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Lurpak has a rich heritage when it comes to creating quality food porn. And now, to launch its new Cooks Range, Wieden + Kennedy has created another stunner, with the adventure-themed spot imploring home cooks to ’embrace the unknown in wide-eyed wonder’.
Online retail sales were down this February compared to last, with a three percent drop making a marked constrast to last February’s five percent gain. And Kiwi buying from offshore website merchants continues to have the jump on domestic players, according to BNZ’s latest monthly stats.
Rather than following Clemenger’s lead by taking the gently, gently approach, The Tombras Group has instead created an ad for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the States that wouldn’t be out of place in the 72nd sequel of the Final Destination franchise.
Moves and shakes at Porter Novelli, Anthem, Colenso BBDO, the Rock, Lego, and Beat Communications.
The Dominion Post and NZ Herald will contest this year’s Canon Media Award for Best Newspaper with circulation over 30,000, while Good, Home and The Listener are the finalists for Best Newsstand Magazine. In the new Best Blog category it’s Toby Manhire, Cameron Slater and Giovanni Tiso, with Best Website finalist placings handed to 3News, The Wireless and Yahoo NZ.
Season four of Game of Thrones screens in the US today and on SoHo in New Zealand tonight. Sky and DDB have ensured Kiwis know about that with its very well-received, social-media fuelled campaign to bring down a statue of the much-despised King Joffrey. But HRV is also getting in on the act with a tactical spot called ‘Winter is Coming’ that’s set to run in the slot just before the premiere. Plus: Hell Pizza supports the bad guy and other entertaining parodies of the show.
Football fever (and football-related advertising fever) is ramping up as Brazil gets ready to host the World Cup in June. And there was a bit of fancy footwork in New Zealand last week when a selection of Auckland agencies put down their iPhones and laced up for the inaugural CAANZ soccer tournament. Plus: agencies also skive off to play basketball for TRN’s 3 on 3.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
ZM, part of The Radio Network (TRN), has teamed up with ice cream franchise Pride & Joy to give a $30,000 franchise opportunity to a lucky New Zealander, who shows the drive and determination necessary to run a successful business. Pride and Joy co-founders James Coddington and Tony Balfour say that they are focused on providing opportunities for remarkable people among today’s unemployed and underemployed.
There’s no doubt that the Americans secretly feel relieved that their neighbours to the north also have an embarrassing politician, but the Canadians are aiming to wipe out the Rob Ford-shaped smudge on their otherwise respectable political track record. A new faux mayoral campaign, which has been launched by an online organisation dubbed No Ford Nation, presents a series of dishevelled men as viable alternatives to the current Toronto mayor.
Just a few weeks after being named agency of the year at Axis, Colenso BBDO has picked up another agency of the year accolade, this time at the inaugural Asia Pacific Effie Awards.
Fairfax, like many ‘traditional’ news businesses around the world, has had a fairly rough time of it lately, with declining circulation and ad revenue, ongoing cost cutting and the ensuing job losses. But a new management team is in place in the New Zealand market, there appears to be a bit of renewed optimism in the media (check out Pew Research Centre’s State of the Media 2014 for a great rundown of what’s happening), its digital numbers are strong and some believe the negative sentiment towards print is overcooked, in Australia at least. Despite the issues of recent years, Fairfax is still a big business and a big employer in this country, and it’s looking for a few new recruits, so its inhouse team has created a self-promotional video (how good is that voice?) aimed at selling those in the UK on the New Zealand lifestyle and the chance to work in the “innovative, integrated multi-media business”.
While some critics saw the Wolf of Wall Street as an indictment on the exorbitant habits of stockbrokers, this isn’t necessarily the only interpretation that could be used to understand Scorsese’s directorial decisions. There’s also a growing school of thought suggesting that the financial theme was actually a metaphor for the modern trend of websites becoming insanely popular despite offering nothing in terms of completely original content.
Sky and DDB have some good news for haters of King Joffrey, the most despised character from the SoHo-screened series Game of Thrones. As the fourth season looms, fans won’t actually be pushing down a seven-metre-tall replica of Joffrey, but they can use their social media voice to the same effect.
