While it won’t help fix the most annoying part about hosiery—indiscriminate holes appearing all over the place—Columbine has farewelled its more than 20-year-old look and opted for a visual makeover in a bid to “modernise the Columbine image”.
The Church has embarked on a pretty expansive journey over the past 10 years. Starting out as a small design agency, it’s since gone on to become a design, advertising and communications agency and on Monday, to coincide with the opening of its first office in Australia, and as a “coming of age” of sorts, the communications agency officially relaunched itself.
The latest radio survey was released last week and, as expected, various ‘we’re number one’ claims came spewing forth. Of course, these claims are based on what the people actually listen to. But we all know the people don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s why we need experts to make decisions, and the experts have done just that to decide on the winners of the NZ Radio Awards.
Who’s it for: Speight’s by Shine and Curious Film.
Why we like it: Inept, high-maintenance and presumably well-moisturised city-slickers head to the hills for some toughening up. And who better to whip them into shape and enhance their gradually decreasing manliness than a strong, silent, Speight …
Colenso has followed up its impressive Axis haul with four ‘in-book’ accolades at the D&AD awards, while Saatchi & Saatchi and DDB NZ scored one each. But, unlike last year, there will be no pencils handed out to Kiwi agencies as no local work was deemed good enough to make it through to the nomination stage.
Things have been going pretty well for Yahoo!Xtra as of late. Just last month the joint venture between Yahoo!7 and Telecom New Zealand announced a net profit of $1.88m for 2010, an increase of 37 percent on the 2009 results. But Telecom has decided to part with its 49 percent share of Yahoo!Xtra, announcing it has sold it to Yahoo!7. That means Yahoo!7, a 50/50 joint venture between Australia’s Seven Media and US company Yahoo, will now own 100 percent of Yahoo!Xtra.
DWA, “the world’s only tech-focused media planning and buying agency”, has just opened up a New Zealand branch in Parnell and tech media veteran and native Kiwi Stephen Old has been chosen to run it.
Hot on the heels of winning the Nestle Milky Bar Kid Search in New Zealand and Australia, The PR Shop has won the recent CDB Consumer Products pitch to work on the SodaStream brand.
…as the Marketing Association ramps up its, er, marketing with a new human in a newly created role; Martine Jager returns from Australia to join Westpac New Zealand’s marketing team; Radio New Zealand announces its new board; TrinityP3 downsizes and St John Craner moves to the country; Syro Communications announces a staffing coup; International Rescue adds a generous photographer to its ranks; and a Kiwi expat gets a plum Asia Pacific posting with Interpublic’s Mediabrands.
BurgerFuel has once again hopped on the interactivity campaign train, starting a location based social media promotion with L&P and location-based digital platform for nerds, Foursquare.
Everyone likes a success story and Massey University is hoping to capitalise on all sorts of successful Kiwi global ventures as part of its new promotional campaign that carries the slogan, ‘The engine of the new New Zealand.’
It’s been a staple of the design industry for just shy of 20 years, but spatial, product and graphic design magazine ProDesign is set to permanently close its pages with AGM Publishing announcing the upcoming May issue will be its last.
6,346 votes later, the results have been tallied and the awards dished out in the second round of Freeview awards, which honour almost anything and everything, from decoders and retailers, to satellite receivers and television shows.
This week’s roundup includes Countdown employing MasterChef 2010 winner Brett McGregor to offer tips on making the ultimate child’s cake; TV3 amps it up for this weekend’s ITM 400 Hamilton; another sporting push from Freeview for the Rugby World Cup; famed international landmarks get doodled on by hotels.com; Rexona employs a man impractically wearing sunglasses during the night to up the appeal of its deodorant; and Sara Lee goes retro with a sitcom cartoon featuring a 1950s baking housewife.
The Outdoor Media Association of New Zealand has released its Q1 revenue results, and the OOH sector has got out of the 2011 blocks pretty well, with gross media revenue for the industry increasing 7.1 percent ($970,000) on the same quarter last year for a total of $14.6 million.
Over 10,000 entries were submitted from around the world and the nominees for The Webby’s, AKA the Oscars for nerds, were announced this week. And Special Group’s ‘Living Office’ web banner, New Zealand-based Drugs.com and Supply’s ‘Scam Machine’ for Netsafe are the only local contenders up for an award, while Resn, DraftFCB, Alt Group, Oh Baby, Fairfax and APN all received the next best thing, official honoree status.
As the 2011 World Cup in Mumbai drew to a close recently, the design for the 2015 ICC Cricket World Cup logo was unveiled, revealing cultural references that pay homage to New Zealand and Australia, who will be co-hosting the event.
