Christmas is a time of family, binge-eating and falling asleep in the ambrosia at 3pm. But for some of our fellow beasts, as you can see in the Save the Children fund’s top-notch stop motion Animal Love dating video, Christmas often just enhances their crushing loneliness.
Auckland multi-disciplinary design company Alt Group walked away from one of the design industry’s largest and most prestigious international competitions last week with four red dots and a red dot grand prix in their luggage. And it’s the first time a New Zealand design company has received this coveted prize.
Who it’s for: Fruju Fruit Whip
Why we like it: A moderately depressing, tongue in cheek look at the domestic reality of the modern day whipping boy. Unashamedly sexist, yet, at times, remarkably accurate.
This quirky, artsy Kapiti ice cream TVC …
Just over a year ago, The Wine Vault would have been categorised as your traditional, conservative, small New Zealand business. Its marketing tactics consisted of leaflet drops, direct mail campaigns, a monthly email to the customer database and a few fairly unsuccessful radio ads. But owner Jayson Bryant changed all that when he decided to dive head-first into the then-nascent world of social media retailing in New Zealand.
Sochi 2014 recently launched its new brand, emblem and tagline (‘Gateway to the Future’) for the winter Olympics, introducing the first ever Olympic Games emblem that also forms a web address.
In a move likely to bring plague, pestilence and horrible smoting upon the land (but a smile to the dial of Richard Dawkins), an atheist group has launched a campaign to raise $10,000 for “ads carrying atheist and humanist messages on buses in major NZ cities, encouraging Kiwis to think critically about their beliefs”.
DNA design have just launched the first issue of their new online publication Open, “a forum for exploring what’s happening in the evolving world of consumers”.
Good, old-fashioned, tree-based magazine-lovers claimed a famous victory over their digital cohorts/opponents at last night’s inaugural Magazine Publisher’s Association Christmas stoush. But the mag-debaters had to call on some visual aids to get them across the line.
Westpac Australia recently raised the interest rate on its variable mortgages by nearly twice the level of the Reserve Bank’s increase, to the chagrin of many of its ever-poorer customers. So, it decided to release a patronising little animation entitled Cool Bananas to justify the decision.
DDB Group New Zealand has appointed Steve Kane to a newly created position of creative director, experiential, an appointment the agency claims is a first for a Kiwi ad agency.
Michael Bay, the typically over the top director whose filmic style is probably best described as oversexed soap-operatic with explosions has taken it to a new level of cheese with his new Victoria’s Secret commercial, tongue and cheekily (we hope) referencing the teasing movie trailers he’s so adept at creating.
When two worlds collide, bad/cringey/entertaining things usually happen, as the exclamation mark-laden, uber-tech geek Christmas message from HP and its PR agency Acumen Republic shows.
First there’s a press release from TV3: “November has seen Nightline pull away from its competitor TV ONE’s Tonight in all key demographics.”
Then there’s one from TVNZ: “The latest news numbers show Sunrise lost a quarter of its audience in November while NZI Business and Breakfast continued to edge ahead.”
Rejoice anachronists! It’s 8 December, much more commonly known as pretend to be a time traveller day, so be not afraid if you happen to come across any Victorian gentlemen, dystopian warriors, robot butlers or maybe even workers flying home on their jetpacks this evening.
The latest glorious edition of our sister/brother/cousin publication (does it always have to be a sister publication?) Idealog is on the shelves soon. And woe betide any businessperson, inventor, entrepreneur or captain of industry who misses out on the nice surprise included within its extremely knowledgeable and good-looking pages.
The official release has been sent and no-one’s particularly surprised with its content: Clemenger Group has appointed Nick Garrett as managing director of Colenso BBDO, beginning 1 March 2010.
Eighty Kiwi marketing heavyweights (and a few lowly journalists) ventured to the floating pavilion in Auckland yesterday for a cup of tea and numerous pearls of wisdom that were delivered by a host of marketing thought leaders as part of the Marketing Association’s inaugural marketing forum.
Who it’s for: New Zealand Book Council
Why we like it: Colenso and London’s Andersen M Studios worked for eight-months to bring Maurice Gee’s Going West to life in an attempt to promote more reading. Everything in the moody, beautiful film is hand-made/cut, the …
Ah, new stuff. How we love the way you always bring a little bit of excitement to our dull, repetitive, meaningless lives. Of course, new stuff is a big part of the marcomms industry, so what better way to disseminate some of this newness than by making a gigantic melange.
As we all know, ’tis been a season of flux and upheaval in adland. And the Colenso stable will have a distinctly different look to it in the new year.
Esquire magazine recently released its new ‘augmented reality’ December issue. Readers were implored to download an app and then hold their magazine up to a webcam to make Robert Downey Jr (an appropriate subject given his well-publicised penchant for reality augmentation in the past) come to over-excited life. There’s also a weather-dependent fashion portfolio, a time-sensitive updated Funny Joke from a Beautiful Woman and a few other slick features on offer.
Extreme sports aficionados, ravers, sugary-drink loving youngsters and other NZ Herald readers will soon be getting their mits on the The Red Bulletin, a self-styled “almost independent” monthly lifestyle magazine that covers music, art, culture, society and sport.
In June last year there was a blaze of publicity surrounding Flossie.com, a female-centric masthead that brought together the ‘best of the best’ female focused websites. But the blaze has well and truly subsided, advertising reality has bitten and Flossie Media Group has now decided to turn its back on the display advertising model.
Everyone loves free stuff. Especially women, it seems, as a new campaign that tests what lengths the ladies will go to to get their hands on some of the world’s most coveted items has shown.
So mediocre were the entries for the November newspaper ad of the month that the judges decided not to pick a winner. They didn’t even hand out any merit certificates.
Last week, Matt Blomfield, Hell Pizza comms manager and co-owner of Pitch Televsion, told StopPress a new reality TV show that pitted young advertising creatives against each other in a series of pitching battles had been commissioned by TVNZ and would screen on Saturday nights at 7.30pm starting in May.
Who it’s for: Silver Fern Farms
Why we like it: Good Kiwi man ‘o the land takes back what’s rightfully ours from a bunch of Euro aristocrats. More patriotic post-colonial New Zealand humour from the stubbie-loving Colenso crew.
Mad Men ticks all the fictional advertising boxes on TV. And now Pitch, a new TV show that’s just been commissioned by TVNZ will focus on the ‘reality’.
As my mother always said, whether you’re engaging in shemale love, being attacked by a shark, suffering from horrible sunburn or lying under a car close to death, there’s always someone worse off than you.
We don’t mute the ads. Or fast forward through the ads. We record the ads. At six.