All the best ideas in the business were recognised last night at the Axis Awards, and one of the best men in the business was recognised too, with advertising veteran Sandy Moore accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Following a competitive pitch involving two other agencies, Carat has been awarded the media planning and buying business for Barfoot & Thompson. But that silver lining comes with a fairly big cloud, because Dick Smith has left the Carat building.
It’s not generally in the nature of those who work in this industry to stay under the radar. But that’s what Post Creative has purposefully done since it opened its doors in 2011. Now, with ex-DraftFCB and Ogilvy bod Matt Simpkins coming on board as a replacement for co-founder Adam Bryce and the ribbon recently cut on a new office in Auckland’s Freeman’s Bay, the team thought it was about time they stuck their heads above the parapet, showed off some work and explained their model.
Restructures among the big publishers have been fairly common in recent times and, following Bauer’s purchase of the NZ Magazines portfolio, APN has embarked on another one, with its Pacific Magazines titles New Idea, Girlfriend and That’s Life now trading alongside the New Zealand Herald’s Newspaper Inserted Magazine (NIMs) portfolio.
TVNZ is having a fairly rough time of it at the moment in terms of PR, with the Shane Taurima saga, the fake abuse own goal, Brian Edwards’ attack on Fair Go and, adding salt into its wounds, even a bit of a slap from overseas with calls from an ex-head of TVNZ telling the BBC not to replicate New Zealand’s public broadcasting model. But, according to its half-year earnings report, the finances aren’t looking too bad at the state broadcaster, with a net profit after tax of $20.8 million for the six months to 31 December, up 47 percent on the same period last year. Plus: TVNZ’s disappearing Igloo?
Fair Go is one of the great survivors in the world of TV and it kicks off its new season tonight at the new time of 8pm. But while the ratings remain solid, not everyone’s enamoured with the show, with Brian Edwards writing a scathing piece and offering some advice to those who come in for some unwanted attention.
It’s one of the oldest digital shops in the country and it has done work for a huge number of clients. And, like the internet itself, Terabyte Interactive keeps on changing. Chief executive Doug Hanna logs on.
It’s a car that claims to get your heart racing. So Holden and Ogilvy have dangled a carrot to those who reckon they can do the opposite with a new digitally-led campaign aimed at changing the perception of the Barina.
Clink your glasses for Holden’s heart racing, Vodafone’s period drama, Hallenstein’s kaleidoscope and Whittaker’s chocolate art.
After around six years at the helm of the NZ Marketing Association, and with a number of big accomplishments under her belt, chief executive Sue McCarty has announced her resignation.
January’s Nielsen online ratings showed audience numbers generally going up for both nzherald.co.nz and stuff.co.nz, with Fairfax reclaiming the top spot in Auckland. So is that growth reflected in online ad spend? Not according to SMI data, which showed that both APN and Fairfax Media went in the wrong direction last year.
Just as the intertubes lit up with opinions when Telecom launched its spark logo back in 2009, so the intertubes are again abuzz with today’s news that Telecom was planning on changing its name change to Spark. Here’s what chief operating officer Jason Paris had to say about it.
Back in October last year, stuff.co.nz knocked nzherald.co.nz off the top spot in Auckland for the first time. Fairfax saw it as a big win, but NZ Herald editor Tim Murphy tweeted that a response to our story saying it was merely a blip after it climbed back on top soon after. Now, Nielsen online ratings for January show volatility in APN’s numbers since then and a steady rise for Fairfax, which has once again claimed the top spot by the smallest of margins.
Following the decision of the two big Aussie supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, to remove New Zealand-produced goods from their house brand labels and Shane Jones’ request for a Commerce Commission investigation into the way Progressive Enterprises treats its suppliers (and the inevitable Facebook campaign asking Kiwis to boycott the company), Foodstuffs has taken the opportunity to remind the nation that the big brands under its umbrella—Pak ‘n Save and New World—are full-blown Kiwi.
For the past few years, the Iron Maidens—Sarah Walker, Sophie Pascoe and Lisa Carrington—have been promoting the culinary pleasures of the flesh. But NZ Beef and Lamb has taken a slightly different tack with its new ‘Tough Standards, Tender Results’ campaign, which shows how the butchery trade has changed throughout the years and aims to reinforce the attributes of the New Zealand Beef & Lamb Quality Mark.
Straight A’s for Auckland, The Heart Foundation and TV3 this week.
There was a fair bit of chatter in the market last year after the Great Ratings Drop of 2013, something the broadcasters and their research partner Nielsen put down to a range of factors, including an improving economy, a mild winter and changing media consumption habits. Not surprisingly, the broadcasters remained confident that TV was an effective—and cost-effective—option for advertisers. But, in an age of supposed accountability and measurability, why don’t they release minute-by-minute ratings data to the market to prove it?
Unitec has done a good job of bringing academia to life in recent years, with its reality-advertising campaign Change Starts Here, GPS-enabled buses that turned Auckland into a media platform for ‘We make the people who make it’ and, most recently, the personalised Umag. And it’s once again taking the school to where the potential students are: the mall.
Raunchy bread, time-travelling mascots and banal questions make the grade this week.
Media spend figures from Standard Media Index (SMI), which launched in the New Zealand market last year, show a five percent increase in total spend in 2013, with big increases for cinema, digital and radio. So how does that compare to Nielsen’s AIS ad spend figures?
Bauer Media has, as most expected, been given Commerce Commission approval to proceed with its purchase of APN magazine titles the NZ Listener, NZ Woman’s Weekly, Simply You, Simply You Living and Creme. Updated with more comments from chief executive Paul Dykzeul.
Generally speaking, humans try to steer clear of anything related to exploding number twos. But TVNZ has fully embraced them in a series of new channel idents for TV2 via Blacksand.
For most New Zealanders, there’s been a high rate of food consumption over the past few months. And the nation’s broadcasters are hoping there will be plenty of food-related TV consumed this year as well, with TVNZ’s MasterChef NZ making a few changes to its format and MediaWorks hoping for big things with its new show The Great Food Race.
Sky launched Sky Go, the long-awaited update to its online and catch-up service iSky, in October last year. And, after a fair bit of social media activity to promote the new website and mobile apps, it’s now launched a print and TV campaign via DDB that shows how easy—and potentially perilous—it is for subscribers to ‘Watch On’.
One big hit from NZTA and Clemenger BBDO, another big hit from Old Spice and Kiwi Steve Ayson, a curious child calls Christmas into question in a spot for ze Germans by Mark & Louis, and a collection of oddvertising for Carlton Dry from Taika Waititi.
Malcolm Rands has been fighting the good fight for almost 20 years with Ecostore—and the charity the company helps to fund, Fairground Foundation. He released a book telling the story of his journey a few months back. So how is Ecoman planning on saving the world?
This industry generally isn’t backward in coming forward about its achievements and there are many opportunities for those achievements to be acknowledged. But we’re sick of writing about you, so, as we often do on the last day of our publishing year, we’re taking the opportunity to talk about what we’ve done this year and what we’ve got planned for the next.
