The finalists of the NZDM Awards have been announced, with Colenso BBDO/Proximity and justONE/.99 leading the field on 13 each and Loyalty NZ next on ten.
Author StopPress Team
Craft brewers have a penchant for experimentation and, judging by the growth of the sector, that seems to be working out pretty well for a few of them. But Wellington-based ParrotDog is one of the few to have applied that philosophy to the audio-visual realm and it has once again gone loco in its newest ad.
Humanitarian aid organisation World Vision has enlisted the services of Sugar & Partners after the agency won a creative pitch.
Ellen DeGeneres has removed all the cigarettes from Mad Men to draw attention to the Great American Smokeout, an annual anti-smoking campaign arranged by the American Cancer Society that encourages nicotine puffers to stop for a day on the third Thursday of November.
With sledging cricketers grabbing headlines this week, it’s timely to put the spotlight on tuning out hardcore abuse. One NBA superstar’s solution is a poker face and a set of Beats By Dr Dre headphones.
Want to pimp your office with a new mascot? How about this moa, once an exhibition prop at Auckland Museum that’s now surplus to requirements?
The promotion for Anchorman 2: the Legend Continues has become a multi-faceted advertising stunt that makes it seem as though Will Ferrell has actually morphed into the gaffe-prone news anchor from the film. Now, after two trailers and cross-promotion with Dodge Durango, Ron Burgundy and his crew have decided to educate the world.
British Airways and creative partner Ogilvy UK have come up with a smart way to show off their range of destinations with billboards that communicate with its planes. It’s so simple even toddlers can #lookup.
Google seems to be making a habit of making us get all emotional. In a recent effort in India, it told the story of how search can bring about a touching reunion, now it’s showcasing a French boffin’s labour of aircraft love.
Auckland, Wellington and Rotorua have had a bit of tourism work done recently. And Tourism Bay of Plenty is following suit with a campaign that hopes to lure visitors to the region and get them to open their wallets over the peak summer season.
The creative use of statistics is fairly common in this industry, from the recent misleading Dove ad claiming 90 percent of New Zealand women would recommend it, to a current spot for Head & Shoulders that claims you’ll be “up to 100 percent dandruff free forever”, whatever the hell that means, to any number of other ASA complaints. So we appreciate a bit of truthiness from time to time, and Lipton (which is owned by Unilever, a company well-versed in the art of sneaky number usage) has taken the proverbial out of tenuous marketing claims with its latest campaign for sparkling iced tea. Plus: one of our favourite campaigns of the year shows why honesty is the best policy.
Michel Gondry, the French director best known for his work on the ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, animated his conversation with Noam Chomsky for a new documentary titled ‘Is the Man who is Tall Happy?’. And the result is a colourful reimagining of information viewers would normally find boring.
A new addition all but cements the new Fairfax executive team, Facebook hunts for a head of sales in New Zealand, Network’s Dennis Lynch passes the baton, Twenty plus one, Toni Knowles heads up VeNa, Stacey Perillo takes on Facilitate Digital role, PPR lauded for innovation, Hunter names a new general manager, 18 pyars get accrediatation, TV3 inspires a new generation of reporters and Metro Recruitment aims digital.
By selling its Switch Kites brand direct to consumers online, Inverno Trading has disrupted the industry’s traditional distributor/retailer model. And it’s gained legions of fans in the process.
In a sea of sameness and functional claims, NZ Tax Refunds rose above the rabble by giving the feeling a name.
David Bell, ex-creative director at Media Design School’s creative advertising course and the recipient of the 2011 lifetime achievement award at Axis, has been on a mission to get his book The Dog Hunters in front of as many people as possible since it was published in July. Sales are building slowly as word spreads, he says, and so far he’s been spreading it via social media and at shows like Armageddon. And now he’s harnessing the power of Kickstarter to help fund an illustrated version.
Last night’s last minute win over Ireland meant the All Blacks finished the season undefeated, the only team in the 18-year professional era to achieve that feat. And to celebrate, Adidas, which, as Gregor Paul wrote in a great piece about the creeping commercial influence on the game, might be trying to up its game after the arrival of fellow main sponsor AIG, created a new website (sort of).
The old creative writing adage goes “show, don’t tell,” and this is clearly an axiom that Getty Images aims to tap into with a new infographic that details why companies should use transmedia storytelling to market their offerings.
We had a bit of fun last week detailing some typos we’d come across recently. But this one from New Zealand Farmers Weekly that was sent in to us by an eagle-eyed reader takes the cake.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
A range of media owners are trying to find the sweet spot between ads and editorial. And the likes of MasterChef NZ and The Block NZ have been able to appeal to commercial interests without alienating the viewers. TVNZ’s latest effort in this regard is Purina Pound Pups to Dogstars, which arose from its million dollar branded content initiative and is currently in production. Plus: TVNZ’s new logo.
Google has commemorated the 50th anniversary of Dr Who by creating a doodle in honour of the popular television show. In addition to featuring cartoon versions of 11 of the characters, the doodle also has an interactive element in the form of a vintage video game.
Music videos have shifted onto the next step of their evolutionary progression to give us a new interactive experience. Earlier this week, Interlude’s Bob Dylan video was making the rounds, and now attention has shifted to Pharrell Williams’ 24 Hours of Happy.
BrandWorld’s Mike O’Sullivan pioneered the masthead format in New Zealand, he’s been inducted into the TVNZ Marketing Hall of Fame and, as this video created by his loving team shows, it turns out he’s also a dead ringer for Peter Griffin.
Potato chips and penguins are not a particularly natural partnership. But the power of advertising has made it so. And now, in Bluebird’s 60th year, our Antarctic friends are back in a rehashed ad to promote a co-branding initiative with Tegel and Wattie’s that sees the release of some new ‘Kiwi As’ flavours.
TVNZ’s loss is Orion Health’s gain as Annemarie Browne moves on, more changes at Fairfax, Aegis welcomes a new digital media guru, Octane rekindles old flame, 19-year-old entrepreneurial hot shot heads to the US and Iain Nealie shacks up with Google.
Forty-seven years after Bob Dylan’s song Like A Rolling Stone was released, it’s got a video to go with it. The clever work by digital media specialists Interlude in the US means viewers of the video can skip between channels as the song continues.
While the newspaper industry is currently facing up to a range of concerning statistics, one of the positive consequences of the digital era is that newspaper brands and media companies have been forced to innovate and experiment with new forms of storytelling. APN NZ did a great job of bringing all of the various strands of its modern business together for its 150th birthday celebrations last week, from the printed paper to the special editorial projects to the parallax scrolling website to the live blog of the newsroom to Dick Frizzell’s commissioned artworks of Kiwi legends to the 15-day promotion. And at the cocktail function at the Auckland Art Gallery, they showed a clip created by Leon Sefton of Perendale Productions that showed what the current crop of editors and journalists thought about the milestone—and what the company will need to do if it hopes to be around for the next 150 years.
Dodge has been getting a lot of mileage, if you’ll excuse the pun, out of Ron Burgundy and the upcoming Anchorman sequel. After several TVCs, it’s going online with a contest that lets you touch Ron (in a virtual sense) to try to win a Dodge Durango.
If you’re filled with the Christmas spirit, Coke Zero has just the site for you. It’s the Sweater Generator, where you can create yourself a jersey that will be the envy of yuletide nerds everywhere.