For this year’s edition of National Rail Safety Week, KiwiRail and TrackSafe NZ have followed in the New Zealand Transport Association’s footsteps by launching a game to get their message across to the masses.
Mensa-wannabes rejoice – you can massage your neuroplasticity with a Mensa-supported Brain Training Zone by Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky Labs. It’s a site with hundreds of brain training games, puzzles and IQ tests “to get your cognitive thinking up to scratch”.
Colenso BBDO has partnered with Mountain Dew to develop a novel range of skateboard decks that reveal a hidden message as the skater grinds away the bottom. And what makes this project even more interesting is that Colenso owns a share of the IP that comes with the innovation, meaning that the agency could stand to profit if the concept attracts interest from players in the skating industry (production company Finch officially owns the IP and Colenso shares in it).
Over the last few weeks the nation’s political parties have been furiously hammering stakes into the ground in an effort to erect their campaign posters. And while most political ads feature smiling politicians with perfectly combed hair, the Conservative Party’s Colin Craig has instead opted for a monochrome death stare for his campaign.
The Best Awards finalists have been announced, with a bevy of great design from New Zealand and Australasia. The annual awards are organised by Designers Institute of New Zealand and names the very best in graphic, spatial, product and interactive design, awarding a coveted purple pin to the winner of each category. This year there was a strong involvement in getting Australian designers to enter, wanting to put a spotlight on Australasian design, and CEO of Designers Insitute of New Zealand Cathy Veninga says standards have remained high.
Vine is still fairly nascent platform and, aside from V Energy, we haven’t noticed a huge number of Kiwi brands using it too creatively. But, just a few spots further down the alphabet, Z Energy is giving it a crack and we enjoyed its attempt to draw attention to its super long hoses as part of its ZipThru campaign.
Foodstuffs has collaborated with one-to-one agency JustOne to launch a new loyalty programme exclusive to New World. In the past, the company has relied on the Fly Buys reward scheme to give its customers added incentive to shop at the store, but Foodstuffs group general marketing manager Steve Bayliss says that it was time to develop something discrete. And while this is a novel move for New World, it comes well after Countdown first launched its loyalty programme in 1994.
AJ Park patent specialists Anton Blijlevens and Jillian Lim touch on some interesting patents to look out for in the future.
Industry happenings at TRN, MPA, Adshel, Hunch, BelowTheLine, Apollonation and the Pond.
In an age where click-hungry online publishers are looking for their next hit, a celebrity death is basically manna from heaven. Philip Seymour Hoffman was the last major case (The Sydney Daily Telegraph got a telling off for this headline). And Robin Williams was found dead in his house this morning, so, unsurprisingly, the story has been dominating many of the world’s major news websites. So is it a case of a bottom-feeding media doing everything it can to increase its audience, or a concerned media attempting to offer a fitting tribute? Or both?
Digital screens are coming to a space near you, and the operators are pretty excited about it. But Robett Hollis is sounding the alarm bell and says the industry needs to think hard about what to put on them.
Not knowing about sports and then commenting on them is a surefire way to get some laughs, as Bad British Sports Commentary shows. That relationship was flipped around by NBC Sports last year to promote its coverage of the English Premier League when it got some laffs by creating an ad featuring a US football coach (played by Jason Sudeikis) who became a UK football coach. That didn’t go so well, and now Coach Lasso is back in a new role, with star US goalkeeper Tim Howard in support.
Jockey announced its sponsorship of the All Blacks and All Blacks Sevens teams early this year and gathered together a host of buff professional rugby players to parade about in their gruts for the black and white launch campaign. Now it’s added some colour—and given a cheeky nod to its support of the ‘boys’—for a campaign leading into the Bledisloe Cup and Rugby Championship.
Back in the day, the Yellow Pages ruled. Business names were sometimes based on where they would end up in the book (that’s why there are so many accommodation options starting with A and the Krasilovky Brothers of New York took that to extremes with their long-running listing battle). But for many consumers the online realm is a much more efficient way of finding businesses and Google has taken its toll on the print-based directories and forced them to find new revenue streams. So why are there still so many online business directories in operation?
