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].
Global design and marketing staffing company Aquent has released its 2010 Market Eye survey, which offers a snapshot of hiring intentions and salary predictions for the marketing and design industries in Australasia. And the results bode well for continued recovery, with particularly strong signs of recruitment glee in New Zealand.
Of note this week on Ads@6, plenty, really. The nice wee number for the new Mastercard promotion sees the All Blacks getting owned; the phrase ‘cook us some eggs’ gets bandied about by a kid in the Henergy ad; TSB continues to milk its most recommended status; the Benadryl cold monster is awesome; the new Canon campaign is, as they say in Mexico, very muy bien; Hyundai goes epic and cringey; the Furnware spot for Vodafone tickles a little bit of fancy; and the woman in the Big Save commercials with the nigh-on sinister enthusiasm for low prices wins the prize for scariest eyes ever seen on New Zealand television (aside perhaps from Anthony Dixon).
A television campaign that was created for the University of Florida Health System, UF & Shands, by Auckland visualdigianimation studio Oktobor and directed by Tracey Rowe from Robber’s Dog has taken out a Best of Show nod at the 2010 Aster Awards, an annual US contest that recognises excellence in healthcare marketing and advertising.
At some point, we’ve all had a bit of a wardrobe clean out and chucked a plastic bag filled with mangey old garments in the clothing recycling bin, left it outside the op-shop, or, God forbid, just thrown it in the wheelie bin. But Fashion Trade, a new initiative from Country Road and Red Cross hopes to change all that.
Howcroft and Marsh
Nigel Marsh, the chief executive of Y&R Brands Australia and New Zealand, will soon step down from the role. He will be replaced by Russel Howcroft, the national chief executive of George Patterson Y&R in Australia and the man Y&R New Zealand’s chief executive John Ramage reports to.
Ah, Baileys, hiding there in the depths of the booze cabinet, next to the port that’s been open for 20 years, the half-finished cheap whisky that your dodgy uncle brought round for that ill-fated family barbecue and the watered down bottle of vodka your teenagers got stuck into for their after-ball. The problem with this all-too-common alcohol scenario is that Baileys is best served chilled, so, to encourage people to put it in the fridge, it has launched a new on-pack promotion where a code on the sticker is revealed once the bottle has been suitably chilled.
After embarking on a fairly successful first foray into mobile out-of-home advertising to draw attention to its Fly Buys Music offering during NZ Music Month, Loyalty New Zealand has gone back to good old reliable mass-awareness television with a new campaign that aims to drum up support for its partners among different groups, including flatmates, builders, mums, teenagers and even orphans.
The 2010 Australasian Promotional Marketing Association (APMA) Star Awards winners were announced last week in Sydney and Kiwi agencies AmbientX and Apollo Marketing New Zealand walked away with a couple of gongs in their goodie bags.
You’ll definitely want to lick the spoon after reading this.
The cut off for the NZ 2010 Best Design Awards, which celebrates the cream of New Zealand’s graphic, interactive media, product and spatial design crop, is looming ominously, so if you’ve got work from the past year to show off, get it in before 14 July. And alongside the awards, event sponsors The Pond, GEON, MINI, BJ Ball and ProDesign have launched a competition to try and get people excited about design.
Entries for the 10th YoungGuns awards are now open, so if you’re under 30 and you’re already delivering awesome ideas that are “challenging and changing the way communication is done”, get in there for a chance to be recognised as the best emerging creative talent in the world—and to have your place of employ recognised as a supporter of the yoof.
Air New Zealand already has plenty of customer loyalty, but plenty obviously isn’t enough, because the national carrier has come up with another way to inspire brand allegiance after it jumped on the location-based social media bandwagon and opened its Foursquare account.
After every Olympic Games, New Zealand’s obsession with medal tables and country rankings becomes apparent as we do a few sums, take comfort in our per capita performance and repeatedly utter the phrase ‘punching above our weight’. But in the advertising world, if results from the Cannes Lions are anything to go by, New Zealand doesn’t even need to rely on per capita results, because the 25 Lions won by Kiwi agencies, which was up from 23 in 2009, meant we were again near the top of the pile in terms of total awards won.
