There has been widespread speculation recently that the weekday version of the New Zealand Herald would be moving to a compact format and APN New Zealand has confirmed that’s the case, with a date set for September 2012. And, as its print product changes, it will also be redesigning its major digital property nzherald.co.nz.
Fonterra has been under the pump in recent times due to the steadily rising price of dairy products. But a complainant recently took aim at some of the language used on its website to promote the goodness of dairy. And not even new ambassador Richie McCaw could stop the Advertising Standards Authority from upholding two of the five complaints.
After a tender process that ended up attracting over 50 submissions, Sydney agency Iris has been chosen to lead Christchurch and Canterbury Tourism’s push to bring Aussie visitors back to the region after the earthquake.
The Magazine Publishers Association has set some fairly bold targets for the industry and hopes to increase its share of ad revenue by around $30 million over the next two years, going from around 10 percent of the total ad market to 11.5 percent. It’s certainly a big ask, but Nielsen’s more in-depth Consumer and Media Insights research, mostly positive readership and circulation results in the last batch of numbers, and now, the appointment of Katrina Horton to the newly created role of commercial director with the MPA, all seem to have given the industry some extra confidence that it can reach those goals.
Colenso BBDO and .99’s ‘Every Day a New World’ brand campaign for New World was very well received, and even inspired a piece in Mumbrella asking why New Zealand’s advertising was so much better than Australia’s. And .99 has kept up the good work, with its rich media homepage takeover winning the IABNZ Creative Award for June.
As the owner of a Subaru with close to 250,000kms on the clock, getting the chance to drive a car that doesn’t creak when you turn into a park or smell like a squash court is something of a novelty for me. Driving Audis around Hampton Downs at high speed was certainly a helluva lot of fun, so when I was given the opportunity to take Honda’s new hybrid CR-Z coupe for a hoon, I decided to give it a nudge. And the kind folks at Honda are keen to offer one StopPress reader a hoon too.
Given what’s happened—and is still happening—in Christchurch, it’s fair to say earthquakes and cuteness are rather incongruous. But the new Drop, Cover, Hold campaign for Civil Defence by Clemenger BBDO and Robber’s Dog has managed to combine the two to surprisingly good effect by asking Kiwi kids what they think causes earthquakes. And some of their answers are pretty awwwwww-inspiring.
Skinny welcomes a new Paul, Jo Hartley trades OMD for Carat, Studio Alexander appoints a general manager, Acumen Republic ups its events firepower, Volkswagen goes human hunting, and iStart and Software Shortlist get together to embrace the pay-per-lead model.
In honour of Tim and Eric’s show this year, it’s T’ird, Doug Pitt’s non-celebrity endorsement, Skittles embraces inter-species love, promoting road safety by handing out bubble wrap in traffic, VW’s fast vs. fast campaign, Old Spice finds some courage, Toshiba and the benefits of testing, what vaginal odour looks like (in Malaysia), ‘Bronies’ ride again, beauty in the machines, fighting dubstep robots and you don’t want to see the linen-clad Papa Chico when he’s angry.
There was plenty of pomp, ceremony and promotional activity to celebrate the airing of the first episode of MediaWorks’ big reality show The Block last night. And the Nielsen TAM numbers have given the network something to crow about.
Leo Burnett Sydney has won the McCafé and Family portfolios for McDonald’s across Australia and New Zealand, taking the business off DDB, which has held the account for more than 30 years.
Air New Zealand filled up a room with social media sponges and marketers yesterday to hear Randi Zuckerberg, the former Facebook marketing director and less famous sister of Mark (some might say she’s the female equivalent of Doug Pitt) and Wildfire’s Jessica Gilmartin speak. And if any Kiwi company was going to sponsor a social media breakfast, it would have to be the very socially active national carrier. But in case you haven’t been paying attention over the past few very difficult years in the aviation industry, it has put together a video explaining the airline’s approach to social media and showing what it has managed to achieve as a result of its focus on it .
