The latest agency news, campaigns and client wins (and losses) making headlines across Aotearoa.
The holy grail of accounts is up for pitch. With an estimated budget of about $1 million, the Government’s two major public information programmes are again up for grabs; but this time, the current Electricity Authority’s agency, DraftFCB, will be leading on the creative side of one of the programmes, as well as pitching for the account.
Colenso BBDO is licking its collective lips after snaffling up DDB’s hot young creative team James Connor and Christie Cooper in the latest round of agency swapsies. Connor, who has been at DDB for five years, and Cooper for nine, took out a bronze Young Guns Award for DDB three years ago for their out of home Fruit Burst campaign, and also worked on campaigns for Cadbury, Sky, Pascalls, and Pink Batts.
Voting is now open for the January/February edition of The Glossies. See this month’s entries below and cast a vote for your favourite. And remember, there’s just one vote per computer.
Lucky seven, God’s in heaven, one little crutch, a David Beckham, one hockey stick, a slice of heaven. There, 7 ways to say seven, with out mentioning dwarves once. Why? Well seven’s obviously the lucky number for Spark PR & Activate, as they start the New Year with a seventh brand new client, Weight Watchers NZ. The win tops off a hugely successful 2011 for the Auckland-based agency. In recent months, Spark PR & Activate has also been appointed as PR agency for Electrolux Cookware and Laundry, Dermalogica NZ, boutique stationery store Red Letter Day and Mambo apparel.
One of the few positive aspects of the Christchurch earthquakes is that those from the region seem to have banded together in an effort to try and get their city back on its feet. And Phantom Billstickers, which started in Christchurch in 1982, is doing its bit by offering existing businesses that are moving to new premises, new start-ups, bands, arts groups, or “anyone with something to say” a leg up. Phantom’s Robin McDonnell says there are no complicated conditions. It’s just their way of helping. So Christchurch folks just need to bring in 100 A3 posters to the Sydenham office and they’ll stick ‘em up on their high profile sites around the city.
Design and communications agency The Church has created a new direction for the New Zealand International Arts Festival. Targeted at first time festival goers the concept is about adding an ‘extraordinary’ experience to your every day life – be it catching a bus, or walking to work. Creative director Chris Waind says the opportunity to work on such an iconic event was too good to miss. “We’ve been able to bring all our experience with the NZSO and our creative conference We Can Create to bear and that’s injected the energy and effectiveness we think the brand needed”.
Advertising is a very competitive business. Accounts are coveted, staff are constantly being poached and awards are hotly contested. And it seems that competitive streak also applies to extra-curricular activities, as evidenced by events that took place at the Colenso towers this week.
Judging by this expensive-looking new epic for the launch of the Subaru XV, the Australian arm of the business isn’t afraid to spend money on big ads. And while it’s fair to assume New Zealand doesn’t have access to those sort of budgets, it does have Barnes, Catmur & Friends on its side, and, just like its contextual number celebrating the Great Auckland Snow last year, this smart print ad showcasing the reversing cameras that now come as standard in the Legacy and Outback models also hits the spot.
Lemonade Design is by no means a newbie to the design game with several prominent clients including Eden Park, Jucy Rentals and Burger Fuel on the roster. And now the agency has turned its hand to new premium ice cream brand Holy Moly.
In defiance of the threat posed by digital to television, MediaWorks is taking a huge risk and premiering one of its top new shows online. As crazy and contradictory as this approach seems, when FOX did the same thing last year, it got some surprising results: despite over two million people watching the show before it was broadcast, it rated through the roof on the night, up 20 percent from its lead-in show Glee, way beyond the network’s wildest dreams.
Mobile devices are basically seen as a necessity these days and, like a dog without its bone, there’s almost nothing more depressing than seeing a modern human try to function without its phone. For marketers, these devices offer some very exciting creative possibilities, and MediaWorks has jumped on the ‘social TV’ bandwagon and released what it believes is a world-first smartphone app called Pluk that uses audio recognition technology to deliver content from the TV straight to the user’s phone.
After a bit of a wait, Clemenger BBDO managed to find a replacement managing director when Andrew Holt shifted south from Colenso in late 2010. And it’s also been on the hunt for a new creative director ever since Paul Nagy left in mid 2010. Good things take time, of course, and it’s now filled the position after executive creative director Philip Andrew, who has overseen some pretty bloody good work since taking responsibility for the empty chairs, announced the internal promotion of Brigid Alkema.
It’s not just Whitcoulls, with its very public financial struggle and consequent sale in mid-last year, that is being affected by the slow sales of books in New Zealand. With literacy levels dropping year on year, the lack of trading is also keeping our country’s authors downtrodden and many of our stories untold. But the New Zealand Book Council, just like other separate entities like NZ Book Month, which won the not-for-profit gong at the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards last year for trying to put a book in the hands of every Kiwi, is out to change this. And it’s latest ad, which was made by Colenso BBDO and follows up from the haunting and very well-awarded Going West with some more engaging paper artistry, aims to show the printed word can shape and inspire.
