As we wrote last week, DDB is on the hunt for a tinge of ginge to spruik Speight’s new alcoholic ginger beer. An excited and then dejected Karl Burnett featured in the first spot and now, in what could be seen as the exact opposite of Sky’s Casting Tapes campaign, it’s released a second clip showing off the auditions.
When we interviewed Andy Fackrell, DDB’s new executive creative director, in the latest edition of NZ Marketing, he said we could probably expect fewer gags and more visual storytelling to come out of the agency in the next few months. And its impressive campaign to promote the Olympic coverage on Sky, a brand that’s well-renowned for taking a humorous approach to its marketing efforts, ticks both of those boxes.
It was announced a couple of months ago that DDB NZ’s creative sage Toby Talbot was leaving to take up a role within the DDB Network based in London where he would be working on global clients like Volkswagen and McDonald’s and doing a creative MBA. Everyone was assured it was a short-term thing and he’d be back to take up his position after his year-long overseas sabbatical. But he’s “made the most difficult decision of his business life” and instead made a clean break from the DDB Network to take up a role as executive creative director with one of the UK’s top agencies, RKCR/Y&R.
DDB has been on the hunt for a creative director since Adam Kanzer departed in mid-2010 and, just as it did when Justin Mowday shifted from DraftFCB to take up the managing director role, the Death Star has managed to secure the services of another senior DraftFCBer: creative director Chris Schofield.
Mini’s advertising has been consistently good in recent years, both here and overseas, and it’s undoubtedly one of the automotive industry’s most innovative brands. In New Zealand, DraftFCB’s creative and media strategy during the Soho campaign was top notch and the experiment to get rid of car yards and see if people would buy new cars online was a particularly brave retail strategy (although the MINI Garage on Ponsonby Road does look suspiciously like a car yard). Well, now it’s got another hit on its hands with the Carmonica.
Our Maan in Cannes gets up close – and personal – with Chris Schofield, creative director at DraftFCB and one of just six Kiwis to be chosen for jury duty at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, to find out about his Cannes experience. He was judging the Radio Lions and, interestingly, while DDB NZ managed to take home a gaggle of Lions for its Sky TV Arts Channel campaign, this category was the only one to go ‘Grand Prix-less’.
If they haven’t been washed away by the flash floods, six lucky New Zealand bastards are currently swanning about in the South of France. Of course, business is being mixed with pleasure: they are there in a professional capacity as judges for the Cannes Advertising Festival awards, which, as the world’s biggest and best advertising event, invites the world’s biggest and best advertising brains along to do the deciding. So here’s to them.
Six of the country’s largest, most impressive creative brains will join a host of other large, impressive international creative brains as jury members for the 2010 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.