNZ News & Sport Search Engine Optimisation Campaign and look forward to the big night on 26 Feb when the winners are announced.

Last week I was a speaker at the Search Engine Boot Camp conference held in Auckland.

It was a 1 day event and held at the Hilton Hotel. The day was divided in two, with the morning focusing on SEO & PPC search marketing, whilst the afternoon was primarily on social media marketing (SMM). There was a good range of speakers & some interesting presentations which the audience seemed to appreciate.

Search Marketing Agenda

• Keyword Research
• Link Building Fundamentals
• SEO Content Creation
• Paid Search Optimisation
• Landing Page Optimisation

Social Media Agenda

• Social Media Ecosystem
• Managing SMM Campaigns (Social Media Marketing)
• Twitter Marketing Tips
• Tracking the Success of Search & Social Media (Web Analytics)
• Integrating Search & Social into your communications mix
• How do you make sure Social Media works for you

I was 3′rd speaker off the rank & the topic I was charged to present on was ‘SEO Content Creation’. In other words, how to maximise search engine organic rankings through on-page code and content SEO (search engine optimisation). I finished up with some tips which hopefully attendees will find useful.

I’ve previously attended & spoken at Search Engine Boot Camp & have to say that this was significantly better than previous ones. The audience was switched on & very engaged. Lot’s of positive feedback from people I spoke to & similar comments echoed in Twitter #sebc.

If you attended, your comments on this are welcomed below.

In a recent post I mentioned recent IAB figures which showed for the first half of 2009 New Zealand TV advertising revenue plummeted 13%, while, in stark contrast, online advertising grew 7% compared to last year.

This may have been a shock to some media planners & buyers.  Especially those who to date have given little, if any, attention to online. No one likes their world turned upside down, so some may even be in denial & view this as a short term aberration due to the recession.

I don’t think so!

Most people acknowledge UK is a couple of years ahead of NZ on the online curve & generally what happens there is a pretty good indicator of things to come in NZ.

Whilst things have been tough enough in NZ, the recession has been much worse in UK. As a result the UK advertising industry has really suffered, with a £1.5 billion reduction in total media spend. Despite this, online advertising has continued to grow because of its performance accountability.

The real bombshell however is that, for the first time ever, more money is being spent in UK on online advertising than on TV!

That is pretty astounding & makes UK the first major economy to see online spending overtake television.

As the above table shows, UK’s growth in online advertising has very clearly been lead by paid search.

In NZ paid search is now the biggest online advertising channel & accounts for 36.3% of all online spend. However to put this in context, according to the IAB, paid search in UK accounts for 62.6% of all online spend.

Begs the question – when will that happen here? My money’s on it being within 2 years.