The ‘Shit People Say’ meme kicked off with a couple of stunners that clocked up 16 million and 8 million views respectively and then rapidly went downhill as everyone climbed aboard that particular bandwagon. But Beam Global has brought it back for its Bar Legends trade campaign, with a clip made by Young & Shand (eager eyes might be able to spot Mr Shand in the video) and The Downlowconcept detailing some of the interesting scenarios Kiwi bar tenders have to put up with.
Back in September 2009, we sent StopPress into the wild. Almost three years later and, with steadily rising audience numbers and what we think is a fairly well-established position as an important source of news, views and hullaballoos for the marketing, advertising and media community, we’re pretty proud of our e-baby. But, as everyone in this industry knows, laurel-sitting is not recommended, so, with the help of our digital agency and ‘creative co-conspirators’ &some, we’ve spent the past few months redesigning the site. Rest assured, we’ve kept all the good bits, but we’ve given it a good spruce up, shifted from WordPress to Django, installed a better comments engine, added the ability for users to submit jobs (an events uploader will be coming in the near future), made the design more responsive so it will work on iPads, tablets, smartphones and big browsers, and basically tried to ensure we took care of what &some’s head nerd Matt Cooney calls ‘the whole platform-for-the-future thing’.
Having recently departed his executive creative director role at JWT Sydney to return to New Zealand, Angus Hennah has joined a different member of the WPP family and taken the role of executive creative director at Ogilvy.
There weren’t too many particularly memorable promotional efforts from the wide range of Rugby World Cup sponsors last year. But a few stood out, and one of them was MasterCard’s Priceless Moments series by McCann Sydney and Prodigy. Now the agency has followed that up with a pretty funny spot promoting a competition that’s offering one lucky—and, judging by the ad, potentially very annoying—rugby fan a trip to Europe to watch the All Blacks play Italy, Scotland, Wales and England.
One of the smart things about Pak ‘n’ Save’s proposition is that it isn’t really based on price, it’s based on value. And that was proven recently when it was judged to be the best value brand in the country. Its entertaining corporate spokesstick Stickman has been beating that particular drum in his inimitable animated style for a few years now and DraftFCB’s self-reflexive, whimsical campaign is one of our favourites here at StopPress (not everyone likes him though). And the two latest spots reaffirm that.
When Treasury sent out a note on December 15 last year asking for interested parties to put their hands up if they wanted a piece of the ‘extension of the mixed ownership model’ account, everyone with dreams of festive cheer died a little inside. And, while the Greens are complaining that the tender process broke the rules, the list of winners was released recently—and fairly silently—and Clemenger BBDO and PR company Senate Communications have taken the big prizes in the comms space.
The Wellington Phoenix has announced another signing: Clemenger BBDO, which has gained a place as the team’s official advertising partner for the coming season.
Given the attitude of ‘the normals’ towards marketing and advertising, it’s fair to say the industry has a few perception issues. Before I started this job, I envisaged being in the eye of the wankery storm in Auckland, surrounded by people who wore shiny shirts, drove ridiculous cars and used business jargon with absolutely no sense of irony. That’s occasionally true, of course, and my Invercargill-based parents are obviously deeply ashamed at what I’ve become, but, in my relatively short time spent writing about the industry, I’ve found it to be, by and large, full of exceptionally smart, talented, creative, hard-working, hard-playing, competitive and often very opinionated businesspeople. For some, the fact that it attracts extroverts is part of the industry’s appeal. For others, however, some these extroverts—and their often anonymous views posted on websites like this—give the industry an air of unprofessionalism. So, as we get set to relaunch StopPress, we thought it was a good time to delve into the thorny issue of online opinions.