For the first time, CAANZ is publicly calling for top media minds to help decide the illustrious 2012 Media Awards winners. Those keen on judging the awards can apply now, or nominate someone else they think perfect for a judging role. Rather than casting aspersions on any previous judges, this new process adds a touch more gravitas to the proceedings, and should ensure only the most knowledgeable and experienced people are representing the industry – leading to greater consistency across categories.
If you believe the digital doomsayers, free-to-air TV is currently experiencing death by a thousand cuts. But in New Zealand, it seems as though TV is slowly clawing its way back to the good old days after data released by industry body ThinkTV showed a two percent or $11 million rise in total ad revenue to $618 million for 2011, up from $607 million in 2010 and $569 million in 2009.
After a few years of quiet on the Y&R NZ front, it’s been pretty much all good news recently, with a host of new accounts locked in and some big creative hires to brag about. And it’s continued down that positive track by naming Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington’s associate creative director Scott Henderson as its creative director in Wellington.
In what will be a big loss for both Colenso BBDO and the New Zealand marcomms community, planning director, talented author, effectiveness evangelist and well-liked bearded brain box James Hurman has accepted the role of planning partner at Ogilvy Shanghai, bringing an end to four very successful years on College Hill.
It hasn’t been a particularly ice block friendly summer in New Zealand. But at least the ice block advertising looks to be of good quality, because, for the second month in a row, ice blocks have run away with Colmar Brunton’s Ad Impact Award after Tip Top’s ‘Tongue Twista’ Popsicle ad was judged the winner of the December round.
Who’s it for:Open Polytechnic by Ogilvy Wellington, Firstlight Productions and Teaspoon Films.
Why we like it: A very well-made and engaging TVC that backs up the successful Open World campaign and zeroes in on the Open Polytechnic’s main competitive advantage: relative freedom. With time increasingly …
Burger King has been selling its tiny burgers overseas for a couple of years now (check out the “horniest, most boobstatic Burger King ad ever” from the US). And it’s just launched the seemingly lady-friendly products in New Zealand, with Colenso BBDO and Flying Fish getting together to create a new, fairly strange TVC that features some sweet electro funk, some fairly cool effects and some forced rhyming.
Last year the marcomms industry rallied for DDB’s Pip Mills, who was diagnosed with melanoma. And now it’s banding together to help Tom Wells and his family. And you can help.
The NZTA and Clemenger BBDO have been pushing the advertising envelope recently. It released the most popular ad of 2011 at the end of last year, Legend, and followed that up with a controversial ‘you’re on candid camera!’ campaign to draw attention to drugged-driving at the start of 2012. And, as part of its summer push to reduce the road toll, they’ve taken a rather patriotic, jingly, kitschy approach to fighting driver fatigue, with three 15 second ads that showcase some of New Zealand’s classic and/or cringey town signs/tourist attractions to the tune of some down-on-the-farm Kiwi songs.
Barnes, Catmur & Friends won the Tourism Fiji account in mid-2009 and set out on its mission to grow New Zealand visitor arrivals from 100,000 per year to 120,000 by 2011. Since it took over, and despite the ongoing political uncertainty, arrivals have gone up 18 percent on the back of some good creative comms, including an enticing TVC, a billboard that showed how hot it was in Fiji during the New Zealand winter and a well-received Adshel promotion that ‘Fiji’ed’ a few hundred locals. But, despite these local results, Tourism Fiji has decided the best approach to “ensure the best possible return on the Fiji Government’s significant annual investment in marketing Fiji to the world and to effectively position Fiji competitively into the future” is to find a lead global advertising agency to develop and implement a new global masterbrand strategy.
As brands try to rise above the rabble and somehow etch themselves into the minds of consumers in a positive fashion, experiential marketing—and the associated brand generosity—is becoming much more prevalent. And, as the multi-faceted Great Pascall Road Trip campaign shows, these experiential elements are increasingly becoming the glue that helps bind major promotions together.
It’s tough being a charity at the moment. More charities mean there’s a heap of competition for the donated dollar, a drop in the level of donations seems to show that givers may be suffering from a form of ‘compassion fatigue’ that makes them immune to charitable overtures and, in many cases, there’s confusion about what the charity actually does, something evidenced by the story of the newly rebranded Leukemia and Blood Cancer New Zealand.
Special Group managed to take home 4 Caxton awards in 2011 for its Orcon Business banner, including the Quinlivan Black Best in Show, and it’s kept its name in the hat for the next round after winning the Oct/Nov ‘Could be a Caxton’ award for its ‘Send a Newspaper’ ad for the Newspaper Publishers’ Association.
