Monthly Archives: February, 2013

News
Passion for anthropological evidence gathering results in obligatory Harlem Shake post
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Memery is a fickle mistress. One day you’re hot, one day you’re supplanted by people tipping milk over their heads for no apparent reason. And, generally speaking, you know a meme is close to death’s door when people in offices start partaking (or, in the case of flash mobs, when companies implement them as the experiential aspect of a campaign). Given there’s a website dedicated to agencies around the world that have embraced what the kids are calling the Harlem Shake, and given practically every media outlet in the world has collected some of the best efforts, it’s quite possibly in its last throes, but we couldn’t resist the pull of the thrust, so here’s our obligatory post showing local business folk indulging in weird, bacchanalian behaviour.

News
Air New Zealand: eating social media for breakfast
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Sim Ahmed captured the goodness of Air New Zealand’s social media breakfast last week with a liveblog. But if you hate words, then you’ll be overjoyed to learn that the airline has put together a video highlights reel for aspiring social media gurus who missed out.

News
Hyundai feels the love, Holden looks for rejection therapy
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In 2007, almost two in five New Zealanders who planned to buy a new car in the next four years said they would ‘definitely would not consider’ any Hyundai model. But, showing how perceptions can be changed quickly with quality products and solid marketing to back them up, the latest automotive brand rejecter results from Roy Morgan Research show this proportion has now halved, and effectively increased Hyundai’s available market by 25 percent.

News
Contagion takes TV2 into the real world
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Towering beanstalks, enormous tomes and lie detection are the ingredients in Contagion’s new campaign for TV2, which aims to enchant viewers into picking up the remote for the new season of programmes that started this week by focusing on Once Upon a Time and Revenge.

News
Is honesty the best policy? Boundary Road Brewery’s trying to find out
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Stolen from your mum’s purse? Relieved yourself in a swimming pool? Told someone that, no, they don’t look fat in that? Boundary Road and Barnes, Catmur & Friends are looking questioningly at you. And a new ‘scientific’ online survey seeks to gauge Kiwi honesty, with a campaign asking cider-drinkers or free-stuff-sifters to answer 15 questions in The Great Kiwi Honesty Test and win a season’s* worth of the new bevvie, Honesty Box Cider.

News
Blessed be the bank that celebrates success
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ASB has a good pedigree when it comes to using likeable characters in its marketing. And, after seven months of planning with its agency Saatchi & Saatchi, it’s hoping it has created another one after foisting the bearded, booming Brian Blessed on the nation to help get New Zealanders to celebrate success, no matter how small that success might be.

News
Wolves! Eagles! Cats! Awards! Models! Fashion! Quick-draw! Shaking! Undying love!
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Old Spice answers the call of the wild; Litter Genie’s weird musical feline journey continues, this time with a slow jam; what real humans think of ad awards; print and digital up a tree; fashion forward; fast chat; two memes collide in the best Harlem shake yet. Plus, George FM’s solid effort; Lego and Google get romantic; the first internet banner; Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon’s history of rap; marketing pick-up lines; Puritan Valentines cards; our favourite Valentine’s website; and why Papa Ratzi really quit.

News
Foreign magazine man interviews local magazine men
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Monocle editor, Wallpaper founder, Financial Times columnist and overall media darling Tyler Brûlé was in the country recently to eat oysters at the Oyster Inn on Waiheke Island and speak to a few invited guests as part of Colenso BBDO’s Love This Speaker series. He also recorded a radio show about the state of the local magazine market with John Baker, chair of the MPA and publisher at Tangible Media, and Andy Pickering, editor of Pilot and the Herald’s Spy pages and freelance creative director. So click your thingee to hear what they had to say.

News
Succeed on and pump your fists, says ASB’s new bearded mascot
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Aside from a classy print ad, and some classic Spring home loan activity, ASB largely kept its powder dry during the Great Bank Wars of 2012. But now it’s ready to play and, with the help of Saatchi & Saatchi and Brian Blessed, an able but much hairier replacement for its last foreign thespian, Dame Judy Dench, it’s launched its new ‘Succeed On’ campaign, which aims to get us humble Kiwi folk to indulge in a bit more healthy self-congratulation.