There’s been plenty of press lately about media companies being forced to adjust the way they did business in fast-changing circumstances, chief among them Fairfax, which announced the cutting of 1,900 jobs in Australia and host of other big changes (check out this anonymous opinion piece by a Fairfax journalist in Australia that painted a rather vivid picture of the current situation at the company). But according to Fairfax Media’s group executive editor in New Zealand Paul Thompson—and as evidenced in Oriella’s global study—journalism remains a career of huge variety, opportunity and importance and the company says its continuation of the intern scheme in 2012 is “a sign of its belief in itself, its journalism and the future”. And, given that future will likely be digital, this year applicants will have to upload a video clip of no more than 90 seconds about themselves to YouTube as part of the process to show they’re up to the task.
As Lion says goodbye to one of its prize marketers, Frith Morrissey joins TBWA\, Will Seal shifts from PR to media and JWT’s Rod Prosser heads for France.
This weekend my mailbox was inundated with catalogues from big retailers telling me about their current toy sale. Apparently ‘tis the season. As I flicked through one of the catalogues I began to notice just how gender-specific it was. In the “play and pretend” section (it is a sea of pink) there are little girls playing with Barbie glam pools and day spas, or wheeling around a shopping trolley (with food no less). Or, they can take their pick from one of the kitchen, supermarket, pots and pans or laundry playsets. Flick a few more pages, and you’ll find the pink ‘craft and creativity’ section, or the blue ‘action and adventure’ section. You get the picture.
All the Kiwi design shops missed out in Cannes, but Alt Group has been awarded five red dots, including a sought-after red dot: best of the best in the red dot awards in Berlin for The Social Kitchen, a project created for Fisher & Paykel in collaboration with The Engine Room restaurant and furniture design company IMO, following on from the silver Clio award it won in New York.
Some cultures celebrate the release of a new edition of NZ Marketing by throwing three virgins into a volcano and dancing for days on end. But in New Zealand we simply write something on StopPress and alert readers to the fact that by picking up a copy of a magazine that recently won all four of the big gongs in the trade/professional category at the 2012 Magazine Awards *awww shucks* you can fill your brain with stories about how the senior management team at Saatchi & Saatchi is trying to rediscover the agency’s lost mojo; the intriguing brand wars playing out in the local automotive sector; the state of New Zealand’s radio industry in an increasingly digital world; how to choose an agency without losing your shirt; the massive changes currently being dealt with by the retail sector; and David Bell’s take on why we might currently be going through this generation’s equivalent of the Mad Men era.
Just as restaurants often find it difficult to operate successfully as bars, it’s tough for ad agencies to succeed as design shops—and vice versa. That’s partially because there seems to be an element of patch protection at play on both sides of the fence, perhaps as evidenced by some of the comments in the article about Designworks’ foray into advertising with the University of Canterbury’s latest campaign. But, as one of the few agencies that’s won both Best Awards for the likes of the ecostore rebrand and Four’s big yellow duck as well as a whole host of prestigious creative awards, Special Group seems to be doing a pretty good job of striking a balance. And its latest effort is the creation of a new brand identity for Omaha Organic Blueberries (OOB).
The APMA Star Awards, which celebrate the past year’s finest promotional efforts, took place last week in Oz, with New Zealand marketing agency Belowtheline the only Kiwi agency to take home a gold, winning the top award in the ‘best sponsorship leverage’ category for its ‘Game Plan’ promotion for Sanitarium’s sponsorship of the All Blacks before and during the Rugby World Cup.
Following on from the recent news that Carat took the Sovereign Insurance account off OMD without a pitch, the agency has further bolstered its client list after being appointed to manage strategy and media buying for Bendon brands like Lovable, Elle MacPherson Intimates, MacPherson Men, Davenport, Pleasure State and Stella McCartney Lingerie across New Zealand.
Auckland’s Logick Print & Graphics took home the supreme award at the Pride in Print Awards on Friday night, with an experimental job done in partnership with Panprint for Jacob’s Creek that showed what could be achieved by printing its logo with different embellishments.
