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Figures released today show New Zealand online advertising spend experienced healthy growth in the first quarter of this year, keeping pace with, and in some cases outstripping, international trends.
As if an unrivalled lifestyle and living amongst New Zealand’s most breathtaking surrounds wasn’t enough, residents of the Lake Wanaka region have a new logo and slogan to love, hate or remain indifferent to.
With the champagne glasses barely out of the dishwasher, V48HOURS Film Festival 2010 grand champions, The Downlow Concept, have received even more good news.
Newspapers and PR reports were all aflutter last week with the news that Boy, written and directed by Taika Waititi, is now the “number one New Zealand film of all time”, overtaking The World’s Fastest Indian (TWFI) with a lifetime box office of over $7,050,000 in the eight weeks since its release on March 25. But are we comparing apples with apples?
Putting aside the business of creativity, strategy and effectiveness, international design competitions are kind of like Lotto Powerball. First and foremost, you’ve got to be in to win.
Me, worry? TV3’s director of marketing and communications Roger Beaumont is unfazed by a recent sideswipe from the New Zealand Herald suggesting a striking similarity between a line on the station’s new ‘serious news journalism’ TVC – “Six billion stories…and counting” – and SBS’, Australia’s multicultural and multilingual radio and television service, tagline “Six billion stories and counting”.
Air New Zealand has continued its purple patch, picking up a few more global industry accolades over the weekend after being chosen as Best Airline Australia/Pacific and handed the Staff Service Excellence Award for the Australia/Pacific region at the Skytrax World Airline Awards, a ‘passenger’s choice’ style awards for airlines.
Raising funds is a tough business. Some sell cheese rolls. Some sell sausages in bread. But TBWA’s Tara McKenty and Iain Nealie have taken an altogether different approach: they’re selling themselves – or, at least, their future – in the form of made-up stocks.
Mike Mizrahi, one half of the world-class, New Zealand-based event and production company, Inside Out Productions, will be the inaugural guest speaker at the CAANZ Marcomms Leadership Group event at Orams Marine on 27 May. And Claudia Macdonald, the group’s chair and managing director of Mango Communications says tickets are selling fast, in the style of hotcakes.
This week on Ads@6, Chorus talks shop and takes to the countryside, Sam Neill shows off his acting talents for Kiwibank, Sugar’s new BNZ campaign heads to Kaikoura, Samsung shows off its 3D televisions (without actually being able to show off its 3D televisions) and we wonder if the ad for Sinopec is actually a front for some kind of cult.
In a year where the profession of design claims to have been devalued by the Super City logo competition, Designworks has bucked the trend and restored a bit of pride, taking out the Supreme Award at the 2010 Vero Excellence in Business Support Awards last night.
The brief was delivered last weekend and all the films for the 48hr Cannes Young Lion YouTube competition have now been uploaded. But the second stage is currently underway and, as 49 percent of the judging is based on the number of votes each ad receives by 23 May, it’s up to the creators to spread the word about their effort and get the masses clicking on that green thumb beside their video.
Tickets to New Zealand’s premier design event, Semi-Permanent, go on sale from 24 May with a limited number of earlybird and deluxe VIP places up for grabs. And all will be relieved to know that passes include the legendary Semi-Permanent goodie bag and access to the after-party.
Greedy old Air New Zealand has scooped another Best Airline award, this time at the 2010 Which? Awards.
It’s news Stinky Jim, but maybe not quite as you know it.
The One Show and One Show Interactive pencil winners have been announced. And, unusually, despite nabbing nine nominations, Kiwi agencies have come away with a big fat donut and a few merit certificates.
The New Zealand Retailers Association is calling for entries from stores in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington for the 2010 Top Shop competition, widely regarded as New Zealand’s leading retail excellence awards. And the comp has returned this year with two new categories (online retailing and sustainable retailing), some new sponsors and a burgeoning sense of optimism in the Kiwi retail sector.
The CAANZ Digital Leadership Group (DLG) has been expanded to include a Wellington sub-group and it will be lead by Craig Osborne, head of digital at Omnicom Media Group.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has released its guidelines around advertising food that might appeal to children in an effort to “provide clear guidance to advertising agencies, marketers and consumers”. And, amazingly, most seem fairly happy with the new, slightly stricter rules.
DDB has been a bit of an arrivals and departures hall recently: Justin Mowday and Aimee McCammonn are soon to join and creative director Adam Kanzer and retail creative director Kim Ellison are soon to leave, with both of their resignations coming in the same week. And, if the old axiom is correct and bad news does indeed come in threes, DDB’s executive creative director Toby Talbot says he’s bracing himself just in case.
The heads were down and the fingers were furiously a-tweetin’ yesterday at the inaugural Social Media Junction (SMJ). And an array of big social media brains spilled their secrets and gave tips, tricks and advice on best practice to around 200 conference goers at Sky City hoping to get to grips with this increasingly important but at-times intimidating marketing realm.
Michael Carney is quite possibly the most productive man on the planet. And he’s generous, too: he’s giving away a few free copies of his new literary baby – an e-book called Adventures into the Unknown World of Social Media that deals with marketers’ fears about the space and details the ways to overcome them – to a few speedy downloaders.
If the increased numbers of entries for the 2010 Magazine Awards are anything to go by, the fog appears to be lifting and local magazine publishers are keen to back themselves in an increasingly confident publishing environment.
APN Outdoor has instituted a new networking programme for its clients and business partners called ‘Friends in High Places’, with the new initiative set to butter up 250 of its clients and business partners with an invite-only show featuring Kiwi singer/songwriter/denim jacket-wearing dreamboat Dane Rumble and rising musical stars Artisan Guns, AutoZamm and Lisa Crawley.
The call for entries for the 2010 TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards is now open. Hopefully you already know that. But what you might not yet know is that the New Zealand Marketing Association (NZMA) and NZ Marketing magazine have managed to secure a very impressive bunch of marketing brains to do the judging.
Kamran Kazalbash has been appointed as the general manager of retail at DraftFCB and Angela Spain will be coming on board as general manager of the agency’s public relations arm.
It used to wander freely and happily, but we rounded it up, put in an enclosed space, turned the lights up to full, force-fed it other news and a host of harmful hormones and then sold it back to you, the unsuspecting consumer. And now we wait for the social media firestorm.
Tourism New Zealand (TNZ) has enlisted the services of Australian digital and social media specialists Razorfish Amnesia following a review of its digital marketing strategy. But no-one from either party wants to talk about the new relationship, what the relationship will entail, what the job is, how much the budget is or who else was asked to pitch.
Want to know how to harness the raw power of online advertising? Well then, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of New Zealand Advertisers’ event ‘Outfox, Outsmart and Outgrow Your Competition’ should be right down your e-alley. And there are only 20 tickets left for next week’s event.
