One of the talented StopPress Team of Content Producers made this post happen.
There’s nothing like leaving on a high note and Clemenger BBDO’s Jon Pickersgill and Sarah Jackson have done exactly that because, just before they jet off across the ditch for new creative adventures at Sapient Nitro in Brisbane, they scooped the June ORCA with their back to front/front to back anti-drug-driving campaign for the NZTA.
Porirua chocolate maker Whittaker’s has been voted New Zealand’s most trusted brand in the annual Reader’s Digest Most Trusted Survey, moving up three places to top the 2012 list, knocking last year’s number one St John’s from its perch down to number two.
In April this year the outdoor sector industry body OMANZ launched its Step Outside campaign using its own medium to reel in advertiser and media agency interest. And with phase one of the campaign safely tucked away in the past, phase two has kicked into gear, this time adding visual cues in an attempt to drive home the message of how powerful out-of-home advertising can be.
Six teams teams of young media and creative agency whippersnappers were named as place getter in last night’s inaugural Fairfax Media Young Spikes Media and Integrated Competitions, but it was the Whybin \ TBWA and OMD teams that took out the winning spots, and each will now represent New Zealand at the Young Spikes competition held in Singapore in September.
APN shuffles staff into senior appointments thanks to sales restructuring, M&C Saatchi’s hire at first sight, Wright Communications acquires a new trio, The Research Agency expands by two, Fairfax feels Droga5’s creative spirit and Dentsu eyes up Aegis.
Kleenex’s Paper Dresses campaign has been plodding along nicely since 2009, showing just how dextrous Kiwi fashion students can be with masses of toilet paper. This years campaign, however, has upped the ante with a concerted effort to bring the promotion further into the mainstream, thanks to a collaborative effort between Ogilvy, Kimberly-Clark and TVNZ that seeks to directly engage, and interact with, the public over the course of nine months.
Logos are a wonderful thing. Executed correctly, they can become an instantly recognisable representation of your brand. But for some brands, the need to evolve the logo is irresistible and, if you look at some of these before and after logos posted by Stock Logos, highly necessary.
Come this Friday, over 8000 athletes from around the world will be seeking medal glory, but they’re not the only ones in the running for top-placed rankings. The Olympic Games, of course, seems to be as much about athletic prowess as it is about getting brand messages across to the masses of captive viewers. And MediaCom Sport, together with Brandwatch, have created a nifty interactive data visualisation tool and Twitter tracker to keep track of how well the 25 Olympic sponsors are faring.
Yahoo! New Zealand’s inaugural Digital Stars Awards have been on the hunt for the country’s best emerging digital media talent and, after scrutinising 18 savvy entries, the list has been narrowed down and the five finalists revealed, representing a decent cross-section of Kiwi agencies.
Spinning Olympic promo, Gotye meets Star Wars, when Lego gets gangsta, Banking group Banco Sabadell’s mob of symphony, Morgan Freeman champions New Zealand, have a taco why don’t you, Lionel’s tea, Good Book’s metamorphosis, Graham Henry and Ted, and the most fitting 50 Shades of Grey promotion.
Putting a corporate design pitch out the public is nothing new. Toyota’s current logo was the result of a worldwide design competition in 1936, the result of which garnered an impressive 27,000 entries. While it may not be on the hunt for a new logo, Subway New Zealand is putting a call out to the public to design its gift cards with its ‘our cards, your canvas’ competition.
If you’ve been losing sleep lately, it probably has something to do with the thought of missing out on attending the event second in glamour and prestige only to the Academy Awards, the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards. If you haven’t purchased your tickets yet and fancy your hand at winning one, it’s time to stick your nose out. We want to know, if this year’s trophies were embossed with a scratch and sniff that revealed the smell of marketing, what would that smell be? The best answer wins a ticket to the awards, valued at $245.
Last year, New Zealanders’ confidence in the economy took quite the fall, plummeting nine points, from 99 in Q4 2010 to 90 in Q4 2011. And results for the second quarter of this year don’t make for better news, with confidence remaining at the global average of 91, down six index points from the same time last year, according to the latest round of Nielsen’s Global Survey of Consumer Confidence and Spending Intentions.
There’s Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, and our very own David Tua. Sure, the boxing world has been graced by many a talent over the decades, but Adshel reckons the pool of knockout talent isn’t the exclusive domain of athletes. Its newly launched Knockout campaign is an intercontinental battle where the best Adshel campaigns from the previous quarter are pitted against each other, with the ultimate power falling into the hands of you, the discerning industry player, to cast your vote.
