Not surprisingly, Fairfax’s proposal to outsource 66 Australian editorial jobs, including some sub-editing, to New Zealand didn’t go down too well with its staff or the national journalists’ union and led to a 36 hour unprotected strike among staff from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review, The Sunday Age, The Sun Herald, the Canberra Times, the Newcastle Herald and Wollongong Illawarra Mercury that finished this morning. News Ltd also recently announced the possibility of up to 400 editorial jobs getting the chop and while the local industry reported some pretty solid numbers recently, some of the big Aussie mastheads are thought to have had their biggest ever drops in circulation in March, so it’s obviously a tough time to be in the newspaper game, both for journos and for publishers. But as if all this wasn’t enough, an article we read recently in Wired shows editorial staff might have another fight on their hands due to the rise of robot reporters, which the chief of pretty frickin’ amazing US company Narrative Science has predicted will be writing 90 percent of the news in 15 years. Let’s hope Gina Rinehart doesn’t get wind of this technology. We demand another strike. Hasn’t anyone seen I, Robot?
Monthly Archives: May, 2012
Cadbury’s new global brand campaign Joyville got underway with a big TVC about the secret chocolate ecosystem. And the local branch has launched the first New Zealand iteration of that campaign, something Cadbury’s general manager of marketing Iaan Buchanan calls chapter one of a multi-chapter story that will be told this year.
Art and social media collide in Orcon, M&C Saatchi and We Love Inc’s Semi-Permanent Twitterbots experiment.
A young director who demands the best.
The Ice Bar Co. used pea packets to hide ice blocks, and Argentinian brand Andes is using a squash …
After officially winning the Vodafone account at the end of February, DraftFCB has sent some of its first work into the wild, with one simple retail ad for “the nakedest ever broadband deal” and another slightly more out-there idea—quite literally—for the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S III.
New Zealand is one of the only markets in the world where Red Bull isn’t the number one energy drink. That title is held by Frucor’s V, and it got there through a combination of savvy NPD and a series of brilliant campaigns. Given what’s come before, it’s always going to be a challenge to raise the bar creatively, but Colenso BBDO and Frucor have given it a good nudge with their latest effort, the V Motion Project.
Shared responsibility is an increasingly important part of the road safety programme, as evidenced most recently with the hugely successful Ghost Chips campaign, which, for the first time, specifically targeted young Maori and used humour to equip them with the tools required to speak up when one of their mates was too drunk to drive. And NZTA, Clemenger BBDO and The Sweet Shop have followed up that pop cultural phenomenon with a new campaign that tries to convince family members to do the same.
Colmar Brunton has just released some survey results that show 60 percent of New Zealanders follow a brand on social media and more than two thirds think a social media presence adds to the brand’s appeal. But what those consumers say when they’re talking to those brands is another, very different question. So we thought we’d republish a column by The Research Agency’s Andrew Lewis that ran in the last issue of NZ Marketing and detailed the interesting results of a survey on how people interact with brands on social media.
Kiwis of all ages are prolific users of social media but, according to a recent Colmar Brunton survey, it’s not just to keep up to date with family and friends. Nearly 60 percent of Kiwis follow at least one brand and over one third (37 percent) say a social media presence makes a brand more appealing to them.
MediaWorks TV has confirmed it will be not be renewing its output deal with CBS and is instead shifting the funds into the creation of local content. And Sky’s free-to-air channel Prime has taken over the rights and signed up for its first ever output deal.
We called it in late April, and now the official word is out: Westpac New Zealand has appointed DDB Group as its sole creative advertising agency.
Newspapers, according to the latest readership and circulation figures, are still holding on and, in some rare cases, adding readers. So why, when the commonly held view is that newspapers are dead—or at least dying—does New Zealand appear to be bucking an international trend?
Auckland-based dairy producer The Collective has embraced social media as its major marketing channel in an effort to better connect with its ‘herd’ and, in many cases, get them to assist with product creation. And that strategy has been vindicated, not just because it is one of the fastest growing companies in New Zealand, but because it was also named as the first and only New Zealand brand to feature in The Social Brands 100 list—”the authoritative ranking of brands leading the way in the social age”—coming in at number 57 ahead of brands like Dell, Groupon and Intel.
We wrote about Colenso’s win of the Tourism Fiji account back in early April, and the island nation has added another Kiwi agency to its roster after Auckland-based full service web agency Sparks Interactive was named as its new website partner.
Who’s it for: Sony by Frontage, Flying Fish and Blockhead
Why we like it: ‘Tis a beautiful piece of film, with New Zealand in a starring role. David Attenborough himself would probably rather stay inside to watch nature than venture into the real world after seeing this …
Adam Good returns to the region, Y&R bolsters its Welly offering, prodigal Prodigy returns, Unlimited chooses its new editor, AWARD school opens for its second year of business in New Zealand, Eleven PR loses one of its flock to Mt Maunganui, and TVNZ names its Olympic team.
