Twenty-four hours isn’t long when you’re tasked with helping to provide water for arid African villages. But that’s all the time Pip Perkins and Jennie Ko were given at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity earlier this week in the Young Lions Press ad competition.
James Hurman is a planner for Colenso BBDO and in his book The Case for Creativity, he argues you shouldn’t do shit ads because they’re less effective than highly creative ones. Given I love great ads (the locus of the book is advertising creativity, rather than innovation in the broader sense), I should be an easy sell. But while I really wanted to like the book, it has several weaknesses.
One of Gordon Ramsay’s most popular programmes is Kitchen Nightmares, where he helps turn struggling restaurants around. Let me say right from the start, I’m no fan of Ramsay. But I believe he’s teaching us some valuable lessons when it comes to website marketing. Let me explain.
Six categories down and it’s slim pickings for the Kiwis at Cannes, with Colenso BBDO flying solo and picking up its third bronze lion for the Multiple Sclerosis Waikato campaign in the Outdoor category. This adds to the bronzes it won in the promo and activation and direct categories for Westpac Impulse saver and the Pedigree ‘Doppelganger’ adoption drive.
The public has spoken and the public will be required to participate after Palmerston North-born Pulusea Seumanu’s idea was named the winner in ANZ’s ‘Welcome the World’ campaign. Seumanu’s idea brings together clothing, cards, colour and movement, all of which will be co-ordinated in a mass spectacle created by thousands of Kiwis.
As consumers, we might not give much thought to advertisements beyond having a chuckle at some or snarling and changing channels in response to others. On the other side of the screen, it’s a different story. Stakeholders want to know campaigns are doing what they’re meant to do: making an impact and delivering commercial results. And that’s what the Effie Awards reward.
Who’s it for: Coca-Cola by Hugh Mitton
Why we like it: Coca-Cola recently ran a worldwide crowdsourcing contest on the eYeka co-creation platform and asked participants to create an illustration, photograph or video of the brand to depict ‘energizing refreshment’. The contest saw over 2,600 entries …
As the Rugby World Cup draws closer and Kiwis inevitably succumb to the ensuing mayhem, ticket to the matches are becoming an increasingly prized commodity—especially when they’re tickets to the quarters, semis and the finals. And wouldn’t you know it, Coca-Cola is planning to capitalise on that enthusiasm with a multi-channel campaign that includes what it says is its largest ever on-pack promotion.
A lot has been written about the closure of 1-dayout.co.nz in the past few days. And I’m surprised at some of the claims made by its sales and marketing manager Race Louden in his recent article for StopPress, Getting the hell out of daily deal Dodge.
Three days into the Cannes Lions, the folks at Colenso BBDO Auckland must be feeling pretty pleased with themselves, having scooped New Zealand’s only two trophies to date.
We all love the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). Oh wait, we don’t. But that’s the whole point behind a comic campaign launched by Barnes, Catmur & Friends on Monday on behalf of the ASA. To raise awareness and hopefully generate more funding via the ASA’s voluntary levy scheme, the team at Barnes, Catmur & Friends, led by creatives Matt Weavers and Jesse Stevens, created a mock website called the Department of Advertising Standards and Regulations (DASR).
The weekly gossip mags haven’t had too much to celebrate recently in terms of readership. But there’s been no shortage of excitement in the rather fluid editorial ranks, with Sido Kitchin and Fiona Fraser moving from APN’s Women’s Weekly to ACP’s Woman’s Day and Sarah Stuart being brought in to replace Kitchin. Now there’s been another big shift, with Hayley McLarin deciding to step down as editor of New Idea magazine after six years at the helm for a role as communications director at CureKids.
How personal is too personal? ASB know all about that, after all its Creating Futures campaign has been centred on providing that personal touch. But it all got a little too personal recently when its In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) commercial was unveiled to the viewing public, prompting a raft of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority for being too simplistic and exploiting the vulnerable, among other reasons.
In the past nine months there has been an increase in the number of group-buying websites offering vouchers for anything from haircuts to hotels to beauty therapies. These sites offer a heavily discounted, service-orientated deal, usually for 24 hours, in a variety of cities around the country. But as a marketing tactic, while successful in some instances, the group-buying model is flawed in a number of ways, primarily because it often attracts the wrong kind of customer to a business.
