The latest agency news, campaigns and client wins (and losses) making headlines across Aotearoa.
Aah Christmas, what’s not to love? Parties, presents, yummy treats. But gifts aren’t always what you want, take reindeer sweaters, or singing fish ornaments for example. To make up for the bitter disappointment such gifts bring, we have two $50 gift cards to give away, for Subway and GrabOne.
The price wars between the supermarket behemoths Progressive Enterprises and Foodstuffs is heating up, with Foodstuffs winning the latest legal skirmish. A decision by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ruled Progressive Enterprises guilty of presenting an artificial advantage and breaching ethics guidelines.
BCG2 Health’s Pfizer ‘FACTORy’ programme, originally developed in New Zealand in collaboration with Spitfire, and then launched into Australia, has won a Pfizer Human Health global award for commercial excellence and innovation.
In our humble opinion, Powershop’s ‘Same Power, Different Attitude’ campaign is one of the best campaigns of the year. But we wondered aloud a couple of weeks ago whether its latest execution featuring Darth Vader prancing through a field like Julie Andrews crossed the IP line. Turns out it did, and the LucasFilm patent lawyers have been in touch telling them to cease and desist. They’ve done as asked, but, with a dose of challenger brand cheek, they’ve also taken a leaf out of 42 Below’s book and, with the help of its PR agency Sputnik, decided to have a bit of fun with the apology letter.
Stolen Rum is a New Zealand-based start-up rum company that wants to bring back the romanticism and history of rum to a contemporary audience. The rum itself has been judged world class, and it’s got the requisite feel good back-story, but an in-house cheeky guerrilla marketing campaign hopes to put Stolen Rum on everyone’s lips—including the spirit-making behemoth it’s competing with, Bacardi.
While all the talk in broadcasting land is about Sky and TVNZ’s Igloo, TVNZ has just announced the arrival of a new addition to its OnDemand family called Ad Hover, “a dynamic, customisable and fully interactive advertising opportunity” created in conjunction with DraftFCB that aims to give viewers a more engaging and immersive video experience and claims to significantly up the brand recall measures for advertisers.
A new free mobile application which helps make Christmas shopping easier has been a huge hit among iPhone users.
Jack Delmonte and Hadleigh Sinclair from Publicis Mojo take November’s ORCA for their ‘Low Fat’ Subway campaign, which was a real hit with the judges, and can be credited with inventing the phrase “hairy neck dumplings” as a euphemism for goatee adorned double chins.
Gamers usually like to escape reality. But, as part of a YouTube campaign for Turtle Beach, a company that designs, manufactures and markets high quality audio peripherals for video game consoles and personal computers, Droga5 NZ has reversed that scenario and taken a 24 year-old Kiwi gamer named StatiC (real name Phil) on a journey through a real warzone, Iraq.
When we asked TVNZ’s head of digital Eric Kearley in early November whether TVNZ was working with Sky and would launch a set-top box before the digital switchover, he flat out said no. But last night Sky and TVNZ brought out the big PR guns and officially launched “New Zealand’s worst kept secret”, Igloo, the mid-play TV network that offers both pay and free-to-air channels. And while there’s plenty to shout about with the new offer, there are still questions lingering about its modus operandi and whether MediaWorks will play nice.
Droga5 has signed with one of New Zealand’s leading gaming businesses Fiveight. The New Zealand-owned and operated company represents SEGA, Turtle Beach, Ubisoft and Warner Bros. There were no incumbents, as the company was only formed last year.
It’s nearly Christmas so we thought we’d lighten things up a bit with a look at some of the more, ahem, misguided marketing attempts.
Forget half an hour of current affairs – instead a new comedy show, to be hosted by Paul Henry, is planned for Sunday nights on TV3. Henry will host Would I Lie To You?, a comedy panel show featuring two teams and guest celebrities.
After a successful pitch for Maritime New Zealand’s business earlier this year, feast your eyes on the first ad produced by DraftFCB for the Maritime NZ: ‘Don’t be a clown, wear a lifejacket’.
It’s tough finding the perfect gift. And time is running out to find it before Christmas. But Colenso and Heart of the City have joined forces to make it slightly easier—and to promote the shopping districts of the Auckland CBD—with the launch of the Gift Guru, a festive addition to the Big Little City website that offers hints and tips from “super stylist and shopping extraordinaire” Charlotte Rust.
Who’s it for: Paper Plus by Hyde and Toybox
Why we like it: Everyone loves origami. And pop-up books. So, as part of its big rebrand, Paper Plus has embraced both of them in these quirky, cutesy campaign.
Who’s it for: Vend …
Mega stores have changed the face of home retailing, and MSN is hoping to recreate that same success online with Homes NZ. The new website appears to be pushing all the right buttons, attracting 36,000 page views in its first two days.
When local tech start-up (and winner of the supreme honour at the New Zealand Innovator’s Awards) Vend HQ launched www.welovepos.com, a website for sharing point of sale horror stories and celebrating great technology and design, it purchased a clunky, obsolete old cash register named Steve with one purpose in mind: trashing him. So they went to the customers and asked them whether he should meet his maker via firing squad, hammers, dynamite, or by ‘falling’ off a tall building. Then, as the votes started coming in, they thought, why not all of the above?
