Recently, the One Weather sponsorship served as a pre-roll battleground for major car brands, as Ford touted the superiority of the Ranger over the Hilux through a faux weather reporter moulded on the lovable pie-eater from Toyota’s advertising.
The car brands have since put away their monobrows, and Vodafone has now stepped into the One Weather slot—and the telco is also hoping to give its sponsorship a distinctly Kiwi feel (hopefully, without the monobrows).
But rather than having a hirsute actor represent the people of New Zealand, Vodafone is instead giving real Kiwis the chance to appear in the weather-related ad on a daily basis.
From tonight, the 15-second pre-roll that serves as the precursor to the weather update will feature six one-second segments of user-generated content sent in by Kiwis from across the country.
What’s the weather where you are today? Tell us! Video your #1SecondWeather report & share on Instagram or Twitter & # your town for your chance to be on TV tonight! Terms at 1secondweather.co.nz
Posted by Vodafone New Zealand on Monday, 1 June 2015
As part of the ‘1 Second Weather‘ campaign, amateur weather readers are asked to take a short video selfie describing the conditions in their location. Participants can submit their video via Instagram or Twitter with the tag #1SecondWeather and a hashtag featuring their location (for example #Rotorua).
Six videos will be selected and TVNZ will edit these into one-second clips to screen during the 15-second commercial every weekday.
“New Zealanders have a long and chequered history of talking about the weather and this really just gives them an opportunity to do it on the TV,” says Nileema Allerston, Vodafone’s head of business brands and comms.
This campaign follows on from the recent launch of Vodafone’s brand campaign featuring the travels of courier driver Keith and the piglet Piggy-Sue.
“The campaign is going phenomenally,” says Allerston. “We’ve been dumbstruck by the responses. Customers are emailing every day to tell us that they love the campaign. It has really resulted in a lot of interaction.”
However, Allerston says that it was a very conscious decision not to include Piggy-Sue in the One Weather sponsorship activation, saying that the telco’s aim is showcase the reach of the network and what this means to regular New Zealanders.
Given the allure of having one second of fame on Kiwi TV, entries have already started streaming in. And from the looks of things, it appears there won’t be any monobrows or pies on display when the weather is introduced this evening (Kiwis do, however, have six weeks to introduce these familiar elements).
Update: Vodafone has released its first couple of weather reports.
