The latest agency news, campaigns and client wins (and losses) making headlines across Aotearoa.
A new Orcon campaign with Contagion gives the ISP a chance to get new customers and frontman Kim Dotcom a chance to push his political barrow. Orcon is using what it calls a “fun, cheeky” video featuring Dotcom, and social media activity, to push its $99 uncapped internet plan on fibre or ADSL.
The floor of the car is a place where various horrors tend to lie undiscovered until the annual clean. Honda has tried to remedy this in its new people mover with an in-car vacuum cleaner. And, along with a series of ads featuring the voices of Rainn Wilson and Neil Patrick Harris, it has also taken to Twitter to let various snack and toy brands know that they don’t stand a chance against its powerful suction.
The dirty secret of gamification – which chairperson of our Game Developers Association Stephen Knightly defines as using game thinking and mechanics to engage customers and users – is that the psychology is nothing new. The good news is it still works.
ASB has built a new app for businesses, seeing as much demand for convenient mobile commerce among businesses as among consumers.
A couple of months back, Heineken challenged unsuspecting travellers at New York’s John F Kennedy Airport to ditch their travel plans for a destination of the roulette board’s choosing. Now the stunt’s had a cleverly crafted sequel by the brand’s agency Wieden and Kennedy. Heineken tracked down people who tweeted saying they’d drop everything for a spontaneous trip and rolled in the roulette board to test their mettle.
Over the past few years, Sky has favoured the humorous approach in its ‘My Happy Place’ advertising. Its new ‘Come with us’ brand was rolled out around the start of August and, while a series of relevant movie quotes dotted around HQ certainly gave the brand a sense of whimsy, its big, cinematic and poetic TVC by DDB and Ruskin is a much more serious, intriguing and emotive affair that’s designed to showcase the range of quality content subscribers can access.
DDB has teamed with Paw Justice in a campaign that asks Kiwis to spread opposition to a recent law allowing party pills to be tested on animals.
The interweb is chock full of creative ways people have left their jobs with fanfare. Now journalism graduate Marina Shifrin’s effort, a dance video, has scored more than a million views.
Kiwi tech companies remain strongly export-focused, but there’s room for improvement in how they sell and promote themselves, according to this year’s Market Measures Survey.
Former Interest.co.nz managing editor Bernard Hickey is banking on subscriptions as the route to growth for his new politics and economics news website and email service hivenews.co.nz.
Five good’uns this week, with ukuleles, emoticons, family time, song rash and Rotorua making the cut.
Since DraftFCB took over the Air New Zealand account at the start of last year, its work has been fairly retail focused, with the airline’s deals being promoted on TV and online. But it’s finally got a chance to have a bit of fun with a campaign to promote the launch of the new Airpoints credit cards.
There’s a growing movement in food around provenance, as seen by US restaurant chain Chipotle’s recent campaigns. And there’s a growing, but still unfortunately fairly niche movement in business around ethics, as evidenced by the creation of organisations like The B Team and the real steps being taken by big companies like Puma. All Good Organics has tapped into both of these trends, first with bananas and recently with its drinks range, and co-founder Simon Coley recently put down the crayons at Powershop and, along with Matt Morrison, headed to the jungles of Sierra Leone to see how the kola nut farmers it works with have benefitted.
There’s been a buzz of interest, judging by the comments, on this Trade Me auction that gives the less pure-minded among us an alternative to New World’s Little Shop collectables.
Clemenger BBDO’s Simon Wharton and James Burton have taken the August ORCA off DraftFCB for their NZTA ‘GPS vs.’ campaign, which reminds us that “when you’re focused on the phone, you’re not focused on the road”.
A new ad with some very angry cartoon characters – made by BBH Mumbai for Skoda India – makes us glad New Zealand doesn’t have external fire hydrants.
New Destination Rotorua Marketing TVCs aim to win the hearts of Kiwi travellers, especially Aucklanders.
