Trampers can now traverse New Zealand from the comfort of their living rooms, beds or wherever they plug in their computers after the country’s Great Walks were added to Google’s Street View.
As we approach the end of the year, the young up-and-comers who have been honing their creative skills at various ad schools set out on their quest to find gainful employment by showing off their handiwork. And the first of them was held last night when ten people graduated from the 12-week AWARD School course. Feast your eyes on some of the best scamps.
This week, Bauer launched the latest addition to its revamped digital arsenal in the shape of the new Women’s Weekly website. So we chatted to the media company’s head of digital Michael Fuyala about how the rollout of the new digital properties is going, what he expects for the latest title and which advertisers have already been attracted to the various online properties.
While we generally prefer to write about good advertising campaigns here at StopPress, we’re happy to give the bad ones a prod from time to time, whether it’s for blatant rugby bandwagon jumping or cringey beach cricket. So here are a few that have got our goats recently.
The modern radio audience has become divided, with streaming services and websites flooding onto the market. The Edge knew it needed to keep up, so it made its audience an offer it couldn’t refuse.
Spanning two wars and a bit of rugby in between, Dave Gallagher’s story, which is presented on a Steinlager ad alongside vintage photos and props, makes for compelling reading—and it comes as little surprise that the judging panel for the Newspaper Ad of the Month singled it out as the standout creative in September.
When people look back on the great heatpump wars of the noughties and 2010s/teenies/tenties/tenners, they will presumably think of rugby players on walls, cricket players cracking dad jokes on couches or slightly sinister bald men. Daikin farewelled Dan Carter as an ambassador earlier this year but attempted to maintain the humour in its follow up effort. But now it has switched its approach and, in a new Australasian brand campaign via Sugar & Partners and Robber’s Dog, is focusing on emotions rather than technology.
At the recent CAANZ session ‘Who’s buying? The future of content commercialisation in NZ’, several industry commentators weighed in on whether content marketing is nothing more than an annoyance. Here’s a rundown of what Metro’s Simon Wilson, The Spinoff’s Duncan Greive, MediaWorks’ Alana O’Neill, Fairfax’s Ellen Read and former Herald editor-in-chief Tim Murphy had to say.
A new app from UK luxury car brand Bentley lets drivers design their own vehicle according to their emotions. Well, kinda.
For the latest season of MKR NZ, TVNZ played the regional card pretty hard in an effort to drum up some parochial support for the contenders. And it seems to be a successful strategy, because Sugar & Partners, Carat and NZ Rugby are claiming victory after its outdoor and social media campaign got the punters talking about the ITM Cup.
A study by PageFair and Adobe released in August estimates ad blocking will cost the global industry around US$41.4 billion dollars in 2016, up from the US$21.8 billion lost this year. And the onus of this revenue leak is increasingly being shifted onto publishers. So what are they doing to fight back against the ad-block threat?
Newspapers love big events, as brands hoping to show their tactical advertising flair tend to gravitate towards them. That was certainly the case after the 2011 Rugby World Cup win, as it was on Monday when the team backed that performance up by beating the Aussies. But we found a few more full-pagers in a special World Cup lift-out in the Herald this week, as well as some other rugby-related efforts.
Facebook announced a stonking third quarter result today, beating analysts’ expectations with US$4.5 billion in revenue and a 14 percent increase in the number of monthly active users. But, much more importantly for the world’s largest social network, Richie McCaw has finally signed up and got the blue tick after a bit of pressure from the socially savvy Dan ‘Mince on Toast’ Carter. And, just a couple of days in, he’s already close to the 300,000 fan mark. If he keeps that up, he’ll soon be getting thousands to post ‘authentic’ pictures of him in his Versatile house, wearing his Beats headphones and using his favourite teeth whitening brand.
The latest wave of transformative digital services has the potential to change lives to an extent far beyond the disruption caused by the previous two waves, desktop web in the 1990s and mobile in the 2000s, says Accenture Interactive’s Michael Buckley.
