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During the Cricket World Cup, Hyundai promoted its new Genesis sedan by putting cars on plinths—and in the path of some sixes—inside the grounds and trying to get people to answer a few questions about the car’s various features in its animated TV ads. But they do things bigger in the US, so it used a few of them to send a message from a girl called Stephanie to her astronaut father.
A big part of GoPro’s marketing strategy is to promote great footage captured by its users. And that often just proves how dull your own life is. Or is it? One office worker who strapped on a camera and made the footage into “an exciting GoPro commercial” doesn’t think so.
Industry happenings at Adhub, NZTE, NZME, Vodafone, Socialites, Anthem, Beat Communications and Contiki.
The Campbell Live saga has shown that commerce and current affairs often make uneasy bedfellows. But across on a different medium, the publicly funded Radio New Zealand and the commercially minded NZME are jumping into bed, with iHeartRadio now streaming Radio New Zealand National, Radio New Zealand Concert and Radio New Zealand International. And both sides think it’s a win-win.
Mitsubishi and Clemenger BBDO have had a fairly good run on the advertising front, with the retro campaign for the Mirage and the humorous take on hybrid technology to launch the MPEH Outlander standing out. Now it’s released an ad promoting the just released Triton ute that talks up its reliability with the tagline ‘You can bet on it’.
Where brands used to simply advertise, now they’re regularly ‘creating content’—and often hoping to inspire warm fuzzies. Vodafone and True nailed it, Air New Zealand did it over Christmas, Samsung made a very special delivery in Australia and to show how it is helping to preserve our national icon, Tasti has got in on the act with ‘Project Nest’.
Earlier this year, in an effort to encourage the entrants of the Winston Fletcher Fiction Prize to write freely, the competition organisers released a quirky campaign that places typical client feedback alongside the covers of three famous works of fiction. The targets of client dissatisfaction in this case are Salman Rushdie, Scott F Fitzgerald and Joseph Heller, and the comments in each instance criticise the very aspects that make their books so enduring.
Last week, Coca-Coca Life hit Kiwi shelves, giving Kiwi consumers their first opportunity to purchase the stevia-based variant. But long before anyone in Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington or Dunedin was able to taste the drink, the Coca-Cola team headed south to the rustic setting of Otira to give the 87 permanent residents living there the first sampling rights. The proceedings that unfolded were captured on film and then edited into Coke’s new TVC, which carries the ‘Let Life surprise you’ slogan.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
Automotive brands are pretty keen on ambassadors. Audi has Simon Gault and Steve Dunstan, BMW has Jeff Wilson, Josh Emett and Kathryn Wilson and now Jaguar has joined the club and teamed up with the founder of Crane Brothers, Murray Crane, to launch its new XF and continue its sales momentum.
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, get ready to submit an entry and show us what you’re made of. PLUS: how to win two tickets to the awards and a night at the Langham.
Imagine being able to travel to a destination simply by imagining it. Well, with Russian Airline S7, you can in a sense with the Imagination Machine (created by Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam in collaboration with Tellart), a unique installation that uses EEG-technology to turn participants’ minds into game controllers.
Since its inception, Skype has served as means by which people living on opposite sides of the world could see and hear each other. For some time, it was the market leader and functioned independently without too much competition from other players. However, Google’s move into online calling when combined other services such as Whatsapp and Viber have placed pressure on Skype to evolve its offering—and the service has done just that.
The frisson of live musical events is what makes them so appealling, both for musicians and fans. And while video games aren’t likely to replace that sensation, the latest iteration of Guitar Hero is offering a dose of reality by allowing gamers to play in front of live crowds.
For many years, one of the primary tourism marketing strategies has been to pay for high-profile humans to come visit. Generally, that’s been in the form of travel writers. But as social media democratises publishing and individuals gain huge audiences through various social channels, that’s changing quickly. Tourism New Zealand has been embracing this for a while now (as has Contiki, which recently announced local YouTube star Jamie Curry would join its fourth roadtrip) and Tourism Wanaka got in on the act recently with its first official #instameet last weekend.
In the lead up to the official release of his book Private Vegas, James Patterson made available a single edition of the book that would self-destruct after 24 hours. But it came with a pricetag of $300,000, making it exclusive one super rich fan. So, to appease his equally faithful but poorer fans, he commissioned the digital wizards at Resn to develop a website that provided 1,000 electronic copies of the book, each of which also self-destructed after 24 hours.
