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].
A veritable smorgasbord of Kiwi magazine industry hot shots have been roped in to impose their harsh judgements for the inaugural New Zealand edition of The Maggies, the popular UK award show that’s been shipped down to the southern hemisphere to honour the year’s best magazine covers.
Subjects were canvassed, numbers were crunched and insights that have guided strategy and communications were delivered. And the research companies that have followed this path and impacted on the fortunes of their clients have been recognised with the announcement of the finalists for the Market Research Effectiveness Awards.
Hey, look, it’s almost Fathers’ Day, which means a host of companies will soon start guilting consumers into buying socks, booze and other trinkets in order to show their patriarchal love. And nothing says fatherly love like Chivas Regal, some of which you can win if you’re cool and entertaining enough.
Pizza and horror movies have always gone pretty well together. And while there have been plenty of classic zombie flicks over the years, not one of them has featured pizza in the movie itself. Hell Pizza and Christchurch-based filmmakers Little Sister Films decided to change that by creating Deliver Me to Hell, supposedly the world’s first ‘pick a path’ interactive Zombie movie and now a mid-level YouTube sensation.
On this edition of Ads@6, ANZ receives plaudits for the gratuitous use of a meercat; Women’s Weekly puts its ladies on display; State’s ‘My 3 Things’ puts a few favourite things in boxes; the Audi spot makes design/tech nerds (and possibly even captains of industry) go weak at the knees; Orcon opens up multiple windows; Telecom attempts to lure the punters to its Backing Black scheme; and Fantastic noodles embraces Engrish.
After snatching the Westpac account from Saatchi and releasing a couple of rather well-received campaigns recently, Colenso is on a bit of a roll at the moment. And, as is often the way when the going is good, the hires have followed, with Daniel Wright set to join as digital creative director at the end of the month and Margot Chandler appointed as Clemenger Group’s ‘people development director’ in a newly developed human resources role.
After losing the Flight Centre business recently, Total Media, which is part of the Omnicom Group, has decided a restructure is in order, so there’s no room for the Auckland general manager position, a position which was held by Jason Rutherford for the last eight months.
Group chief executive …
Barnes, Catmur & Friends has just released a new Benjamin Button-esque billboard campaign for Okuma (it’s Kiwi for fishing, don’t you know). And it involves some pretty classic, quintessentially swarthy young/old seadogs. Ah, don’t they grow up and get tattoos and have facial hair and start smoking pipes and reeling in those big ones so fast these days.
This country’s diminutive stature has, according to legend, made us the perfect testing ground for technology firsts. And while it seems we always have to wait before we get our delivery of the newest gadgets, there have been a host of cool techie developments of late, from sandwich ordering to iPad apps, and crowdsourced language studies to dancing digital cows.
Usually our bragging is completely unfounded and based entirely on lies. But not this time: Nielsen has shown that StopPress is still at the top of the table when it comes to the percentage of visitors who have used a mobile phone to access the internet for the month of July. And, by extension, it would seem that you tech-savvy information hounds obviously have your hands on the lentils/fingers on the pulse when it comes to mobile usage.
The first phase of the search for Christchurch’s top retailers has just drawn to a close, with entries for the Top Shop awards up 11 percent on the 2008 edition.
New technology has meant that consumers are engaging with media in ways that George Jetson would be proud of. Of course, given the feverish enthusiasm for the iPad, there’s already quite a bit of interesting data about it and while the consumers love it, publishers are also rightly excited about the revenue—and creative—possibilities offered by the new medium. So who’s buying two of Apple’s most popular devices, the iPad and the iPhone? Nielsen surveyed more than 64,000 mobile subscribers in the US to find out.
TV ratings are a lot like politics: whether you’re winning or losing, the other side is always doing it wrong and, even in the worst situations, you can always try and spin things to make it look more positive than it really is.
As interactions and events rather than the old school spray and pray approach are increasingly being utilised to rise above the rabble and capture the jaded consumer’s attention, experiential marketing’s star continues to rise. And the good news keeps coming for local experiential agency AmbientX: after its double medal haul at this year’s Australasian Promotional Marketing Association Star Awards for the Arnott’s Velish campaign, it has managed to pick up a couple more significant client wins recently.
