Monthly Archives: July, 2015

News
Twitter reaches out to Kiwi ad agencies, looks to increase local presence
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Two Twitter evangelists, head of communications Nathan Burman and international revenue manager Olly Wilton, are currently making the agency rounds in New Zealand as part of a push to increase the scale of the social media company’s business in the local market. Over the course of the last week, the pair have met with various agencies and media outlets to discuss why it’s worthwhile to shift ad spend to the network.

News
Bieber booty
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Justin Bieber has made headlines again. And no, not for peeing in mop buckets or destroying hotel rooms or dangerous driving, this time it’s for… his butt.

News
NZ’s top ten followed Instagram accounts and the marketability of ‘social influencers’
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Lorde once said that all the internet is “ … is doing your own PR”. And in modern times this rings truer than ever. We curate the material we put on our social media accounts, crafting the image of ourselves that we want to present to others. You could say we are our own brand and social media is how we market ourselves, and while most of us get paid in ‘likes’ or ‘followers’, some social “influencers” are teaming up with brands and getting paid in cold hard cash. And on that note, here are the top ten followed Instagram accounts in the country and how a few of these media personalities are racking up the dollars from doing what they do best.

News
Audience targeting, measurement and other digital clichés: 4th Screen Advertising’s Sarah Kavanagh on why advertisers demand more on mobile
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“Everyone is selling audience,” says Mobile Embrace’s Sarah Kavanagh. And this means that ad tech providers constantly have to tweak what they’re offering in order to make it attractive to advertisers. She recently chatted to StopPress about how the mobile industry is evolving and how ad tech players are responding to that change.

News
Kiwis hooked on shopping in cyberspace
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New Zealand’s ecommerce sector has shot through the roof as punters increasingly open their laptop lids instead of their wallets to purchase new items. Data from Nielsen shows New Zealanders now buy 18.2 million items each year, to the value of $4.6 billion, and this figure is expected to rise to $4.8 billion by the end of this year.

News
All opinions welcome: TVNZ calls on viewers to share their likes and peeves via the Greenroom
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You don’t have to look far to find someone willing to express an opinion on the state of Kiwi television. Whether it’s something as simple as volume of television ads or something a bit gruntier like the legality of Global Mode, Kiwis have over the last few months shown themselves to be very interested in expressing their views on the evolution of the medium in the local context. And now, in a bid to collate all these opinions in a single place, TVNZ has launched the TVNZ Greenroom, an online initiative that allows Kiwis to share their thoughts on how the broadcaster is doing.

News
Times they are a changin’: LGBT-inclusive advertising and its value for marketers
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Advertising can be a bit like a mirror, or perhaps more like the Mirror of Erised (cue cheesy reference) from Harry Potter where an idealised version of ourselves is reflected back at us. When targeted well it can be so pervasive that we come to think of advertising scenarios as being normal “Of course I should be wearing those shoes”, “Clearly I need that marble bench top in my kitchen”. Advertisers try to reflect our relationships too, marketing to couples and families. But wouldn’t it be strange to see advertising bypass us, for us to see ads embodying relationships or representations of people that don’t reflect our reality. For the reported 10 to 15 percent of New Zealanders that make up our LGBT community, it has been like this for a long time. But things are changing, the world is slowly but surely progressing, and so is the advertising world along with it. Here are a few examples of advertising that includes this community, and why it would be of interest for advertisers to continue doing so, particularly in light of gay marriage increasingly becoming legalised in more countries.

News
Get with the program(matic): the social media lift
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With over two million Kiwis on Facebook and 100s of thousands on Twitter, social media offers a means by which to increase the reach of a campaign. This week, AdRoll’s Ben Sharp looks at why social should be key to your programmatic marketing strategy.

News
Mindfood heads for home with latest brand extension
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Magazine brands have long embraced the wagon wheel approach and interact with their audiences through a range of different mediums, whether it’s print, online or events. And while there’s no doubt print is declining in popularity in some segments, it is still working well in others and Mindfood has followed up its launch of its Style brand extension last year with a new one called Decor that’s aimed at the big, growing but quite cluttered home and living market.

News
Hold, beep, ride: Semble adds public transport to its contactless payment portfolio
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The days of wallets being crammed with loyalty, bank and business card might soon be coming to an end. In fact, wallets themselves could well be headed for obsolecence if Semble has anything to do with it. The company has already been facilitating contactless mobile phone payments across the country, and it has now announced that it’s expanding into public transport. The expansion is part of Semble’s plan to become a one-stop mobile shop for every card in a person’s physical wallet, chief executive Rob Ellis says.

