Fourteen years ago, Jai Waite dove into a wave in Greece and hit a sandbar, becoming paralysed from the chest down with only limited function in his arms and hands. Now, as production editor at Attitude Pictures, he’s won a prestigious Apollo award for his documentary “Jimmy Wants a Job” – and it was edited using his knuckles.
Here’s a wrap of the Grand Prix and gold winners in the Cannes 2014 film category.
Tell Nielsen the truth about your scandalous agency lifestyle. Nielsen even has a drinkable offering in return for your time (‘you” being advertising folk) and your secrets. There are ten cases of wine (six bottles in each) to be won for those who fill in a survey to help Nielsen ‘understand agency life’. Everyone who completes it will receive a short report from Nielsen about the findings.
T-Mobile has joined with DDB Tribal to introduce us to Spanish entrepreneur Jose and his ‘wi-fi’ dogs, who assist holiday makers in searching for wi-fi. The dogs are trained to sniff out frequencies from the nearest router and can be rented by the hour. Or we could just go with T-mobile’s travel plan.
The ubiquity of Che Guevara’s face on the bodies of people across the world stands as testament to the fact that there’s something inexplicably appealing about being associated with a revolutionary cause. Add to this the fact that the spirit of Guy Fawkes has been resurrected as the face of the online anti-totalitarian movement, and it becomes quite evident that people still believe some battles are worth fighting for. Using this revolutionary drive as a premise, Replay Jeans has released a new spot via 180Amsterdam that places its consumers as the revolutionaries fighting against the faceless totalitarian regime bent on destroying the earth.
Kath Dewar, managing director of marketing agency Good Sense, shares her not-so-rosy views on pester power in the light of Countdown’s hugely successful Heroes Dreamworks campaign.
By the time the curtain was drawn on the 2014 Cannes Festival of Creativity, a total of 1143 lions had been distributed to the finest examples of advertising to have been published throughout the world over the course of the last year. And of these gongs, 25 will be making their way back to New Zealand in the laps of Kiwi winners.
Kiwi life assurance company Sovereign has appointed JWT as its creative agency and has extended its commercial partnership with the Dentsu Aegis Network for other comms purposes, including media, PR and social.
ZenithOptimedia (ZO) has released its June 2014 Global Ad Expenditure Forecast, and it predicts that over the next two years the online channel will overtake TV as the medium where advertisers spend the most money. In addition to this, the report also analyses of how the Kiwi market is likely to compare internationally.
When Jono Sorenson left advertising agency Carat in March to become a sales director at Diverse Media, he signed up there for only three days a week – because the rest of his time he now devotes to muesli.
He and fellow muesli-fan/fiancé Lucy Leckie have launched The Muesli Hub – “a platform to build your own muesli online and have it delivered to your door”. They want to inspire people to re-prioritise breakfast.
It’s winter and for some people in New Zealand that means a trip to the hospital for injections or even open heart surgery, because of rheumatic fever.
GSL Promotus is behind a national Health Promotion Agency campaign to let more people know that strep throats, if left untreated, can develop into rheumatic fever in at-risk populations. The campaign involves six different TVCs, a multitude of radio ads (in English, te reo Maori, Samoan and Tongan), online videos and banners, and Adshel posters.
In an effort to dissuade potential smokers from picking up that first cigarette, the Health Promotion Agency has launched a new campaign via GSL Promotus that gives a tongue-in-cheek depiction of exactly how ugly a relationship with cancer sticks can be.
Paul Catmur, the managing partner of Barnes, Catmur & Friends, shares his views on life, advertising and the parallels between the FIFA World Cup and Game of Thrones.
Two of New Zealand’s four shortlisted entries picked up gongs in the film category at Cannes, with Clemenger BBDO’s ‘Mistakes’ winning a gold lion and DDB’s ‘Be the Artist’ winning a bronze.
Over the weekend, Clemenger BBDO’s ‘Blazed’ campaign (produced by Curious Film) for the NZTA won a pair of golds and a silver in the Film craft category at Cannes.