GrabOne, New Zealand’s leading daily deal website, is partnering up with Kidsline, a free peer counselling service for children under 14. Today GrabOne launches their Kidsline donation campaign on their website where customers can donate to the charity.
Apollo Marketing has capped off a year of strong growth and multiple awards by winning B&T’s Promotional Agency of the Year for 2011. This is the second year running that the trans-Tasman agency has won this award, beating fierce competition from other Australian and New Zealand agencies.
Colenso’s last campaign for Frucor’s PepsiMax, MaxIt Jobs, went down a treat with the young, mostly male, sugary drink-loving target audience and was a finalist for the FMCG category at the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards and took home a silver Effie as a result of the sales lift. And it’s followed that up with a similarly masculine campaign/competition called Bromitment, “a pledge, promise, obligation to be there with your boys, to participate in any and all shenanigans that may go down”.
As we wrote last week, publishers—and other media owners—are being forced to come up with creative solutions to get brands to sign on the dotted line. This means advertorial and brand-funded content is becoming an increasingly important element of the magazine sector’s revenue and the half magazine, half cookbook called Everyday Dish that’s just been released by Tangible in association with LG is a very good example of that evolution.
ACC has appointed DraftFCB for its advertising, marketing and design services. The incumbents were Clemenger and AIM Proximity.
Christmas is rapidly approaching and we all know what that means: it’s going to rain. So what better way to survive a Kiwi summer than with a Blunt umbrella, the Kiwi invention developed by Greig Brebner that’s designed to stand up to Wellington-esque conditions, won’t poke anyone’s eyes out and has been coveted by the likes of Wired and Men’s Health. We’ve got two of the virtually unbreakable XL numbers in blue valued at $110 to give away to a couple of lucky StopPressers and, because New Zealanders love nothing more than talking about the weather, all you have to do is tell us about an occasion when a bad dose of it ruined something, be it a wedding, a shoot, a bar mitzvah or maybe even a base jump.
Local comedy 7 Days, and 3 News’ election coverage highlight a strong month of growth for TV3, which saw significant gains in the key 25-54 demographic, while TV One continued to lose ground.
The tributes are flowing for long-time Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington typographer and designer Eric De Vries, who died off the Kapiti Coast over the weekend after he failed to surface from a free-dive.
It’s not easy being a freelance journalist. When you’re reporting on an event overseas, the fee for your work doesn’t always meet the cost of getting you there, let alone a place to stay and a packed lunch. Award winning journalist Jon Stephenson is returning to Afghanistan before Christmas 2011 to cover a number of stories, and he needs a bit of support to get there.
Here at StopPress, we’re big fans of J&D’s, a website that proclaims everything should taste like bacon (for the special someone who has everything, its new Bacon Lube really is the perfect Christmas gift). And while we were baying for blood at the Fight For Life on Saturday night, we also became big fans of Buffalo Creative’s efforts to leverage Kiwi Bacon’s sponsorship of the event.
From 1 January 2012, MediaWorks Radio will be replacing Solid Gold with a new nationwide station called The Sound.
New Zealand social media agency Catalyst90’s post-election Twitter analysis reveals that some MPs missed the boat by ignoring social media as a platform for strategic campaigning and positioning.
The times they are a-changin’ in print media land. Display ads are harder to come by and publishers are being forced to come up with creative solutions to help brands spread their gospel. And, to reference the increasing amount of revenue such creative executions contribute to the magazine industry’s coffers, the MPA has agreed to a new protocol that it hopes will capture more of the spend occurring in magazines for Nielsen’s Advertising Information Services.
Rumours are rife Cudo is on the brink of closure after just nine months, with some claiming the company has already let most of its staff go.
It was announced a couple of months ago that DDB NZ’s creative sage Toby Talbot was leaving to take up a role within the DDB Network based in London where he would be working on global clients like Volkswagen and McDonald’s and doing a creative MBA. Everyone was assured it was a short-term thing and he’d be back to take up his position after his year-long overseas sabbatical. But he’s “made the most difficult decision of his business life” and instead made a clean break from the DDB Network to take up a role as executive creative director with one of the UK’s top agencies, RKCR/Y&R.
Digital activation agency Touch/Cast, bought by Clemenger just last month, and retail advertising agency Raydar have joined forces to bring a new digital offering to the Auckland market. The venture will be headed up by well-known digital evangelist, Zac Pullen.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are big days for retailers in the States—and, judging by some of the figures this year, the discounts offered up by all and sundry certainly got consumers to prise open their wallets. In times of economic stagnancy, the level of consumption is often used as a barometer for recovery. But, as this fairly brave print ad for Patagonia that ran in the New York Times shows, maybe less consumption is a good thing. Or perhaps it’s just a bit of cheeky reverse psychology in action.
Rico, the furry, double entendre-loving puppet, was a polarising mascot for Air New Zealand. Some felt his lewd conduct was ‘off’brand’ and a bad look for a premium airline that had lost its marketing way. Others felt it wasn’t aimed at New Zealanders and was a smart, fun way of gaining a heap of international attention via the airline’s social media channels. He was cerainly one of the most talked-about marketing things of the year, but now, in typically dramatic fashion—and with a smart digital tie-in to the boardgame Cluedo—Rico has been killed off.