The All Blacks’ impressive 2015 Rugby World Cup final victory 34-17 over close rivals Australia played in the small hours of Sunday morning New Zealand time and drew over a million television viewers.
There was plenty of marketing activity during the Rugby World Cup and that has continued after the All Blacks lifted the trophy, with brands celebrating the win on social media and in print.
To launch a new Unilever product called Persil Ultimate in New Zealand, Bauer was briefed to help show busy mums how using it could save them time to focus on the important things. To do that, it combined editorial endorsement from Woman’s Day, offered advice from food columnist Chelsea Winter and created an online hub where readers could share time saving tips. And, as Ben Fahy writes in the final instalment of the Beyond the Page series, the Moments that Matter campaign worked a treat for all parties and took out the best sales solution at the Magazine Media Awards.
With last week’s news of Ogilvy’s Paul Manning shifting across to .99 to take up the reins as the agency’s new managing director in early 2016, there were some question marks over what this meant for current managing director Ben Goodale. After the news broke, Clemenger Group sent out a release saying that JustOne and .99 would become disparate agencies (still within the Clemenger Group), with Goodale and Manning leading them respectively. We chat to Goodale about what the future holds for the agency he started just over a decade ago.
When he’s not lending his voice to Pak ‘n Save’s Stickman, Paul Ego is mocking Jeremy Corbett on 7 Days or performing on the stand-up circuit across the country. And when not entertaining the masses with his brand of dry and often self-deprecating humour, Ego likes to engage in some very risqué use of the fax machine.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
NZME confirmed today there would be a total of 15 redundancies across the business as part of its decision to bring news staff across radio, print and digital together in a single newsroom, which will house 280 employees.
It’s Halloween tomorrow, and plenty of Kiwi brands are jumping on board the ghost train. Some campaigns are spookier than others, but Contact Energy’s ‘Trick or Treat’ pre-roll ad on YouTube takes the opportunity to let viewers choose their own adventure. PLUS: the rise of Halloween as a retail event in New Zealand.
Mr Whippy is often licked, he can never be beaten (at least when it comes to puns). But we have a late contender for the final instalment of The Big Game, a prestigious award dished out by StopPress to the best example of desperate euphemism usage from non-sponsors hoping to ride the rugby attention train. We’ve already seen Moa sneak into the stands of the Rugby World Cup with its fairly blatant ‘Four More Years’ brew. And while actual sponsors ASB and even Steinlager are promoting the consumption of hot beverages while watching the game, Hallertau Brewery has crafted a specially made breakfast beer ahead of Sunday’s final. Let’s hope David Seymour gets his hands on one.
In the first of two stories, Ben Fahy talks with MediaWorks chief executive Mark Weldon about the thinking behind its unified news brand Newshub, which has required a multi-million dollar investment, is modelled on the BBC and is set to kick off in Q1 next year.
After six years as the executive director at Ogilvy & Mather NZ, Paul Manning has resigned from his post to take up the managing director role at .99.
Last night, the rain didn’t stop the New Zealand Geographic team from distributing the awards for the Photographer of the Year competition. This is, after all, an annual event celebrating a group of people who during their careers have grown accustomed to weathering the elements—and a bit of water falling from the heavens didn’t seem to bug anyone in attendance. This year there were more than 5,800 entries, which the New Zealand Geographic team eventually whittled down to 28 finalists, from which nine winners were chosen.
Everyone loves a good .gif. There are even awards to celebrate the art form. And now gif hunting site Giphy has created a fairly mad ad that riffs on classic cooking programmes to show people how to make one.
While the knee-jerk reaction to a pre-roll is generally an attempt to hit the skip button as quickly as possible, this isn’t always the case. Not all pre-rolls are created equal—and Mountain Dew and the Wall Street Journal are showing why a bit of creativity pays when it comes to producing these ads.
While there are many exciting uses for drones, the most consumer-friendly use of the technology is film. Many birds don’t take too kindly to the space invaders. Privacy advocates don’t like them much either. And, as a clip that got picked up yesterday from Kor Creative showed, neither do schoolkids from Rosmini College. So in honour of the destructive kick, here are few other drone-based clips.
