With every new model released, mobile phones become less like mobile phones and more like computers. Data plans are slowly becoming more reasonable and, with Apple and Google already in on the action, mobile marketing is slated as one of the many next big things for the marcomms sector. As such, the demand for third-party metrics on mobile internet usage from advertisers and publishers in New Zealand is increasing, so Nielsen has responded to that demand with Mobile Market Intelligence (MI), something it claims is a world first in online audience measurement methodology.
Author StopPress Team
Online niche retailer Natureshop isn’t particularly well known in New Zealand. But in these modern and increasingly environmentally-conscious economic times, that doesn’t necessarily matter, because through a combination of extensive online marketing, high quality e-commerce websites and a focus on sustainability, it was named New Zealand’s fastest growing exporter, fastest growing retail or consumer products business and second-fastest growing company at the 10th annual Deloitte Fast 50 index.
Those creatives grow up so fast these days don’t they? Soon enough they’ll be getting told to shut up by Devo for talking during speeches at the Axis awards (if they’re lucky enough to get jobs when they graduate). So if you want to see what the young whippersnappers from the AUT Adschool have been up to in 2010, make sure you head along to the end of year show on Tuesday 9 November at Film Construction, 22 Minnie St, Eden Terrace. It’s industry only from 5.30pm to 7pm, then the hoards of parents, pals and pets get to have a gander from 7-9pm. And, as is the custom during the burgeoning festive season, the drinks and nibbles will be plentiful. Here’s what some of the young’uns produced last year.
Ben Lightfoot, the can’t-do-no-wrong boss of McCann Worldgroup’s New Zealand operations, has been appointed chief executive officer of McCann’s Singapore office, a promotion that’s just reward for Lightfoot’s efforts in relaunching a Kiwi face for McCann two years ago, according to Michael McLaren, regional director of McCann Worldgroup, Asia Pacific.
The Val Morgan Cinema Network is hosting a 3D Cinema Advertising Showcase next Tuesday night at Sylvia Park. But wait, there’s more than just a selection of awesome 3D ads from around the globe on display. All those who attend will also get to see an advanced screening of David Fincher’s The Social Network, a tale of mystery, intrigue, extremely wealthy nerds and banal status updates.
Humans have always strived to find new and exciting uses for fruit and vegetables (orange cannons, apple bongs and every kind of alcohol ever invented, for example). And New World, which now claims to be “different, just like you”, is the latest in a long line of grocery tinkerers, with a big new brand ad out of .99 that shows the staff band playing the likes of carrot recorders, cabbage guitars, pumpkin drums and other innovative musical instruments to the tune of Dave Dobbyn’s ‘Slice of Heaven’.
Those NAB ad of the month judges are obviously pretty tough nuts to crack, because Jeneal Rohrback from Marsden Inch, Sue Worthington from Indiego and Jon Coles from .99 decided not to select a winner for the October round. But in true NCEA fashion, they did give DraftFCB’s ‘Night test drive’ ad for Mini a Highly Commended acknowledgement.
The 2010 AWARD awards have drawn over two thousand entries across the nine major categories, including the newly created music video, applications, social media, environmental design and branded content. And the organisation responsible for dishing out what are deemed to be Australasia’s most prestigious creative awards (and also for creating the call for entries juggernaut known as Ian), is opening up a number of wildcard position on its juries. So, any Kiwis with an interest in the creative arts—whether they be agency folk or plumbers—can apply to be part of the action.
… with ACP Media, Sugar, DB Breweries and Alcatel-Lucent all issuing a few new swipe cards.
In a bid to capture consumers in the lead-up to Christmas (which is—deep breath—less than eight weeks away), HP and Microsoft have teamed up and established a temporary pop-up store in central Auckland. Called Ten O’Connell, the store opened on Thursday night and will remain popped-up for …
With Tourism New Zealand’s campaigns to China, Japan, Australia, the UK, USA and Germany now firmly unleashed, comes good news for New Zealand’s tourism market, with fresh figures from the Tourism Satellite Account: 2010 showing spending by international tourists in New Zealand increased 1.6 percent ($149 million …
As the UK plunges into the depths of a freezing, grey winter, tonnes of Kiwi’s look as if they want to give it up, opting instead for beaches, BBQ’s and that season called summer. Marmite’s Bringing Home the Kiwis competition, which will bring home 100 Kiwis for …
Next year is the 75th anniversary of Tip Top. So, as part of the celebrations that are sure to come in the new year (and to herald the arrival of the prime time ice cream consumption period sometimes known as summer), Colenso BBDO and up and coming Sweet Shop directors Mark Albiston and Louis Sutherland have gone to town—and country—and made eight almost documentary style, nostalgia-inducing commercials that are filled to bursting with all the ingredients of the classic Kiwi summer.
It’s that time of year again: Sausages are consumed voraciously, jandal-adorned feet almost instantly become sunburned, refreshing beverages are sought and summer advertising campaigns are released. And, following on from the man-heavy launch spot for the new Ranfurly Frontier lager a few weeks back, Lion Nathan and Publicis Mojo have also entered the masculine mainstream beer fray with a new number for Speight’s, which documents a rather urban Southern Man’s domestic journey to dish out a few cold Gold Medal Ales to the boys.
