ANZ is a long-time supporter of Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. And it became a principal partner this year. So, to celebrate that upgrade, promote diversity and ensure it gets its fair share of the pink dollar, it’s given ten ATMs throughout the city a proper jzushing.
Below the Line has crafted the Kiwi rewards programme for Sanitarium’s Weet-bix brand with an app that lets people redeem rewards for products, vouchers, experiences and competition entries. Identifying and signing reward partners was the biggest challenge for the agency, with more than $1 million of rewards offered.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
New Zealand’s hottest little software company Vend took its ethos of JFDI and plastered it all over the show in its new premises. Chief marketing officer Nick Houldsworth talks about their mint new space.
Kiwibank and Assignment Group got out the craft knife last year for a quirky Welcome Home Loan promotion featuring a couple that lived in a cardboard house. And they’ve continued that crafty theme with a stop-motion ode to dough that aims to draw attention to its insurance products.
The adage that change is the only constant proves true at Whybin\TBWA, APN NZ Media, DNA and Finch. Updates regarding Finch.
Last year Pepsi Max was behind a big hit after Nascar driver Jeff Gordon dressed up and took an unsuspecting car salesman on a scary ride. That clocked up around 40 million views, but a few cynics reckoned it was fake, including Jalopnik writer Travis Okulski. Bad move, Travis.
We’ve seen a giant duck, a giant lollie, a giant rugby ball and even giant bags of weed. Now Mike Pero has added to this nation’s huge oeuvre by financing “one of its greatest home purchases in its over twenty year history: The Mike Pero Flying House balloon”.
Last night’s 26th edition of the annual NZ Direct Marketing Awards at Auckland’s Langham Hotel was a lavish affair, which was hosted by comedian Ben Hurley and the Marketing Association’s chief executive Sue McCarty, who recently resigned from her position. In total 41 different awards were handed out over the course of the event, and by the end of the night the attendees from Colenso BBDO/Proximity and iSite Media must’ve had tired legs due to the number of times they were called to the stage.
In 2009, when Alex Gledhill co-founded Quina Fina tonic water, he wanted to create a traditional variation of tonic water that contained the bark of cinchona. However, after following his research to the Ecuadorian province of Loja – the natural habitat of cinchona – he discovered that the tree was on the brink of extinction due to deforestation caused by the high demand for the antimalarial properties found in the bark. Rather than just accepting this problem, Gledhill decided to do something about it.
Pernod Ricard-owned wine producer Stoneleigh will bring some botanical intrigue to Auckland from 28 February to 8 March, as it takes over Queens Wharf with its ‘Wonder of Nature’ event. Over the course of the campaign, Stoneleigh will break the concrete flow of the city’s landscape with the introduction of suspended gardens, which were conceptualised by award-winning landscape designer Jules Moore.
Mercedes-Benz has waved goodbye to the generic website advertising new car models with what is calls an interactive web special for the GLA SUV. A combination of static images, viewer clues and video, it also manages to sneak in some customer service tools to hook potential buyers.
Telecom continues to search for ways to reach a mobile-savvy audience beyond the traditional landline. Hard on the heels of announcing a name change to Spark and its planned internet TV and movie service ShowmeTV, it’s partnering with Spotify to offer the Premium version on certain mobile plans.
Contact Energy and one its agencies, JWT, are diverting from their traditional audience focus with promotions based around events. A Twitter contest to help decide the People’s Choice winner at this year’s Fringe Festival is aimed squarely at a youth demographic.
Earlier this year, it was announced that Image Centre Group* had won the Wendy’s account from King Street. And four weeks later the new account holder has launched a campaign via its in-house creative agency &Some to introduce the Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger to the Kiwi market.
Fair Go is one of the great survivors in the world of TV and it kicks off its new season tonight at the new time of 8pm. But while the ratings remain solid, not everyone’s enamoured with the show, with Brian Edwards writing a scathing piece and offering some advice to those who come in for some unwanted attention.
It’s amazing what lengths some people will go to get a job. But would you pay for a one-month internship at an ad agency? That’s what Colenso BBDO is asking for as part of an charity initiative to raise funds for Cure Kids. And, as a result, social media knickers are once again in a twist.
It’s one of the oldest digital shops in the country and it has done work for a huge number of clients. And, like the internet itself, Terabyte Interactive keeps on changing. Chief executive Doug Hanna logs on.
Ikea and German agency Thjnk have turned to RGB to make the best use of a nine square metre billboard and show how home owners can make similar space saving decisions. It’s a geeky but cool concept to advertise the furniture retailer’s small space solutions.
Rather than pelting consumers with a series of special deals in the typical infomercial style often employed in supermarket advertisements, German-based Edeka has instead taken a weird approach that both Adweek and Slate have compared to Gangnam Style.
Digital and content roles should attract bigger pay this year than the other creative and marketing sectors surveyed by Font in its Market Pulse report. Candidates with a diverse skill set and strong digital competency will be in high demand, with an integrated approach becoming the norm.
As part of its partnership with the New Zealand Cannes Lions, Val Morgan is giving young ad hotshots an opportunity to represent New Zealand in the Young Lions competition at the 61st Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity being held between 15 and 21 June.
Socialize Media has created a new site, The Big Upgrade, aimed at showing off what Kiwis can do with ultrafast broadband. It’s created its first set of online videos and launched the site across a number of social media channels.
Econsultancy’s first Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing for 2014 shows a strong appetite for digital risk in spite of a lack of support from the top and squeezed budgets. Content, targeting, social media engagement and mobile optimisation were high on the agenda of surveyed companies.
A new clip for Sony’s Playstation Plus subscription service is out to explode the stereotype that gamers are a lonely bunch. It takes us on a ride through a series of experiences that could only happen in our imagination, or a game, and shows how these things are better done together. Or, using multiplayer.
First it was Coke telling us how it could cure our social media addiction, now a Brazillian beer maker has a solution that would make it impossible for drinkers to communicate using their cellphones. It proposes a cooler that would block connectivity and make bar dwellers very lonely indeed.
Tequila brand Jose Cuervo is celebrating its 150th year in style with a new website that spans five pages. Each is a different take on tequila through the ages, showing off the ad style of the day from an old parchment to post-war chic.
Powershop wins the prize for best use of the doge meme on Trade Me with an ad that’s drawing the eyeballs. Hunting a Ruby on Rails developer, the ad secured 22,000 views in a day, well over the average 200 views the company’s job ads normally get.
To attract South American students (and the unsubsidised fees that come with them), Education New Zealand has arranged for Otago Polytechnic to host a pair of popular Brazilian bloggers for several weeks. Caio Komatsu and Luana Mazotti, both from Sao Paolo, are the founders of the blogs Fail Wars and Puro Veneno, which are said to reach a combined audience of approximately five million people. And the organisers of the campaign believe that the pair’s keyboard-tapping hobby could help to spread Latin American awareness of New Zealand, not only as a tourist destination but also as a great place to study.
The tenth and final Axis love letter has been released ahead of the show on March 6, and it’s another doozy, with DDB’s Mark Lorrigan harnessing the immense power of song to showcase his intense and probably illegal devotion to Y&R in ‘It ain’t stalking if I love you’.