It aims to put on good shows all year, and, with a selection of its stars wheeled in (including a performance from the biggest of them all, Billy’s Big Brass Brand), a few branded ice sculptures (rumour has it new chief executive Kevin Kenrick fashioned them with his bare hands), lots of bass, some slick production and plenty of delicious things in spoons, TVNZ certainly put on a good one last night to launch its 2013 season.
As we wrote a few weeks back, Contact Energy put the feelers out for some new agency partners and JWT New Zealand has been chosen as the company’s sole creative agency across brand, digital and retail.
Marsden Inch have chucked a generous sum behind the bar so there are drinks, there are nibbles, there are students, and there are portfolios. All that’s required to complete the equation are lots of creatives to wander along between 5.30 and 8pm tonight to The Nathan Club on the ground floor of the Nathan Building at 51 Galway Street, Britomart. There’s also been a suggestion to bring along a few more of the shit idea bins to the show. So to encourage everyone to be at their biting and incisive best, MDS will have a special limited run of 20 shit idea bins on offer.
Hakanoa Ginger Beer and M&C Saatchi got into a bit of PR strife a few months back after a campaign asking for parents to swap their red-haired kids for a six pack of ginger beer received a public scalding. After the public response—and despite claims about it being an attempt to raise awareness of the discrimination of ginger haired children—the campaign was pulled early. But the Advertising Standards Authority has upheld a complaint about it, saying the posters were socially irresponsible and discriminatory.
Interactive ad revenue figures have been steadily heading upwards over the past few years in New Zealand and in the latest round of figures, the sector hit its highest ever level, with total advertising spend in Q3, 2012 of $94 million, an increase of three percent from the last quarter and an increase of five percent year-on-year. But, as you’d expect in such a rapidly developing industry, there are still a few issues to contend with, including a fall in display advertising, the use of ad blocking software and discussions around the appropriate methodology for collecting revenue data.
The best moment of my life was undoubtedly winning the meat pack at a friend’s wedding, closely followed by the time when three loyalty cards came due on the same day. So it was pleasing to learn that an ad celebrating sexy meat for Pak ‘n’ Save’s Meat Week has won DraftFCB the October ORCA.
Absolut’s latest artistic innovation is, as per usual, pretty impressive, with the company rejigging its entire production process in an effort to create unique patterns on four million bottles. There are only 4,800 of them available in New Zealand and, judging by the number of co-workers fawning over the bottle sitting on the StopPress desk, they might not be around for too long. But fans of the brand and its creative MO have an opportunity to get the next best thing by creating their own personalised bottle online.
The various ‘Look At These People Having More Fun Than You at Fancy Events’ sections in the nation’s magazines and newspapers have a powerful pull on the often judgemental, fame seeking human animal. So, in a continuation of Lindauer’s ‘Don’t Worry Boys’—and in a continuation of its vow to never show the target market in the campaign—it hijacked The Sunday Star Times’ ‘About Town’ (or in this case ‘Around Town’) social pages to show real partners despondently left at home on National Girls’ Night out last week.
And we bow down and give TVC of the Week praise to Westpac’s bickering oldies, Good Books’ bodice ripper, Stickman’s chicken adulation, OPSM’s surf lifesaving tie-in and Big Little City’s visual love letter to Auckland.
Unitec’s brave ‘Change Starts Here’ campaign by Special Group and Naked helped change perceptions of the institution, and its latest ‘We make the people who make it’ push ramped up the brand’s cool factor by showcasing some of the impressive constructions its students have been involved in around Auckland. But it certainly didn’t stop at TV because that quest has continued through a range of smart campaign extensions and media partnerships organised by Beat PR, including one with George FM that’s given a group of Unitec students the challenge of constructing the ultimate DJ booth.
Yahoo! New Zealand has announced a three-year sponsorship of Netball New Zealand and the Silver Ferns. And the good news doesn’t stop there for the sport, because Kia has switched its sponsorship focus from tennis and signed up as the naming rights sponsor for the Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic.
Rob Banks heads to New York, Naked appoints a head of Australasian ideas and viral fun glutton Rob Whitey McConnaughy joins the Sweet Shop.
Red Bull is undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest content marketers and has been successfully fusing marketing with pop culture for decades through its association with ‘extreme sports’. That was cranked up even further recently with its investment in Red Bull Stratos, and it got plenty of payback in the form of roughly eight million people watching the event live on YouTube and tens of millions of dollars worth of media coverage and social buzz following Felix Baumgartner’s successful jump. And while this marketing stunt/scientific mission is obviously going to be hard to top, the brand’s latest Rube Goldberg-esque stunt, Kluge, which follows up another classy effort from last month, features a host of its sponsored athletes doing their thing and took 17 days to build, is still pretty bloody amazing and once again proves the value of creating ideas worth talking about.
We included a link to a brilliant Irish charity initiative that saw “ad creatives, designers, animators, directors, illustrators and more dress up their favourite worst feedback from clients, transforming quotes that would normally give you a twitch, into a diverse collection of posters” last week. But the depictions of the sometimes fraught agency-client relationship—some of which have presumably used a bit of poetic licence—seem to be universal and we thought they deserved a bit more of a showing, so here’s a few of our favourites.
