Parliament has announced today it’s introducing plain packaging requirements for cigarettes and other tobacco products, making New Zealand only the second country in the world to do so. Rachel Ramsay looks at both sides of the plain packaging argument, asking if where there is smoke , there is liars.
The newspaper industry has certainly had better years than 2012, with a continuing shift away from paper by readers and advertisers, big losses and restructures for the major players in this market and the spectre of the Leveson Enquiry hanging over print journalism. But there was still plenty to celebrate. News Work’s new business and marketing manager Jenny Stiles sounds off.
Given New Zealand’s feverish excitement during the Olympics when our gold medal tally was greater than that of the usually better performing Australian Olympic team, there’s still a fairly healthy dose of ‘friendly’ rivalry between the two nations. Over the years there’s been a bit of talk about New Zealand becoming the seventh state (and it happened briefly during the Games when, for the first time since 1912, the two nations came together as a rogue state known as Aus Zealand) and, from a marketing perspective, plenty of companies have decided to take care of business in New Zealand from Australia. But subtleties and local nuances are important when it comes to communications, as TVNZ-NZ Marketing Award winners Volkswagen and Z Energy can attest, and some things that work in other markets might not work here. And that’s the card British American Tobacco has played in the latest instalment of G2 Sydney’s animated Agree Disagree campaign, which taps into New Zealand’s patriotic, independent, Aussie-hating streak and questions the wisdom of following Australia’s lead on plain packaging legislation.
As we wrote last week, British American Tobacco has taken the unusual step of launching an ad campaign to state its case against the plain packaging proposal. And now it has launched the next phase of its campaign, which focuses on the issues it believes plain packaging could create for other New Zealand export industries. But Plain Packs NZ has followed the lead of the UK with a clip that shows the appeal of the packaging to kids. PLUS: the agency and production house behind the Agree Disagree campaign confirmed.