Designers, animators, advertisers, marketers and possibly even a few hip accountants don’t have too long to wait until the 2010 edition of Semi-Permanent starts squeezing some creative juice. And Nicolas Roope, an all round digital and design ideas guy from the UK who set up Poke London, retro phone company Hulger and this cool t-shirt blog, is venturing to New Zealand to speak at the event. He took time out from his busy schedule of coming up with awesome things (and from being the UK’s Webby ambassador, a member of the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and a member of the UK Coolbrands board) to have an e-chat with StopPress.
Five years after co-founding creative talent representation business The Pond, Sue Worthington has sold her shareholding and set up another small specialist creative agency, Indiego. And The Pondʼs other co-founder, Leighton Howl, has bought Worthington’s half of the business (with a second silent investor) and is looking for further investment to fuel expansion of the Pond model into Australian and Asian markets.
So many things to read about, see, enter and attend, so little time.
It may be a relatively unsexy side of the digital marketing world. But there’s no doubt email is powerful (read this if you don’t believe it). And the Jericho Email Marketing Metrics Report for 2010, which crunched tens of millions of permission-based commercial emails in New Zealand, has shown that email drives massive readership and clicks—especially on Mondays.
Some companies just seem to have unending revenue streams. And as Trade Me stretches its tentacles into the services area and starts competing with Yellow and Google (for the full round-up, scroll down to near the bottom of this story), it’s also finding a bit of a niche as an online display advertising team for other websites, the latest of which is metservice.com.
While all the talk in DDB land is about the big merge between Rapp and Tribal DDB, Mango Communications continues to blaze a rather successful trail and has managed to get hold of a wee beauty: the public relations account for Icebreaker in the New Zealand market.
New Zealand loves comparing its performance with other nations. And typically we always do well on a per capita basis. But the YoungGuns Top 10 rankings of the most Awarded Countries of the past decade shows that we’re flat out better than almost all of our foreign rivals when it comes to the quality of our creative advertising whippersnappers (turns out the old folk aren’t too bad either).
You might have noticed that digital is not an ‘other’ anymore. And while a number of the larger agencies have been operating separate digital factions for some time, many of them now appear to be moving digital back to the centre of the agency offering. TBWA\ recently brought Ross Howard in as creative director of Tequila to sit beside executive creative director Andy Blood, Saatchi & Saatchi closed its digital outfit SaatchiDGS this year, and DDB is the latest to head in this digi-direction after merging its direct arm Rapp and its digital arm Tribal DDB, into one, Popeye-esque arm they’re calling Rapp/Tribal.
The New Zealand Marketing Association has launched two flashy new advisory services, PR and Word of Mouth, bringing the total number of resources aimed at developing specialist areas of marketing to 18.
Westpac has gracefully declined to provide Saatchi & Saatchi with its advertising business and in a competitive pitch the account for the creative work has gone to Colenso.
DraftFCB recently announced a raft of new hires, and it might have to add a few more names to the list after Stella Travel Services, the international company behind the United Travel and Harvey World Travel brands, and Sony Electronics signed up with DraftFCB Media.
Special Group’s print ad for ecostore ended up sparking off a rather heated discussion about the exciting realm of PH levels in washing powder when we wrote a story about the whole malarkey a few weeks back. And the swift response obviously tickled the fancies of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau’s Newspaper Ad of the Month judges, because it’s been awarded the gong for the July round.
For your viewing and critiquing pleasure, the kind folk at Adshel have assembled all the entries from last week’s Creative Challenge. And, with teams given just one hour to come up with a static poster campaign for next year’s Auckland Fringe, the collection of ideas certainly makes for an interesting study of the creative process.
Lemonade Design has won a competitive pitch to overhaul the Eden Park brand and rebuild its website, with both projects due for completion before the new stand is opened in the next few months. But there appears to be bit of confusion in the Eden Park ranks as to whether or not the cat should have been let out of the bag so early.
This week on Ads@6, Sunsweet ‘Amazins’ go high on the crapometer; Mt Ruapehu forks out for serious prime time; the Campbells stock spots tickle a fancy or two; Toyota and Saatchi continue the current trend for paper-based ads; Wattie’s tries to sell chicken in a can by making cans into chickens; and two of the best campaigns on TV at the moment, Kiwi Bank and 2degrees, keep delivering the goods.
Come with us now as we tap into the unending desire for flagrant industry-related people watching.