For many, getting ink on your fingers after reading a newspaper is probably a rather quaint notion. But SparkPHD, NZME and ANZ embraced it for a Cricket World Cup supporter’s ad and came away with the win in newspaper ad the Ad of the Month.
We’ve seen Tweeting sharks and honey badgers, driving dogs, armed dolphins, soothsaying cows, live streamed eagles and even erotic cats. And now we’ve got an octopus photographer—AKA Octographer—after Sony and FCB gave ‘Rambo’ a camera and taught it how to take photos of visitors to Kelly Tarlton’s aquarium.
Through its ongoing ‘Easy As’ campaign, Mitre 10 has shown that the Kiwi appetite for DIY extends beyond home renovation TV shows. In September 2013, the first phase of the intiative, which consisted of 27 clips, reached one million YouTube views. But general manager of marketing Dave Elliott says that this is only small part of what underpins the company’s digital strategy.
With driverless cars seemingly written in the automotive stars, those who get a thrill out of controlling their own vehicle might soon be forced to do it in private, rather than in public. And VW has riffed on the joy of driving with a great spot about a man with a very unusual dilemma.
Whether it’s a set of knives, tiny groceries, a free coffee, a toaster, fuel discounts or Airpoints, reward schemes and collectables campaigns are so hot right now in marketing land. In conjunction with TRA, we’ve asked normal humans what they think about the various schemes on offer and now we want to hear from you in the industry, so help us out, fill in this survey and you’ll go into the draw to win your own reward in the form of a Timex Ironman Move x20 Activity Tracker Band valued at $180.
.99 has secured the creative account for Carpet Court, one of the biggest players in the New Zealand flooring sector, after a competitive pitch.
Channel Four in the UK has a fairly impressive in-house creative team, as evidenced by its magnificent Paralympics campaign from a few years back. And now, to launch its new ondemand platform All4, it’s peered 100 years into the future and predicted a same sex royal wedding, robotic horse racing and a series of mutant hosts.
Extreme close-ups can cause everyday items to look virtually unrecognisable as the characterising details are magnified under the photographer’s lens. And this serves as a reminder that though these tiny details might not be immediately apparent to the naked eye it doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. So, in an effort to draw attention to the design details that went into the new Kia Sorento, Work Communications has launched a new spot that gives viewers a close-up look at the various sections of the vehicle’s bodywork.
The Effies Worldwide Index was released last week and, after tallying up the points earned through finalists and winners in the local Effie awards shows, FCB New Zealand and Colenso BBDO were ranked fifth and eighth respectively in the individual agency rankings, with Barnes Catmur fifth in the independent agency rankings. PLUS: all the Kiwi wins from the Asia Pacific Effies.
Yesterday, Sky was again reminded of how intense and instantaneous online outrage can be when advertisers don’t deliver on what’s promised. In this case, the promise involved simulcast streaming of the new season of Game of Thrones at the same time as viewers located in the United States. Sadly, as 1pm rolled in, the stream failed and the online fury ignited. And while it wasn’t difficult to find scathing comments about Sky’s streaming mishap, it was quite entertaining to see Slingshot engage in a bit of corporate banter.
According to a story in Digiday, The Onion makes 90 percent of its ad revenue through content creation, with a number of big brands looking to infuse a dash of the site’s humour into their commercial messages. And this series for Honda about an unassuming office worker who is convinced by a stuffed wolf to pack in his job, buy a motorbike and ride the road “righting wrongs and making wrongs right” is one of our favourites.
In 2012, Dave Schiff started ad agency Made in a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado with two friends. They had no money, no clients and no idea how to run a business. Just three years later Made has more than 40 employees with a client list including a host of internationally recognised brands. And this week, Schiff is in Auckland to speak at Project15 on modern disruption and cause-based advertising.
In 2013, the long wait for a Thunderbirds are Go revamp finally ended with the announcement that ITV Studios and Pukeko Pictures (in association with Weta) had agreed to remake the show under the title Thunderbirds are Go—and last night Kiwis watching TV2 got their first taste of the CGI-powered live-action model sets coming to life during the first episode of the 12-part first series. PLUS: Brains introduces the new show.
Advertising veterans George Logothetis and Graham Clifford took part in a bit of blasphemous product placement over Easter, with their Product Placement Bible. The result is a humorous (or not so humorous depending on the individual) website which imagines scripture sponsored by some of the world’s top brands.