ASB previously put its clients to work by getting them to accumulate as many likes as possible in return for lower mortgage rates. And for its latest campaign, the bank is again giving some of its customers control of how low their interest rates might go—but this time they have to sweat for it. As part of its ‘Run Down Your Rate’ competition, the bank has selected ten customers who will be able to run down their interest rates during the ASB Auckland Marathon.
As Paul Casserly’s excellent documentary Radio Punks showed earlier this year, the story of student radio in New Zealand is full of interesting twists, turns and characters. And up-and-coming student directors Olly Clifton and Benjamin Zambo, who are currently in year 13 at Western Springs College in Auckland, have added to the oeuvre by giving their take on bFM, which started as a capping stunt in 1969 under the moniker Radio Bosom, grew into one of the most vibrant media brands in the country in the ’90s and is now attempting to compete against consolidation and a proliferation of other media options now available to the young’uns.
At a presentation held yesterday, Lightbox chief executive Kym Niblock said that recent research conducted for the SVOD provider indicated that a fifth of current Sky subscribers said they were likely to leave the service after the Rugby World Cup and one in four are likely to add a streaming service in the near future. But Sky’s director of communications Kirsty Way thinks these figures will come to fruition.
While the expression ‘thinking outside the box’ is a bit of a cliché, Traffic proved it can pay off. By identifying a gap in the renovation market it effectively created a new national brand with great potential for overseas expansion.
Claudia Batten is currently on the Better by Design Study Tour in the US along with a number of other Kiwi overachievers and she says the success of Contently—and the attitude of its founder Shane Snow—shows that marketing now needs to come from a place of integrity and sincerity.
TRA broke the champagne on its fancy new office in Britomart this year (and developer Peter Cooper called “the best fit out in the precinct”). And it’s about to do it again, this time in Wellington.
NZ Retail/The Register editor Sarah Dunn reckons there might be more to selfie culture than meets the eye.
For the upcoming Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards, Vodafone is following in the footsteps of the Coachella organisers by enabling those not in attendance to experience the event through Snapchat. And the telco hopes this will get the event to reach thousands of Kiwis beyond the 8,500 capacity of the venue.
As a still-nascent format, digital video can be a confusing realm for brands to navigate. So is it all it’s cracked up to be? And if it is, then what? Facebook video or YouTube? Long form or short form? DIY or through a publisher? Pre-roll or standalone? Fortunately, Lynda Brendish has done some of the legwork for you.
You may not have noticed, but the Rugby World Cup final looms on Sunday morning. And still the brands attempt to squeeze blood from the rugby stone. And this week’s winner of The Big Game, a prestigious award dished out by StopPress to the best example of desperate euphemism usage from non-sponsors hoping to ride the attention train, goes to Mr Whippy for its glorious pun-based treat.
Steinlager’s campaign to support the All Blacks during their attempted retention of the Rugby World Cup focused on the similarities between this quest and the 1905 Originals Tour, where the first team to be known as the All Blacks travelled six weeks by boat and won 34 out of 35 games. And ahead of the final on Sunday morning, DDB New Zealand has released some new print ads focusing on three remarkable stories from that journey.
If a new campaign from Durex is anything to go by, then men and women don’t really view sex all that differently. When separated into two gender groups, the responses from both men and women on whether they would engage in a one-night stand were almost unanimously affirmative. But there was one question on which they differed in opinion.
The University of Auckland has launched a campaign via JWT all about ‘achieving the amazing’, which takes the clever approach of using science to do just that, literally. Here’s a rundown on the effort.
Typically, finding a surprise in your food is a Very Bad Thing and whether it’s a mouse in a loaf, a cockroach in a Big Mac, or a wasp in a block of chocolate, media outlets take great pleasure in heaping shame on those responsible when it happens. But to promote its new range of real fish, Sealord has embraced that and given unsuspecting shoppers a bit of a fright in the frozen food aisle.
Sanitarium, Mastercard and Safekids perform a victory dance this week.