News
Monocle magazine and the art of bucking the trend
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Tyler Brûlé’s media empire makes a point of avoiding the path that its contemporaries in print have taken over the past five years. Instead of investing in magazine apps, a social media presence, or web content strategies, Monocle, the magazine he launched in 2007, doubled down its analog output and now has two resort newspapers, stores in three continents, a cafe, and a 24 hour radio station.

News
Federation sweeps up Mojo’s vehicular leftovers with Motorcorp win
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After the liquidation of Publicis Mojo, we heard a few whispers that its car client, Motorcorp distributors, wouldn’t be moving across to Joy and was on the hunt for an agency. And that agency has been chosen, with Federation taking over responsibility for the Volvo and Renault brands. Plus: Federation’s new work for Emirates.

News
Radio Hauraki brings out the big guns for its ‘intervention’
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Radio Hauraki is in the midst of an existential crisis. And, after rather forthrightly saying it had been pretty shit for the past few years and that it had to kill that station to save it, The Radio Network brand has come out of rehab with a new line-up (Martin Devlin and Laura McGoldrick, Angelina Boyd, Greg Prebble, Matt Heath and The General and Mikey Havoc) and a new campaign at the hands of Saatchi & Saatchi. And, as part of its ‘intervention’, legendary turntablist and Beastie Boys DJ, Mix Master Mike is venturing to New Zealand to celebrate the official relaunch.

News
It’s DIY romance with Mitre 10’s saw serenade
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Bacon roses, a cat with a heart on it, or perhaps just a laid-back, low key fight. The list of options available to show you love on this most romantic of days is almost limitless. And Mitre 10 has helped aspiring romantics by offering instruction on how to play a tool-based love song.

News
Yellow ditches DDB / RAPP Tribal for upstart True
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Yellow Group has dropped DDB / RAPP Tribal and appointed True as its new agency, according to the directories company. Yellow says it is finalising one more project with RAPP, which will be completed by the end of the month, after which the relationship will end.

News
Campbell Live beats TV One competitor for the first time
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Campbell Live won its first battle in the 7pm timeslot last night, by attracting more viewers than its current affairs rival Seven Sharp. This is the first time the Mediaworks show has overtaken any TV One 7pm programme, a massive blow for TVNZ which has probably got John Campbell yelling “bloody marvellous” from TV3’s Mt Eden office.

News
Make token suggestion, win business boardgame
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According to entrepreneur Nick Hindson, New Zealand is ranked second in the world in the number of new businesses that are started up, but more than half don’t last the distance. So, in an effort to teach New Zealanders—be they school children, corporate ballbreakers or budding entrepreneurs—about business sense and financial literacy in a more entertaining way, he has created a new board game called Market $hare, which features 64 real New Zealand businesses. We’ve got a couple of games worth $89.99 to give away and all you have to do is tell us what the next addition to the Monopoly board will be after the cat was chosen recently following a public vote.

News
BNZ wants you to be good with YouMoney
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Last week BNZ Bank sent members of the media blue cakes in the shape of a brain, prompting us at StopPress to theorise the upcoming launch of a youth orientated product based around zombies. It seems we were half right.

Opinion
Advertising is alive and well—just with fewer horses and bayonets
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Countless articles pronounce the end of advertising, the death of marketing, and a gloomy outlook for all involved. From the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, or pretty much every marketing and advertising conference, the headlines shout that we’re in serious trouble. There’s only one problem, says JWT’s Simon Lendrum. It’s all bollocks.

News
Samsung and Colenso draw on experience for country’s first live cartoon
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Samsung has been one of the big movers in the mobile space in recent years, and, with a series of quality ads based around its ‘Next Big Thing’ tagline, has had plenty of success from taking the fight directly to Apple. While the late Steve Jobs rejected the idea of a stylus, Samsung has fully embraced the idea for its Note series and, to demonstrate the kind of artistic trickery the newest model is capable of, Colenso BBDO and Samsung collaborated with the New Zealand Herald’s legendary satirical cartoonist (and one of the oldest fathers in the world), Peter Bromhead, in an effort to go beyond the banner and become part of the content.

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