Monthly Archives: October, 2014

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Hammers vs ladles: who won the battle of the formats?
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On Wednesday night, Belinda MacDonald and Neena Truscott, dubbed the Modern Day Hippies, were crowned the first winners of My Kitchen Rules New Zealand. This moment concluded the battle for New Zealand’s latest food porn crown, while simultaneously bringing an end to a ratings battle that has waged since TVNZ first decided to schedule its programme against MediaWorks’ The Block NZ. StopPress takes a look at how the two formats fared against each other.

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Wow no cow
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Given they create butter, ice cream and steak, cows are quite possibly the most delicious of all the beasts. But they’re bad for the environment, and some believe they’re bad for our bodies. So Oatly’s chief executive Toni Petersson decided to embrace the power of music in advertising with a unique performance about oat milk.

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Virtually assured
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Facebook has said it needs to sell 50-100 million Oculus Rift headsets to make it meaningful. But Dos Equis is getting in early and offering fans a dose of virtual reality.

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By the numbers: how the lives of advertising executives stack up next to regular Kiwis
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The advertising executive is a strange but predictable beast. It shares similarities with the average New Zealander, but is different in pertinent ways. While the advertising executive’s raison d’être is to know and understand the shopping, watching, working and lifestyle habits of the average New Zealander, it does not practise these habits itself. Latest statistics from Nielsen compare the lives of ad executives, or ‘adlanders’ to the lives of average New Zealanders, and unsurprisingly there is quite a divide.

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Data dump: who’s got New Zealand’s ears?
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We live in increasingly visual times. And no-one’s got time to read those pesky words anymore. So every week we’ll publish some of our favourite graphs. In honour of MediaWorks’ new season launch last night, here’s one that shows what’s been happening to overall share of audience in commercial radio since 2005.

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Horse’s Mouth: Paul Maher and Liz Fraser
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MediaWorks has had a fairly rough ride over the past few years. But the big guns were all smiles last night at the new season launch. We sat down with two of them—chief executive of MediaWorks TV Paul Maher and group head of revenue Liz Fraser—for a chat about the company’s content strategy, results and evolution.

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Every brand needs a rugby player*
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This Sunday the All Blacks will take on the United States in a widely hyped exhibition match in Chicago. While the United States certainly can’t be described as a rugby playing nation, all 61,500 seats at the Soldier Field have been sold out. Such is the star power of the All Blacks that they are capable of filling a stadium in a country where rugby ranks below badminton, ten-pin bowling and pro wrestling in terms of popularity. And given the seeming supernatural ability of those who don the increasingly tight black shirts to make people interested in things that they don’t necessarily care about, it comes as little surprise that Kiwi brands have shown such a willingness to attach their labels to rugby players. StopPress looks at how rugby players are helping brands get noticed.

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Kiwi dominance continues at Echo Awards as Republik and Colenso win big
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For the third year in a row the Diamond gong given to the best piece of work entered in the international Echo Awards will be returning from San Diego to Auckland. On 30 October, this prestigious direct marketing award was awarded to Republik New Zealand for Fuji Xerox’s ‘Wide War One’ campaign, which also picked up a gold in the ‘information technologies’ category. This Diamond win follows on from Colenso’s 2012 and 2013 wins. And while the College Hill agency didn’t make three in a row, it didn’t leave the awards show empty handed either.

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The Generosity Journal: Ant Salmon
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As part of our series with the One Percent Collective that’s dedicated to celebrating good work and inspiring a bit more generosity, Ant Salmon, managing director of Big Communications, doffs his cap to Andy McDowell and all the others who have done their own thing.

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Online trackers: are our local news providers following us?
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A battle is raging between online advertisers and those who don’t want to be followed on the Web, and New Zealand news websites are harbouring a surprising amount of trackers. Journalists and privacy experts have recently been pointing the finger at news websites as some of the worst offenders when it comes to collecting people’s data without any formal disclosure. Much of this is happening through online ‘trackers’, hidden pieces of code in websites that track how a user clicks, or even hovers, on a site.

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Spark partners with NBA, offers discount on basketball streaming
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Following the recent unveiling of its ambitious ‘Boroughs’ project, which will see five high-tech basketball courts introduced in Auckland, Spark has now announced a marketing partnership with the National Basketball Association. As part of this deal, Spark will offer its home broadband customers NBA League Pass and League Pass Premium annual subscriptions beginning next month, giving customers 15 percent off the full price of either a full season or a one-month subscription.

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Kiwi brands experiment in six seconds of fun on Vine
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Since Vine launched in January 2013 it’s fair to say the six-second video app has taken off. According to Vine, every month now more than 100 million people watch Vines across the web. Owned by Twitter, the social media platform boasts 1 billion views or ‘loops’ of videos every day, with the majority of users being teens. The largest age group on Vine is 18 – 20 year olds. But are Kiwi brands slower on the uptake than our global counterparts?

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Following the audience: big brands collaborating with Facebook
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Every day, around two million Kiwis log onto Facebook to scroll down their newsfeeds to see what is happening in their lives. And according to Stephen Scheeler, the company’s head of New Zealand, these aren’t sporadic single visits because the average user peruses the site around 15 times in a single day. “For those two million Kiwis on Facebook, about 12 percent of their media consumption is Facebook,” says Scheeler. “Remember, eight years ago it was zero. So this has been a massive shift.” The rapid migration of audiences into the digital realm is by no means surprising, but such statistics are increasingly serving as strong impetus for brands to shift their commercial messaging to where the eyes are. So we take a look at how brands are collaborating with the social media juggernaut to spread their commercial messages.

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The Warehouse goes long, launches Christmas campaign with kid-filled online video
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The Warehouse Group has been bringing the real world and the online world closer together recently, with its recent rebrand of R&R Sport to the ‘omni-channel’ Torpedo 7, its Click Madness promotion, free wifi in the newly refurbished stores and an app that lets shoppers compare prices. Now it’s launching its Christmas campaign with a five minute online video that puts the decision-making in the hands of the experts: kids.

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Cutting the cord
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Wires are so noughties. And, as speaker and headphone company JBL shows, they’re bloody annoying too. PLUS: eggs, popcorn, radiation and people struggling with everyday tasks.

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Top 20 Getty images chosen by Kiwis over the last year
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As noted in a series of articles published on the Getty Images website last year, publishers and brands are starting to shift away from the stereotypical images that have until now typified what advertisers had constructed as perfection. The investigation into visual trends found that women were increasingly represented in positions of power, same-sex relationships were sometimes used in lieu of straight imagery, older people were appearing with greater regularity and beauty was being given a more flexible definition. Interestingly, the top 20 Getty images that have been downloaded by Kiwis since the beginning of the year also indicate that these international trends are starting to take shape in New Zealand. However, trends don’t emerge instantaneously, and this means there were still some more conventional images included on the final list.

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Glossing up the insert: Fairfax unveils new-look Sunday magazine
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Over the weekend, Fairfax distributed a revamp of Sunday, the magazine insert included on a weekly basis with the Sunday Star-Times. The new version features an updated portrait layout, more pages and a combination of new content and the return of various favourites that have thus far appeared in the pages of the magazine over the last ten years. To incorporate the new design elements, Fairfax brought in art director Delaney Tabron to work closely with Sunday editor Rebecca Kamm, who joined the publication in January.

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