Sony has a history of making beautiful ads to sell its TVs, with bouncing balls, paint and rabbits all clocking up millions of views on YouTube. And Flying Fish director Luke Savage and local effects house Blockhead have built on that tradition with a brilliant TVC for agency Frontage Inc in Japan to promote the qualities of Sony’s X-reality picture engine.
After the defection of TVNZ’s ex-head of sales and marketing Paul Maher to MediaWorks recently, general manager of media solutions Jeremy O’Brien has taken over half of that role and been announced as the new head of sales.
Special Group is the first New Zealand ad agency ever to be asked to talk at the Semi-Permanent creativity conference, which packed out the Aotea Centre in Auckland for a few days recently and featured headline acts like New York artist Ron English, UK digital agency Hi-Res, San Francisco-based Industrial Light & Magic and Wallpapermagazine. The local lads opened proceedings in front of around 2000 people with a talk centred around the eight things they do to make their work more effective that showcased the diverse range of work they have produced over their four years of existence—including the Best Award-winning packaging work for ecostore and the 2011 AXIS-award winning AXIS opening film. So here’s a summary of their presentation.
The NZRU will no doubt be hoping the All Blacks’ Rugby World Cup win might put a bit more lead in its commercial pencil to help get through a fairly difficult time for the national sport. And it’s managed to retain five of the team’s major sponsors, with Coca-Cola, Unilever, Sanitarium, Barkers and Bvlgari re-signing as All Blacks sponsors for undisclosed sums.
The magazine sector had some pretty good news to report in the latest round of readership and circulation figures and, given what’s happening internationally, the New Zealand newspaper sector should also be fairly pleased with the results, which show there’s still plenty of life in the old dogs yet.
You can read all about it here, and you can see all about it here.
It’s time to get back to our ABCs. And our Nielsens.
For only the second time, the new magazine circulation methology has spewed its quarterly data, coinciding with the Nielsen Magazine Comparatives Q2 2011 – Q1 2012 readership results.
And the news: it’s all up for most and a …
A handful of Kiwi agencies have made it into the finals of the APMA Star Awards, celebrating the year’s finest promotional and experiential marketing across Australasia.
Apollo Marketing NZ, Loyalty NZ and Below the Line (the only indie Kiwi agency) are among the 31 finalists shortlisted from a pool …
Earlier this month, prime minister John Key recently came out and said he’s not against gay marriage, following on from US president Barack Obama announcing his support for it. And last week the local marriage equality movement forged ahead with a punchy new campaign, known simply as WTF?
The …
Quickflix is hoping to make some big impacts in the New Zealand market as the country’s first TV and movie streaming service and, to help it along, its just launched its Quickflix App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. The App allows Quickflix WatchNow subscribers to view unlimited blockbuster movies and television shows instantly, on-demand, from their devices and also provides entertainment for non-subscribers, including access to all the latest movie trailers, as well as free Hollywood entertainment.
To celebrate the launch, Quickflix is giving you the chance to win a year’s subscription to its service (worth $203.88). To win, we want to know which TV show and movie you’d stream to your hearts content, and why. And, because everyone likes to win something, every entry receives a free month’s subscription to Quickflix.
Clemenger BBDO Wellington’s major social marketing coup, Nick Ward jumps in the pond, Clemenger BBDO’s “long search” comes to an end, design agency Insight eyes up Australian opportunity, new agency The Creative Store, Facilitate Digital takes a creative lead, and Datamine mines more talent.
A lot can happen in 873 images.
You can’t beat experience.You know when you say a word too much and it starts to sound weird …
Look what happens when you drink beer.
Got fake milk?
Vimeo …
In front of an almost capacity Langham conference centre young MC Oliver Driver had to shout to get attention. That’s becasue the 800-odd media and agency flunkies were riotessly celebrating their efforts last night at the CAANZ Media Awards.
And the big winner? Well it was linked to the halting of interest and inflation rates last year, it forced the electricity industry to drop its pants and it has already won a host of the country’s big awards. And DraftFCB continued its golden run by following up from the last two year’s efforts and taking the Best in Show title for its work on Electricity Authority’s What’s My Number? campaign.
The StopPress scanner is smeared with greasy fingerprints, but it’s not because we’re submitting files to Scanwiches or Cat Scans. It’s because we’re hitting go on the May round of The Glossies. But we need your vote. So get in there and choose your favourite.
Mitch Olson is founder of game design studio, Gamedojo, which, in partnership with NZ Marketing and our sister title Idealog, is hosting the Gamification Lab in Auckland next month. He is also co-founder of the hugely successful social game world SmallWorlds and knows how to go beyond buzzwords and hype to create a business case for gamification for your brand.