Who’s it for: Westpac by Colenso BBDO and Assembly
Why we like it: Aside from the quirky Impulse Saver app and a spot about how easy it is to buy a house, Colenso and Westpac seem to have been pretty quiet since they shacked up last year …
It’s fair to assume most of us have experienced that horrible feeling when you push send on an email and realise it’s gone to the wrong person. It’s a peril of the modern world and, in many cases, the email chain that ends up going public usually offers up a healthy dose of schadenfreude. So, in an effort to drum up some interest in the end of year graduation show for AWARD school tonight, DDB, Colenso and a couple of AWARD School students conducted something of an experiment with a ‘leaked email’ that showed up the industry’s insatiable desire for whoopsies.
Orcon has appointed M&C Saatchi as its advertising agency. Taryn Hamilton, general manager retail at Orcon, says M&C Saatchi was chosen on the merit of the team’s creative thinking and strong team focus.
The online realm is a rather fluid and exciting space at the moment. Companies large and small are chopping, changing and innovating in the quest to find the most effective model and close the gap between eyeball numbers and ad dollars. And MSN, with its parent company ninemsn, is set to embark on some big changes, with a new corporate umbrella brand called Mi9 that will encompass all of its brands, new ad exchange technology that basically creates a stock-market for online inventory, an increased focus on behaviourial targeting and a renewed effort to bump up online news numbers with a portal overhaul.
Businesses are wasting time and money trying to reach people online without realising many resent brands invading their social space. This is according to findings from TNS’s Digital Life study, the most comprehensive view of online consumer behaviour available today, surveying more than 72,000 consumers in 60 countries, including over a thousand New Zealanders.
Christmas is fast approaching and The Warehouse, Noel Leemimg, Farmers, Whitcoulls and DTR all jump on the red and green Christmas bandwagon. Already red, The Labour Party solicits themselves. Gin Wigmore and Hayley Westenra sing their own praises, and dog whisperer Cesar Milan wants to show us how to be the leader of the pack.
Things are heating up in the election race. And the comms are coming thick and fast. So here’s a rundown of what the parties have been up to on the campaign front in the final week of hand-shaking, baby-kissing and tongue-wagging.
You may have seen the worm on telly last night, when up to 1600 people from all over New Zealand gave their second-by-second reactions to the Leaders’ Debate on TV3 with Roy Morgan’s Mobile Reactor, an app downloadable to smartphones. TV3 compared that worm with the one provided by their studio audience of 65 undecided voters. But can the technology assist in the advertising realm?
New Zealanders often have to wait for a bit longer than everyone else for the newest iPhone, hit TV shows and, occasionally, the latest blockbuster movie. And, as a new ad for Kia featuring three hip-hop hamsters that’s about to be launched on Kiwi screens attests, the same is occasionally true for commercials.
Hamilton company Print House has won the rights to introduce technology into New Zealand that allows a video screen to be placed within printed material.
Fastway Couriers is targeting the online retail industry with the nationwide rollout of its simpler, more modern, logo, which replaces a logo that was almost thirty years old.
Stolen Rum has managed to gain a fair bit of attention in its short life through a combination of a good product, good branding and good PR. And it’s set up a cheeky wee competition with the help of its newish agency Pead PR that is judged by well-known columnist Steve Braunias.
Like most media outlets, we get sent a lot of press releases. But because journalists are so busy destroying the lies, discovering the truth, inadvertently recording conversations and farewelling colleagues who move into PR, it’s increasingly difficult to get their attention. So we certainly appreciated this rather creative—and honest—approach to attention getting in a release one of our colleagues received recently.
Ad agency Sugar and online DVD rental company Fatso are capitalising on paranoia about new video piracy rules with a clever new campaign. As record companies sent out warnings for people found making illegal downloads, they sent out phony warning letters with the fictitious logo of the New Zealand Copyright Authority and the message “notice of breach”.
Despite tough times for print, newspapers remain close to Kiwis hearts, even when they’re overseas. Special Group has followed up its Kiwis Together campaign with a full page ad encouraging readers to fold up the newspaper, pop a message on it, and send it to a Kiwi overseas – so they could read enjoy it just as if they were back home in NZ. Alternatively it could be sent to an Aussie mate.
