Jemma Fastnedge

Looking forward to presenting this webinar to upskill the industry on the importance of contracts and some key issues to consider. #influencermarketing #influencers #aimco

14

There is always that moment, that point in time when you think "this could be a game changer". Right now is that moment ... the quality of fractional leaders available to NZ businesses is outstanding. CEOs, founders, boards and investors have access to world-class part-time leadership to deliver high-value, high-impact outcomes. You have heard the term Fractional, and if you want to lean about HOW this new way of working can accelerate your business then come along to this breakfast...seats are limited, it's a hot topic, just saying.....

10

2 Comments

It’s amazing to finally see the new ABC News digital experience properly out in the wild.   It's been months of work, across a huge number of teams within not just Digital Product but a significant collaborative effort with our friends in both News and Marketing. It encapsulates a significant step forward for us. One that is a deliberate attempt to appeal to a broader set of the Australian public through a modern, fresh and hopefully more inviting look and feel. It’s important as ABC News constitutes well over half of our weekly digital audiences. It acts as a key gateway into our other products such as ABC iview and ABC listen. So by doing a better job of attracting and retaining audiences through News, we anticipate a rising tide effect elsewhere. Yesterday morning at 6am, we had a raft of teams across Digital Product up early to support the launch. The best launches are the uneventful ones and that was very much the case yesterday. It’s a sign though of solid preparation when a rollout of this magnitude goes according to plan. We wanted to coincide the Web launch with the TV brand refresh that hit audiences via ABC News Breakfast. I must say felt the rebrand was looking sensational across TV yesterday. From black to blue – it's really a much more engaging News brand overall now and seeing it coordinated across TV, digital and third party speaks to the incredible collaboration behind the scenes. One unexpected positive from the launch was witnessing an overall server demand drop, as our morning audience traffic increased from 6am. This is a very rare set of events to occur simultaneously! It was due to the new homepage being built a lot more efficiently than its predecessor. Thus requiring less resources and ultimately delivering faster page load times for our audiences. Although you might have seen some minor changes with the ABC News App, there’s a lot more to come here. We made a collective call to stagger the releases here so that we could de-risk the rollout. So watch this space in the coming weeks. Super proud of what the team's have achieved here 😁 https://lnkd.in/gx9zZXDw

54

4 Comments

Navigating the Red Tape:The Struggles of Small Businesses in 2024 The recently released ACCI Small Business Conditions Survey 2024 paints a stark picture for small businesses across Australia. With 45% of small businesses contemplating closure within the past year and 82% reporting significant impacts from regulatory red tape, the challenges are clear and pressing. For the hospitality industry, these findings are particularly concerning. Our sector, known for its dynamic and flexible workforce, faces unique challenges in complying with increasing regulatory demands. The cost of compliance, both in time and money, is diverting essential resources away from growth and innovation. As we look to the future, it's imperative that we advocate for meaningful regulatory reform. Without it, the hospitality industry risks increased closures, reduced investment, and ongoing operational strain. Let's work together to support our small businesses and ensure a vibrant and sustainable future for the hospitality sector. #SmallBusiness #HospitalityIndustry #RegulatoryReform #ACCI #BusinessChallenges Clipboard Hospitality Tipu Sultan ➡ Key Findings: Impact on the Hospitality Industry The hospitality industry, characterised by its reliance on casual and part-time employment, is particularly susceptible to these challenges. Increased regulatory compliance burdens can lead to higher operating costs and reduced profitability, making it harder for hospitality businesses to thrive. The industry's need for flexible staffing solutions further complicates compliance with stringent regulations, impacting workforce management and operational efficiency. Future Implications If the current regulatory environment persists without significant reform, the hospitality industry may face: 👉 Increased Business Closures: More hospitality businesses may consider closing due to unmanageable compliance costs and pressures. 👉 Reduced Investment: Potential investors might be deterred by the high regulatory burden, leading to fewer new hospitality ventures. 👉 Operational Strain: Existing businesses may struggle to maintain profitability and service quality due to the additional time and financial resources diverted to compliance. 👉 Employment Challenges: Difficulty in hiring and retaining staff due to the combined pressures of regulatory compliance and workforce shortages.

