Its New Season Launch Time Again

That's right, it's that time again. New Season launch. Time to look at what are the programmers hanging their hats on this year.

As I tend to be quite negative on this blog, I've decided for this entry to change tack, and explain what I'm looking forward to.

First up, TV3.

Even though it was early, the TV3 Launch was great. Paul Henry MC'ed and dare I say it, he was quite charming. I'm sure most people enjoyed the digs at his previous employer and he really held the audience. I really enjoyed how Kelly took us through the entire schedule programme by programme basically, which meant I walked away from the presentation with a really good grasp of what they are going to be airing next year.

Highlights for me (and please note - these are NOT necessarily what I think will rate. They're the programmes that I will be watching)

• The New Girl. Yes, it's on FOUR . I hope they promo the hell out of it. It's an adorable series. 
• American Horror Story. Not sure how NZ will react to this, but it looks incredible and has an amazing cast.
• Homeland. Clare Danes doesn't usually do it for me, but this series looks interesting.

And of course their awesome returning series

• The Secret Lives of Dancers
• The Good Wife
• Californication
• The Big C

Next was TVNZ.

I found the TVNZ launch a little too much. PUTs are down, rates are up, they're making our clients pay more and more and more for less and less ratings so they spend what must have been quite a substantial amount of money on a very flashy presentation. Let's not start on the fact that they flew up the Wellington and Chch media people and put them up for the night ontop of all of the glitz. Mostly because I am glad they did - was a wonderful chance to catch up with old friends.

Paul Maher spoke well, but I thought it was a real shame that the 'Johns' did pieces to camera rather than speaking live. Lacked that kind of 'real' touch and I felt like they spoke more about the shows than actually showing us the programmes. Following far too many drinks, run-ins with arrogant Shortland St cast members and inappropriate grabbing from actors of other local shows, I walked away not really knowing what TVNZ were putting up next year. Which is a shame. 

Following some further investigation, this is what I'm looking forward to:

• Keep Calm & Carry On (Jacquie Brown)
• Seven Dwarves. Which looks a little like a Dwarf version of Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.
• Once Upon a Time. Appeals to the geek in me

Finally, the Prime launch was yesterday.

The Launch itself was wonderful. High Tea at the Langham. What a lovely way to spend an afternoon. As usual Karen and Kathy were a joy to listen to as they took their little digs at the big boys in the market. They also addressed something I was concerned about, how SOHO might affect their deal with HBO - it would seem it will only strengthen their offer, which is great news.

Things to look forward to on Prime (according to me):

• Wild Boys - Australian series, looks great
• True Blood
• QI
• Boardwalk Empire (after screening on Soho)
• Junior Masterchef

Prime seems to have picked up a number of the British Dramas that I would have expected to see on One a few years ago. I really hope the audience finds Prime's programming as it's really good quality stuff.

So there you go. My thoughts on new programmes this year. I think it's a shame that no one seems to have picked up Wilfred which is pretty genius. But there you go. Find a way around S92a and torrent that sucker.

The Awesome Reaction Opportunities of Online Advertising

Jeepers, what a news day! Hows about that Obama unscheduled announcement at 3-something this afternoon? That was a ripper.

News started coming through Twitter about 2.30 this afternoon about the unscheduled announcement from Obama and then very quickly the rumour mill went into overdrive in that it was to announce that Osama Bin Laden had been killed and the US had the body.

This kind of news of course spreads like wildfire on the internet. The announcement was to be streamed live on The White House website, which of course was delayed for almost an hour. During which time, everyone was hungry for information, which meant publishers had to turn information around SUPER QUICK.

As @tweetdaniel pointed out, TV3 didn't manage to get it quite right:

I would recommend clicking on the link above so you can check it out in full, but basically, it reads:

"We are currently experiencing extremely high traffic due to the announcement that Barack Obama is dead. Please bear with us we will be back up soon."

Whoops.

Not sure that was right.

Now, if you've read my blog before, you will probably know that I don't have a lot of nice things to say about TVNZ. I still don't, because when I tried to watch a live stream on tvnz.co.nz this afternoon it wanted me to report the error in loading, which I tried to do a number of times. Le sigh.

However, they did manage to do something right today (shock horror I know).

There I was, reading Mashable.com on what was to be announced and what do I see, but a One News banner run through the Google Content Network:

I do not tell a lie, this was up within half an hour of me first reading about the rumour that Obama was going to announce the death of Bin Laden. Now, it's not the prettiest of banners, but it's bang on. All the information you need. Up to date. Relevant.

I think it is awesome and just shows how online is the best medium for this kind of immediate response. Press also gives the opportunity for quick reaction turnaround, but for that, we're talking the next day, not within the hour. This is just too good. Brilliant work.

This doesn't change anything though TVNZ. This is clever, but all is not forgiven...

Budget Online

Can someone please sort out Budget's online advertising.

Yesterday I was on Trade Me where I saw a Budget ad and thought 'spin the wheel - cool, sure, this will be interesting. Wonder if they are going to do this within the ad or take me to a landing page?'

Now, I understand that there is a button on this ad which says 'Spin Now' but I wasn't paying that much attention so I just clicked on the actual wheel in the ad. Took me straight to a new tab which told me that it was "bad request - invalid verb". At this point, I took a screen shot of the landing page and emailed my Trade Me rep and suggested they work out what is going on.

No idea what they did with this information, but they thanked me for it.

So, today on TV3 page, I see the Budget ad again:

And again I click on the wheel instead of the spin now button and yet again, I get this:
Now, this could be a Chrome issue (I can't be bothered finding the ad again in Firefox and playing with it) but I do wonder, who is building this creative for them? I am pretty sure it is possible to make sure that the rest of the ad doesn't click through at all, if that was what they were going for, or more to the point, make it so that everything but the button clicks through to their site.

What is going on?

What did Trade Me do with this information? Did they pass it onto the agency/client? Let them know what was happening? And if so, how come new creative which doesn't go to an error landing page hasn't been supplied to all publishers running this ad?

This is one of the reasons why it is so hard to get clients into online. They start with a sample of 1 (themselves) and decide that no one clicks on online advertising, so what's the point? Then, once you convince them to consider online, they start playing a little more and clicking on ads and this sort of thing happens.

Someone is letting the side down here. I'm not sure who, but you're not helping the rest of us by not caring about your advertising.

Skin it baby

OK, so I might be behind the 8 ball on this one, but I love it.

So we've all known for a while that you can skin the MediaOne players to look all cool and someone made it a PSP and they have done funky things, blah blah, but this is the first time I have seen this on TV3:

The media player is a television! How awesome is that. CLEVER.

Again, may have been like this for months, but I only saw it this week and I think it is choice. Well done LG, or whoever came up with it.

As an aside, pretty busy at the moment. If things quieten down, then there might be some more substantial posts, got some thoughts floating around my head, just need to put fingers to keyboard.