The latest agency news, campaigns and client wins (and losses) making headlines across Aotearoa.
Right in time for the gambling rush that annually coincides with the Melbourne Cup, TAB has launched a new campaign via Sugar & Partners that features a group of friends seated on a flying rollercoaster. And while this might sound like an aptly terrifying metaphor to accompany the ups and downs of gambling, the characters depicted in the 45-second ad seem to enjoy the trackless journey through the sky.
There will be plenty from the marketing community gearing up for the Melbourne Cup today and, with a couple of Kiwi options, the TAB is aiming to get the locals to lay down a few more bets this year. But founder and chief executive of NZ Tax Refunds NZ Cilla Hegarty has managed to combine marketing and horses in a very different manner: racing a branded thoroughbred/”fast-moving advertising billboard” called Gottagetmywoohoo.
Plaudits for HPA, Dulux, Y&R and ASB this week.
Every year, multiple sclerosis awareness week sees hundreds of bucket-shakers hitting the streets to raise funds for those who suffer from this debilitating disease. But this year, MS Auckland wanted to raise more money and more awareness than ever before. So indie agency Hunch came up with a way of illustrating the disease’s effects—and raising some cash—by shacking up with Hell Pizza and sending out a few deliveries to unsuspecting recipients.
Last year, FCB introduced the line ‘No More Beersies’ to the Kiwi vernacular via its ‘Say Yeah, Nah’ campaign for the Health Promotion Agency (HPA), and it became a ubiquitous catchphrase in weekly conversations. Now, just over a year later, the agency has carried the beersies line into a follow-on campaign that borrows from the tropes of beer advertising to reinvent the humble glass of water. In each of the clips, the pouring of a glass of water is accompanied by the stereotypically deep voice of a beer advert narrator, who over 30 tongue-in-cheek seconds draws attention to the crisp goodness of a simple glass of H2O. PLUS: we look at whether the ‘Say Yeah, Nah’ campaign was effective.
No doubt the bed makers were happy to see Arianna Huffington extolling the virtues of sleep, lambasting the burn-out culture of the corporate world and promoting the idea of nap rooms at work during her recent visit to New Zealand. And here are a few recent efforts to get Kiwis buying a new rest station from a vampirical Sleepyhead, a rugby-loving Slumberzone and a design-savvy Sealy.
StopPress understands that Ogilvy and Mather’s executive creative director Angus Hennah has left his post at the agency, bringing an end to his two-year stint. Paul Manning, Ogilvy’s executive director, says that Hennah made the decision to resign and that the team at Ogilvy was disappointed to see him depart.
Some believe there’s no bigger sucker than a marketer who thinks they’re missing out on a trend. And Toronto agency John St has managed to illustrate that by gently skewering its own industry and the lemming-like traits of those who inhabit it with a series of very funny clips about catvertising, making things go viral and exFEARiential marketing. And its latest effort, Reactvertising, continues that trend. John St creative Jacob Greer answers a few queries about the success of its comical self-promotional strategy.
As we wrote last week, there are a few Kiwi brands experimenting with the captivating loops of Vine. And, to announce the arrival of its new online boutique, Lacoste asked social media savant Zach King, who gained fame through the digital trickery displayed in his online videos, to help out.
After M&C Saatchi closed its doors, Whybin\TBWA has been looking after the Fire Service’s business. Now it’s looking for a more permanent partner and, in an unusually forward move, Y&R has showed its stripes very publicly by producing a blasting season PSA that advocates fire awareness.
Despite announcing record profits at last week’s AGM, Sky does not appear content to rest on its laurels. The broadcaster recently unveiled Neon, its subscription video on demand (SVOD) offering, and from today it will be screening a new channel called The Zone. Designed to fill the sci-fi void in Sky’s programming, the new channel will screen horror, fantasy, science-fiction, cult and superhero shows via Sky and SkyGo.
