Monthly Archives: October, 2015

News
Contact Energy and JWT give trick or treating an interactive twist
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It’s Halloween tomorrow, and plenty of Kiwi brands are jumping on board the ghost train. Some campaigns are spookier than others, but Contact Energy’s ‘Trick or Treat’ pre-roll ad on YouTube takes the opportunity to let viewers choose their own adventure. PLUS: the rise of Halloween as a retail event in New Zealand.

News
The Big Game: Hallertau’s special wake-up call
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Mr Whippy is often licked, he can never be beaten (at least when it comes to puns). But we have a late contender for the final instalment of The Big Game, a prestigious award dished out by StopPress to the best example of desperate euphemism usage from non-sponsors hoping to ride the rugby attention train. We’ve already seen Moa sneak into the stands of the Rugby World Cup with its fairly blatant ‘Four More Years’ brew. And while actual sponsors ASB and even Steinlager are promoting the consumption of hot beverages while watching the game, Hallertau Brewery has crafted a specially made breakfast beer ahead of Sunday’s final. Let’s hope David Seymour gets his hands on one.

News
New Zealand Geographic Photographer of the Year winners announced
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Last night, the rain didn’t stop the New Zealand Geographic team from distributing the awards for the Photographer of the Year competition. This is, after all, an annual event celebrating a group of people who during their careers have grown accustomed to weathering the elements—and a bit of water falling from the heavens didn’t seem to bug anyone in attendance. This year there were more than 5,800 entries, which the New Zealand Geographic team eventually whittled down to 28 finalists, from which nine winners were chosen.

News
Gif and bake
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Everyone loves a good .gif. There are even awards to celebrate the art form. And now gif hunting site Giphy has created a fairly mad ad that riffs on classic cooking programmes to show people how to make one.

News
Don’t skip just yet
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While the knee-jerk reaction to a pre-roll is generally an attempt to hit the skip button as quickly as possible, this isn’t always the case. Not all pre-rolls are created equal—and Mountain Dew and the Wall Street Journal are showing why a bit of creativity pays when it comes to producing these ads.

News
I can feel it coming out of the air tonight
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While there are many exciting uses for drones, the most consumer-friendly use of the technology is film. Many birds don’t take too kindly to the space invaders. Privacy advocates don’t like them much either. And, as a clip that got picked up yesterday from Kor Creative showed, neither do schoolkids from Rosmini College. So in honour of the destructive kick, here are few other drone-based clips.

News
Let the panting begin: ten Kiwis get ready to ‘run down’ their home loan rates at the ASB Auckland Marathon
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ASB previously put its clients to work by getting them to accumulate as many likes as possible in return for lower mortgage rates. And for its latest campaign, the bank is again giving some of its customers control of how low their interest rates might go—but this time they have to sweat for it. As part of its ‘Run Down Your Rate’ competition, the bank has selected ten customers who will be able to run down their interest rates during the ASB Auckland Marathon.

News
Into the bosom: student directors tell the tale of bFM
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As Paul Casserly’s excellent documentary Radio Punks showed earlier this year, the story of student radio in New Zealand is full of interesting twists, turns and characters. And up-and-coming student directors Olly Clifton and Benjamin Zambo, who are currently in year 13 at Western Springs College in Auckland, have added to the oeuvre by giving their take on bFM, which started as a capping stunt in 1969 under the moniker Radio Bosom, grew into one of the most vibrant media brands in the country in the ’90s and is now attempting to compete against consolidation and a proliferation of other media options now available to the young’uns.

News
‘One in five people are likely to drop their Sky subscription in the next 12 months’ – Lightbox chief executive Kym Niblock
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At a presentation held yesterday, Lightbox chief executive Kym Niblock said that recent research conducted for the SVOD provider indicated that a fifth of current Sky subscribers said they were likely to leave the service after the Rugby World Cup and one in four are likely to add a streaming service in the near future. But Sky’s director of communications Kirsty Way thinks these figures will come to fruition.

Opinion
Those who tell the stories can change the world
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Claudia Batten is currently on the Better by Design Study Tour in the US along with a number of other Kiwi overachievers and she says the success of Contently—and the attitude of its founder Shane Snow—shows that marketing now needs to come from a place of integrity and sincerity.

