The latest agency news, campaigns and client wins (and losses) making headlines across Aotearoa.
APN Outdoor and Auckland Council are taking the first step towards transforming Auckland’s CBD into the Times Square of the South Pacific, unveiling the first of six digital billboards to be placed across the city.
#Flashbackfriday seems to be a thing on Twitter. And a few socially-aware brands are joining in the fun so we can laugh at the past. For example, this quality Air New Zealand ad from the ’60s imploring New Zealanders to fly south and do the twist on a mountain-top, or ANZ’s classy, fashion-forward print ad.
We speak to Premier League Pass co-founder Tim Martin about the business of sports in New Zealand and the technology behind the new sports broadcasting platform competing with Sky TV’s virtual monopoly.
Current Idealog editor and ex-roving adland reporter Hazel Phillips has just released her new book Sell: Tall tales from the legends of New Zealand advertising. It’s a triumph, a tour de force, a gripping romp, and it tells the story of how the local ad scene came to be and the characters who helped create it (keep an eye out for an extract in the July/August edition of NZ Marketing magazine). We’ve got a couple of copies to give away, so go back into the mists of time and post your favourite Kiwi ad in the comments section. The two commentors with the best taste will get the literary spoils.
Frucor’s V brand has pushed a number of marketing envelopes in the New Zealand market and, given it’s at the head of the field in the energy segment, that seems to have paid off. Frucor also has global ambitions for the brand, and it’s looking to climb the ladder in Europe with a campaign centred around internet trolls.
Pluk is taking its wares and projecting it onto the big screen, bringing its audio-recognition promotions app platform to the cinema.
Our weekly round-up of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from the intertubes.
Powershop has managed to find a solid niche in New Zealand’s energy market as a cheeky challenger brand that gives its more than 50,000 customers additional information about their energy usage, lets them buy power online and shows them plenty of love. And now the Meridian-owned business is taking that model to Australia.
Levi Hawken had his five minutes of fame when Nek Minnit started doing the pop cultural rounds. He’s milked it a bit since then, with cameos on TV3 with the likes of Food in a Nek Minnit and New Zealand’s Top Nek Minnit, but the opportunists cashed in on the phrase as well, selling a range of t-shirts and paraphernalia. So what do you do when the flames are petering out and the zeitgeist has moved on? You do an innuendo-filled ad with local ‘glamour model’ Kelly Windsor to spruik berry-flavoured lube, of course. Feels Delicious indeed.
New Zealand is basically the Canada of the South, with a loud, obnoxious neighbour, a passion for wood chopping and a strange combination of pride and self-doubt. So PopPress is confident this passport-based experiment by Canadian beer brand Molsons will be right up Kiwis’ alleys.
The New Zealand advertising scene is always pretty proud of its per capita hauls in the world’s big creative awards. And 2013 appears to be no different, with the combined awards won between Kiwi agencies—a record haul of 32—placing us 9th on the list at the 60th Cannes Festival of Advertising.
Cannes Lions? Pffff. The TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards are the ones they’ll mention in your eulogy. And after much scratching of chins/stroking of beards among the judges, the finalists have been announced.
We love taking voyeuristic journeys into the lives of people lucky enough to be on Google’s Glass Explorer programme.
This time we see through the eyes of professional tennis player Bethanie Mattek-Sands as she prepares for Wimbledon.
Programmatic ad buying is a cornerstone of online advertising, spread by the influence of global ad networks such as Google. But MediaWorks Interactive and Ecostore have attempted to flip that model on its head—and they are shouting from the rooftops about their results.
The Online Media Standards Authority (OMSA) is open for complaints from next Monday (1 July). Says the Law Commission’s single regulatory body recommendation will take too long.
Airmail app is Sim Ahmed’s new go-to productivity tool. It’s simple and unobtrusive, just the way an email client should be.
Pizza. It’s delicious, but no one has time anymore to walk down to the local pizza joint and wait for a box of carbohydrates, protein and other supposedly edible miscellany to heat up. Domino’s Pizza New Zealand is hedging on this to happen and predicts by 2016 4 out of every five of its sales dollars will be made online.