Social media has forever changed the way we connect with each other and while some detractors are averse to sharing snapshots of their lives with the online community, LG and its advertising agency Y&R, are hedging their bets that members of the public will be keen to have their Facebook posts not only publicised, but brought to life by a team of performers and artist Otis Frizzell thanks to a gigantic 26-foot high bricks-and-mortar Facebook wall built in Auckland’s Aotea Square
Vodafone may be seeking to acquire a new branch of business with Telstra Clear, but DraftFCB’s latest TVCs for the Telco revisits BestMate, an old product favourite that, although popular, hasn’t received much promotional love as of late.
Wellington startup Showcase Software has launched its Showcase app, a business tool for marketers and sales teams that enables them to create a business app without the need for an app developer. And with Z Energy and Hyundai New Zealand already on board, the company’s eyes are now firmly set on the millions of business users of iPads and Android tablets around the world, with discussions already taking place with Nike and Apple.
Of all the sabbaticals you could embark on, flying halfway round the world to New Zealand to work on crafting a new beer range surely has to be one of the most desirable. And that’s the precise task assigned to US brewmaster Brian “Spike” Buckowski thanks to a campaign run by Barnes, Catmur & Friends for Boundary Road Brewery. Utilising brewing sites around the world, the agency put the call out for a genius brewer, with a skill set that sits somewhere between genius and God-like, to “come down and do his stuff”.
The advertising and marketing approaches of old are much less effective in today’s marketplace. Many consumers just want companies to stop shouting at them. And Stop Shouting is the name of an upcoming marketing seminar put on by Post Creative’s Post New in association with Air New Zealand, featuring speakers who believe that to win in business, radical changes in brand behaviour, marketing approaches and the way organisations conduct themselves is imperative.
Following on from its slick rebrand of Paper Plus last year, Hyde Group, with the help of writer Vaughn Davis and designer Graham Murray, has launched the chain’s new online office stationery offering paperplusoffice.co.nz with a series of billboards that aim to capture the attention of traffic in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch.
On average 115,000 Kiwis use Skype daily, and MSN New Zealand has added the site to its local advertising network, boosting MSN’s audience reach to over 2.3 million New Zealand internet users.
Babyboomers are often portrayed as greedy, BMW-driving, house-hogging, tax avoiding luddites. But they also use the internet, have Facebook pages and watch YouTube. So why should they miss out on all the viral marketing fun? As no one was really catering to them specifically in this area, Publicis Mojo Auckland, Goodman Fielder Australia’s Lawson’s bread and The Down Low Concept have tried to fill the gap with a light-hearted look at that particular life-stage, with self-help tips delivered by one of the statesmen of Australian comedy Trevor Marmalade.
New Zealand has a special connection to Antarctica, due to a combination of our close proximity, the past efforts of explorers like Edmund Hillary and our ongoing investment into scientific research on, protection of and stake in the icy continent. And, in an effort to draw attention to some of the altruistic, world-leading work the New Zealand Antarctic Research Institute is doing to unlock the secrets of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, the appropriately named BRR was enlisted to create a new identity.
After weeding through nearly 1,600 image submissions, Getty Images has picked Aucklander Jamie Wright as the winner of Grab New Zealand, a photography competition that gave enthusiasts the world over the opportunity to show off their visual definition of everyday Kiwi life.
After a pretty intense rough patch, where three of its big clients—Vodafone, Air New Zealand and Westpac—went west in quick succession, .99 has been on the hunt for a few wins and it’s received some welcome good news after being appointed as the full service agency for Tower following a recent head to head pitch against M&C Saatchi.
Sentia Media welcomes a new general manager, Cooper Street Media aims for the Sky, AD2ONE adds one, Insight goes global and JWT gets a move on.
The effectiveness of advertising on Facebook is being called into question once again following revelations from the BBC that its ‘VirtualBagel’ experiment, an imaginary business that tech reporter Rory Cellan-Jones started in a bid to test it, received 3,000 ‘likes’ within four days, despite the fact that it offered no products or interesting content.
Following the worldwide unification of TBWA’s digital operations into the Digital Arts Network (DAN), Whybin\TBWA has announced that its digital consultancies Tequila and Shift have officially been melded into DAN\Auckland. And in a coup for the local agency, the Auckland arm was chosen to build DAN’s user experience (UX) lab, the network’s global centre of excellence for digital user experience design.
He was up on stage a few months back collecting a trophy for best production company at the AXIS awards. But George Mackenzie, who spent three years with The Sweet Shop, most recently as managing director for NZ/Asia/MENA, has decided to try his hand elsewhere and will join Robber’s Dog as managing director.
As Rebecca Black so famously sung, “It’s Friday, Friday, Gotta get down on Friday, Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend, Friday, Friday, Gettin’ down on Friday, Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend.” But today isn’t just any old Friday. It’s the third Friday the 13th of the year. And to celebrate, Pak ‘n’ Save and DraftFCB decided to have a bit more fun and try to scare the bejeesus out of everyone.