Only a few weeks after VW celebrated its 60th anniversary in New Zealand via a Colenso-created campaign, Holden has now also started the party for its diamond jubilee with an Ogilvy spot that has a strong Kiwi flavour. And while VW gave the power to the people by piecing together a crowd-sourced spot, the team behind the Holden campaign have taken a more traditional route by assembling a narrative that showcases the car brand through the ages.
David Seymour, the Act Party’s Epsom candidate, released a campaign video in May that has been bouncing around YouTube for the last few months. And from the evidence on show in the nearly three-minute clip, it appears that Seymour might be a little new to the on-screen political game.
Colenso BBDO has won the June/July Orca award from the Radio Bureau with its doggie radio station K9FM, which already picked up a silver at the recent Cannes Lions. K9FM is a campaign for Colenso’s client Pedigree that dogs can listen to at home while their owners are out working. It stems from research that found that classical music calms dogs down, ambient sounds keep them stimulated and a relaxed voice eases their separation anxiety.
In an effort to subvert the preconceptions attached to working at the company, McDonald’s has a launched a new campaign via DDB that gives viewers a look at some of the success stories that have emerged from starting a career at one of the stores.
We live in a world where targeting individuals is becoming increasingly attainable, where streaming and ondemand services (and, in many cases, illegal downloads) give viewers much more control over what they watch, and where online video has become a major sucker of people’s time. As such, the sceptics tend to believe traditional, primarily ad-funded TV is an anachronism. But, according to NZ on Air and Colmar Brunton’s recent media consumption study, Kiwis are still watching plenty of linear TV; according to ASA ad spend figures, brands are still spending up large on TV advertising; and according to pretty much everyone, good video content still has the biggest emotional impact when it comes to branding. So, once again, we’re aiming to celebrate the efforts brands, agencies and production companies put into changing perceptions and/or selling more stuff over the past year and a bit with our annual StopPress/MediaWorks TVC of the Year.
Following its identity change on Friday, Spark released its first ad campaign over the weekend. Dubbed ‘never stop starting’ and created by Saatchi & Saatchi NZ, the campaign’s first 60-second TVC brings the imagery used in the teaser posters to life by featuring a protagonist walking toward and talking to the camera. As the ad progresses, the actor takes on a variety of different characters and speaks about the importance of starting anew.
With Spark livery freshly stamped over those of the corporate we used to know as Telecom, the organisation is expanding its Givealittle fundraising platform from charity to individual projects. Spark My Potential will pick out some of the projects listed on Givealittle and give them crowdfunding coaching and in some cases match pledges dollar for dollar.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
Technology allows us to do many things, such as detect monsters, take a horse’s heartbeat or stop drunk dialling. And a creative athlete from San Fran has found another use: puerile but entertaining GPS art.
With Telecom spreading its wings as Spark today, we decided to look at a few other rebrands of varying quality from here and around the world.
Industry happenings at Springload, DesignWorks, NBR, MediaWorks, The Muesli Hub, GrabOne and Spikes Asia.
As Spark’s Jason Paris said in this story, the biggest part the rebrand “is valuing our existing customer base and turning them in to advocates so they become an acquisition channel in their own right”. So before the launch of the new brand, Spark set a series of Automatic Thanking Machines loose on the nation to do just that. And while it calls it a world first, perhaps there’s some morphic resonance/independent multiple discovery at play, because just this week TD Canada Trust had a hit on its hands with its own benevolent machine.
27 years ago, Telecom was given its name. Today it’s officially giving itself a new one. As one of the country’s biggest ever rebrands rolls off the production line, we talk internal enthusiasm, teaser campaigns, customer sentiment, competitive responses and man-hole covers with Spark’s general manager of home, mobile and business Jason Paris and Spark Digital’s general manager services and solutions Jo Allison.
Big Pipe, Telecom Digital Ventures’ naked broadband offering, officially launched a few months back and, to draw attention to its offer, it recently asked its followers to have a bit of fun with its logo for the chance to win some loot. Here are some of the results.