Shopper marketing and retail activation is still in its infancy in New Zealand, but, given some figures show up to two thirds of purchasing decisions are made instore, things are starting to heat up. And Ogilvy New Zealand, which already has a solid presence in this space with connections to the Greg Partington-owned instore media company Hypermedia and product demonstration company Demoworks, is aiming to tap into this growth area by bringing these entities under one name and launching a new local office called OgilvyAction. And, in its first month of existence, it has already won the New Zealand Pork account in a competitive five-way pitch.
Plastic is bad, mmmkay. And SodaStream NZ, with the help of the PR Shop, is following in the footsteps of overseas markets and using shock and awe tactics to show it, with a large travelling cage filled with 2,000 empty cans and bottles that aims to visually represent the average amount used by a Kiwi household in a three-year period, educate the locals about the world’s recycling problem and, of course, show that SodaStream is a better, eco-friendly option.
It was not without a sigh and a grunt that agencies with relaxation on their minds received a notice from the Treasury on December 15 asking for interested parties to put their hands up if they wanted to work on the ‘extension of the mixed ownership model’ account. They obviously don’t know Christmas is a time of reflection for the marcomms industry. But it seems the biggest live pitch at the moment (aside from the decision on Vodafone, which is still thought to be in the hands of the global bods), is now down to the shortlist stage.
As everyone knows, Telecom’s Abstain campaign died a horrible death before it was even born and it was a regular inclusion in the ‘least favourite’ campaign category in our Year in Reviews. Vaughn Davis managed to pin down the former head of marketing Kieren Cooney for a chat about the campaign, the thinking behind it and its unfortunate leakage for Idealog before he headed off to Australia and we’re pretty sure you markety types will be interested in what he had to say. So put your finger on this.
Is Latte-Land really nothing more than a rabid trash hole filled with Remuera tractors and rude, abrasive people who think life doesn’t exist south of the Bombays? Idealog doesn’t think so, and it’s standing up for Aucklanders everywhere (yes, even the ones who don’t live in Auckland any more). The latest issue contends why the Auckland hate must stop and that embracing the inner wanker is key to our wealth and happiness. Property Council head Connal Townsend, Waterfront Auckland chief executive John Dalzell, and Heart of the City’s main man-about-town Alex Swny explain why Auckland is now so much more than just an international airport and endless traffic snarl-ups. Plus: former Telecom marketing head Kieren Cooney spills the beans on the company’s provocative pink fist (and how the campaign unravelled), inside IBM’s secret Kiwi lair, Peter Jackson’s tiny aero-empire that’s capturing the hearts of bearded middle-aged men all over the world, and some local blokes who turned down MTV’s millions (and lived to tell the tale). Fill your boots now. In fact, we’ll fill them for you. Subscribe to six issues of Idealog and 6 issues of NZ Marketing here and we’ll give them BOTH to you for the fantasmagorical price of $60 + GST! Hoorah!
With the huge—some might say completely OTT—number of courses available in New Zealand, education is a very competitive sector. And, as is usually the case over summer, a range of academic institutions are currently ramping up their marketing activity in an effort to get more students to sign up. The last phase of Unitec’s year-long docu-ad series went live recently, AUT is pushing its interesting new campaign, and many smaller, more specialised schools are also advertising. But two new ads caught our attention this week: one featuring the inspiring ‘and not but’ message for the Open Polytechnic, which was created by Ogilvy Wellington and follows up from the very successful ‘Open World’ campaign, and the other a nice animated spot for the Manukau Institute of Technology, which was created by BCG2 and Cirkus.
An interesting bit of biz news in from the States today, which has some relevance for this end of town. Namely that this year in the States, for the very first time, internet ad spending is set to eclipse total spending on all print media. But this has been long predicted. What is surprising is the e-marketer.com chart showing that online ad spending is set to overtake TV in the States by 2016.
Due to a short lapse in brain-functionality late last year as we dreamed of festive leisure, we made a bit of a whoopsie in the Jan/Feb edition of NZ Marketing by mistakenly running a graph that had featured in the previous issue. The graph was meant to show Nielsen’s TAM statistics about the huge number of New Zealanders who watched RWC games but, because of our error, it obviously made no sense at all and caused a fair bit of confusion. We apologise to all those who were befuddled by it. Here’s the correct graph, with the original story from Nielsen’s Caroline Atford.
In what will be a big blow to incumbent agency .99, Air New Zealand has chosen DrafFCB to be its lead agency after a competitive pitch, starting in March. But there is still some mystery surrounding the set-up of the account because Saatchi & Saatchi, which a few industry big mouths had thought was looking good to take the win, has also been included on the airline’s agency roster.
Fourteen months after launching its mobile application, GrabOne’s mobile sales are at an all time high. Twelve percent of all GrabOne purchases over the Christmas period were via the GrabOne mobile application, up from 5.45 percent in November 2011 and 1.5 percent over Christmas 2010.