Author StopPress Team
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].
Last night, Sky and DDB held a small celebration at The French Cafe to mark the pair’s 20 year relationship (check out some of the best ads here). And, perhaps because of the positive response its last music video/love song received, DDB decided to whip up another one for Sky, which includes an amazing performance from the creepy envelope licker Lloyd.
ASB and Saatchi & Saatchi have added another award for the Like Loan campaign, which lowered its home lending rate with Facebook likes. The latest is a Warc Prize for Social Strategy, awarded to only 18 campaigns globally.
Big sporting events bring them a flood of commercial messages and advertisers are starting to release their work for this year’s Football World Cup in Brazil. But Powerade’s short documentary on Nico Calabria, who hasn’t let the fact that he only has one leg stop him from becoming an amazing footballer, will be hard to beat.
The McDonald’s Australia Facebook page recently reached the milestone of one million Facebook fans and, to celebrate this milestone, the fast food chain produced a quirky ’80s-video-game-inspired cartoon that succinctly relays the full range of common interactions that brands have with consumers via social media. It also seems that McDonald’s is continuing its trend of honesty by including various references that allude to complaints from fans. PLUS: see which other brands also celebrated reaching this milestone.
Ogilvy & Mather has won the inaugural News Works Agency League competition, which since last March has has been celebrating the nation’s standout newspaper adverts on a monthly basis.
The finalists for the 41st edition of the annual One Show Awards, regarded as one of the most prestigious in the world, have been announced, and Kiwi agencies have been acknowledged as finalists in 20 of the categories listed. This year, the show received almost 22,000 entries from 63 countries, and these were then whittled down to 1,229 finalists (from 463 agencies) by a panel of international judges. Each of these finalists will now have to wait until 9 May, when the winners will be announced during a ceremony at Lincoln Centre in New York City. As was the case last year, Clemenger and Colenso received the most nominations among the Kiwi agencies.
Much like a great wagon trek during a gold rush, countless food trucks have arrived in Auckland in an effort to snatch a piece of the fast (but gourmet) food market. Standing out in this increasingly crowded space is no mean feat, but this is exactly what husband-and-wife duo Otis and Sarah Frizzell have managed to do with their technicolour food truck business, The Lucky Taco.
Sometimes smoking is cool on TV and in movies, sometimes it’s not, and brands move with the trend. Action for Smoking and Health (with the cunning acronym ASH) is on a mission to find out if teens think their peers are hotter with a cigarette in their hand and dating app Tinder is the tool of choice.
AT&T is showing it has a sense of humour and a personality with its recent parody of the drama True Detective. Matthew McConaughey’s character Rust Cohle is the one to get a spoof, complete with drawl, a juice box and a group of kindergarten kids.
British brand McVitie’s has declared all out war on cookies and not just the baked things that come out of the oven. It’s released a Chrome plugin that will detect cookies on your computer, the data that tracks internet visitors, and blow them into oblivion.
Spilt rabbit, self-deprecation and schadenfreude catch our attention this week.
Trustpower has been offering phone and broadband services for eight years under a standalone brand, but its name naturally prompts an association with electricity. The company is out to change that with a campaign that reveals a full kit of services.
Would you take a job that asked you to work 135 hours or more a week, have degrees in medicine, finance and the culinary arts while not receiving any holidays whatsoever? That’s what one interviewer asked for recently.
Sky’s chief executive John Fellet likes to keep a fairly-low profile. But he’s decided to play his part for a skit on The Crowd Goes Wild that indicates life at Sky is akin to The Office and shows Fellet giving Mark Richardson and “that other guy” a good (fake) bollocking for telling fans on-air that Kiwi fighter Brice Ritani-Coe could get a wild-card entry into Sky Arena’s Super 8 event.
The Herald on Sunday ran a story over the weekend that detailed All Black Aaron Smith’s romantic dalliances. And we couldn’t help but notice a strange bit of brand advocacy in among the sordid revelations.
Some say that print is dead, but maybe advertisers just need to start using the medium in new, more creative ways? And no, we are not talking about QR codes or even any kind of clever digital tie-in.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
Vodafone is making sure it doesn’t miss out on its share of sales of Samsung’s latest generation Galaxy smartphone, the S5, with a hint of gold fever. It negotiated to offer the gold variant of the device and is putting up a bunch of swag to enthusiasts who can’t resist being first to get the new tech.
Creativity is all-important in this industry. But it’s also messy and difficult, as this simple yet quite accurate diagram shows.
The modern human condition tends to be one of constant connection and, in many cases, slight addiction. But JWT and Sacred Hill are jumping on the mindfulness bandwagon and aiming to inspire a different, more classical version of connection with a beautifully-crafted new print campaign.
The search has begun for the next 26 winners keen to etch their names in the nation’s marketing history, with the call for entries for the 2014 TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards now open.
Sadly, a lot of the time content marketing is terrible. Marketers trying their damnedest to make something that will ‘go viral’ often miss the mark by a long shot. But when a brand gets it right, it’s awesome.
There are plenty of songs that take the piss out of social media (one of the best in this category is College Humour’s ‘Look at this Instagram’). But you know what there aren’t enough of? Serious songs about social media marketing, like this one, which was performed at a conference and made us throw up in our mouths.
MediaWorks announced yesterday that it would be extending its radio brand The Edge onto television by launching a new TV channel on the Freeview and Sky platforms later this year. Described by The Edge programme director Leon Wratt as “radio with pictures on steroids,” the Edge TV will feature Jay-Jay Feeney, Mike Puru, Dom Harvey, Guy Williams, Sharyn Casey, Clint Roberts and other presenters on a daily basis. Updated with comments from MediaWorks group comms manager Rachel Lorimer and MediaWorks radio group programme director Andrew Szusterman.
Colenso BBDO and Whybin\TBWA are the only Kiwi agencies in the running for a Webby Award, with DDB, Terabyte Interactive, Saatchi & Saatchi, DNA and Y&R also honoured.
Hell is getting set to launch its new smoked rabbit pizza, just in time for Easter. And, like many companies launching new products, it sent out a goodie bag to selected media to draw attention to it. But, unlike many companies launching a new product—and in quintessentially controversial Hell fashion—it also included this unusual ceramic toy.
Industry moves at the Marketing Association, 8 (8com), Fairfax, Icebreaker, Ogilvy, Zenith Optimedia, Volom, Pead PR and The Sweet Shop.
There’s method in Amazon’s madness as it breaks into the streaming media market, if the new TVC for Amazon Fire TV is anything to go by. The madness is the star courtesy of crazy specialist actor Gary Busey, who in talking to inanimate objects shows the value of a voice search feature that actually listens.
Nissan is using its 80th birthday celebrations with a very techy promotion to pay homage to owners of its vehicles who find it hard to part with their steeds in favour of a new model. ‘Love stories’ between owners and their cars can be shared on a new website or social media and some families even get a 3D printed model of the family with their old vehicle when a new one is delivered.