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].
Taschen and Mad Men. ‘Tis a match made in advertising heaven. And we’ve got three Ads of the Mad Men era notebook diaries to give away to those hoping to relive the glory days in 2013. So delve into the recesses of your mind (or the recesses of the internet) and post your favourite line or scene from the show (or just a funny old ad) in the comments and you could be the envy of all your friends next year.
We’re fans of Charlie’s ‘Mission from Good’, Unitec’s ‘We make the people who make it’ and Fly Buys ‘Every time you swipe something a little bit good happens’. And they just keep on giving.
Auckland Fringe 2013 officially launched today with a snazzy new look devised by design partner Special Group and the promise of three weeks of the bizarre, the beautiful and the baffling in February as “joystick orchestras, boy bands, Antarctic song cycles, cross dressing history celebrities and stories about dogs, Nazis and curry” vie for attention. And for all the creative types out there, festival sponsor Taxi Impact is offering you the chance to plaster one of its taxis with whatever wrap you want* as part of its Taxi Art Project.
‘Tis the season for awards, and Kiwi agencies have put in a more than respectable showing at the recent Australian Graphic Design Association Design Biennale Awards in Melbourne.
Auckland-based digital display and customer engagement company Ngage Media has struck up a deal with the Efficiency Group that will see it launch Ngage Australia. PLUS: a run-down on last week’s Cutting Through the Digital Landscape event.
As the Auckland Zoo gets set to mark its 90th birthday this month, it’s received an early birthday present in the form of a rebrand that was launched this week.
Big Communications already has a solid list of Auckland-centric clients on its roster, such as ATEED, Auckland Rugby, Barfoot & Thompson and The Blues. And it’s added another one to that list: The Langham Auckland.
Lindauer has been on a mission to empower the girls this year, and, in an extension of the Girs’ Night Out brand campaign, DDB played on the Sunday Star Times About Town section by creating an ad featuring forlorn, lonely male partners who were left at home to wallow in self-pity, iron, eat pizza, pat cats on stairs and watch TV with men friends as the girls got amongst it on Lindauer’s National Girls’ Night Out. And the esteemed judging panel of Matt Sellars from Saatchi & Saatchi, Crispin Schuberth from Barnes, Catmur & Friends, Paul White from AUT and Oriel Davis-Lyons from Special Group chose it as the best of the November bunch.
With a restructure currently taking place, assets being sold and general tough times in the newspaper industry being faced up to, APN certainly has a lot on its plate at the moment. But the local and international awards its digital team have won—from best website for the fourth time in five years at the Canon Media Awards to a few mentions at The Webbys—show it’s creating international quality solutions and doing its best to keep pace with rapidly changing media consumption habits. And APN Digital New Zealand was recognised again last week at the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers 2012 Digital Media Awards for the Asia Pacific region, with the recently redesigned nzherald.co.nz winning silver in the best in online media – newspaper website category, following up another silver in 2010.
NZ House & Garden’s April issue, which was shot at the home of avid antique collector Sandy Smith, has won the Magazine Cover of the Year at The Maggies.
What some call the Original Sin of publishers giving their content away for free online has meant media companies around the world have found it difficult to change that expectation among readers and monetise the online realm. But it does appear to be changing—slowly. As The Listener’s new push for paid content goes live, we thought we’d share this interesting infographic from bestcollegesonline.org and Mashable that showed what’s happening in the world of paywalls and how it’s affecting readership.
Job losses and a high-profile departure at APN, Tim Wood heads to Rapp Tribal, Paul Hancox heads to TV, Jordan Dale snaps up bcg2 scholarship and Pead PR bolsters its tech team.
When Claudia Batten speaks about business, it pays to listen. Her career began in corporate law with Russell McVeagh in Wellington, where she specialised in contract, IP and technology law. But as the tech boom boomed, she moved to New York and set up gaming ad network Massive, which was sold to Microsoft in 2006 for a princely sum, with some reports at the time claiming it fetched US$400 million. This year, she left her second start-up Victors & Spoils, the Boulder-based, crowdsourced creative agency she co-founded in 2009 with ex Crispin, Porter & Bogusky directors Evan Fry and Jon Windsor, after French holding company Havas bought a majority stake in the business and positioned it for international expansion. And, as is often the way with serial entrepreneurs, she’s already started work on her next, still rather mysterious project. But she took time out to have a chat with NZTE as part of its advice from entrepreneurs series.
Marmageddon has been a harrowing time for lovers of yeast-based spreads. But it’s been a boon for the media. And, remarkably, there’s still a bit more blood to be squeezed out of this particular stone, because Saatchi & Saatchi, Spark PR & Activate, Sanitarium and photographer Chris Sisarich have come up with a novel way to raise funds for The Rebuild Christchurch Foundation this Christmas by auctioning 19 photographs of empty Marmite jars donated by New Zealand celebrities including Rachel Hunter, Sir Graham Henry, Jaquie Brown and Trelise Cooper.