With all the inane questions, like farming and ‘brain teasers’ posted on social media, many brands seem to think their customers are absolute morons. But as ASB’s well-awarded Like Loan showed, social media can occasionally serve a useful commercial purpose, with all the likes the app received giving the bank the details of almost 18,000 potential customers and delivering a solid business result. That campaign was a bespoke app, but a similar philosophy applies to Kiwi social auction company BuddyBid, which is currently raising some cash to take the idea overseas.
If Nielsen’s World Cup ratings are anything to go by, then it seems that the Kiwi appetite for football has grown over the last four years. On 13 June, 215,000 Kiwis tuned into TV One to watch the opening match of the tournament, a significant jump up from the 61,000 that tuned in for the 2010 opener in South Africa.
The Outdoor Media Association of NZ (OMANZ) has reported another period of growth for the Out of Home industry, with gross media revenue for Q1 increasing by 2.3 percent over the same period in 2013, reaching $15.8 million for the quarter. Plus: the industry’s steps to solve the measurement problem.
Changes at AUT, Yahoo!, APN, MediaWorks Radio, Food magazine, The Sweet Shop, NBR and Mazda.
A new OK Go music video is generally cause for great celebration, given their consistent record of producing amazing visual treats. Strangely, no-one seems to remember their music, perhaps because their videos overshadow the songs. But the band has embraced that and accepted the challenge to continually raise the bar, and it’s done it again with its latest optical illusion-heavy clip.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
Goodbye Pork Pie is to Mini in New Zealand as The Italian Job is to Mini in Europe. So, to drum up some interest in the new Mini Hatch in this part of the world, Mini, DDB and director Matt Murphy—the son of the original film’s director Geoff Murphy—set out on a mission to remake a classic scene from the movie. And the final clip premiered this week.
Those who enjoy seeing grown men roll on the ground in faux-agony are undoubtedly loving the Football World Cup. And Durex, a big believer in the joys of sexual honesty, has jumped on the football bandwagon and taken aim at those who fake it.
Earlier this week, it was reported that Facebook paid only $23,000 of tax over the course of 2013 in New Zealand. But, rather than further contributing to the media revile already available elsewhere, we decided to look at the positives by giving a rundown of all the awesome things Government could purchase with the funds attained from the organisation.
The traditional PR model may be eroding, but PR agencies and corporate comms teams still serve an important business function, says Kelly Bennett.
The Internet Party, “New Zealand’s newest, most awesome political party”, has landed with a bit of a thud on the political landscape, with a controversial founder/funder, a partnership deal with the Mana party and the announcement of Laila Harré as leader (and the ensuing leadership photo, which, according to Twitter, looks a lot like a cast photo from either The Almighty Johnsons, Star Trek or Outrageous Fortune). So how is it planning to woo the voters? We asked brand manager Andy Pickering a few questions.
Let me start by stating that Scaling Up Excellence by Robert I. Sutton & Huggy Rao and Unfair Fight by Sam Hazledine are both as comprehensive as they are excellent. One is all about taking your business to the next level, while the other is a précis of considerations and actions required for SMEs and startups. As such both books are probably not for you. One of them will be extremely relevant, while the other will be as useful as a Facebook poke. But since both are so damn virtuous and wholesome, I’ve devised a bit of a system based on key criteria to help you discover which book is best suited to you and your business needs.
Rather than sweating it out with barbells, grunting gym buddies, or shouty instructors, what if gyms let you escape? That is, let you go to that place in your head that ‘happens’ when you’re rocking out in a dance tent or speeding up a glacier on a bike. It’s called the zone, and it’s where Les Mills wants to take customers, with its new virtual-reality based venture called The Project: Immersive Fitness.
Four Kiwi entries have been shortlisted for awards in the Cannes Film category, with DDB, Clemenger and Saatchi & Saatchi all in with a chance to pick up some silverware at the ceremony.
