From delivering pizzas, to firing rockets to finding lost souls to letting film-makers capture amazing aerial footage, drones are proving fairly useful. And New Zealand production company Reel Factory is benefitting from providing what it claims is the first drone-based footage for a live, full HD, international broadcast at the Cricket World Cup.
Approximately one million NFC-enabled smartphones are in use in New Zealand and as more and more humans become accustomed to paying via contactless terminals, those two technologies are edging ever closer. Semble, a joint venture between banks and telcos (and supported by Samsung), announced its arrival last year (and is holding a special event on Tuesday), and there are plenty of other ways to pay without using notes or coins. Now the country’s biggest bank is joining the fun with its own solution: an update to its goMoney app that will turn your phone into a mobile wallet.
Danushka Abeysuriya is a geek-turned- adept-businessman, whose smartphone video game development company Rush Digital, founded in 2010, now has 20 staff, turned over more than $1 million in 2013, and has clients across in Europe, the US and Australia. This is the story behind the success.
Messaging apps are coming of age and Colenso BBDO’s Neville Doyle has some suggestions for marketers who want to test the waters.
Despite a rocky start and questions over commercial influence on the government, the $10 million strategic marketing partnership between Warner Bros and Tourism New Zealand (with Air New Zealand also along for the ride) seems to have done the business, with The Hobbit trilogy—and the Lord of the Rings movies before it—getting the country into the minds of numerous foreign moviegoers and helping to increase the number of visitors to our shores. But we could always do with a few more, so it’s released the third and final instalment of its ‘Home of Middle-earth’ series.
Often when we visit or move to a new city and are ready to explore what it has to offer, we can be overwhelmed with choice. Where are the decent cheap eateries? Which art galleries will I like? Which music venues suit my tastes? There are plenty of media outlets devoted to informing us where the best bits are, but one of the more interesting—and increasingly popular—options is Concrete Playground, an online guide to culture in Auckland, Wellington and Australia.
Mobile Embrace’s 4th Screen Advertising has announced a partnership with MetService, giving the mobile advertising sales agency to publish client advertising across all the weather company’s mobile properties, including the mobile site, and the urban, rural, marine and snow weather apps.
For its latest campaign, McDonald’s seems to have taken inspiration from the the nursery rhyme ‘Sing a song of six pence’. But rather than having “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” singing to a king, it has instead added a touch of music to its Big Mac boxes. Yesterday, as selected McDonald’s customers in Auckland opened their Big Mac boxes, they were blasted by song straight from the burger’s container. The singing boxes were part of McDonald’s global ‘imlovinit24’ initiative, which sought to share 24 moments of joy to millions in 24 hours.
As the .GIFYs, Buzzfeed and Reddit show, looping images are extremely appealing to modern day humans. And, in celebration of International Happiness Day last Friday, Google, Pharrell Williams and the UN foundation invited folks from all over the globe to create their own dancing GIF and spread a bit of happiness for climate action.
American bank BancFirst embraced Steven Adams’ colloquialisms in an ad called ‘Speaking Kiwi with Steven Adams’. And here’s part two.
After the Blackcaps play in the Cricket World Cup final on Sunday, you can be sure there will be a host of print ads congratulating or commiserating the team the following day, as there was when the All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup in 2011. But Ford has got in early with a full-page ad featuring in today’s Herald celebrating the glorious victory over the South Africans and warning Melburnian Mrs Mavis Madrigal to cover her gnomes and azaleas to protect them from flying round objects.
For the third year running, Tourism New Zealand has reworked its ‘more magic every day’ campaign in a bid to attract Aussie skiers across the ditch for a winter holiday. The latest iteration of the ongoing campaign by Whybin\TBWA Sydney sees the Kiwi tourism body partner with Air New Zealand, Flight Centre, Instagram and the ski industry in New Zealand to drive holiday visitor numbers. And while Tourism New Zealand has previously collaborated with the other parties, this marks the first time that the organisation has partnered with Instagram to promote New Zealand through paid imagery and video content. PLUS: StopPress chats to Tourism New Zealand director of marketing Andrew Fraser about the organisation’s digital strategy.
Despite the rapid progression and expansion of all that is digital, with even five-year-olds owning iPads these days, television still remains the most dominant form of video consumption in New Zealand, according to a New Zealand multi-screen report issued by Nielsen. And, even more surprising, is that report shows television isn’t only the most popular video-viewing platform, but that its use is also increasing.
It’s been just a few days since Air New Zealand announced its departure from Airpoints partner BNZ to team up with Westpac, but banking brands have fast taken action pushing themselves out through social media via sponsored posts (featuring an array of creative airline puns) to make sure they’re not overshadowed by the new partnership deal. Here’s what BNZ, Westpac, Kiwibank and ANZ have been up to.
