Optimism was in the air at the New Zealand Marketing Association’s Northern Regional Event today, with the general consensus among some of the country’s bravest and ‘upto’ direct marketers being that with the fancy tools now in the box there’s never been a better time to be in the game.
In strange things for sale on TradeMe news, committed Mexi-Dougophiles can bid to get their hands on the authentic and presumably extremely valuable Mexi-Doug Instant Kiwi costume, with the proceeds from the auction going towards WWF’s Earth Hour.
Somewhat surprisingly, for a man who’s the president and chief creative officer of the massive behemoth that is the Time Warner Global Media Group (oh, and he’s also the senior vice president of Time Warner), Mark D’Arcy exudes calm and charm. And, with a silver tongue and a penchant for strange magazines like this, he seems like your quintessential creative director. The strange thing is he’s actually working for a media company and he’s at the forefront of what he sees as a move towards media-led creativity in marketing.
After analysing the visual searches and choices of more than 1.5 million creative professionals around the world and reviewing thousands of tearsheets, commercials and other websites to discover trends, the global creative research team at Getty Images has produced some rather revealing white papers that show how the kinds of imagery used in marketing material in the technology and telecommunications, pharmaceutical and financial sectors has evolved in recent years.
Magnation, the purveyor of fine periodicals, has recently embarked on “its most revealing promotion ever” by offering customers that strip down to their unmentionables and head into one of the shops a reward for their brave exhibitionism. And, according to Sahil Merchant, the founder of Magnation and “chief magazineologist”, the promotion has been wildly successful, highly amusing and, given its unexpected popularity, nigh-on financially catastrophic.
Absolut vodka today launched its new ‘Drinks’ campaign in New Zealand, with renowned fashion photographer Ellen Von Unwerth and smokin’ screen hotties Kate Beckinsale and Zooey Deschanel combining forces in an effort to show off some of the world’s best known drinks and the stories behind them.
Sam Neill is the new face of Kiwibank’s ‘Kiwi Thinking’ campaign. And part of the campaign implores Kiwis to submit their best ideas. Well, at StopPress we like ideas too. So we want you to submit your best ideas to us.
The New Zealand Lotteries commission recently roped in Donald Trump to be the frontman for a Big Wednesday promotion. The winner and a few friends get to live like him for a week (presumably being forced to put squirrels on their heads for veracity’s sake) and, if his busy schedule allows, they’ll even get to meet him (presumably licking the filth from his gold-plated shoes). So, to honour the business magnate, we want you to come up with a catchy new slogan for The Don and his vast portfolio.
Michael Gregg, chair of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and advertising director at Trade Me, will be stepping down from both roles in August, swapping acronyms and tech-speak for boating, skiing, fly fishing, the collection of delicious fruits of the sea, the removal of old man’s beard and the long overdue doing up of his bach in Havelock in the Marlborough Sounds.
You know it was a bad year when an industry organisation comes out and says it’s fairly happy with a significant core revenue decline. But that’s exactly what the papers have done after the release of the Advertising Standards Authority’s New Zealand Advertising Turnover scorecard. Online, however, is sitting pretty as the only sector to notch up an increase.
Rhys Darby continues to capitalise on his awksome (so awkward it’s awesome) Murray Hewitt-inspired profile in the US, this time as the front man in a big – like NZ$80 million big – campaign for Hewlett Packard called Let’s Do Amazing.
The Don (not the delicious Japanese meal, but the funny-haired American business tycoon), is currently gracing a range of New Zealand media channels to promote the New Zealand Lotteries Commission’s latest Big Wednesday prize. And everyone wants to know how much he got paid.
Aside from these, this, and this, StopPress loves nothing more than data. And we’re particularly fond of hard data. Of course, the brilliant thing about data is that it can be used selectively to show how good you are, and how bad other things, like competitors, are. And there’s almost no better example of this than the tit for tatting that is news ratings data in New Zealand.
Who it’s for: Vector (working with Y&R), which is trying to drum up support for fibre optic cabling and get fibre to Auckland doors so users will be able to download illegal movies at speeds 50 times faster than current levels.
Why we like it: Quirky …
Fairfax Media has announced the launch of the 2010 Fairfax Media Cannes Young Lions competition, which will give four of New Zealand’s top advertising talents the chance to compete at this year’s Cannes International Advertising Festival.
