This post was created by one of the small but mighty StopPress team of journalists. Among their number are: Zahra Shahtahmasebi, Niko Kloeten, Penny Murray and Rachel Tsai. Send your news to [email protected].
The Japanese are renowned for their kooky ideas, be it in the form of ads, businesses or game shows. And, to promote the speed of its new “premium 4G” ultra-fast data service, telco provider NTT Docomo has followed up last year’s elaborate high-speed fried shrimp ad with an elaborate high-speed gyoza dumpling ad.
The 2015 TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards are ready to be collected. So if you feel you’ve performed heroic feats of marketing over the past year, take a leaf out of Wendy Rayner’s book, submit an entry and you could also be Mighty Marketing material.
From Ram’s patriotic effort to Cadillac’s knobby manifesto to Lincoln’s campaign featuring Matthew McConaughey, car brands often like to get deep and meaningful in their ads. Honda has given automotive cliches a bit of poke—while gratuitously promoting its new car to “a small but hard to reach demo”—with an ad featuring Abed and Dean Pelton from Community, which is being shown on Yahoo and sponsored by Honda.
Back on Oct. 27, 1994, Wired (or, as it was then known, Hotwired) claims to have given birth to the web’s first banner ad. 20 years on and the web is littered with them, to the point where banner blindness has become a real thing. But how well do you really know your banner ads? Boonstra McDonald has created a site where you can learn a bit more about your favourite flashing friends. And it turns out large rectangle, square button, pop-under and co. have got quite interesting back stories.
The Pew Research Center in the United States has released its 12th edition of the annual State of the News Media report, which examines the landscape of American journalism and tracks trends related to readership, revenue and device usage. And while the publication doesn’t include a Kiwi perspective, it does provide an in-depth glimpse at many of the changes and challenges that the local media also faces due to digital disruption. One of the most telling findings from the study was that 39 of the top 50 news sites now receive more traffic to their sites on mobile phones than from desktops.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
We live in sad times. And they just got sadder, because artists Aric Snee & Justin Crowe have released an amazing new narcissistic development, the selfie-arm, ‘a sarcastic solution to the problem of being alone.’ PLUS: the wonders of solo chatting.
In an effort to remind Russians to watch their speed, BBDO Moscow has produced a smart YouTube-based campaign for InTouch Insurance that only shows an accident happening when viewers fast-forward an otherwise boring ten-minute video of a car driving along the road.
Four-person Swedish agency Dogwash has released a quirky campaign that allows ad folk to accurately express their thoughts through a catalogue of emojis that can be downloaded from the app store. And since most agencies always have one eye on the gong, the emoji suite includes Cannes Lions, Clios, D&D Pencils and a host of other award-themed options.
Game of Thrones has seemingly become to Ireland what Lord of the Rings is to New Zealand: a perfect opportunity to market stunning landscapes to fans of the series. And for this reason, Tourism Ireland and HBO have been surprising Ireland’s residents and visitors by scattering fantastical Game of Thrones props around the country to promote the show while simultaneously promoting Ireland as a tourist destination for Game of Thrones fans, or anyone who admire the stunning landscapes in the series.
As the industry continues to fragment, agencies are forced into adapting their approaches to ensure that clients’ demands are still met. And while they don’t always have the massive holding-company budgets at their disposal, indy agencies have the nimbleness to react quickly to change and redefine their role. And Sugar & Partners creative and digital director Dave Nash sees this as a major advantage at a time when more and more clients are asking for integrated advertising executions.
Content is de riguer at the moment. And while there’s plenty of action in this area, there’s also plenty to learn. So, to help with that, StopPress is hosting an event next week for those looking to get a flavour of the latest thinking on content marketing. The Content Marketing Picture—organised in partnership with co-hosts Getty Images and TVNZ—will take place at the Spark Conference Centre in Auckland, Tuesday 5 May, from 5.00pm.
After a year of judging new brand ads in New Zealand, Colmar Brunton has announced that Vodafone and FCB’s festive ad ‘Dinner for two’ has taken out the award for 2014’s Most Impactful Ad, with Samsung’s G5 Days and Nestle Purina’s ‘Herding Cats’ also claiming big fist trophies for the most persuasive and most enjoyable awards respectively.
It seems that many aspects of life are crossing over to the digital realm these days down to the way we communicate, work, shop, read – the list is endless. Ikea has taken this idea one step further, offering an online virtual wedding service.
While some car brands have attempted to get cars running on water, Toyota has taken a different approach, proving to the public that it has a car that quite literally runs on bullshit.
As technology continues to develop and become more readily available, it gives ad agencies the means by which to evolve the traditional media channels—and this is particularly prominent in the out-of-home advertising category. Locally, we’ve already seen billboards update in real-time during the elections, we’ve seen selfies linked from Twitter to outdoor digital screens, and we’ve had outdoor creative adjusting in accordance with the temperature. And now, Ogilvy & Mather in Hong Kong is taking it a step further with a new anti-littering campaign that uses the DNA of litterbugs to create digital faces that have a resemblance to the actual people who dropped trash on the floor.
The Apple Watch has, as expected, created plenty of chatter. And it’s now launched three TV ads showcasing what it can do—and, perhaps unintentionally, what it can stop.
Former director and owner of now-defunct company The Media Counsel (TMC) Glenda Wynyard has been sentenced to eight months’ home detention.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
Changes at ASB, Starcom/ZO, TVNZ, Ambient Group, MediaWorks and Fonterra.
Devin Graham, an American videographer who produces adventure and extreme sport videos under the name Devin Super Tramp, has become one of social media’s biggest names, with more than 2.9 million YouTube subscribers and over 530 million total views. Tourism New Zealand got him to come for a visit and it ended up being the most successful social influencer work it has done to date.
The buzz phrase ‘programmatic ad buying’ has been picking up momentum in recent months, and is now commonly heard in discussions on the state of modern media. And despite the frequency with which the word is used, it still carries enough uncertainty to motivate ad tech company Chango to recently run a sponsored web series on Adweek explaining key concepts to the US market. Similarly to the US, New Zealand is also coming to grips with programmatic ad buying. And to find out a bit more, StopPress recently chatted to Zane Furtado, the programmatic director at Acquire Online.
The way the world is going, it probably won’t be too long before the mobile phone renders cards obsolete. But until that happens, ASB is using the phone to make using cards easier by allowing customers to set temporary locks and maximum withdrawals and restrict contactless, international and online payments.
The marketing world is keen on vending machine stunts, with stunts allowing them to accept everything from hugs to Canadian passports to piano playing to motionlessness (this trend was skewered nicely by Taxi). Now, in an effort to tackle pollution, Volkswagen has created one that accepts batteries instead of currency in Russia.
For some strange reason, unboxing videos are quite popular and some of the channels are making millions. But Samsung played with the artform to launch its new phones, showing some much more exciting activities than normal.
Advertisers are increasingly questioning the brand value offered by banner ads that seemingly do little more than annoy web users. And for this reason, media owners and agencies are being forced into producing innovative online banner campaigns that include interactive elements. So recently, when FCB and the Pandora international ad development team set out to create a campaign for the release of the new Holden Cruze, the pair decided to give users a look inside the vehicle.
The Maybelline cosmetics brand started out in 1915 when Mabel Williams combined coal dust with Vaseline to create a more dramatic eye—and it has since grown into a beauty product juggernaut. We take a look at some of the brand’s print ads over the years.
A meaningful slow clap goes out to NZTA, Mitsubishi, Tasti, Spark and Coca-Cola this week.
