Author Ben Fahy

News
Irish eyes are still smiling as O’Sullivan takes over Droga5 reins—UPDATED
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We broke the story about Andrew Stone leaving Droga5 on Friday to spend more time with his family and do some consultancy work. And that high-profile departure, combined with the recent loss of its foundation client ASB to Saatchi & Saatchi, led to a fair bit of speculation that Droga5 was in a bit of trouble. But Mike O’Sullivan, who has stepped up to fill the leadership role, says the doors are still well and truly open and, with a few new clients and a new management team, the agency is poised for growth.

News
TVC of the Week: 31 July
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Sorted’s shrinkage, RadioLive’s fly on the wall approach, ASB’s Facebook in real life tomfoolery and TV3’s Olympics promo take the TVC title this week.

News
Attack of the fakebots: are your social media followers real?
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Over the weekend, we received a message from Facebook’s account manager Adnan Khan asking us to consider adopting Facebook’s Social Plugin commenting system on StopPress, as it would increase the authenticity of the conversations and reduce the number of “faceless trolls” and offensive comments (if you’re so inclined, you can comment on StopPress stories through Facebook, Twitter or Google by logging-in to Disqus). So we couldn’t help but revel in the irony when ComputerWorld published an article yesterday about the fact that, according to social media management tool Status People, 94 percent of Khan’s almost 30,000 Twitter followers were fake.

News
CAANZ calibrates industry’s moral compass with new ethical guidelines
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According to CAANZ, one of the big challenges facing the communications industry is the way it is sometimes perceived by clients—and society more broadly. So, in an effort to address this and show that it is in fact what chief executive Paul Head calls a reputable and professional industry that adds value to businesses, the communications industry will be governed by a formal set of rules after CAANZ introduced its new ‘Code of Ethics, Practices, and Obligations of CAANZ Members’.

News
Digital and physical collide as Saatchi & Saatchi launches first major piece of ASB work
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Given Facebook’s pervasiveness, it’s not entirely surprising to learn the ‘Facebook in real life theme’ is already pretty fertile comedic territory. And ASB’s new agency Saatchi & Saatchi, with Thick as Thieves on production duties, has tapped into that idea for its first major piece of work for the bank, an online-only campaign to promote the new Facebook payments platform that shows what such a transaction might look like ‘IRL’.

News
Let the light games begin: Resn shines with ‘Olympic first’ online gaming experience
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The interactive smarty-pants at Wellington agency Resn have forged a global reputation for awesomeness with its work for a range of big global clients including Puma, Domino’s and Toyota. And now, as the London Olympics get set for blast off, it is claiming an ‘Olympic first’, with an online experience created with Paris agency CLM BBDO for French energy company EDF that claims to have reinvented the way the humble computer mouse is used for gaming.

News
North & South’s Twitter stoush
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The latest issue of North & South features an in-depth cover story on the Ewen Macdonald case that was one year in the writing. And, as often happens when a big story hits the public domain, it was picked up by the major papers, which led to a bit of an online barney between ACP and editor in chief of the Herald’s products Tim Murphy.

Movings & Shakings
Refined Sugar: O’Leary joins ‘recalibrated’ indie
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As is often the case in the advertising biz, losing big clients usually means losing staff. And after Sugar decided not to go back for a BNZ booty call, managing director Jeremy Johnston says it has said goodbye to approximately four full-time equivalents over the past few months. But now that the “recalibration” is complete, he says the newly restructured business is on the upward trajectory, as evidenced by the arrival of ex-Ogilvy executive creative director Damon O’Leary, who has joined as creative partner.

News
Nielsen flips the script with new people-centric online measurement system. But where’s the IAB endorsement?
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After almost two years of consultation and development, Nielsen has launched its new online audience measurement solution, Nielsen Online Ratings, which measures people rather than computers and claims to paint a more accurate picture of the whole online consumer and digital universe. But while the new system has already been endorsed as the official measurement currency by the Australian IAB, that’s not the case in New Zealand.

News
Take a gander at the Glossies
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Due to a combination of rain fade, La Niña, the dog eating it and launching a new website, the June round of The Glossies is a bit late. But absence makes the heart grow fonder, so have a look at this month’s contenders and vote for your favourite magazine ad.

News
The vagina dialogues: taboo-busting Carefree keeps it real, readies itself for complaints
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Here at StopPress we often start the week off with a frank discussion about vaginal discharge, so you can imagine our excitement when we saw an ad for Johnson & Johnson’s brand Carefree last night depicting a naked woman talking about the female body and the role of its new acti-fresh product. But, rather than beat about the bush, so to speak, and use the obligatory ‘patronising euphemisms’ often associated with the category, the ad features the word vagina, and it’s thought to be one of the first times it has been used in a New Zealand TV ad.

News
Out with the old? How the Vodafone takeover might affect TelstraClear’s partners
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The big news yesterday in the business world was that Vodafone had put in an offer to buy TelstraClear for $840 million in an effort to better compete with Telecom in the corporate and fixed line space. There’s plenty of water to go under the bridge before the deal is approved and, as you’d hope with a merger of this size (and with a restraint of trade clause written into the contract for Telstra), the decision is expected to take a few months. So if it does go ahead, what will that mean for TelstraClear’s existing agency partners?

Movings & Shakings
It’s the circle of life: O’Neill jumps back on board the ASB train with senior Saatchi role
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Saatchi & Saatchi officially welcomed ASB into the building at the start of July, along with around 12 new staff across its account service, digital, production and creative teams. And while there’s no title on his business card, Philip O’Neill—ex Mitchell’s and TBWA\ managing director and self-proclaimed “adman at large”—has joined the agency as the main man on the account.

