Monthly Archives: March, 2010

News
Give and take: the joys of generosity-based marketing
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Wholly Bagels owner and founder Charlie Daily decided on his marketing strategy out of necessity: he had no budget for mainstream advertising, so, instead, he decided to use giving and generosity as his major marketing tool. And so far it’s proven to be a very effective approach.

News
Wellington and the tapestry of life
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Why we like it: As Mother always said, put some animated needlework in your ads (or your songs) and you’re bound to win the TVC of the week prize on StopPress. And the artisanship on display in this quirky, handmade and awfully time-consuming little number that was …

News
Dignity happily traded for free things in Magnation promotion
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Magnation, the purveyor of fine periodicals, has recently embarked on “its most revealing promotion ever” by offering customers that strip down to their unmentionables and head into one of the shops a reward for their brave exhibitionism. And, according to Sahil Merchant, the founder of Magnation and “chief magazineologist”, the promotion has been wildly successful, highly amusing and, given its unexpected popularity, nigh-on financially catastrophic.

News
Value judgements: measuring returns on social media
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Econsultancy and the Online Marketing Summit have produced a US-based report called the Value of Social Media that is based on a survey of more than 400 client-side marketers and agency respondents. And Andy Beal, founder and editor of MarketingPilgrim.com, took a gander, with his major observation being that 61 percent of the companies felt their measurement of the return on investment (ROI) from social media is either poor or very poor.

News
Ads@6: 11 March – 17 March
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This week in the Ads@6, the Suzuki Swift is apparently still the one. And the ad is definitely still the one that will make you scratch your own eyes out. Protex follows suit with an ear/eye-scratchingly bad jingle of its own. Perhaps John Rowles should think about becoming a consultant following his famous victory in the Great New Zealand Twitter jingle survey recently.  

News
Lotteries should have paid Trump US$1m, says event expert
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NZ Lotteries isn’t spilling any beans on how much it paid to get Donald Trump involved with the new Big Wednesday promotion, but David Higgins of Duco, the events company behind the highly successful Tua versus Cameron fight, has intimate knowledge of the magnate in question and believes it probably cost much more than the estimates currently doing the rounds.

News
Netherlands confronted in tampon ad; US networks aghast
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In the world of ‘feminine hygiene products’, sometimes known as ‘tampons’, there are certain advertising rules that have, over time, become engrained: weird blue liquid, euphemisms galore, unrealistic happiness, slow motion beach shots, dancing, basically all the things the above video parodies. But ad agency JWT and US tampon company Kotex decided to flout some those rules for a new campaign in an effort to ‘get real’ about ‘that time of the month’. But everyone knows TV isn’t about reality (unless it’s ‘gritty’) and it seems there’s no room for the horrible, disgusting v word on US TV screens. 

News
DDB looks inside for inspiration
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DDB New Zealand has announced the promotions of two of its senior creatives, with Dave Brady replacing previous head of art and “crafty bastard” Mike Davison and Paul Hankinson taking on the role of head of copy.

News
Sloganise Donald Trump, win blingin’ Guess laptop case
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The New Zealand Lotteries commission recently roped in Donald Trump to be the frontman for a Big Wednesday promotion. The winner and a few friends get to live like him for a week (presumably being forced to put squirrels on their heads for veracity’s sake) and, if his busy schedule allows, they’ll even get to meet him (presumably licking the filth from his gold-plated shoes). So, to honour the business magnate, we want you to come up with a catchy new slogan for The Don and his vast portfolio.

News
Cannes Seminar Programme offers chance to pick massive brains
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The 2010 Seminar Programme at the Cannes Advertising Festival has been announced and more clients than ever are set to take to the stage and dish out their 0.02c, including Yahoo!, Microsoft Advertising, Facebook, MasterCard, Kraft Foods, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Hewlett-Packard and Coca-Cola. So, get the company credit card out and pick those brains.

News
Words and images used to explain things
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Unless you’re scared of large, uninterrupted blocks of text, why would you read a story about one boring thing, when you could read a story that deals with a whole range of exciting things? That’s right, you wouldn’t. Or would you?

News
NZ’s online advertising high priest goes bush
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Michael Gregg, chair of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and advertising director at Trade Me, will be stepping down from both roles in August, swapping acronyms and tech-speak for boating, skiing, fly fishing, the collection of delicious fruits of the sea, the removal of old man’s beard and the long overdue doing up of his bach in Havelock in the Marlborough Sounds.

News
The language of ideas, the reality of results
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I’m consistently surprised by how often we use language in ways that undermine our efforts as an industry. It surprises me because communication should be the one thing we nail – clear, precise language that explains exactly what we mean – but actually we’re often pretty bad at it.

Opinion
Classified information
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In this installment of Michael Carney’s Marketing Week: Classified advertising was hit hard last year. How long before newspapers give it up? All change in the New Zealand movie business. And will 3D advertising change the game? US publishers are adding online readers to total circulation and charging advertisers for all of them. So is that likely to happen here?

News
Strategy gets best view for next episode of the Prentice
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Independent design and ad agency Strategy has snaffled Ogilvy New Zealand’s recently departed head of planning Michael Prentice. He will take up the role of group strategic director for the Auckland, Christchurch and Sydney offices and will also be general manager of the Christchurch office.

News
HP goes to Darby day
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Rhys Darby continues to capitalise on his awksome (so awkward it’s awesome) Murray Hewitt-inspired profile in the US, this time as the front man in a big – like NZ$80 million big – campaign for Hewlett Packard called Let’s Do Amazing.

News
Takapuna store impresses trendy cognoscenti
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Monocle magazine, a respected mouthpiece in the fields of design, trends, retail, art, pop-culture and politics, has published a list of the world’s 25 best retailers and Takapuna’s The Department Store has taken the number one spot.

News
NZ Lotteries pulls out the Trump card
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The Don (not the delicious Japanese meal, but the funny-haired American business tycoon), is currently gracing a range of New Zealand media channels to promote the New Zealand Lotteries Commission’s latest Big Wednesday prize. And everyone wants to know how much he got paid.

News
News Zealand: choose data, stick boot in
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Aside from these, this, and this, StopPress loves nothing more than data. And we’re particularly fond of hard data. Of course, the brilliant thing about data is that it can be used selectively to show how good you are, and how bad other things, like competitors, are. And there’s almost no better example of this than the tit for tatting that is news ratings data in New Zealand.

News
Strawedband internet explained
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Who it’s for: Vector (working with Y&R), which is trying to drum up support for fibre optic cabling and get fibre to Auckland doors so users will be able to download illegal movies at speeds 50 times faster than current levels.

Why we like it: Quirky …