Yesterday, it was widely reported that 2degrees had acquired internet service provider Snap for an amount speculated to be between $26 million and $30 million, making it possible for the telco to offer a service that had long been absent from its offering. StopPress chatted to chief marketing officer Malcolm Phillipps about what this means for the company.
Nivea Sun has won the January 2015 Colmar Brunton Ad Impact award for ‘Take Care Out There’ for an ad created alongside American artist Thomas Leveritt that gives a very literal view of how sunblock can protect your skin.
As Colin Peacock noted in MediaWatch this week, as two X Factor judges were sent packing for bullying and lambasted for having an over-inflated opinion of themselves, a man who has “built his reputation on his ego and on picking on people poorly equipped to defend themselves on air” is getting set to kick off his experimental, multi-media breakfast news show on April 7. And MediaWorks has launched the last phase of its marketing push to get New Zealanders to tune in.
Netflix, which launched in the Kiwi market today, yesterday announced that its pricing structure will include three different subscription options: $9.99 for single-stream standard definition plan; $12.99 for a two-stream high-definition plan; or $15.99 for a four-stream ultra-high definition plan. And this announcement has been met with swift responses by the players currently in the market. PLUS: traditional broadcasters also announce some changes.
Air New Zealand (x2), Westpac, Toyota and William Hill all get giant cheques this week.
The One Percent Collective, which aims to create “a seismic shift in charitable giving in Aotearoa”, has already chalked up a few celebrity endorsements, with Dai Henwood, Conrad Smith, Kimbra and many others contributing to its first magazine, The Generosity Journal. And now ‘local craplebrity’ Guy Williams is helping out by imploring punters to do something good for a change and apply for the newly created chief digital storyteller role. PLUS: six more charities set to be added to the flock.
The joy of prediction is that no-one tends to remember the incorrect guesses. But whether it’s Arthur C Clarke, Nostradamus or Minority Report, they’ll often cling to the correct guesses as proof of some remarkable soothsaying ability. And, with the help of Weta Workshop, Magic Leap, a fairly mysterious “cinematic reality” startup that received US$542 million of funding last year, posted a video of what it sees as the future of gaming a few days ago.
Following last week’s announcement that Kiwi FM would be switching off, MediaWorks has now released a statement saying that new nationwide radio brand called Magic will launch on April 20. Targeted at 50- to 69-year-olds, the new station will be programmed by The Breeze content director Ian Avery and feature classic tracks from the likes of Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, Roy Orbison, Dusty Springfield and Rod Stewart, among others. And this move could make commercial sense, given the high level of disposable income this group has in its pocket.
The rise of social media has given humans an opportunity to communicate directly with brands. That seems to have led to more gimme gimme gimme than positive endorsement, but Toyota has decided the risk is worth it and is soliciting questions from New Zealanders and attempting to answer them in an entertaining fashion as part of its Armchair Test Drive campaign.
What is looking at our inbox and phone hundreds of times a day doing to our heads and, importantly, what does this ‘hyperstimulation’ mean for attention spans, cognition and brand recall? Saatchi & Saatchi senior digital strategist Ian Hulme found out at a SXSW session run by Hey Human called ‘Neuroplasticity and Tech – Why brands have to change’.
It’s been exciting times at MediaWorks in recent months, with big restructures in the business and man-slaughterers, fraudsters, bullies and drink drivers featuring on TV. Across at TVNZ, there hasn’t been quite as much drama and its new reality format Our First Home has been plodding along rather than taking the nation by storm, but one moment has made it to US clip show The Soup. Plus: searches for the word ‘fart’ spike after a case of flatulence on The Bachelor NZ.
Air New Zealand has announced it has dropped its long-time Airpoints partner BNZ to team up with Westpac, saying the partnership would result in better earn rates for customers and BNZ saying the relationship was no longer a good fit for the bank. So is the lure of ‘free’ travel enough to make customers switch?
After around ten years of broadcasting, originally as a Kiwi-only music station and more recently with some international artists thrown in the mix, MediaWorks has announced that Kiwi FM will close on March 31.
Y&R has claimed the Motor Trade Association (MTA) account after a three-way pitch also involving Clemenger BBDO and Wellington-based creative agency Scenario.
Toyota is one of the country’s most trusted brands and has been a regular on the Reader’s Digest list (despite a couple of high-profile international recalls in recent years). This is a big part of the reason it’s still top of the pops when it comes to overall sales. And it’s playing on that trust—and on the fear people have of being ripped off by automotive cowboys—in a new campaign via Saatchi & Saatchi for its Genuine Parts business that sees Dai Henwood taking a leaf out of the Eddie Murphy/Martin Lawrence acting book and playing three different characters.
A record 32 golds were handed out at the AWARD Awards last night. And of the Kiwi agencies, DDB, Clemenger BBDO and Colenso BBDO had most cause to celebrate. PLUS: local talent acknowledged at the Young Guns.