Unitec says its latest campaign with Special Group and 8Com brings together the best of its earlier efforts Change Starts Here and We Make the People Who Make It.
A cute kitten and a hero firefighter add up to a winning formula for an ad. The original video of firefighter Cory Kalanick reviving the kitten was apparently shot on the HD Hero3 Camera by Go Pro, so the company’s seized on the footage for a tear jerking ad.
New Zealand is one of highest users per capita of Facebook, but many Kiwi brands have been slow to make the most of it. Catalyst90 CEO Tom Reidy has a few ideas about how you can get your Facebook page working harder for your brand.
A good night was had by all—or at least most—at the rejuvenated Magazine Awards. Ben Hurley kept the crowd entertained, MPA chair John Baker was typically bullish about the future of the magazine industry, Dr Sarah Sandley was acknowledged for a stellar 20 year career, Bauer’s titles were a welcome addition to proceedings and no-one fell off the Q Theatre stage. Speech of the night went to Rochelle Gillespie from OH!Baby, who implored everyone to keep drinking, make a few more babies and buy their magazine. Plus: TVNZ Blacksand’s crafty, Origami-inspired intro vid.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
There are plenty of blogs devoted to strange and cringeworthy stock imagery. But what about stock video? It’s also ripe for the prodding. And as the very funny Getty Critics blog proves, adding sound makes these generic scenes way better.
An APN Outdoor digital billboard scored highly for recall on a test by walkers in central Auckland bombarded by ad messages.
Dancing chickens beat dancing babies any day, as this kooky ad to promote Mercedes’ stability control shows.
Whether it be Ches and Dale, the great Crunchie train robbery or John Rowles singing about roofs, many of the country’s most memorable ads feature jingles. Despite their propensity to burn themselves into human brains, they’ve largely gone out of fashion now, but Cadbury and DDB are trying to give the nation another dose of ‘song rash’ by giving a classic Roses ad a modern twist.
Shine and client Hyundai’s hunch that Kiwis don’t have enough time to spend with their families proved true when it teamed with production company Exposure to video interview hundreds of us. Now it’s brought those dreams of how we’d spend more time with our loved ones to the ‘Family Time’ campaign.
A room full of publishing talent and their supporters gathered at the Q Theatre in Auckland for the refreshed Magazine Awards tonight and it was Woman’s Day, Idealog, North & South, NZ Life & Leisure, Oh! Baby and NZ Rugby World that took the major wins.
The recently merged creative agency Verdict/MEA Mobile is a finalist in this year’s Australian Mobile Awards for its campaign promoting Rip Curl’s 51st annual Pro Surf competition.
After ACP was purchased by Bauer last year, many have been waiting to see what ze Germans would do—and what its digital strategy would be. And, following on from the launch of Metro Eats and Metro Arts, the next cab off the digital rank is cleo.co.nz.
One of the world’s most enduring and successful agency-client partnerships has come to an end in this part of the globe, with Volkswagen saying goodbye to DDB after 11 years and, in another slightly surprising decision to follow up from last month’s 2degrees pitch, choosing Colenso BBDO as its agency.
An unfortunate coincidence perhaps, but it was chokes from all quarters on the Stuff website earlier this morning as the lead headline screamed about Emirates Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup loss while further down on the front page there was a story about a US doctor saving a lady who choked on a piece of meat.
Radio streaming service Pandora may be a music company, but it’s also a business built on data.
At the heart of that data is the Music Genome Project. Twelve years in the making, it’s a big part of how the company decides how it will serve up your next song.
It’s a simple question. And one that very few of the Apple fanatics lining up to get their hands on the new iPhones could answer.
Using facial recognition tools, BNZ has launched EmotionScan, an online experience developed by BNZ in partnership with psychologist Stuart Carr and Swiss emotion recognition software company nViso, to help customers figure out how they feel about money.
We’re increasingly using online and mobile banking, but it’s not going to make human customer service go away. In fact Westpac’s new banking platform is designed as much to get in touch with real people as it is to do more services for ourselves away from branches.