4

This piece in Mumbrella by Brad Bennett is well worth a read. I have a pet theory that over the next decade we're going to see a rise in the commitment to long-term brand building corresponding with a flight to quality and durability as the underpinning of true sustainability. Right now though, things are a little sad on the advertising front and Brad explains why. #marketing #brandstrategy #advertisingeffectiveness

10

5 Comments

This morning we launched a very minimal, just viable MVP for Coshop NZ, a "for purpose" startup idea that has been kicking around in my head for the past few years. Happy to say we’ve had over 10 orders already! It’s a small step in what I hope will be systemic shift towards a fairer, more sustainable food system and away from the unfair, wasteful duopoly we currently have in Aotearoa today. Local food co-ops in Wellington hit $1M ARR in fresh produce last year, distributing it to communities at pop-up food hubs at half the price of supermarkets using just manual bank transfers and a google sheet. I believe that by scaling up the amazing work of organisations like Wesley Community Action and FoodTogether we can drive systemic change to address climate change on a global scale - empowering communities to create resilient, sustainable and fair food systems. We've just done the first step, lowering the bar to entry for coops by taking care of ordering, digitising payments and email notifications. Now on to the next phase - feature building, gathering impact data and co-designing with communities. Big thanks to Creative HQ, Motion Capital, mentors Eoghan Walsh and Franco Sabadini and the cohort of this years Climate Response Accelerator. It was a huge confidence boost, an amazing learning journey and amazingly supportive. Even bigger thanks to Fokko van der Schans, Sabrine van Rossum and Mandy Hale who have worked with me over the past few months to take CoShop from being just an idea out to out into the world. If you feel like this is something you’d like to support, we’d love: - Funding! Seed investment or impact grants (potentially eligible for tax rebates!) - Help with dev work using Typescript, NextJS, React and MedusaJS - all open source!

95

32 Comments

Miriam Bell, The Post, good read. Another angle to this is leverage in property accelerates wealth building. That allows downsizing and later-life investing in Kiwisaver and Managed funds. We forget, at age 60, we have 30 years left of investing to spread our money out to age 90. Cashing out, or de-risking at retirement age is old-thinking and frankly, madness. It’s these second-season older investors that will contribute to funds such as Simplicity and a percentage of their money will cycle into the likes of Simplicity Living - as Sam Stubbs says, with a goal to build 10,000 rentals over 10 years. We can’t under-estimate the power of the downsizer-investor, in contributing to the shape of the property market.

21

5 Comments

Helping companies elevate a customer lens in their business strategy deepens brand connections and accelerates integrated organisational impact and value-based outcomes. Pretty exciting. https://lnkd.in/gYPRvDQt #customer #customerexperience #digital #value #strategy

6

Want to know more about Spark Accelerate? (My current project with Spark New Zealand) Here’s a good write up featured on Idealog ☺️

15

Nothing beats in person meetings 🙂 Today Kylie Abella and I visited Flex Public Relations clients Sarah & Ben from HH Marine & Full Circle Restorations on the Gold Coast. We got a mini tour of the marina 🛥️ along with taking a deep dive into some aspects of the businesses that we didn’t originally have on the agenda. After a few cups of coffee and getting some wins for them with their Google profiles, it was back up the highway to get the wheels in motion for the remainder of our action items. Onwards and upwards 🚀 #business #strategy

10

Another huge week in the AI space, only a week after presenting at Tourism Industry Aotearoa's TRENZ on the topic there are already new updates to how travel marketing will be affected. The rate of change in this space is so rapid that if you blink you might miss an entirely new generation of tools.   Where we were right - Booking.com is coming! The previously US & UK-only "AI Trip Planner" has come to New Zealand. Leveraging Open AI's ChatGPT service, the app now lets you plan your holiday with conversational prompts rather than by searching by location, budgets and dates. Simply describing your ideal trip and your own travelling situation lets the app provide a suggested itinerary and accommodation to match. Since launch, this service has also been expanded to include flight bookings and attractions through FareHarbor.     Where we missed the mark - Google's AI search summaries are going mainstream! After the slow rollout of Googles AI Search ambitions we believed it would remain in the Google Labs testing phase for some time still. Announced this week at their annual developer conference Google I/O they are rolling out a vastly improved version of the service as the default experience for users worldwide. Not content with simple summaries (and perhaps trying to outdo the rapidly ascending perplexity.ai), Google are reimagining a world where "Google does the Googling for you". The new Google will make suggestions, categorise results, and summarise information based on your questions. It remains to be seen the impact that this will have on ad and organic click throughs, but in a world where you can find everything on the google result page it's hard to imagine these not being massively effected.   What we weren't expecting - while the world waits for the next generation of ChatGPT or a GPT-powered search, the creators OpenAI released an improved version of the existing model, called ChatGPT4o. The new version is faster, produces better images, and will include a voice assistant that people can become way too attached to. Rather than responding to single commands like the current voice prompt, the assistant is supposedly able to respond in real time and is aware of the world around you when using it (terrifying). Be sure to keep half an eye on our Maverick Digital Tourism Marketing website, we've developed an AI hub to demystify and add value to you and your business where Tim Olson is leading an almighty charge to try and keep up! https://lnkd.in/gBfNi9bd

