Author Ben Fahy

According to Nielsen’s AIS data, Revlon spent $4.1 million on advertising in New Zealand in 2010 and $3.3 million to the end of October this year (base rate card value), largely in magazines and TV, and, as part of a global alignment, MediaCom has taken over the media planning and buying in New Zealand from DraftFCB.

In our humble opinion, Powershop’s ‘Same Power, Different Attitude’ campaign is one of the best campaigns of the year. But we wondered aloud a couple of weeks ago whether its latest execution featuring Darth Vader prancing through a field like Julie Andrews crossed the IP line. Turns out it did, and the LucasFilm patent lawyers have been in touch telling them to cease and desist. They’ve done as asked, but, with a dose of challenger brand cheek, they’ve also taken a leaf out of 42 Below’s book and, with the help of its PR agency Sputnik, decided to have a bit of fun with the apology letter. 

When local tech start-up (and winner of the supreme honour at the New Zealand Innovator’s Awards) Vend HQ launched www.welovepos.com, a website for sharing point of sale horror stories and celebrating great technology and design, it purchased a clunky, obsolete old cash register named Steve with one purpose in mind: trashing him. So they went to the customers and asked them whether he should meet his maker via firing squad, hammers, dynamite, or by ‘falling’ off a tall building. Then, as the votes started coming in, they thought, why not all of the above? 

Colenso’s last campaign for Frucor’s PepsiMax, MaxIt Jobs, went down a treat with the young, mostly male, sugary drink-loving target audience and was a finalist for the FMCG category at the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards and took home a silver Effie as a result of the sales lift. And it’s followed that up with a similarly masculine campaign/competition called Bromitment, “a pledge, promise, obligation to be there with your boys, to participate in any and all shenanigans that may go down”. 

Here at StopPress, we’re big fans of J&D’s, a website that proclaims everything should taste like bacon (for the special someone who has everything, its new Bacon Lube really is the perfect Christmas gift). And while we were baying for blood at the Fight For Life on Saturday night, we also became big fans of Buffalo Creative’s efforts to leverage Kiwi Bacon’s sponsorship of the event. 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are big days for retailers in the States—and, judging by some of the figures this year, the discounts offered up by all and sundry certainly got consumers to prise open their wallets. In times of economic stagnancy, the level of consumption is often used as a barometer for recovery. But, as this fairly brave print ad for Patagonia that ran in the New York Times shows, maybe less consumption is a good thing. Or perhaps it’s just a bit of cheeky reverse psychology in action. 

There was a bit of a storm in a beer mug back in July when DB was given the rights to use the generic term Radler as a brand name. Corporate bullying, some indie brewers cried. Cutting off your nose to spite your face and making consumers dislike you for no good reason, others shrieked. Mwahahahah, DB laughed. So when The Boundary Road Brewery launched its Lawn Ranger brew recently it claimed it was ‘Radler-style’ and put up a cheeky billboard saying ‘Fine, we won’t call it Radler then’. Now DB has set its lawyers Simpson Grierson on the case, saying the term ‘radler style’ is off limits and telling BRB to lay off the allusions. 

The problem with disasters—either man-made or natural—is that those not directly affected by them and the media reporting on them when they happened often tend to forget about the ongoing struggle to recover. That certainly seems to be the case two years on from BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and Fraser Grant, an expat Kiwi working in Switzerland, and his Swiss partner Gabriel Mauron have created a cool heat-sensitive postcard for the Gulf Restoration Network based in New Orleans in an effort to get a few more hands on deck. 

Much like DraftFCB and The National Bank, the industry has been waiting patiently to see what Colenso and Westpac would come up with after the account shifted from Saatchi & Saatchi last year. It’s already created the Impulse Saver app and a home loan spot and, while the new animated ad explaining the financial perils of the modern world that launched last night isn’t being seen as the big reveal, it is the first time the bank’s new tagline ‘help is what we do’ has been seen in the wild. 

The online realm is a rather fluid and exciting space at the moment. Companies large and small are chopping, changing and innovating in the quest to find the most effective model and close the gap between eyeball numbers and ad dollars. And MSN, with its parent company ninemsn, is set to embark on some big changes, with a new corporate umbrella brand called Mi9 that will encompass all of its brands, new ad exchange technology that basically creates a stock-market for online inventory, an increased focus on behaviourial targeting and a renewed effort to bump up online news numbers with a portal overhaul.