While Skyline’s animated ode to garages took out our TVC of the Year award, it’s clear the ad won because of a concerted effort from the company’s staff and suppliers. Some felt it was a tribute to the passion and pride the employees have in the small company, but others felt the ‘win by any means necessary’ approach was slightly embarrassing, wasn’t in the spirit in which the award was set up and didn’t accurately reflect the best, most popular ad of the year. It was within the rules, but if you’re in the latter camp, then it’s fair to say Lotto’s ‘Lucky Dog’ by DDB and The Sweet Shop was the ‘pseudo-winner’, as it was leading the polling by a fairly large margin up until the last couple of days. And with five other DDB creations also making it into the top ten, DDB had an impressive overall showing, something executive creative director Toby Talbot says can be put down to the power of solid client relationships.
Quite possibly the most elaborate cellphone ad ever made.
Sacre bleu! Frenchies foist fun upon unsuspecting button pushers with the awesome ‘Escape Machine’.
The unofficial Rugby World Cup song?
The Beastie Boys are back. And they’ve enlisted the help of some …
Subway has just pimped out its Subcard App and turned it into the first mobile-only loyalty card in New Zealand. You can also load cash on your account and pay with your phone, be it an iPhone, Android or other. So to celebrate the release of this wonderous sandwich-buying technology we’re making all your bread-related dreams come true and giving away two $50 Subcard credits. Just devise an absurd sandwich and come up with an absurd name for it. The best combo wins.
You chose ’em. And here they are. A few surprises in the mix, most notably the fact that little old Skyline got more votes than DDB’s epic canine adventure for Lotto (which is closing in on one million views on YouTube) in the TVC of the Year poll. The much-discussed brand ad for New World by .99 took 13th spot, ahead of Colenso’s ‘V Pomparkour’ and Genesis ‘Pukekos’ by DraftFCB came in near the top at fourth. Not too surprising, however, is the fact that six ads made by DDB, an agency renowned for its excellent TV work, made it into the top ten.
It looked like Lotto’s ‘Lucky Dog’ had it in the bag the whole way. But some excellent campaigning at the final stages of voting last week saw the animated spot for Skyline Garages created by Barnes, Catmur & Friends (BC&F) and Cirkus beat out the big boys with the big budgets to take the inaugural StopPress/ThinkTV TVC of the Year award.
Dan Carter is a marketer’s dream. He comes across as a fairly nice chap, he’s well-spoken, he doesn’t get into drunken brawls outside bars, he’s bloody good at rugby and, as evidenced by the fact the E channel voted him the third sexiest sports star in all the world and Jockey chose him to model their gruts, he’s easy on the eye. But Daikin and its agency The Works have somehow managed to make him look creepy in their new TVC by sticking him on a wall, making him perform the role of a heat pump and having the female talent make googly, come hither eyes at him.
With a relationship that stretches back ten years, Gregg’s is a well-established brand in the DraftFCB stable. And, having started up in Dunedin almost 150 years ago—and with its instant coffee being a “mainstay of every pantry since the early 1960s”—it’s also a well-established New Zealand brand. So who better to celebrate that than with what Gregg’s general manager of sales and marketing Brendan Downey-Parish calls the “iconic characters played by the Topp Twins”.
Saatchi & Saatchi has been in a state of creative flux since executive creative director Dylan Harrison decided to head to Australia after less than a year in the role. While the search for a replacement was undertaken, Jeremy Taine was brought in as a part-timer to guide the agency’s creative output. But there’s no need for that anymore, because they’ve found their man: Venezuelan-born Antonio Navas, who comes to New Zealand from a role as executive creative director at Ogilvy and Mather New York.
Breaking down language barriers to engage all New Zealanders in a conversation with our deaf community is a challenge. But that’s exactly what Deaf Aotearoa New Zealand (DANZ) and Wellington design agency Creature hope to do with their new campaign for New Zealand Sign Language Week 2011 that proudly states ‘I am Deaf, Let’s Talk.
The marcomms community has already offered plenty of assistance to those affected by the earthquake in Christchurch, and NZ Marketing’s social media columnist Simon Young is hoping there might be some more corporate generosity left over to help out with Servolution, a project involving a whole bunch of churches and community groups doing a range of good deeds such as painting out graffiti, picking up rubbish, checking for smoke alarms, providing school makeovers and cleaning parks and reserves from 14-20 April.
Having ticked the call for entries box by means of a multi-lingual presidential address, English-based D&AD has taken another unique measure to draw attention to its awards, this time by updating its website over the course of judging week (which began yesterday) with how it’s all going.
In March we shared the awards haul goodness from the Asia Pacific Advertising Festival, aka Adfest, held in Thailand. But despite how much we know you all love to read, nothing quite beats seeing the winning efforts for yourself, and now that the Adfest winners showcase has been made available online, that’s exactly what you can do. And if you’re into all of the nitty and gritty behind the winning efforts, there’s a stack load of info under each video. So go on, click and watch to your heart’s content.
Indie media agencies taste good, particularly if you’re media giant Mediacom, which has acquired the New Zealand branch of independent media agency media360—the largest independent media agency in the country.