Opinion
Lance Walker on the weight of measurement, the importance of exploration and why marketers need to assert their place at the executive table
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Newly appointed chair of the Marketing Association Lance Walker recently spoke at the Marketing Association Network of Executive Marketers events in both Auckland and Wellington, and shared his views on the evolving role of marketers in the modern industry. In a thought piece shared with StopPress he talks about why the current trend of marketers placing emphasis on numbers isn’t necessarily conducive to creative and effective marketing.

News
Tales from the big smoke: ATEED calls on Aucklanders to share their stories
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Earlier this year, upon taking on the position as the general manager of global destination and marketing at ATEED, Vivien Bridgwater said that she wanted to tell the Auckland story. “We’re embarking on a research phase to find that authentic and distinctive Auckland story,” she previously told StopPress. And to achieve this, the organisation has over the last few weeks handed the reins to the 1.5 million residing in the city to tell their stories via the #loveakl campaign.

News
From killers to trainers
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In response to growing concern about this issue, Adidas has partnered with not-for-profit organisation Parley for the Oceans to develop a pair of sneakers made entirely out of waste collected from the ocean. And the prototype for these shoes was recently unveiled at a speaking event.

News
Toyota claims most reputable company as Vodafone’s rank slides
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Toyota has been crowned the title of New Zealand’s most reputable company, rising after nabbing second place last year to take line honours in this year’s New Zealand Corporate Reputation Index through AMR and the Reputation Institute. Air New Zealand also rated highly coming in as runner up while Vodafone lost esteem in the eyes of the public, dropping eight places in the index this year.

News
A perfectly good reason to visit New Zealand
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Whittaker’s will no doubt be pleased with Kiwi blogger Rebecca Blanford’s reasons for visiting New Zealand. Rather than choosing one of the more generic reasons for returning to her country of birth, Blanford, who blogs under the nom de plume RunawayKiwi, wrote that she was visiting to get a taste of Whittaker’s Jelly Tip Block chocolate that recently hit the supermarket shelves.

News
Beast wars: BP’s lost rabbit beats Vodafone’s lost pig in Colmar Brunton Ad Impact award
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The idea of multiple discovery is that “scientific discoveries and inventions are made independently and more or less simultaneously by multiple scientists and inventors.” It happened with the theory of evolution, it happened with the discovery of oxygen and it’s happened a lot in advertising, something James Hurman discussed in a story in Idealog a few years back. And, following on from the Vodafone spot that chronicled the struggles of a courier driver trying to locate the owner of a piglet named Piggy-Sue, BP and Ogilvy & Mather also pulled at the heartstrings with a 90-second spot that showed a motorcyclist going to extreme measures to reunite a bunny with its young owner. So won the battle of the lost creatures? According to Colmar Brunton’s Ad Impact research for May, it was BP that won out over Vodafone, despite being beaten to the punch by the telco.

News
Steinlager set to bring back the white can
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At the last Rugby World Cup, Steinlager ran its white can campaign in recognition of an All Blacks fan that had held on to an unopened can of beer since the 1987 World Cup. The wait for glory finally ended in 2011 when the All Blacks finally lifted the trophy again, the can was finally cracked open and the Steinlager beer (well past its best before date) was consumed by one very patient fan.

News
Music-infused gin, or music-infused joke? Rogue Society Gin’s unique distilling method
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When most people think of the coupling of gin and music, more readily to their minds probably comes an image of drinking gin while listening to it. But Rogue Society Gin has come up with another idea, partnering up with Loop Recordings Aot(ear)oa, distilling gin while music is playing to create the “world’s first music-infused gin”. Part-PR stunt and part-absolute madness, even the makers themselves can’t tell us whether the gin actually tastes any different.

News
Magic cups for Magic Mike
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To get Channing Tatum adorers ready for the upcoming launch of Magic Mike XXL, Fuse and OMD ran an activation to help support its other media by mass-producing some takeaway coffee cups with thermochromatic artwork with the Magic Mike cast on the front. And guess what happens when the cups get hot?

News
Kiwibank aims for the young’uns, harnesses the social power of Jamie Curry
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Mass media used to have all the power. But the rise of social media has meant that many individuals are now gaining huge audiences for themselves and stealing some of that power away. And brands around the world are increasingly leaning on them to help spread their messages. In this part of the world, they don’t get much more popular than Jamie Curry, who hit ten million Facebook fans last year and has 1.5 million followers on YouTube. So, after working with Coca-Cola and Netflix, she’s now signed up with Kiwibank to create The KB Series, a six-part series that will follow Curry on her journey from Napier to Auckland as she moves out of home and pursues her career in acting and producing entertaining content for her legion of fans.

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