Val Morgan has announced the four ad hotshots that will be sent to the French Riviera to compete in the Young Lions competition at the 61st Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity being held between 15 and 21 June. This announcement comes after Val Morgan arranged a local competition, which gave young creative teams around the country the opportunity to enter in either the film or media categories.
A group led by Localist CEO Christina Domecq is taking the reins of the New Zealand Post subsidiary, buying the directories business for an undisclosed sum. New Zealand Post says Localist isn’t part of its future now its focusing on core sevices.
Although often applauded for featuring superior narratives based on the erudite observations of talented writers, indie film plot tropes don’t necessarily provide suitable content for bedtime stories. This fact, obvious to most, is used as the premise for a new spot for the Newport Beach Film Festival in which an indie-film-obsessed father tells his daughter a terrifying, albeit creative, bedtime story rather than just reading a storybook.
CAANZ chief executive Paul Head this morning announced that Simon Lendrum, managing director of JWT New Zealand, has been elected to the position of CAANZ president, which was vacated by DDB’s Sandy Moore after his recent resignation.
Kiwi households with more than five, and even as many as 10, screens are becoming the norm, according to MediaWorks’ Lifestyle Survey for 2013. Mobile device ownership is growing exponentially in parallel with increasing social media use and online purchasing.
Nike isn’t an official Football World Cup sponsor. But when has that ever mattered? Back in 2010, it certainly didn’t stop it from riding on the coattails of the tournament and creating one of the best sporting ads ever made with Write the Future. Now it’s aiming to do the same for the upcoming tournament in Brazil with its Risk Everything campaign.
Oculus Rift fans have been wondering about the future of their beloved virtual reality gaming experience since it fell into the hands of new owners Facebook. This new mashup is a disturbing vision of where the platform could end up as the social giant dictates the roadmap.
Adobe came up with a creative way to deconstruct its logo and you wouldn’t expect anything less from a company that makes products all about creativity. Adobe Lights was a project which brought the pixels made by 100 artists globally to life in coloured blocks.
If you’re going to follow Playstation’s advice, don’t tell your mum or dad. The company recently asked European fans to stick their fingers in an electrical socket to endure a sustained shock, but it was all in the name of scoring a copy of the new game InFamous: Second Son.
FCB Media, OMD, SparkPHD and Mediacom have taken a large number of finalist placings in the CAANZ Beacon awards, for which winners will be awarded on 1 May. Mediaworks, TVNZ and iSite Media are in the running for the Media Brand of the Year.
For several years now, studies have shown population growth rates in the world’s developing nations have slowed down to the extent that populations are getting older, resulting in a growing strain on healthcare systems. And while the governments of the nations affected by this trend have not yet found a viable way to coax citizens into procreation, Denmark-based travel agency Spies is offering a solution via a cheeky new campaign that encourages couples to go on holiday to heighten the levels of passion in their relationships.
In this series, we talk to Kiwi keyboard tappers that have managed to shift from the personal realm of blogging to create online media brands that are widely read (and in some cases profitable). In the latest segment, we chat to Russell Brown, the owner of Public Address.
Moves and shakes at Mediaworks Radio, ANZ, Silvermoon, Touchast and Big Picture Media.
Direct and digital agency Twenty already has a sizeable insurance client, and it’s added another after winning the Asteron Life account after a competitive pitch.
A couple of Auckland’s major private schools have dabbled in billboard advertising, but private Christchurch girls school Rangi Ruru has taken things up a notch with its first ever TV ad, which has been launched to promote the school and its 125th anniversary.
Around the world, media owners are making changes to their commenting policies, with Google enacting a controversial real name policy on YouTube and Popular Science removing the comments section altogether because it felt ill-informed views “can be bad for science”. StopPress has plenty of great, insightful commentors. But many of them prefer to stick the boot in and push their own pseudonymous agenda, so, in the interests of transparency, the real identities of anonymous commentors can now be revealed with the click of a button.