Feast your festive peepers on the StopPress Christmas goodie bag, which is filled to the brim with an array of newsy delights.
Seth’s Appeal
Looking for the perfect Christmas gift for that special marketing someone this year? You are! Well look no further than the Seth Godin action figure.
Imagine having your own personal marketing guru you can go to for advice and guidance. You could pay millions of dollars for consultants, but why not just get the Marketing Guru Action Figure? Marketing genius and famous blogger Seth Godin serves as the model for this 5.375″ plastic action figure with his trademark mismatched socks and business casual clothes. Each figure comes with a free gift and the Little Book of Marketing Secrets. It’s rumored that if you want an insight into what your customers want and how they’d like to be communicated with, you can rub Seth’s bald head and all will be made clear.
But wait! There’s more! There’s even an interview with the man behind the doll. And for an additional stocking stuffer to really give those tribal marketing purists a festive ‘nergasm’, download his co-created book for free. If only the Don Draper doll was on sale, you could create a beautiful marcomms nativity scene. You can top the largesse off by sending a 42 Below relief cocktail via text so that your poor, recession-weary friends and family in New Zealand or London can drown their sorrows.
Santa Claus gets busy
The folks at the Hoverlion creative collective have put their thinking caps on and come up with a weird and wonderful festive movie/video card featuring Christmas’ creative director Bryan Claus, dutiful, hard-working elf underlings, candles and, of course, the King of the Beasts.
Rascals versus raptors
Rascals (they of the controversial Mad Men-esque spoofery seen at DraftFCB and this novelty Chrissy gift) flipped the bird to the mainstream and the recession in 2009 and set up shop in Auckland as an indie agency. And one of its first projects was a viral PR campaign for New Zealand independent music label Dirty Records to launch rap artist PNC’s single Bazooka and his new album.
The Rascals decided to stage the theft of PNC’s famed raptor mascot, a bright red dinosaur suit that features in many of the music videos and on album covers, and shoot a music video following the suit’s unsanctioned exploits through New Zealand.
The Dirty PR campaign generated radio and blog buzz, with press release pleas issued for the return of the suit. An auction for the raptor was also staged on TradeMe (although it was pulled because selling stolen goods is illegal).
The raptor, seen in the music clip touring the country “doing crazy shit” is eventually returned to PNC’s house, complete with a video journal of its escapades that was filmed on a range of disparate appliances, including the P2-HD, a headcam, harbour bridge security cameras, mobile phones and three or four random handicams. And the end result was polished and coloured by the folks at DigiPost.
Mobile market plumps up
Looking for some light holiday reading this Christmas? Then check out the 659-slide behemoth (or perhaps the 92-slide condensed version might be more your cup of tea) that is the Morgan Stanley analysis of the mobile Internet market. It’s predicting extremely large, almost morbidly obese, things for the platform, with the key snippets being:
Material wealth creation/destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles. The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting. Winners in each cycle often create more market capitalization than in the last. New winners emerge, some incumbents survive – or thrive – while many past winners falter.The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.
Five IP-based products / services are growing / converging and providing the underpinnings for dramatic growth in mobile Internet usage – 3G adoption + social networking + video + VoIP + impressive mobile devices.
Apple + Facebook platforms serving to raise the bar for how users connect / communicate – their respective ramps in user and developer engagement may be unprecedented.
Decade-plus Internet usage / monetization ramps for mobile Internet in Japan plus desktop Internet in developed markets provide roadmaps for global ramp and monetization.
Massive mobile data growth is driving transitions for carriers and equipment providers.Emerging markets have material potential for mobile Internet user growth. Low penetration of fixed-line telephone and already vibrant mobile value-added services mean that for many EM users and SMEs, the Internet will be mobile.
TBWA nabs the bronze
Industry mag Advertising Age unveiled its Top 10 Best Agencies of the Decade and TBWA\ Worldwide was ranked third.
David Walden, chief executive of the TBWA\ Group in New Zealand, says the accolade is a great way to end the year and reflects well on the level of integration throughout the 270 TBWA\ offices in the global network.
“A strong international partner is incredibly important for local clients when you need a global resource for either learnings or best practice and TBWA\ delivers that in spades,” he says.
Goldring goes Tribal
Aaron Goldring has been handed the role of deputy creative director at Tribal DDB New Zealand and will work alongside creative director Dan Wright.
Goldring joins Tribal DDB following five years at AIM Proximity as the head of interactive art, where he was responsible for digital creative output for the likes of TVNZ, Vodafone, Air New Zealand, The Warehouse, Tower, Visa and the internationally-acclaimed Yellow Tree House project for Yellow Pages.
Pitchy business
The Pam’s account is up for grabs. Saatchi’s is keen to get back in there for a slice of what Nielsen says is a $54 million advertising budget, the biggest in the country. But there are mutterings that the departure of Andrew Stone and Mike O’Sullivan and the poor handling of the news by the agency could see it heading elsewhere.
Agencies in the running are rumoured to be .99 (which has New World), DraftFCB (which has Pak n Save and Four Square) and DDB (which has the Heinz Watties account).
Dave McAteer, general manager of own brands for Foodstuffs, wouldn’t confirm which agencies had pitched last week, but says a decision will be made by the end of January. And as far as potential conflicts go, he doesn’t perceive any. He says it all comes down to the best pitch, although if there was to be a conflict, he says it would probably be a “retail conflict”, rather than a product conflict.
