Author StopPress Team

The founder of Dilmah, Merrill J. Fernando, and his son Dilhan have been in New Zealand recently signing off on a new round of ads created by small Kiwi agency Curtiss and Spence and overseeing the Real High Tea Challenge. We sent Dilhan, who is being primed to take over from his father as the face of the brand, a few questions.

Maybelline New Zealand is turning the humble manicure into works of art, getting Kiwi ladies (and perhaps a few lads) to strut their 10 fingernail-sized canvases through a Facebook app.

Leigh Hart has a prominent role as the prat-falling face of Hellers. But he’s not stopping at meat. Now he’s moving into beer, with his new mostly fake brew Wakachangi—”a South Otago beer with North Canterbury flavours brewed by a West Coaster with the ol’ misty waters of the Waikato”—offering an entertaining commentary on how brewers market their wares.

There’s still plenty of debate about what actually constitutes craft beer, but the pundits can agree on one thing: consumption of it is on the rise, with an article on Stuff showing craft beer made up 13 percent of total beer sales over the past year at Foodstuffs, up from nine percent two years ago, and about ten percent of total beer sales at Countdown. And two of the country’s top booze chains, Super Liquor and Liquorland, both of which are fighting a battle against those supermarkets, can also see the dollar signs and have signed up to sponsor major events on the craft beer calendar.

Independence Day is a marketing free-for-all in the US. And a whole range of brands aim to tap into the patriotic fervour. But this clip, from humour collective The Kids Table, gets to the nub of the modern, foolish, hypocritical and apathetic Western human condition better than any of them with a dose of humorous ‘truthiness’. As it says, “it’s pretty hard to care about wire taps, drone strikes, and the government eroding the rights we fought for centuries ago when you’ve got an ice cold beer in your hand”.

In one of the earlier seasons of The Simpsons, Homer discovers he has a long lost brother named Herb (voiced by Danny DeVito) – who just so happens to own a car company. Homer is invited to build the perfect car for Herb, but the design is so extravagant and unpopular it bankrupts Herb’s up to then successful company

Now a team entreating the 24 Hours of LeMons race in the US has brought Homer’s dream to life. We can’t help but imagine that this vehicle would be perfect for doing donuts in a New World carpark …. Mmmmm ….Donuts.

Staring competitions are an immensely popular spectator sport in some nations, as this factual BBC report shows. And, to illustrate the fact that the Samsung Galaxy S4 knows when you’re looking at it, it concocted a challenge to see if passersby in a train station could ignore the numerous distractions and keep their eyes on the prize.

Winter is time for breathing steam, and in New Zealand (and particularly in Dunedin flats) it often happens inside. But as this music video for Travis by Wriggles and Robbins shows, there are some pretty cool creative possibilities when you combine projections, humans and cold weather.

From the backs of legs to the front of movies, ad creep is increasingly pervasive. And, in a stunt reminiscent of All Good Bananas’ directional messaging in Kiwi supermarkets, advertisers have found a way to beam messages directly into tired travellers’ brains through a device attached to train windows. New media innovation? Or new media violation?

V’s latest campaign is all about adding some additional excitement to a “fairly mundane” sport. But the powers that be are also trying to enhance the sport’s perception, with a clip for the European Tour showing Rory McIlroy facing against a fast-talking golfing machine—literally—called Geoff and an ad for Nike featuring Tiger Woods that seems to be saying ‘shut up, golf IS a real sport’.

UK TV industry body Thinkbox​ has an on-going research project called TV nation, which tracks people’s attitudes towards different forms of advertising. This year it paired TV Nation with Ad Nation, a survey of people working in the advertising and media industries, and compared the two groups. And the results made for interesting, if not entirely surprising, reading.

Golf made interesting with death-sport twist and psychology experiments on children.

#Flashbackfriday seems to be a thing on Twitter. And a few socially-aware brands are joining in the fun so we can laugh at the past. For example, this quality Air New Zealand ad from the ’60s imploring New Zealanders to fly south and do the twist on a mountain-top, or ANZ’s classy, fashion-forward print ad.

​Current Idealog editor and ex-roving adland reporter Hazel Phillips has just released her new book Sell: Tall tales from the legends of New Zealand advertising. It’s a triumph, a tour de force, a gripping romp, and it tells the story of how the local ad scene came to be and the characters who helped create it (keep an eye out for an extract in the July/August edition of NZ Marketing magazine). We’ve got a couple of copies to give away, so go back into the mists of time and post your favourite Kiwi ad in the comments section. The two commentors with the best taste will get the literary spoils.

Frucor’s V brand has pushed a number of marketing envelopes in the New Zealand market and, given it’s at the head of the field in the energy segment, that seems to have paid off. Frucor also has global ambitions for the brand, and it’s looking to climb the ladder in Europe with a campaign centred around internet trolls.

Levi Hawken had his five minutes of fame when Nek Minnit started doing the pop cultural rounds. He’s milked it a bit since then, with cameos on TV3 with the likes of Food in a Nek Minnit and New Zealand’s Top Nek Minnit, but the opportunists cashed in on the phrase as well, selling a range of t-shirts and paraphernalia. So what do you do when the flames are petering out and the zeitgeist has moved on? You do an innuendo-filled ad with local ‘glamour model’ Kelly Windsor to spruik berry-flavoured lube, of course. Feels Delicious indeed.

New Zealand is basically the Canada of the South, with a loud, obnoxious neighbour, a passion for wood chopping and a strange combination of pride and self-doubt. So PopPress is confident this passport-based experiment by Canadian beer brand Molsons will be right up Kiwis’ alleys.

Pizza. It’s delicious, but no one has time anymore to walk down to the local pizza joint and wait for a box of carbohydrates, protein and other supposedly edible miscellany to heat up. Domino’s Pizza New Zealand is hedging on this to happen and predicts by 2016 4 out of every five of its sales dollars will be made online.