Once again, a number of facial follicles are being left to run rampant this month to raise funds for men’s health as part of Movember celebrations. And this year, in an effort to drive sign-ups among ‘mo bros’ and ‘mo sistas’, BBDO Toronto created a moustachioued male stereotype called Bruce to show that, despite the often hideous appearance of those who take part, they really are heroes.
There are plenty of harrowing numbers facing the magazine industry at the moment. But, as the proponents say, magazines are more than just paper. And New Zealand Geographic’s Photographer of the Year is a case in point. PLUS: a gallery of the winners.
On Wednesday night, Belinda MacDonald and Neena Truscott, dubbed the Modern Day Hippies, were crowned the first winners of My Kitchen Rules New Zealand. This moment concluded the battle for New Zealand’s latest food porn crown, while simultaneously bringing an end to a ratings battle that has waged since TVNZ first decided to schedule its programme against MediaWorks’ The Block NZ. StopPress takes a look at how the two formats fared against each other.
A theme park in Sweden has created the most terrifying outdoor poster of all time, just in time for Halloween.
Given they create butter, ice cream and steak, cows are quite possibly the most delicious of all the beasts. But they’re bad for the environment, and some believe they’re bad for our bodies. So Oatly’s chief executive Toni Petersson decided to embrace the power of music in advertising with a unique performance about oat milk.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
Facebook has said it needs to sell 50-100 million Oculus Rift headsets to make it meaningful. But Dos Equis is getting in early and offering fans a dose of virtual reality.
The advertising executive is a strange but predictable beast. It shares similarities with the average New Zealander, but is different in pertinent ways. While the advertising executive’s raison d’être is to know and understand the shopping, watching, working and lifestyle habits of the average New Zealander, it does not practise these habits itself. Latest statistics from Nielsen compare the lives of ad executives, or ‘adlanders’ to the lives of average New Zealanders, and unsurprisingly there is quite a divide.
We live in increasingly visual times. And no-one’s got time to read those pesky words anymore. So every week we’ll publish some of our favourite graphs. In honour of MediaWorks’ new season launch last night, here’s one that shows what’s been happening to overall share of audience in commercial radio since 2005.
MediaWorks has had a fairly rough ride over the past few years. But the big guns were all smiles last night at the new season launch. We sat down with two of them—chief executive of MediaWorks TV Paul Maher and group head of revenue Liz Fraser—for a chat about the company’s content strategy, results and evolution.
If you’re in show business, you’ve got to put on show and MediaWorks, a company with a new chief executive, a new sense of confidence after negotiating a receivership and plenty of big new shows to crow about, put one on last night for its new season launch at Shed 10 in Auckland. So should it be exuding this much optimism?
This Sunday the All Blacks will take on the United States in a widely hyped exhibition match in Chicago. While the United States certainly can’t be described as a rugby playing nation, all 61,500 seats at the Soldier Field have been sold out. Such is the star power of the All Blacks that they are capable of filling a stadium in a country where rugby ranks below badminton, ten-pin bowling and pro wrestling in terms of popularity. And given the seeming supernatural ability of those who don the increasingly tight black shirts to make people interested in things that they don’t necessarily care about, it comes as little surprise that Kiwi brands have shown such a willingness to attach their labels to rugby players. StopPress looks at how rugby players are helping brands get noticed.
For the third year in a row the Diamond gong given to the best piece of work entered in the international Echo Awards will be returning from San Diego to Auckland. On 30 October, this prestigious direct marketing award was awarded to Republik New Zealand for Fuji Xerox’s ‘Wide War One’ campaign, which also picked up a gold in the ‘information technologies’ category. This Diamond win follows on from Colenso’s 2012 and 2013 wins. And while the College Hill agency didn’t make three in a row, it didn’t leave the awards show empty handed either.
As part of our series with the One Percent Collective that’s dedicated to celebrating good work and inspiring a bit more generosity, Ant Salmon, managing director of Big Communications, doffs his cap to Andy McDowell and all the others who have done their own thing.