48

6 Comments

Have you seen my ad on AFR 👉 👀📰 Or better, just go straight to the pay-off. Which is 👉 Use points with IFLYFLAT & Fly Business Class for half price. Why use points? Understand the numbers here. https://lnkd.in/gD6MgZYT #iFLYflat #TheFlightsClub #BusinessClass

23

3 Comments

Terrific examples of Scope 3 emission reporting was shared at #impactx24 here in Sydney today. Key learnings were: 1. Don't panic, just start you auditing, refine the process as you learn, because Scope 3 will account for ×/-80% of your emissions. So it deserves attention and action. 2. Deeply involve your supply chain, incentive them, provide training support 3. Use technology to do the 'heavily lifting' of collecting and processing data From me, don't treat Scope 3 as simply an auditing process, consider medium term market trends, consider innovations that would lead to your product/services to change. Particularly as biodiversity and social sustainability responsible reporting will lead some to reimaging where their business could go.

4

Work life balance was on the agenda at the AFR summit today likely due to the right to disconnect laws that are coming into play here shortly. On my panel I had something to say about it, I figure it's worthwhile providing the context that's missed in the article. Before a horde of angry folk descend upon me and accuse me of heinous crimes against humanity. (or worse 'disdain' for Australian workers - AFR words not mine). Goterra is a climate tech startup, we exist because we're in a climate crisis. So we have very up front conversations with our staff at hiring about what it means to be working in a startup on the climate crisis. Here's what we talk about: 1. Exact working hours - we can't guarantee you start at 9 you end exactly at 5 every day 2. There will be days where we need everyone to double down and help out. 3. We try to avoid overtime, but sometimes it's needed, we manage it with a range of things including but not limited to: additional salary, overtime, PTO. We still make sure that staff have: 1. Flexibility to how often you have to stay late and understanding when you can't make it work. 2. Have to take a day to reset, take leave to enjoy a holiday, go home at short notice to tend to an emergency or celebration - not a problem. 3. You will get paid over time or duly compensated. 4. No one will expect you to be turned on all the time. Today when this question was asked on the panel, a subsequent question was "if you expect them to do more, are you compensating them?" which I think speaks to the distorted perspective on this topic. Aside from the fact that not doing that is illegal I would imagine it's also an entirely effective way to loose staff quickly. We've made work life balance contentious, as though a company who cannot provide bank teller hours to it's employees is somehow inherently bad or evil. Where the reality is, there's work, like agriculture, waste, and climate tech startups that require odd and uneven hours because of the complexity and nature of working with living things or doing first of a kind tech. As I mentioned on my panel, that doesn't mean you can't still do the right thing by your staff and ensure they're being taken care of. I'll look forward to chatting about this more in the comments. Maxim Shanahan The Australian Financial Review

119

20 Comments

Most of the value created by startups that grow to be successful is captured by founders and shareholders. If community building events (like those organised by KiwiSaaS) are important inputs to that eventual success then those founders and shareholders should surely be willing to pay for them directly, rather than expecting everybody else to cover that cost. I strongly advise all the founders I work with to spend *less* time at “ecosystem” events and *more* time focused on making their own ventures one that counts. That is by far the biggest contribution that any individual can make to actually growing an ecosystem. It requires founders to engage in the sector where their customers are, rather than the “ecosystem” where other founders are, and many are reluctant to do that because those are much harder conversations. It’s easy for those who love the vibe of the so called “innovation sector” to dismiss me as a hater, as they have done in the past when I’ve made comments like these. But these are the hard truths.