Some of New Zealand’s top young musos have donned their promotional caps for a tourism campaign that shows off a few of their favourite Kiwi haunts in an effort to entice young Aussies to come for a visit.
Air New Zealand has kept the novel marketing fires burning with another new – and potentially slightly controversial – social media campaign featuring Dai Henwood that aims to capitalise on the buzz created in January over the new long-haul innovations.
Consider it your Monday morning brand warm-up. And tell your boss it’s solely for the purposes of market research. But try to wrangle 17-minutes to watch Logorama, the film featuring more than 2500 logos that recently took home an Oscar for best animated short.
There were scones and jam and cream. There were a host of digital natives and possibly even a few digital virgins. There were a few ironic technical glitches. And there were a range of social media truths laid bare and observations made by the five speakers at yesterday’s CAANZ Digital Leadership Group Social Media in Business forum.
The latest Nielsen Market Intelligence report shows unequivocally that anyone who reads StopPress will almost instantly become extremely wealthy and is up to four times more likely to be accepted into New Zealand’s nouveau über-riche set. Either that or all of you marcomms and media folk are overpaid.
Methven, the New Zealand-owned designer, marketer and exporter of water and energy efficient bathroomware, has won a Red Dot Product Design Award at the 2010 competition in Germany for its Shower Infusions, a system that “transforms a daily shower into a luxurious, mood enhancing spa experience”, as can be seen from the reaction of this showering naked lady.
It’s still 18 months until the Rugby World Cup kicks off, but a massive behemoth of a billboard has already been erected on the corner of Albert Street and Custom Street East in Auckland to mark the auspicious occasion and Heineken New Zealand thinks the rather lovey dovey text (“Turning great rivalries into even greater friendships, since 1873. It’s almost time”) hints at the experience tournament attendees can expect from the beer brand in 2011.
Tim Skellern, who spent three years with Wattie’s after immigrating to New Zealand from the UK in 2004 before throwing in the towel to set up his own company in 2007, has returned to the nurturing bosom of Heinz Wattie’s to take up the role of general manager marketing.
Traditional business presentations are often characterised by slow moving slide shows, unreliable software and cheesy whirling squares. But Christchurch company Orly Productions hopes to change all that with a new, more engaging and extremely user-friendly business presentation platform called iPRES that it has designed to help companies communicate better and sell more.
Social media is certainly all the rage at the moment, but while most in marcomms land seems to be talking about it, not too many Kiwi businesses appear to be following up on all that chatter, if the results from the CAANZ Digital Leadership Group (DLG) survey from December 2009 are anything to go by.
Whakatane’s Deep Origin sparkling water, or, more particularly, the bottle the sparkling water is housed in, tickled the fancies of a range of H20 purists at the 20th Annual Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting Awards in the US recently, walking away with the silver medal in ‘The People’s Choice Packaging’ competition.
In news sure to warm marketers’ cockles, the latest figures from Paymark, the network that processes over 75 percent of all electronic transactions in the New Zealand retail market, show that good old fashioned consumer spending is on the up. But the increased shelling out evident in some of the smaller centres is not being shared equally across the regions.
This week on ads@6, David Tua locks horns with the Blues for Rebel Sport. Next up: Tua vs Chabal; pity about that Whitney Houston concert; and the Creme Egg Goo Therapy campaign taps into the undying human love for slow motion. What humans don’t like are shrinking confections made of orang-utan oil. Whittakers chocolate, on the other hand, very much enjoys telling consumers about such things and has even put together a TVC about Cadbury’s recent takeover by Kraft.
If you’re sick of hearing about how consumers don’t trust brands anymore and feel as though they’re being constantly bombarded by trashy advertising that makes them stupid, drunk and morbidly obese, then Doug Pray’s Art & Copy, “a dynamic exploration of art, commerce, and human emotion”, could be the film for you: it focuses on some of the positive aspects of advertising and interviews the inspirational brains behind some of the world’s most successful campaigns. And it’s coming to the Documentary Edge film festival in Auckland in March.
The end of summer is usually a miserable time, with the relentless passage of the earth around the sun typically leading to an epidemic of Kiwi self-pity and climate-related woe. But Monteith’s is instead celebrating the changing seasons by releasing its first autumn beer, Monteith’s First Harvest ale, in late March.