In this edition of Ads@6, there’s one dominant and quite unusual theme, with Countdown continuing to go for the media jugular and blast everyone for two minutes (but only on ONE) with its ‘Meet the Colemans’ soap launch, its Richard Till spots and a few other Countdown-related comms.
Following on from requests from local advertisers and in an effort to replicate the success of parent ninemsn’s opt-in email initiatives, MSN New Zealand has released a new service called Hotmail Featured Offers that allows advertisers to promote their wares to local Windows Live Hotmail users.
The last time we heard from the Toot Group they were trying to spread the meaty truth and destroy the sausagey lies as part of a campaign for Harrington’s Sausages (in fact, the ‘Know Your Sausage’ poster made as part of the Sausage Awareness Week still hangs proudly from the StopPress walls). And now the gang is back with some more good work for The Trusty Delivery Co., a new grocery service modelled on a successful business in Australia that is aimed at busy, environmentally conscious shoppers who can’t be arsed going to the supermarket.
A relative outsider has stormed through the pack to take out the supreme award in the inaugural New Zealand edition of The Maggies, with the January 2010 issue of women’s surf and snow magazine Curl beating out the big boys to take Magazine Cover of the Year.
For all those looking for some insight into the latest global trends in the realm of unaddressed mail and catalogues, the ‘International Catalogue Exhibition’, which is sponsored by PMP Distribution, is being held over three days (26-28 October) at Auckland’s Heritage Hotel. It’s basically junk mail nirvana.
New Zealand Post has been in the news recently after announcing the arrival of ‘Localist’, a start-up directory business that aims to target Auckland’s small to medium sized businesses, where the local advertising market is thought to be worth around $600 million a year. Yellow responded to the threat with an $8 million investment and the promise of 100 new national sales roles. But away from all that excitement, New Zealand Post Targeted Communications has launched another marketing toy called iTRY, a digital-to-mail sampling solution that gives companies an opportunity to get their products and services into the hands of consumers to trial.
State’s recent ‘My 3 Things’ campaign aimed to show Kiwi consumers the company was actually very nice, cared about your stuff and, quite perplexingly, was looking to find a way to insure the things that were uninsurable. Now DDB New Zealand and AMI Insurance have taken a similar—although more light-hearted and colloquial—approach with a new campaign and repositioning statement for the company that aims to show it ‘Insuring New Zealandness’.
Much like watching an All Black return from injury, the marcomms sector always keeps a very close eye on the communications work of companies that have recently suffered some kind of PR crisis. Certainly, when Telecom’s Paul Reynolds came out in his waders in Glenorchy after the XT debacle with an apologetic number asking New Zealand for forgiveness, opinions on whether or not this was appropriate spewed forth. Since then there have been plenty of ads promoting specific deals and products (sadly, the on-air proposal didn’t really work out either), but Telecom and Saatchi & Saatchi now appear to have resumed normal branding transmission with the release of a beautiful new TVC (by Prodigy films), print campaign and positioning statement ‘From here we can do anything’.
After a period of relative silence on the self-promotional front, Ogilvy has been making up for lost time recently and trumpeting a host of its new work. And the latest addition is a new, characteristically quirky summer campaign for L&P that aims to appeal to young Kiwi malingerers.
Y&R New Zealand’s digital and interactive specialist arm VML@Y&R is now up and running, with Nigel Hammersley and Michael Gregg, two of New Zealand’s most experienced digital practitioners, taking charge of the newest addition to the global network.
As the well-known Queenstown saying goes: “It’s tourist season, but, sadly, you can’t shoot them”. And to try and further increase visitors over the upcoming summer boom time, Tourism New Zealand has launched a fresh marketing offensive in China and expanded its digital campaigns in Japan, USA, Canada, UK and Germany, all of which signify a marked change of strategy following the addition of digital specialists Amnesia Razorfish to its agency roster.
The myth of the subliminal message in advertising is a long-standing one. But Ogilvy and All Good Bananas haven’t given up on that marketing dream and have employed the services of some cool instore technology called ‘Audio Spotlight’ to impart a message about fair trade and environmentally friendly bananas directly into the ears—and brains—of unsuspecting Kiwi shoppers.
Given the stellar performance of the yellow orb known as ‘Old Brighty’ over the long weekend, you probably didn’t receive your regular dose of television advertisements. So here’s a whole heap of them to welcome you back. This time round the love-hate relationship with Tower’s Brian and Lisa continues; TelstraClear launches its big TV push to celebrate 20 years of Kiwi service; the next ad in the RaboPlus ‘It Pays To Focus’ series continues the good form; and, despite threats to pull its advertising from TVNZ following the Paul Henry furore, Countdown instead releases a massive new soap opera and forks over a whole heap of cash to block out ONE’s ad break.
If you miss today’s 5pm deadline to enter the New Zealand Marketing Association’s RSVP and Nexus Awards, they would like to alert you slackers to the fact that, if you pay your extension fee, there’s a maximum of one extra week to get your entries in. Also, early bird discounts for Social Media Junction 2 run out next week.
Oliver Maisey takes up some new creative reins, Naked adds two senior comms planners to its roster and Perceptive loses one of its account managers to social media.
The NBR gave Stuff’s digital billboard promotion a bit of grief this week after it suffered from a few technical difficulties. But the glitches have obviously been ironed out and Fairfax is now using arbitrary capitalisation to trumpet the arrival of “New Zealand’s First Interactive News Billboard” in Aotea Square in Auckland.