90

92 Comments

💰 NSW FUNDING OPPORTUNITY 📣 Exciting news for startups and innovative SMEs! Investment NSW has launched their MVP program. And while, yes - you may just be the Most Valuable Player - they're really on the hunt for applicants with a Minimum Viable Product. The program offers grants from $25k - $50k to support businesses in the critical product lifecycle stages between early-stage research and mature investment opportunities. The aim is to drive the commercialisation of highly innovative and new products, providing the necessary funding to turn groundbreaking ideas into market-ready solutions. Key benefits of the MVP Ventures program: → Financial support to bridge the gap between initial research and securing larger investments → Encouragement for the development of pioneering products that can lead to significant market advancements → Assistance in accelerating the path from concept to commercialisation 🖥️ Go to: https://lnkd.in/gj9hsUHR Georgine Roodenrys Nicole T Garofano, PhD, AAIP Cle-Anne Gabriel Lisa McLean Charlotte Connell Sally-Anne Käsner Anna Minns Caitlyn Touzell Neil Makepeace GAICD Mick Liubinskas ⚡️ Michael Batko Louella Carr #CircularEconomy #Sustainability #ZeroWaste #NetZero #NSW #Innovation #Startups #SMEs #MVPVentures #Commercialisation #InvestmentNSW #MVP

3

Last week alongside Webprofits COO Catherine Dix I attended the iMedia Summits & Events AU, NZ & SEA Online Retail Summit - my first event in quite a long time. Picked the right one to start with 👍 Three days alongside 200 of Australia's top retail brands discussing marketing, ecommerce, customer service, data, logistics, security/fraud, AI and more - hat tip to our incredible partners at Logitech ANZ who attended. I learned a ton so here are my 5 key takeaways: 1. I need to learn a LOT more about affiliate marketing. I’ve seen for some of my global clients how much revenue this channel can drive (upwards of 20% of DTC revenue in some cases). And for the first time at iMedia I saw potential partners/solutions that I think we can work well with. So I need to upskill here fast. 2. I had more conversations about loyalty programs over the three days at iMedia than probably all of last year (excluding our work with Levi's). Something about the last year has really reinforced the value of every customer to retail brand leaders. A lot of them are ready to invest in maximising Customer Lifetime Value. 3. Maybe not surprisingly, but pretty well unspoke across the entire conference was the complexity of implementation of literally any technology or service solution with a major retail brand. I’ve worked with a lot of these companies and know how difficult it is to implement new tech on the stack or integrate a new service provider. Nothing is real until it’s shipped and live, and agencies like Webprofits are providing significant value right now bridging this gap. 4. I’m sorry to say this, but whenever someone said “AI”, everyone’s eyes glazed over. Probably not the correct response but I get it. Look, AI’s been at the centre of marketing for much longer than ChatGPT/generative. The first half of my career was spent trying to understand at the time the most sophisticated AI algorithm in the world - Google Search. That was over a decade ago now. Marketers need to understand AI and work with it - also be skeptical of any claims until verified. 5. Controversial but I’d love to see marketers talking about marketing a bit more. Lots of conversations about tech that can change the game, solve problems etc. How about what makes a great ad in 2024? Brand building for major retailers on TikTok? What every marketing leader needs to understand about Pmax? I'd also of course love more conversation around the fundamentals. (Big exception to this to Freddy Hollow at GolfBox who had me seriously pumped for rewriting product descriptions) On day three I delivered a 10 minute presentation on the main stage to over 100 marketing leaders on the “Anatomy of a $50 Million Revenue Direct to Consumer Campaign”. Big moment for me! I’ve presented a lot over the years but this was definitely the largest in person event. And I really enjoyed it. So I went ahead and recorded my presentation to share here, which I’ll do tomorrow...

39

7 Comments

"Pretending the problem doesn’t exist won’t make it go away or stop it badly affecting people and wildlife in the decades ahead." (Adam Morton, the Guardian) Like a slowmo video of a brick through a window, Labor's environmental cred is shattering, spewing splinters of misguided policy across the political landscape. And it's all down to a shallow-willed PM, Anthony Albanese, and his blundering Climate Change & Energy Minister, Chris Bowen. Stuck in the middle is the Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek. She had some progressive ideas after the last election but Albanese and Bowen soon caved to the mining lobby and that ended any progress on the environment. Labor is failing (and flailing) with the its environment policies and it doesn't look like they have the guts, willpower or leadership skills to sort out the mess before the next election. So they'll toss the environment up into the air and let the electorate decide....once again. A big difference this time around is that neither Labor or the Opposition has anywhere else to go except down a rabbit hole lined with the barbed wire of environmental annihilation. Personally, I don't think the green tinged electorates will stand for this. They will vote for minor parties, independents and the Greens and hopefully we'll end up with a 'tripartite' Senate that will force the major parties to the table to negotiate environmental legislation that puts the environment first. You can tell that the major parties are terrified of this outcome. Labor, in particular, is throwing every little piece of excrement at the Greens that they can find.

3