Back to the Future

Back in Tauranga and back to the future.

When I opened my email today, I received a reminder from The Internet Bureau about their New Generation Search seminar in Auckland this Thursday. It's a five hour return trip from Tauranga, but I think I will go.

The 90 minute seminar features a presentation by Y!SM's Australasian Managing Director Craig Wax of the new Yahoo!Search Marketing's advertising engine, as well as a viewing of the new Yellow Pages portal.

Targeted online advertising has a chequered history in New Zealand. This is partly down to the historic development of the sector, but is mainly down to the limited number of NZ eyeballs. As the Internet Bureau flyer says, New Zealand has been dominated by one large site that has accounted for a significant amount of traffic from this limited eyeball quota. The result has been the widespread adoption of online ad models that really went down with the Ark.

So it is good that this seminar is taking place and good that a new targeted advertising model is becoming available to NZ advertisers and content owners. It will be interesting to see how advertisers and new media agencies resource up to meet the new opportunities that this targeted advertising can bring.