Just as humans will always react strangely when they see themselves on the big screen at the cricket, it seems they will also react strangely when they have the chance to see their name on a can of Coke, something the Share a Coke campaign has tapped into, first in Australia and now in New Zealand with the help of Ogilvy. And, continuing its long association with the festive season and adding to the more than 200 popular Kiwi first names (as this chap found out, Osama wasn’t one of them) and colloquial terms like Mate, Sis, Bro, Mum and Dad that have taken the place of the brand’s cherished logo, Coca-Cola has released another limited edition set of cans featuring the names of Santa and his nine reindeer.
Huffer, which turned 15 this year, joined forces with Absolut last year to design its own bottle and now it’s putting its special touch on premium cars, because 15 unique Audi A1s—the result of a collaboration with local fashion man and Audi ambassador Steve Dunstan—will hit Kiwi shores in January.
A fat, shiny bull mounting a helpless cow: this is war launched billboard-style by Holy Moly ice cream, which claims dairy giant Fonterra is screwing over small businesses with what it believes is anti-competitive behaviour.
‘Tis supposedly the season of giving, and The Telecom Foundation (the telecommunications company’s charitable arm) is making it slightly easier to for Kiwis to do just that after buying online giving platform Givealittle.co.nz and making the fundraising service entirely free.
Auckland branding agency Redcactus picked up three gongs at the global Pentawards recently and it’s celebrating another coup with the completion and publication of Col. Harland Sanders – The Autobiography of the Original Celebrity Chef for KFC.
The top hat and moustache combo is an enduring style. And, rocking the Daniel Day Lewis/lion tamer/creepy magician look to absolute perfection, the addition to the face of APN’s Rowan Spinks has been deemed good enough to take home the agency Mo of the Week title and a $150 voucher from The Grill thanks to TVNZ.
Waikato-based advertising agency King St is feeling pretty chuffed with itself, having snapped up the business for Lion’s Waikato Draught brand, in a move pitted as restoring the brand “to its glory days”.
Media is a competitive business, with everyone fighting hard for their slice of the pie. But it’s also collegial, with everyone cognisant of the struggles involved in getting those slices. And the two worlds combined this week when Tangible Media’s NZ Fishing World took on Fairfax’s Fishing News in the second annual fishing competition.
Saatchi & Saatchi snaffles a digi-boffin, a word from our X Factor sponsors, the Media Design School kids are alright, Adshel brings in a chief organiser, DB stalwart steps down, Gopher adds one to the burrow and Murray Lindsay swaps stations.
As Interbrand’s Tom Warden recently wrote, whether you go for a descriptive or associative brand name, choosing a name for your business is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. And The Namery, which claims to be Auckland’s first specialist naming consultancy, wants to help you with the process.
As news of APN NZ’s decision to sell off a few of its regional assets surfaced yesterday, news also surfaced about changes at News Works New Zealand, the umbrella organisation responsible for profiling the industry’s print and digital brands, which has restructured to “better serve the changing needs of the newspaper industry as it gears up for 2013” and create a more commercial focus to better promote its 30 national and regional news brands across the country.
There’s gold in them thar mobile hills. And a rare few developers have been able to mine it, with The Angry Birds brand estimated to be worth over $1 billion, and OMGPOP, the makers of the hugely popular Draw Something app, bought by Zynga earlier this year for US$185 million (it’s a fickle world, however, and, as is often the case, both Zynga and OMGPOP have failed to rediscover the magic recently). And now, inspired by the gameplay of Draw Something, Kiwi entrepreneurs Tristan Holman, who runs a consultancy called Flashgun in the UK, and Brett Hancock, who heads up Born Digital, are hoping they might follow in their footsteps with their own game called Act a Word.
As head of marketing for ANZ, Mike Cunnington is donkey deep in one of the biggest ever changes to New Zealand’s financial landscape. And the campaign to fuse the brands is now in its final stages. We had a chat with him for the November/December edition of NZ Marketing. And here’s what he said.
Colenso BBDO has earned a reputation for its cause-related communications, from its multi-award winning Doggelganger campaign for Pedigree to the brilliant Trial by Timeline for Amnesty International. And now it’s aiming to help St John, New Zealand’s primary frontline medical response organisation and the main provider of ambulance services. It takes over from Work Communications.
Coloured facial hair is usually reserved for those who drive housebuses, members of hair metal bands or Billy Connolly. It’s certainly not too common in this biz, but Carat’s business director Gareth ‘Connolly of the South’ O’Connor has used colour to great effect and been rewarded with the mo of the week title.
The growth in the outdoor industry is largely being driven by digital media, both ‘place-based’, like shopping malls, oil chains and airports, and large format. In the Asia/Pacific region, ad spend in digital out-of-home has grown 19 percent on average every year from 2006 to 2011 and global spend in the sector last year was $US7 billion, which is forecast to grow almost 20 percent this year. So local digital signage network nGage is bringing together a few smart cookies at an event that aims to showcase the digital signage ecosystem and offer a glimpse into the future.