The mode of delivery for audio has changed markedly in the past few decades, to the point where young folk tend to see a cassette tape as the modern-day equivalent of a gramophone. And a PwC report into the contribution of the music industry to the New Zealand economy shows that while the total retail sales are down significantly on 2012 as a result of shifting listening habits and illegal downloading, the significant growth in online streaming is making up some of the lost ground.
Radio New Zealand has followed in the footsteps of the BBC, ABC and NPR by adopting the acronym RNZ. And while this is a relatively small change, the state broadcaster’s chief executive Paul Thompson says it’s reflective of the organisation’s reach beyond traditional channels into new digital mediums.
In response to continued problem of victim blaming in cases of rape cases, the Crown Prosecution Service in the United Kingdom has released an online clip that uses a simile that will resonate with every Briton – a cup of tea.
Internet giants Google and Facebook continue to dominate online ratings for New Zealanders but increasing numbers of New Zealanders are visiting Stuff.co.nz and the NZ Herald, according to the latest Nielsen figures.
Through a content partnership between Marketo and StopPress, we look at how technology is being used to automate marketing processes and what this means for industry. In the latest edition of the Fully Automate series, we chat to Marketo’s vice president of product management Cheryl Chavez about how automation is making it easier for marketers to roll out and track campaigns.
A few months back Vodafone launched a campaign aimed at teaching parents how to keep their kids safe online. But sometimes you need more than a parent’s guidance. You need technology. And Torch, a special router for parents that claims to stop kids from accessing dodgy content and imposes limits on the amount of time they spend online, created an ad that shows how innocent search terms are not always so innocent.
Something that stood out during our research for the influencer feature in the latest edition of NZ Marketing was the willingness of brands to relinquish creative control to the content creators they work with. So we followed suit by handing the cover creation duties over to a few brands we interviewed for the issue.
With banner blindness and ad-blocking software on the rise, native advertising is growing rapidly. And while there are plenty of thorny issues, Young & Shand co-founder Ben Young thinks that’s a good thing for marketers.
Celebrity endorsement is as old as advertising itself, spanning everything from Pope Leo XIII appearing on a poster for vin Mariani back in the late 1800s to Keiran Read giving Plumbing World the thumbs up to Homer Simpson designing ‘The Homer’. But the digital age has accelerated the trend and moved it in a different direction, with brands trying to cash in on the cachet of celebrities both traditional and new age. So how can they bask in the glow of these ‘influencers’? And how can they use imagery to make an impact? The next StopPress Presents event aims to uncover a few tricks of the trade.
Given this eternal struggle of finding a shirt that exposes just enough chest hair, men’s shirt brand Johnnie-O has released a hilarious spot that provides a guide of what’s just the right amount to show.
MediaWorks’ announced its unified news brand Newshub last Friday and, in the eyes of chief executive Mark Weldon, the multi-million dollar, nine month project to give its radio, TV and digital news assets more coherence is a big step on the journey to create “New Zealand’s leading integrated multi-media company”. He talks to Ben Fahy about how he intends to do that, why it needs to move past selling airtime and why collaboration is the answer.
Here at StopPress headquarters in Auckland, we unfortunately don’t have the promise of snow days during winter to get us excited for a few unexpected moments away from office. However, various states across the US get covered in a white blanket so thick during the colder months that it renders it virtually impossible for citizens to get to work or school. And rather than mourning the confinement that often coincides with snow days, Nike has decided to celebrate the freedom these moments offer in a new spot by Wieden + Kennedy.
With hefty student loans and a growing consensus among international businesses that undergraduate degrees aren’t necessary for entry-level jobs, some are beginning to question whether dedicating three years to a single certificate is really worthwhile. Fortunately, Boundary Road’s Brewniversity offers an alternative. And the best part is that it only takes five minutes to complete the exam.
Contact Energy, Parkinson’s New Zealand and Craigs Investment win this week’s round.
Industry happenings at Hourigan International, Spark, MediaWorks, Finch and Federation.
The accuracy of online targeting tools when viewed alongside the ageing Kiwi population raises a few questions regarding the continued relevance of TV’s 25-54 trading demographic model. StopPress investigates whether this model has become little more than a blunt instrument in the age of big data insights.