News
Indoor outdoor flow: new Adshel study keeps it personal, offers a glimpse into the modern human condition
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In an effort to better understand modern consumers and their media consumption habits, and at the same time facilitate a rethink about outoor media among media agencies, Adshel recently conducted an in-depth study combining quantitative data and ethnographic insights. And, according to marketing manager Emma Barnes, the results of the ‘Inside Outdoor Lives’ study “really backed up our beliefs and strengthened our case of the benefits of Adshel”.

News
BC&F takes the scattergun approach in self-deprecating, ‘technique-laden’ Effie call for entries video
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Go to any industry function and someone is bound to mention the term ‘bullshit bingo’, a game where attendees nod knowingly at one another when meaningless jargon is uttered. And CAANZ, Barnes, Catmur & Friends and Film Construction’s Steve Saussey have taken that to a new, very entertaining level by producing “an award-winning, persuasive, brand-building, results-getting, call for entries viral video” for the Effies that manages to, as Paul Catmur says, jam as many advertising techniques into one piece of communication as possible with the limited budget they had.

News
Media Counsel liquidation draws to a close, as Wynyard comes under SFO microscope
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The Media Counsel hit the skids back in February 2010. And in the fifth six-monthly report, liquidators McDonald Vague are in no doubt as to what caused it: “The reason for the company’s failure lies solely with [Glenda Wynyard’s] action of removing funds from the company to fund her own lifestyle”. And as a result, Wynyard’s conduct is currently being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office.

News
APN’s Martin Simons on the tabloid Herald, the inevitability of paywalls and preparing for the future
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With the massive changes currently taking place in the Australian publishing scene at the moment and the steady move of readers from print to digital around the world, the newspaper business is at a crossroads. So what is the rationale behind the Herald’s change to tabloid? Will New Zealand readers soon be paying for online content? And how is APN preparing for the future? We chat with APN’s chief executive Martin Simons.

News
Sweet marketing music: V and Colenso’s trip into the unknown
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Music and marketing have long been pretty cosy bedfellows. Jingles from many moons ago can often still be recited, bands regularly lend their tunes to ads, and brands are now even creating playlists on Spotify. But V and Colenso BBDO have taken that marriage to a new, hi-tech level with the V Motion Project. And, following on from the launch of the TVC recently, it released the full-length music video on Friday on TVNZ’s U-Live.

News
Horton hears a hooray from the MPA
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The Magazine Publishers Association has set some fairly bold targets for the industry and hopes to increase its share of ad revenue by around $30 million over the next two years, going from around 10 percent of the total ad market to 11.5 percent. It’s certainly a big ask, but Nielsen’s more in-depth Consumer and Media Insights research, mostly positive readership and circulation results in the last batch of numbers, and now, the appointment of Katrina Horton to the newly created role of commercial director with the MPA, all seem to have given the industry some extra confidence that it can reach those goals.

News
Sloganise car, win car*
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As the owner of a Subaru with close to 250,000kms on the clock, getting the chance to drive a car that doesn’t creak when you turn into a park or smell like a squash court is something of a novelty for me. Driving Audis around Hampton Downs at high speed was certainly a helluva lot of fun, so when I was given the opportunity to take Honda’s new hybrid CR-Z coupe for a hoon, I decided to give it a nudge. And the kind folks at Honda are keen to offer one StopPress reader a hoon too.

Opinion
Hello. I’m the new StopPress
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Back in September 2009, we sent StopPress into the wild. Almost three years later and, with steadily rising audience numbers and what we think is a fairly well-established position as an important source of news, views and hullaballoos for the marketing, advertising and media community, we’re pretty proud of our e-baby. But, as everyone in this industry knows, laurel-sitting is not recommended, so, with the help of our digital agency and ‘creative co-conspirators’ &some, we’ve spent the past few months redesigning the site. Rest assured, we’ve kept all the good bits, but we’ve given it a good spruce up, shifted from WordPress to Django, installed a better comments engine, added the ability for users to submit jobs (an events uploader will be coming in the near future), made the design more responsive so it will work on iPads, tablets, smartphones and big browsers, and basically tried to ensure we took care of what &some’s head nerd Matt Cooney calls ‘the whole platform-for-the-future thing’.

News
Clemenger BBDO and Senate enlisted to sell the asset sales
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When Treasury sent out a note on December 15 last year asking for interested parties to put their hands up if they wanted a piece of the ‘extension of the mixed ownership model’ account, everyone with dreams of festive cheer died a little inside. And, while the Greens are complaining that the tender process broke the rules, the list of winners was released recently—and fairly silently—and Clemenger BBDO and PR company Senate Communications have taken the big prizes in the comms space.

Opinion
The pros and cons of anonymity
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Given the attitude of ‘the normals’ towards marketing and advertising, it’s fair to say the industry has a few perception issues. Before I started this job, I envisaged being in the eye of the wankery storm in Auckland, surrounded by people who wore shiny shirts, drove ridiculous cars and used business jargon with absolutely no sense of irony. That’s occasionally true, of course, and my Invercargill-based parents are obviously deeply ashamed at what I’ve become, but, in my relatively short time spent writing about the industry, I’ve found it to be, by and large, full of exceptionally smart, talented, creative, hard-working, hard-playing, competitive and often very opinionated businesspeople. For some, the fact that it attracts extroverts is part of the industry’s appeal. For others, however, some these extroverts—and their often anonymous views posted on websites like this—give the industry an air of unprofessionalism. So, as we get set to relaunch StopPress, we thought it was a good time to delve into the thorny issue of online opinions.

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