Best of Me-

Zuni has been a little quieter of late, as Jacki had the holiday of a lifetime, spending 4 weeks travelling to Scotland for a wedding, across to Europe and back to Sydney via Dubai. Sounds incredibly luxurious doesn’t it? Now re-imagine that trip with a 6 and 2 year old with you. I think in many ways Jacki is as pleased to be back at work as we are to have her humour surround us! We had a few internal work anniversaries too, Miranda and Mark nailed their 1st year and Alan celebrated his 3rd year with us. Hoorah! 
Enjoy,

Valentina

Find Your Lost Pet With Pedigree

The Pedigree Adoption Drive has been an outstanding campaign initiative since 2008, re-homing 33,500+ dogs. Both my dogs came from rescue, so it’s dear to my heart. My 14 year old Labrador has also recently done a Houdini on me twice in the last 3 months, only to find he’d been picked up by concerned neighbours who thought ‘he looked hungry’, gave him dinner and dropped him off at the local vet. That’s really great of them, except I spent 2+ hours driving around my local streets and meeting the very interesting local community. Pedigree Found is a real-time lost dog app available in New Zealand. Using Google’s ad network, Found sends out digital missing pet posters to every smartphone in the area. Absolutely fabulous use of digital that can be implemented easily and change lives. It would surely change mine! 

Facebook eLearning With Blueprint

It’s finally happened!  Facebook have launched an eLearning platform where you can explore and learn how to use Facebook to create better campaigns and drive business results. Blueprint is primarily an education platform designed for agencies, partners and marketers. You can plan what categories of training you’d like to go through and the platform also records who-is-doing-what-training in your organisation to help keep track of team progress. I have no doubt this will be welcomed with open arms by many. 

Zuni’s 2014 Year In Review

 Reflection is a wonderful thing. In 2013 we took a look at how we performed as a business, and in 2014 we did it again to compare the differences. Weexperienced some strong client growth, and our training activities saw us in front of 900+ participants (both public courses and inhouse customised training). As the digital skills and knowledge gap continues to affect Australian businesses, we are totally committed to doing our part in bridging the digital divide. Our infographic shares some of Zuni’s 2014 successes with you. Thank you to all our past and present clients for helping us be the great businesses that we are.

Google’s ‘Buy Button’

OMG. My worlds collided when I found out Google has confirmed the introduction of a ‘Buy’ button, being added to its search results imminently. As a marketer, THIS IS BRILLIANT. As a mother that remembers her credit card off by heart, this is a disaster. The competition from Amazon and their incredibly powerful search engine for products has driven a number of competitive initiatives, and I think I like this one best. Is it much of a surprise that YouTube also announced Shoppable Ads? Shoppable Ads – Nope, no coincidence!

Retail

Brick & Mortar Retailers See $2.2 Billion in Digital-Influenced Sales

I’ve long been an advocate of Micro Interactions when talking about sales and conversions. These small steps in influence and decision making are no surprise at all within the retail sector. The Deloitte Digital study, Navigating The Digital Divide, identifies some of the key behavioural trends happening in the online retail space, with some categories experiencing dramatic increases in digital activity and others seeing the reverse. Customer Journeys isn’t marketing jargon, they have a real impact for businesses and they have to map this path out accurately or stand to lose competitive ground.

Making Creative Assets For FREE

Surely that got your attention. As most marketers struggle with the actual creation of creative assets, Makerbook is about to save your soul. Makerbook is a hand-picked directory of the best free resources for creatives. Everything you could poke a stick at is at your finger tips – photography, mockups, graphics, textures, fonts, colours, video and audio. If you feel like Canva is too good to be true, Makerbook will take you over the edge.

IKEA’s Concept Kitchen

When IKEA does something innovative, it’s certainly based on consumer insight. IKEA has identified how our relationship with food is changing, and what this may mean for our kitchens of 2025. More recent kitchen designs already accommodate for those horrendous mobile phone charger points hiding the long cords, and we know that the LG Internet Fridge was well and truly ahead of its time 15 years ago, but what does this all look like now? Imagine the integration of The SmartPlate, or perhaps a chopping board built into your work-surface that weighs how much you’ve chopped and its nutritional value? Check out some of the prototypes here.

Bits & Pieces

• Looking forward into 2015, Zuni’s Slideshare What Will 2015 Mean For Digital, looks at trends in the digital space we expected this year. At the half way mark, how do you think we’re going?
• The A-Z of YouTube – this is how YouTube celebrates 10 years. Very cute.
• It’s here! The best ever social media report for Australia is ready for you to download – get the Sensis Social Media Report 2015 right here.
• Here’s a pretty cool data visualisation of just how big Snapchat is. There are some nice real-time stats coming through.  It’s not a platform for me, but is it for you?
• Here are 30 SEO tools to make your life easier.
• A plug-in that searches all your cloud-based files using natural language instead of keywords. Game changer.