The wingman. When employed correctly, they’re the one person you can count on to bail you out when you’re being hit on by someone in a bar you can’t stand, or, conversely, when you need a hand to seal the deal. But ever heard of a digital wingman? As part of its new campaign to celebrate the return of the Chick’n McCheese, together with the launch of the new spicy Chicken McWings, McDonald’s has teamed up with DDB Group to deliver a campaign that employs the use of puns as well as a virtual wingman to “talk you up”.
Closed captioning has been a staple of regular television offerings for sometime now, but when it comes to infiltrating the TVC domain, Dubsat reckons it’s onto something good with its is new fast turn-around, online TVC captioning service called Captionflow.
Last time we talked to the Fairfaxians about the situation with their creative agency (Josh &Jamie won the account a while back, took it with them to Assignment Group when they were bought out and then launched the Find Out More campaign), we came away slightly confused. But the confusion is over, because Stuff.co.nz has appointed hot-to-trot indie Shine.
…as ex-Air New Zealander Steve Bayliss heads back to the FMCG realm, MediaWorks says goodbye to one senior player but welcomes another in the radio ranks, Mango adds a duo to the fruit salad and Cannes and YouTube announce the winners of the Young Lions and Goodwork competitions.
No doubt about it, freestyle canoeing is sexy.
Samuel L Jackson reads Go the F**k to Sleep. Sensitive ears beware.
Widely regarded as the worst ad ever made.
Sony follows up its balls spot with a new balls spot, this time …
MediaWorks has announced that television chief executive Jason Paris, who has been in the role for just over a year after shifting across from TVNZ, has resigned.
Vivaki, the Publicis-owned group charged with managing the combined resource of Starcom, ZenithOptimedia and Razorfish, has announced three significant new leadership roles across Starcom and the group, with Alex Radford, Richard Thompson and Jo Reid all getting the call up.
Over the past month we’ve rolled out our Colmar Brunton nzgirl Women’s Tracker presentation to agencies and clients and one of the key discussions from the preso has been around Twitter. While the most commonly bandied-around, unlikely-to-be-grounded-in-fact number of participators in New Zealand is around nice percent I suspect the reality is much smaller. And in an industry more likely to be exposed to new communication tools, I found only a very small number of people actively participating. In some agency meetings, often in a room of twenty media buyers, not one of them was tweeting.
The soon to be relaunched Idealog magazine has ended its galactic search for a new editor, fixing on a local human whose name many of our dear StopPress readers will already know: NBR’s Hazel Phillips.
Happy 100th birthday David Ogilvy. No doubt he’ll be smoking a pipe and spitting out acerbic one-liners wherever it is that admen go to play their harps. And if he were still alive he’d have hours of fun writing stabby, beautifully crafted columns to add to the traditional versus new media debate.
Most airlines produce complimentary inflight magazines. It’s a captive audience of bored, high-value readers and this perfect publishing storm means Air New Zealand’s Kia Ora is one of the country’s most expensive magazines to advertise in. Now the same idea is being employed on the ground, with premium cab company Corporate Cabs releasing its own glossy ‘in-car’ magazine called ME, ‘your guide to a luxury lifestyle’.
Y&R has been on the hunt for a replacement executive creative director since Vaughn Davis departed in September last year. And it’s managed to lure one of our boys back home, with Josh Moore, a Kiwi lad who has been working in Sydney for the past five years as executive creative director and partner in US Sydney, taking up the role.
Tux just wound up a big campaign where it called for entries from the public to find the ad world’s next dog star. And Amazon, a Huntaway from Ohakune, took out the title. To celebrate this famous victory, Tux have got two prize packs to give away to lucky StopPress canine lovers, including a Mr Vintage Tux t-shirt, a Tux frisbee and a big bag of mega-meaty roast lamb flavour Tux. Mmmm, baked in great-tasting flavour. All you need to do to win is come up with an entertaining name for a dog. Or a new dog food.
It’s been around since 2004, but in a bid to further stand out from its competitors on supermarket shelves, the Scarborough Fair brand of coffee, tea and chocolate has recently undergone a design makeover, courtesy of the folks at &Some, or as they refer to themselves, the creative co-conspirators for a connected world.
The stock imagery on the release might show people laughing with magazines, but there probably aren’t too many smiles in the print industry after several unexpected fieldwork issues affected the quality of readership data for Nielsen’s newly pimped out Consumer and Media Insights readership survey.
We’re taking the politically correct NCEA approach today. So we’ve chosen four winners.
Who’s it for: NZTA by Clemenger BBDO and Film Construction
Why we like it: It’s funny because it’s true. Nice to see NZTA using a bit of humour to get …