In a career full of successes, leading the transformation project that brought together the National Bank and ANZ was one of the sweetest for Mike Cunnington.
Monthly Archives: October, 2013
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
Sometimes you just can’t escape lining up. The portaloo at the festival, the cashier at the supermarket, the coolest new bar. But no-one really likes doing it, so it is fairly hard to fathom why anyone would do it for a new phone. Plenty do, of course (even though they don’t actually know why). And the companies selling them go to great lengths to butter these strange tech fiends up and ensure they don’t get queue fatigue, as evidenced by Vodafone and Telecom’s launch festivities for the new iPhones.
New Zealand Rugby conducted something of an experiment last week when the Bledisloe Cup test between the All Blacks and Australia was streamed live and made available on-demand on www.youtube.com/allblacks to more than 45 countries where the digital rights hadn’t been allocated exclusively to a broadcaster. So how did it go? And should Sky be worried?
Following in the footsteps of some overseas entities like Wired and Volkswagen, ASB has opened the doors of its new North Wharf head office to the world by creating New Zealand’s largest commercial interior Google Street View tour.
Last night, in a big shed down on the docks of Auckland town, Jeremy Corbett and Hillary Barry helped launch MediaWorks new season line-up. And, with the return of most of its local shows, some big-rating new international numbers and a couple of new branded content initiatives, director of sales and marketing Liz Fraser is confident it can continue its solid run of form in 2013 next year.
Fairfax Media is celebrating a victory over its main rival APN after Nielsen numbers showed more Aucklanders are reading stuff.co.nz than any other site, with its unique audience for September in Auckland clocking in at 391,000 compared to the nzherald.co.nz’s 360,000.
Google is basically the nervous system of the modern world, and that’s best evidenced by the screen in the Googleplex showing the real-time search queries from around the world (minus the dirty ones, apparently). The auto-complete feature aims to predict what you’re going to ask about based on other popular searches and usually the results are either relevant or quite funny. But a new campaign for United Nations Women by Ogilvy & Mather Dubai has used this democratic online function to show how endemic sexism still is around the world.
Pizza boxes, bad clothes, poster-laden walls, staying up way too late mashing buttons and trying to clock games … Ahh, the memories. All of this—and much more—has been chronicled by Sony and Drum in an effort to chart the history of the PlayStation ahead of the launch of PlayStation 4 later this year.
Westpac has chosen three winning apps in a competition it launched to find ways of making banking processes faster. The Westpac App Challenge crowdsourcing contest pitted 120 entrants from around the country against each other, with seven finalists participating in a Dragon’s Den style showdown a few weeks ago at Westpac’s Auckland HQ.
BNZ’s rapid development of an online banking platform that ‘works like your brain does’, attracted the difficult to impress youth market to the brand.
As the Bacchanalian throng moshed to adland’s gods and goddess of rock at last week’s Battle of the Ad Bands, .99/justONE took the opportunity to shoulder tap—literally—some of those in attendance.
There’s been plenty of speculation about when Kiwi golfing phenom Lydia Ko would sign on the dotted line and start chasing the big bucks. But rather than having to deal with a traditional press conference and the obligatory banal questions from nosey parkers, she decided to announce her decision with an entertaining video that she posted to Twitter.
In These Difficult Times, the predictable response from traditional media is to flog their sales staff harder, argue the value of their channels and bitch about US companies that pay no tax and hollow out the industry. But Vincent Heeringa says the smarter option can be summed up in four points.
Auckland-based digital agency Union, which rebranded from Federation Media earlier this year, has announced a partnership with world-leading digital marketing and innovation learning organisation Hyper Island that will see it bring its Open Master Class programme to New Zealand.
The Warehouse has transformed its offering in recent times, allocating $430 million over five years to refit its stores, improve the customer experience, increase the number of staff on the floor, stock a better range of products and brands and communicate the offer more effectively with the market. That’s led to nine consecutive quarters of profit growth and an increase in sales to $1.55 billion. But while its regular customers were aware of all the improvements, those who had written it off years ago still had some engrained negative perceptions. So, with the help of DDB, it’s faced up to them with The Warehouse Challenge.
When it rains it pours, and new business is pouring all over Colenso BBDO at the moment, with the latest addition to its growing roster being George Weston Foods.
Sergeant Deanne Teao’s better work story is the latest in M&C Saatchi’s campaign to attract new police recruits. The story shows Teao talking a young man out of jumping from an overbridge by talking about his children and family.
An emotionally charged Duracell, a retro Tip Top and a modern Kiwirail get the nod this week.
Oh how we laughed when the Twitterati had some fun with the idea of Auckland Monopoly back in April. Now, after the launch of the game this morning, a new wave of Auckland-centric jokes have come spewing forth.
Alana O’Neill joins MediaWorks, a shock for Jock, Jo Jalfon shifts from phones to food, NZDM Awards judges announced, Kelly Millier heads to NZ Lotteries, its Les Mills for Lwindi Ellis and Thick as Thieves adds Michael Duignan to its roster.
The new book Promoting Prosperity, which takes a look at New Zealand’s early commercial artists and the beginnings of the country’s entrepreneurial and creative roots, tells us about today as much as yesterday, says Clemenger BBDO’s Andrew Holt.
Brandspank, the Rialto Channel, TVNZ Blacksand, Sky Television and MediaWorks were among those flying the Kiwi flag at the PromaxBDA ANZ Awards last weekend. The awards honour top performers in on-air promotion, branding and advertising.
As Tip Top and Colenso BBDO launch the new campaign promoting the reformulated, all-natural range of ice creams, Colenso BBDO/Proximity have been handed the top award for an unprecedented second year in a row at the DMA International ECHO Awards Competition for the launch of its brand platform, ‘Feel Tip Top’, backing up its Diamond for the Pedigree ‘Doggelganger’ campaign in 2012.
Prior to the launch of Tip Top’s brand platform ‘Feel Tip Top’ around one year ago, Colenso BBDO’s Nick Garrett said the Fonterra-owned company had been in something of a holding pattern as it dealt with various business issues like distribution and supplying a couple of key product ranges. Once it had that sorted, it travelled around the country delivering a dose of the feelgoods to Kiwis. And now it’s promoting the fact that, as of January, it’s entire range will only feature natural colours and ingredients.
Since Jess Hall joined Farmers in 2011, the scope and scale of its direct marketing campaigns has radically grown. Hall has grown with it. And the News Works Rookie marketer of the year wouldn’t have it any other way.
There’s been no shortage of quality animal-related advertising in recent months, with O2’s Be More Dog, Volvo’s extreme hamster and, locally, DraftFCB’s award-hogging Driving Dogs standing out. Now VW and Adam&Eve DDB have added to the canine oeuvre, with a cast of 36 showing that ‘there’s a Volkswagen for all of us’.
Pachelbel’s Canon is the one of the most used backing tracks in TV and film, altered every which way to suit the genre. A new ad for Sony image sensors has another twist on the piece and it’s made entirely from the sounds of dripping water.
We’ve showcased all the winners of the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards in print through NZ Marketing, and now we’re showcasing them online. First up, Fairfax Media Supreme Award and BrandWorld FMCG Award winner Griffin’s.