Sky had a stunner last Friday when it announced great numbers, a new five year rugby deal and plans for some fancy new additions to its boxes. It also announced the launch of its much-discussed SVOD offering Neon, which is set to launch in December. Here’s what managing director Dave Joyce had to say about the strategy behind it.
For those of you that thought social media was just for sharing selfies and pretending your life’s way better than it actually is, think again. New Zealand brands and their fans are using the medium for a lot more than that. They are using it together to make things happen. PLUS: we look at examples of crowd-sourcing gone wrong.
A battle is raging between online advertisers and those who don’t want to be followed on the Web, and New Zealand news websites are harbouring a surprising amount of trackers. Journalists and privacy experts have recently been pointing the finger at news websites as some of the worst offenders when it comes to collecting people’s data without any formal disclosure. Much of this is happening through online ‘trackers’, hidden pieces of code in websites that track how a user clicks, or even hovers, on a site.
Following the recent unveiling of its ambitious ‘Boroughs’ project, which will see five high-tech basketball courts introduced in Auckland, Spark has now announced a marketing partnership with the National Basketball Association. As part of this deal, Spark will offer its home broadband customers NBA League Pass and League Pass Premium annual subscriptions beginning next month, giving customers 15 percent off the full price of either a full season or a one-month subscription.
Since Vine launched in January 2013 it’s fair to say the six-second video app has taken off. According to Vine, every month now more than 100 million people watch Vines across the web. Owned by Twitter, the social media platform boasts 1 billion views or ‘loops’ of videos every day, with the majority of users being teens. The largest age group on Vine is 18 – 20 year olds. But are Kiwi brands slower on the uptake than our global counterparts?
Every day, around two million Kiwis log onto Facebook to scroll down their newsfeeds to see what is happening in their lives. And according to Stephen Scheeler, the company’s head of New Zealand, these aren’t sporadic single visits because the average user peruses the site around 15 times in a single day. “For those two million Kiwis on Facebook, about 12 percent of their media consumption is Facebook,” says Scheeler. “Remember, eight years ago it was zero. So this has been a massive shift.” The rapid migration of audiences into the digital realm is by no means surprising, but such statistics are increasingly serving as strong impetus for brands to shift their commercial messaging to where the eyes are. So we take a look at how brands are collaborating with the social media juggernaut to spread their commercial messages.
The Warehouse Group has been bringing the real world and the online world closer together recently, with its recent rebrand of R&R Sport to the ‘omni-channel’ Torpedo 7, its Click Madness promotion, free wifi in the newly refurbished stores and an app that lets shoppers compare prices. Now it’s launching its Christmas campaign with a five minute online video that puts the decision-making in the hands of the experts: kids.
Wires are so noughties. And, as speaker and headphone company JBL shows, they’re bloody annoying too. PLUS: eggs, popcorn, radiation and people struggling with everyday tasks.
Consumers are regularly asked to assist in the creation of marketing campaigns these days, with varying degrees of success. And designer David Trubridge has merged inspiration from bird life with over 500 cherished memories sent in by New Zealanders as part of a crowd-sourced art project for longtime World of Wearable Art sponsor Brancott Estate.
As noted in a series of articles published on the Getty Images website last year, publishers and brands are starting to shift away from the stereotypical images that have until now typified what advertisers had constructed as perfection. The investigation into visual trends found that women were increasingly represented in positions of power, same-sex relationships were sometimes used in lieu of straight imagery, older people were appearing with greater regularity and beauty was being given a more flexible definition. Interestingly, the top 20 Getty images that have been downloaded by Kiwis since the beginning of the year also indicate that these international trends are starting to take shape in New Zealand. However, trends don’t emerge instantaneously, and this means there were still some more conventional images included on the final list.
Hell Pizza is offering an explosive short-term deal with their pizza delivery – and they’re hoping it’s going to net them a record week of sales. A campaign offering a fireworks delivery along with your pizza kicked off last week with the company opening a fireworks preorder for the Guy Fawkes period.