The orange guy has been trying to get apathetic Kiwis to enrol to vote for a while now, as has comedian Guy Williams on TV3.co.nz’s homepage. And now controversial Auckland church St Matthew in the City and TBWA\ have invoked the spirit of Kate Sheppard to try and get the modern folk to embrace the joys of democracy next weekend with a billboard that says: ‘Vote: there was a time when you couldn’t’. It’s almost the opposite of St Matthew of the Ridge’s billboard for Car Fe.
The Marketing Association’s 2011 “Marketing Today” Conference held at The Langham Auckland began with an apt quote from William Gibson. “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” And, as well as an update on all on traditional the marketing concepts like market research, direct marketing, brand management, the conference also provided fresh insight into ‘new-age’ marketing concepts like closer integration of marketing with IT, gamification and social media marketing.
And we bow down and give praise to Rube Goldberg.
A very cool live augmented reality show in a mall for National Geographic.
‘Tis the season…
…for buying underwear.
The weirdest thing you’ll see today.
Journalists: always …
Parallel importing. That’s been legal in New Zealand for ages, hasn’t it? Well, yes and no. If we’re talking about branded goods and not music, films or software, then parallel importing has been legal here since 2003 and it’s allowed traders to import genuine goods bearing a trade mark (think L’Oreal perfume or Sony cameras) that are sourced from an overseas supplier rather than the authorised distributor in New Zealand. So what legal weapons are available to local businesses whose investment is being put at risk by cheap imports?
Google released its take on the modern consumer consideration process recently and called it the Zero Moment of Truth. And, judging by the latest online advertising revenue figures for New Zealand, marketers are paying attention, with search and directories cash rising by 53 percent year on year.
Most of Tourism New Zealand’s sizable marketing and comms budget now gets directed towards digital channels in an effort to get ‘active considerers’ on the plane. And its latest work via Contagion is trying to tempt the Gen Ys back for some backpacking with Storiesbeatstuff.com, something the agency believes is “possibly the largest social media campaign a New Zealand agency has produced”.
Logan Brown’s Shaun Clouston last night opened the WLG pop up restaurant kitchen, where Melburnians are being treated to a flavour-filled fortnight of food flown over from the capital of cool.
The global gaming industry shows no signs of slowing down and Kiwi developers are getting their share of the pie – the local game development industry grew by a whopping 46 percent this year.
Debate about the changing agency model has been raging for a while now. Some indie up-and-comers believe smaller is better, more efficient and less archaic. While bigger full-service multinationals believe the do-it-all-under-the-one-roof approach still works best. Turns out both models are wrong, as this video about the future of advertising made by Toronto agency John St shows.
The Media Design School AdSchool (formerly Axis) End Of Year Show is on tonight from 5.30 until 8pm at the new building at 92 Albert Street. And they want you industry juggernauts to sit down in front of the fresh-faced students, grunt a bit, leaf through a few pages and then decisively and/or contemptuously slap down a special sticker or two before wafting off again in the direction of the bar.
As Leonardo da Vinci once said, water is the driving force of all nature. And it’s also the driving force of Saatchi & Saatchi’s new campaign for Pump.
Who’s it for: Hallensteins by Publicis Mojo and Thick as Thieves
Why we like it: What do Mexico and Matt Dillon have to do with a Kiwi clothes brand? We’re not entirely sure. But it looks good, it’s about Brothers, and it fits into Hallensteins …
Hopefully you’ve already expanded your marketing mind and devoured the November/December edition of NZ Marketing from cover to cover, but in case you missed it, here’s a rundown of the joys you can behold if you get yourself a copy, including the entertaining and enlightening advertising goose chase that ensued in our quest to interview one of New Zealand advertising’s most intriguing characters, Ogilvy’s Greg Partington.
For some time now Ogilvy’s executive creative director Damon O’Leary has been talking about changing his working relationship to that of a contractor. And, as a result, from January 2012, he will move away from his day to day role to provide senior creative and strategic consultancy resource on a project by project basis.
1-1, CRM and loyalty agency justONE is on a bit of a roll at the moment and, following on from the big launch of the long-awaited Farmers Club, it has picked up two new juicy bits of below-the-line business: Ziera shoes and Mercury Energy.