The 2010/2011 rotation of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau’s (NAB) Newspaper Ad of the Month competition has begun and it’s off to a spluttering start, with the guest judges for June shaking their heads, waggling their fingers, furrowing their brows and deciding the quality of the entries wasn’t good enough to award a winner.
All good things must come to an end (except for honey, which doesn’t have an expiration date) and the axe is currently hanging ominously over Ira Goldstein, the New York banker who, since 2000, has been the endearingly stupid face of ASB bank.
With all these new hires, it’s like a staff party in your mouth. And everyone’s invited.
Earlier this week, a customer service survey showed Kiwi consumers are voting with their feet when businesses don’t meet their expectations. And another customer service survey, the KiwiHost/JRA Customer Service Pulse, shows those expectations now involve organisations responding to their concerns much faster than they have in the past.
Elvis is back in the building. And since some of the ad folk have apparently been hassling CAANZ since March about what’s going down this year, consider this your first official notice to get practicing, because the finalists for the always hotly contested Battle of the Ad Bands will go on stage at The King’s Arms on 19 August.
Rate yourself as a bit of a photographer? Then get your favourite snaps in front of the judges for the New Zealand Geographic photographer of the year competition and you could be the envy of all your camera-wielding friends.
The cellular bandwagon keeps rolling on in New Zealand, with impressive results for Adshel’s first mobile out-of-home marketing campaign and TXT2Get celebrating its 1000th mobile campaign.
Big news for Flying Fish New Zealand, which has added US-based animation gurus Psyop to its diverse director roster.
The AUT adschool’s mid year show was held last week, and those young, naive tikes with the world at their feet, blissfully unaware of the crushing reality of the real world, usually come up with some pretty bloody good stuff. And through the magic of technology, you can see it here.
Comforting economic performances and improving consumer confidence in the Asia Pacific region should bring a smile to the collective dial of the New Zealand media and marketing fraternity, with media advertising spend in the 12 markets followed by Nielsen growing by 18 percent from the same time last year, although New Zealand spending across TV, newspaper and magazines is at the back of the regional pack, recording an increase of eight percent.
Despite our apathetic streak (or, perhaps more accurately, a national belief that if you just keep moseying on things will probably come right eventually), new research has showed that New Zealand consumers are actually fighting back against poor customer experiences and voting with their feet when businesses don’t meet their expectations.
Our Maan in Cannes gets up close – and personal – with Chris Schofield, creative director at DraftFCB and one of just six Kiwis to be chosen for jury duty at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, to find out about his Cannes experience. He was judging the Radio Lions and, interestingly, while DDB NZ managed to take home a gaggle of Lions for its Sky TV Arts Channel campaign, this category was the only one to go ‘Grand Prix-less’.
After their combined bacon and dairy victories earlier this year, the dream team of Naked Communications and Josh&Jamie has snaffled another one, SBS Bank.
All the Lions have been delivered at Cannes and Colenso BBDO has easily topped the Kiwi agency list, bringing home a record haul of ten leonine friends (three Gold, four Silver and three Bronze), out of a total of 25 for Kiwi agencies.
ASB has scratched its 12 year itch, after long-time incumbent TBWA\ was ousted by new (but old) boys on the block, Droga5.
Anthony Utama/Getty Images33 different businesses and independent journalists entered the 2010 Magazine Awards, with published work from 65 different titles. You can read all about the serious stuff here. But what fun are awards if you can’t laugh at the expense of your colleagues and competitors? Herewith, the StopPress Alternative Magazine awards for 2010.
There is so much that could be written about last night’s Magazine Publisher’s Association gong-fest, but StopPress has a headache, so instead let’s just say that Healthy Food Guide took out the Supreme Magazine award, NZ House & Garden’s Kate Coughlan took out Supreme Editor of the year and Paula Ryan, resplendent in an impractical yet presumably highly fashionable ensemble, was handed the Lifetime Achievement Award.