Features
From broadcast to broadband: a guide to digital video
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As a still-nascent format, digital video can be a confusing realm for brands to navigate. So is it all it’s cracked up to be? And if it is, then what? Facebook video or YouTube? Long form or short form? DIY or through a publisher? Pre-roll or standalone? Fortunately, Lynda Brendish has done some of the legwork for you.

News
The Big Game: Mr Whippy’s impeccable punmanship and 2degrees’ gratuitous addition
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You may not have noticed, but the Rugby World Cup final looms on Sunday morning. And still the brands attempt to squeeze blood from the rugby stone. And this week’s winner of The Big Game, a prestigious award dished out by StopPress to the best example of desperate euphemism usage from non-sponsors hoping to ride the attention train, goes to Mr Whippy for its glorious pun-based treat.

News
We’ve done it before and we can do it again, says Steinlager
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Steinlager’s campaign to support the All Blacks during their attempted retention of the Rugby World Cup focused on the similarities between this quest and the 1905 Originals Tour, where the first team to be known as the All Blacks travelled six weeks by boat and won 34 out of 35 games. And ahead of the final on Sunday morning, DDB New Zealand has released some new print ads focusing on three remarkable stories from that journey.

News
What men really think
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If a new campaign from Durex is anything to go by, then men and women don’t really view sex all that differently. When separated into two gender groups, the responses from both men and women on whether they would engage in a one-night stand were almost unanimously affirmative. But there was one question on which they differed in opinion.

News
By hoki
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Typically, finding a surprise in your food is a Very Bad Thing and whether it’s a mouse in a loaf, a cockroach in a Big Mac, or a wasp in a block of chocolate, media outlets take great pleasure in heaping shame on those responsible when it happens. But to promote its new range of real fish, Sealord has embraced that and given unsuspecting shoppers a bit of a fright in the frozen food aisle.

Opinion
As Idealog celebrates a decade in the ideas business, co-founder Vincent Heeringa explains how it intends to last a few more
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This month Idealog magazine published its 60th edition. A decade in publishing is an achievement worth celebrating—especially this decade—but co-founder Vincent Heeringa knows things need to keep changing if it’s to last another ten. Here’s his manifesto for the next ten years—and he believes the rules also apply to media in general.

News
Inside BurgerFuel’s in-house marketing machine
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BurgerFuel currently has 82 stores strewn across six countries, and there isn’t a single agency lucky enough to officially call it a full-time client. Damien Venuto sits down with the company’s marketing manager Alexis Lam to find out why he keeps most of the work in-house.

News
Sanitarium takes the biscuit to the busy people with Weet-Bix Go
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With the introduction of new technology the world has become increasingly fast-paced and in almost every industry there are demands to do more with less. A natural by-product of this ‘time scarcity’ is that we have to cram more into our days, something working parents feel particularly acutely. For some, it’s got to the point where there isn’t even enough time to stop and eat. And this modern condition is what Sanitarium is attempting to cash in on with its new breakfast biscuit product Weet-Bix Go.

Partner articles
Up Country: The Waikato Times’ Jonathan MacKenzie on ‘keeping the buggers honest’, gigantic audiences and content being more important than platforms
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In conjunction with News Works, the Up Country series talks with some of New Zealand’s top regional newspaper editors about the performance of their titles in print and online, the role local news plays in regional communities, where they see the industry going and why advertisers should stick with them. Here’s what Jonathan MacKenzie, Waikato editor-in-chief for Fairfax, had to say.

Partner articles
Quiz #2: How regional are you?
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A few weeks back we ran a ‘How regional are you?’ quiz in an effort to show that there is a risk those in the marcomms sector can fall into an urban echo chamber (as last year’s Nielsen survey showed) and forget about the important role the regions play in the Kiwi economy—and the important role newspapers still play in those regions (who’s going to argue with Warren Buffett and WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell?). The average score was 70 percent, but just seven percent of all the respondents got all the questions right, so you’ve still got some work to do, city slickers. Reckon you can beat that? Then put your regional knowledge to the test and take the second quiz below. All those who complete it will go into the draw to win another two night Air New Zealand Deluxe Mystery Break for two somewhere in New Zealand*.

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