Monthly Archives: July, 2015

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Blood, sweat, tears, bees and French philosophers
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You may have noticed there’s a rugby game on this weekend. And you may have noticed that there is usually a whole heap of inane chat before, during and after each match. But Guy Montgomery and Fasitua Amosa have shown us what a post-match should be like with a clip on Squiz, a site that calls itself “New Zealand’s home of short-form video content”.

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The brand and the fury: how Kiwi companies deal with the angry social media mob
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Brands are normally seen as the bullies; corporate monsters taking advantage of the little guy. But they aren’t just a logo, a uniform or an ad. They are made up of multiple individuals working in different branches on different levels. And often it’s the people lower down the chain who bear the brunt of angry customers, as any front of house hospo worker or call centre operator or social media manager will know. So in light of the Harmful Digital Communications Bill passing its third reading, and following some recent anger directed at the likes of Nestle, Cadbury, Ticketek and many others, we decided to ask a few New Zealand companies with ‘passionate’ followers a potentially stupid question: have they ever felt like they’ve been bullied online?

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Mapping the good: new tech tracks where socially responsible consumers spend their dollars
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Many studies have proven that consumers care more than ever about a brand’s social responsibility when shopping, but businesses are still tentative over whether being sustainable has monetary gain. Conscious Consumers wants to show businesses how highly shoppers value ethical companies with the Good Spend Counter.

The Good Spend Counter is a way for consumers to show the causes they support through both an app and a website.

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Vodafone launches online safety guide, tugs at parents’ heartstrings in campaign video
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Modern parents are at times ill-equipped to face these challenges—such as cyber bullying, screen addiction, inappropriate selfies and unsavoury browsing—in that they have no prior experience in dealing with issues like these. They are essentially new challenges for a new generation of parents. So, given the treacherousness of the online landscape, Vodafone has in conjunction with NetSafe and The Parenting Place launched a new suite of services that help parents navigate their way through some of these challenges. At a press even hosted at the Vodafone headquarters in Auckland today, Vodafone consumer director Matt Williams unveiled Digi-Parenting.co.nz, an online hub of articles, videos and printable guides offering practical advice for parents in the digital age. PLUS: the new campaign video hits viewers in the feels.

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Volvo’s features creep into YouTube
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Unskippable pre-roll video ads, according to a recent study by Ad Block Plus and Page Fair, are among the most annoying of all ads. But marketers and agencies are trying their hardest to make them slightly more bearable, with efforts by Colenso and BK’s anti-preroll and Geico’s unskippable pre-roll campaigns standing out recently. Volvo and Grey Canada have also joined in the fun, and, rather than making one pre-roll ad, they linked 60 of the XC60’s new features to the six billion hours of YouTube content that is typically viewed in a month in an effort to tailor them to the videos people were watching.

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I buy with my little eye
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Soon, your face will be useful for more than just looking pretty. MasterCard is developing a new programme that lets you approve online purchases with a simple blink of the eye. And it believes this will cut down on fraud.

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Land Rover’s moving pictures
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As mobile phone technology has improved, there have been quite a few films and ads (like Bentley and Apple) made on them. But Land Rover and Y&R New York have taken it a step further recently with its 5 x 5 film project.

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Yahoo launches in-stream native ad offering, gives selected brands the keys to its homepage
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Self-service is common in supermarkets, petrol stations and at buffet restaurants, but not so much when it comes to producing content marketing pieces for publishing on a major website. And yet, this is exactly what Yahoo has been facilitating to certain selected clients over the last few months through the beta version of new native ad in-feed platform that it has recently made available to the wider market.

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Freeview broadens its service, offers access to on-demand
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Far gone are the days where we got to the best point in our television show only to hear “cccsssshhhh” and see our screens produce an unnerving display of black and white fuzz as we frantically wrestled our bunny ear aerials into the most awkward and weird positions to get the picture back (only to have missed the best part). Luckily this hasn’t been a problem for a while, and our options for viewing television are always getting better, and today Freeview announced the launch of its new digital TV platform, FreeviewPlus, which allows Kiwis with the right technology to access on-demand video on new smart televisions.

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Young & Shand focuses on the suffering of ad folk for Semi-Permanent promo
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For this year’s edition of the Semi-Permanent speakers’ event, Young & Shand has developed a slightly depressing campaign that looks at how over-worked creatives in the ad industry are. Showing scenes of the late-night activity going on in the offices of Saatchi & Saatchi, DDB, FCB and Colenso BBDO, the promotional video encourages creatives to remember to nurture their tired brains.

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Beautiful beer: Garage Project’s alcoholic art–UPDATED
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Wellington-based craft beer brewery Garage Project has grown from humble beginnings since Pete Gillespie, brother Ian Gillespie and Jos Ruffel started out in 2011 using a 500 litre “glorified home brew kit” to moving to a 2000 litre tank and say a large part of their success is not just the quality of the beer, but also its unique branding approach, hiring different artists to design the labels for individual beers. The brewery has also been a frontrunner in the canning of its craft beer, much to the scepticism of some. But it has worked. Demand is strong, and over 140 beers later, a slew of awards and a team that’s grown from three to about twenty, it’s showing no signs of slowing down yet.

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