QR codes have long been talked about as a bridge between the digital and the physical. But the oft-used “let’s chuck a QR Code at the bottom of the ad and hope for the best” approach is rarely successful. So Phantom Billstickers has launched a new and hopefully more enticing approach to the technology that it’s calling the talking poster.
Collectors eagerly await each new release of Absolut limited edition bottles (we even had a desperate plea from a big fan in Germany asking for the Huffer-designed model) and its latest collection, Absolut Unique, is sure to impress.
How to measure PR is an ongoing debate and this question was at the centre of a big review by the CAANZ Marcomms Leadership Group last year. And while advertising value equivalent (AVE) has been rejected in many other markets as outdated and insufficient, a survey conducted for Hotwire, the global integrated PR and communications agency, has shown that it’s still prevalent in Australia and New Zealand. So it’s doing its bit to address the issue with the launch of its own meausurement framework.
The shows and stars set to beam out to New Zealand in 2013 on TV3 and Four were announced last week. And now you can marvel at some of the humans who were there at the launch.
The tinsel is going up around the nation’s shops, the Cliff Richard carol CD is being dusted off and the festive retail shouting is already underway. But rather than add to the commercial cacophony, Running with Scissors and The Good Taste Company have tried to create something of a reprieve with a campaign for its new Double-Ups range.
The hairy battle has commenced and Nigel Hooker from Apollo Marketing has been awarded the prestigious mo of the week title.
We’ve had an oversupply of kids and animals in advertising this year. But, in the follow-up to the launch of Westpac and DDB’s Start Asking campaign, the oldies have taken centre stage in an entertaining fish out of water tale that aims to show the bank has ways of helping customers into their own house.
They’re another year older and (definitely) deeper in debt; they’ve been awarded in international student competitions; they’ve won both the NAB and TVNZ national student challenges; they’ve been through the rigours of a retail round robin with several agencies; they recently submitted six weeks of brand new work on various briefs to an industry panel for some tough words and sage advice; and now the Media Design School advertising students are ready to show their wares next Wednesday between 5.30 and 8pm at The Nathan Club, 51 Galway street, Britomart.
From the agency that brought us catvertising comes a company that makes your videos go “viraler and viraler”; putting in the effort; the sound of print; you’ll never want to eat zucchini again; Google spreads some jam on it; rather than making fun of Apple acolytes, Samsung has brought in the big guns for its big phone; while Obama had Will Ferrell, Romney had Mr Burns; Switzerland goes off the clock; perhaps the best song ever written about sports; five hours well spent if you watch to the end, the evolution of paywalls; a whole lot of creative catharsis; bovine photo bombing; a map of your brain; and the gift that keeps on giving.
Charlie’s has been fighting the good fight against its much larger, some would say much less principled competition since it kicked off in 1999. And, with its newish agency Assignment Group, it’s launched the first campaign for a couple of years in an effort to retell its story and show New Zealanders that the brand is “on a mission from good”.
Kim Hill gets a big international plaudit, Colenso gets greedy, Geoff Devereux goes indie, New Zealand Blood goes digital with Young & Shand, MediaWorks swipes another TVNZer, TVNZ’s new 7pm show gets going, Hayley Holt heads to More FM and Jason Willis lights his Fuse.
The Briscoes lady—AKA Tammy Wells—has been invading New Zealand’s living rooms and mailboxes for almost a quarter of a century and, after thousands of ads about massive savings and red hot sales, the ‘You’ll never by better’ slogan has been well and truly etched into the nation’s consciousness. And this week the Kiwi retailer marked a significant milestone as it celebrated 150 years of business. PLUS: some classic old ads.
Catvertising has gone mainstream in 2012 and Mammoth Insulation’s rather self-satisfied, warmth-loving feline Prince Nikolai Stroganov III, who made the cut for our TVCs of the Week not long ago, added his name to the list when the campaign was launched back in October. Now Sugar & Partners, which is on a bit of a creative roll after recalibrating recently, has followed up the main 45 second brand spot with three more 15 second spots.
Media start-up Snakk Media, which was launched by Kiwi entrepreneur Derek Handley and digital advertising veteran Andrew Jacobs in Australia in 2010 and offers advertisers a network of channels and technology that allows them to target and connect to consumers through smartphones and tablets, has applied to list on the New Zealand Alternative Exchange (NZAX) in the near future.
Running With Scissors’ new campaign for The People’s Wine caught our attention a few weeks back and it’s also found favour with the judges of the October round of the newspaper ad of the month awards, who said “there’s a story here … more of a personal interesting take on a wine ad”, “Kiwi, unpretentious and great to see longer copy” and “beautifully crafted and great use of a newspaper magazine.”
Moa has its fair share of detractors, from threat-making Pakistanis to protective Frenchies to lesbians to those who disagreed with the imagery used in its, shall we say, unique prospectus. So it came as a shock to many when the trickster god of the Kiwi beer family was announced as a sponsor of the New Zealand Olympic team, a sponsorship we felt it did a fantastic job of leveraging online and in person at Kiwi house in London. And as part of its ‘Beer for Olympians’ campaign, it has had one complaint upheld and one not upheld by the ASA.