New Zealand design company Hardhat has won best packaging in the non-alcoholic beverage category of the Dieline Package Design Awards 2013 for cups designed as part of its re-branding of fellow Kiwi’s Coffee Supreme. And Curious Design and Think Packaging came second in the same category for their work on Bolu Tea.
Gina’s restaurant certainly isn’t averse to a bit of saucy advertising (its radio ads are filled with innuendo and good-natured male objectification). And its latest billboard, which features a shirtless Italian stallion with his jeans unbuttoned, the line ‘mozzarella with balls’ and two extra letters that change everything, continues this trend.
.99 has continued its golden run of new business, winning the local L’Oréal business after a competitive pitch.
Internet service provider (ISP) Slingshot is pushing the boundaries and risks stirring up the wrath of the TV and movie industry with its Global Mode product, which helps users circumvent location-based restrictions placed on overseas content.
A little something for your hump day featuring some of the impressive—and ridiculous—things humans on this planet spend their time doing. If this doesn’t increase any inadequacy issues you already have and drum home the fact that your life is boring, then nothing will.
From Women Laughing Alone With Salad to Awkward Stock Photos, plenty of time can be wasted looking at ridiculous stock imagery. Getty Images has a whole host of them at its disposal as well and it’s chosen ten of the most bizarre. See the slideshow here.
The New Zealand chapter of global social media giant Facebook has doubled its revenue in 2012, although it still remains in the red on the back of increased employee benefits.
Getty Images already offers a range of grants to photographers, and it’s added another one that aims to recognise excellence in portrait photography by emerging photographers.
Retirement planning isn’t the sexiest of subjects. But AMP and Running With Scissors have added some human interest to the world of KiwiSaver schemes by conducting a psychological experiment to illustrate that a little bit of willpower now makes things all the sweeter in the future.
Who’s it for: TVNZ by in-house agency Blacksand Why we like it: It’s just a…
‘Creatively-led, humanity-obsessed’ agency/production company Augusto has done some good work for Adidas in recent times, like the 60-minute documentary on the history of the All Blacks jersey and the Supersounds campaign. And for its latest trick, it’s got Richie McCaw, Dan Carter and Israel Dagg to embrace their domestic sides to promote the arrival of iron-on numbers on fan jerseys.
It would be ungracious of Apple to create tablet ads mocking its competitors because it’s leading the pack in that field, however Microsoft has no such qualms when it comes to poking fun at the iPad.
There are plenty of motion-controlled games out there, from Nintendo’s Wii to Resn’s Face Arcade. Now US gum brand Stride and Wieden + Kennedy have embraced that technology for its latest campaign, “the most amazing chewing-based game we’re aware of”.
There’s been plenty of ink dedicated to Seven Sharp over the past few months—a bit too much in the opinion of TVNZ chief executive Kevin Kenrick. But far from free-falling, the more informal, magazine-style current affairs show has stabilised to an average audience of around 375,000 viewers. And, in an effort to get more New Zealanders to give the show a go, it has launched a new campaign via its inhouse agency Blacksand.
ASB Bank was the first in the country to offer social media banking through Facebook and now stands to become the first in the country (if not the world) to offer a home loan rate completely dependent on the number of Likes it receives on Facebook. Although the premise of the competition is simple, its actual mechanics are shrouded in mystery.
Y&R NZ has been appointed the creative agency for KiwiRail-owned Interislander after a competitive pitch, continuing a run of new business over the last year. The incumbent was Saatchi & Saatchi.
Twitter’s Vine app is groaning under the weight of over 13 million humans sharing absolutely everything about their lives, no matter how banal and uninteresting, via six-second snippets (Facebook is competing with the launch of video for Instagram, which launched last week). And while some creative types believe restrictions lead to better solutions, this Funny or Die clip shows the short-format approach isn’t too well-suited to making ads.
The marcomms sector is renowned more for its competitiveness than its collegiality. But it’s nice to see The Radio Network’s ZM can still appreciate MediaWorks’ George FM.
Holden’s latest TVC for the Commodore is part black tie dinner and part bogan romp – showing the new VF Commodore’s classier side, while paying homage to Holden’s bogan roots and fan base.