WoodwardEnglish had the incredible opportunity to be invited to NZCreatorCon 2025, held at the Pullman Hotel in Auckland, New Zealand. This event is the largest social media creator and branded content conference in Australasia, bringing together 300 of New Zealand’s top creators from YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Spotify, Snapchat, and providing an ideal space for learning and networking within the NZ creator community.
The event started at 9am with yummy breakfast pastries by Paneton (including a lovely lady playing the accordion) followed by a presentation by Andy Escapes (thanks to Sony) who is now a full-time content creator making more than he did at his old 6-figure job as a software engineer. Next we had the amazing energy of Brodie Kane who got everyone up dancing and pumped. (Whatever Brodie has for breakfast to give her that insane energy, I want bucketloads of that!)
Next we had a presentation by YouTube giving us SO MANY useful stats and ideas of what the next big things will be.
Then we had Kirsty Willson, Head of ANZ and Global Partnerships for Meta (Facebook/Instagram/Threads) talking about best practices, lots of stats as well as the experience of local NZ creator exploding from 100K to 750K in one year. Oh, and there was a chance to win a pair of Ray-Ban Meta Glasses.
The next section was getting all of the creators to do something good for the NZ SPCA. On the back of our NZCreatorCon ID, was an SPCA animal that needed a good home. Ours was a good boy called Reuben, a 9-month-old puppy. The best thing, he was adopted within the week.
Then we had an awesome lunch thanks to Burger King and the NZ Breakers (Professional Basketball team) with creators trying their skills on the court.
In the afternoon creators went to different workshops. The first one for me was the Spotify workshop which was SOOOO eye-opening for us. Yes, you will start seeing more of our content on Spotify too over the next weeks.
Just like last year, the food that the five-star Pullman Auckland (Hotel) put on was GOD TIER level good. The photos and videos do not do it justice. There was a lot of seafood, South American style BBQ, Paella that I have to admit I went up for thirds (not just seconds) and since I have a sweet tooth, I enjoyed the lolly well with a doughnut roof.
This was accompanied by live music including Josh Leys and even Kings coming on to perform his radio hit “Don’t Worry Bout It.” Of course, just like last year, the night with everyone singing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.
Rob’s random thoughts …
It was SO MUCH fun getting to meet other New Zealand creators and them just “getting” what it is all about. There was also SUCH an interesting variety of creators and again I didn’t meet a single “I’m too cool for you” person the whole 12 hours I was there. One of Rob’s personal highlights this year was meeting the amazing Ruby Tui. She is a New Zealand rugby player who has won Olympic medals and was part of the Black Ferns’ 2021 Rugby World Cup victory.
I felt I learnt so much during the event and Ange and I feel VERY inspired to continue our content creation journey and to finally start some weird projects we have had sitting on the sideline for so long.
One of main points that we took from NZCreatorCon this year is that all platforms talked about this year is that Creators must be multi-platform to succeed. Something to think about.
