MediaWorks has had a fairly rough ride over the past few years. But the big guns were all smiles last night at the new season launch. We sat down with two of them—chief executive of MediaWorks TV Paul Maher and group head of revenue Liz Fraser—for a chat about the company’s content strategy, results and evolution.
If you’re in show business, you’ve got to put on show and MediaWorks, a company with a new chief executive, a new sense of confidence after negotiating a receivership and plenty of big new shows to crow about, put one on last night for its new season launch at Shed 10 in Auckland. So should it be exuding this much optimism?
This Sunday the All Blacks will take on the United States in a widely hyped exhibition match in Chicago. While the United States certainly can’t be described as a rugby playing nation, all 61,500 seats at the Soldier Field have been sold out. Such is the star power of the All Blacks that they are capable of filling a stadium in a country where rugby ranks below badminton, ten-pin bowling and pro wrestling in terms of popularity. And given the seeming supernatural ability of those who don the increasingly tight black shirts to make people interested in things that they don’t necessarily care about, it comes as little surprise that Kiwi brands have shown such a willingness to attach their labels to rugby players. StopPress looks at how rugby players are helping brands get noticed.
For the third year in a row the Diamond gong given to the best piece of work entered in the international Echo Awards will be returning from San Diego to Auckland. On 30 October, this prestigious direct marketing award was awarded to Republik New Zealand for Fuji Xerox’s ‘Wide War One’ campaign, which also picked up a gold in the ‘information technologies’ category. This Diamond win follows on from Colenso’s 2012 and 2013 wins. And while the College Hill agency didn’t make three in a row, it didn’t leave the awards show empty handed either.
As part of our series with the One Percent Collective that’s dedicated to celebrating good work and inspiring a bit more generosity, Ant Salmon, managing director of Big Communications, doffs his cap to Andy McDowell and all the others who have done their own thing.
Sky had a stunner last Friday when it announced great numbers, a new five year rugby deal and plans for some fancy new additions to its boxes. It also announced the launch of its much-discussed SVOD offering Neon, which is set to launch in December. Here’s what managing director Dave Joyce had to say about the strategy behind it.
For those of you that thought social media was just for sharing selfies and pretending your life’s way better than it actually is, think again. New Zealand brands and their fans are using the medium for a lot more than that. They are using it together to make things happen. PLUS: we look at examples of crowd-sourcing gone wrong.
A battle is raging between online advertisers and those who don’t want to be followed on the Web, and New Zealand news websites are harbouring a surprising amount of trackers. Journalists and privacy experts have recently been pointing the finger at news websites as some of the worst offenders when it comes to collecting people’s data without any formal disclosure. Much of this is happening through online ‘trackers’, hidden pieces of code in websites that track how a user clicks, or even hovers, on a site.
Following the recent unveiling of its ambitious ‘Boroughs’ project, which will see five high-tech basketball courts introduced in Auckland, Spark has now announced a marketing partnership with the National Basketball Association. As part of this deal, Spark will offer its home broadband customers NBA League Pass and League Pass Premium annual subscriptions beginning next month, giving customers 15 percent off the full price of either a full season or a one-month subscription.
Since Vine launched in January 2013 it’s fair to say the six-second video app has taken off. According to Vine, every month now more than 100 million people watch Vines across the web. Owned by Twitter, the social media platform boasts 1 billion views or ‘loops’ of videos every day, with the majority of users being teens. The largest age group on Vine is 18 – 20 year olds. But are Kiwi brands slower on the uptake than our global counterparts?
Every day, around two million Kiwis log onto Facebook to scroll down their newsfeeds to see what is happening in their lives. And according to Stephen Scheeler, the company’s head of New Zealand, these aren’t sporadic single visits because the average user peruses the site around 15 times in a single day. “For those two million Kiwis on Facebook, about 12 percent of their media consumption is Facebook,” says Scheeler. “Remember, eight years ago it was zero. So this has been a massive shift.” The rapid migration of audiences into the digital realm is by no means surprising, but such statistics are increasingly serving as strong impetus for brands to shift their commercial messaging to where the eyes are. So we take a look at how brands are collaborating with the social media juggernaut to spread their commercial messages.
The Warehouse Group has been bringing the real world and the online world closer together recently, with its recent rebrand of R&R Sport to the ‘omni-channel’ Torpedo 7, its Click Madness promotion, free wifi in the newly refurbished stores and an app that lets shoppers compare prices. Now it’s launching its Christmas campaign with a five minute online video that puts the decision-making in the hands of the experts: kids.
Wires are so noughties. And, as speaker and headphone company JBL shows, they’re bloody annoying too. PLUS: eggs, popcorn, radiation and people struggling with everyday tasks.
Consumers are regularly asked to assist in the creation of marketing campaigns these days, with varying degrees of success. And designer David Trubridge has merged inspiration from bird life with over 500 cherished memories sent in by New Zealanders as part of a crowd-sourced art project for longtime World of Wearable Art sponsor Brancott Estate.
As noted in a series of articles published on the Getty Images website last year, publishers and brands are starting to shift away from the stereotypical images that have until now typified what advertisers had constructed as perfection. The investigation into visual trends found that women were increasingly represented in positions of power, same-sex relationships were sometimes used in lieu of straight imagery, older people were appearing with greater regularity and beauty was being given a more flexible definition. Interestingly, the top 20 Getty images that have been downloaded by Kiwis since the beginning of the year also indicate that these international trends are starting to take shape in New Zealand. However, trends don’t emerge instantaneously, and this means there were still some more conventional images included on the final list.
Hell Pizza is offering an explosive short-term deal with their pizza delivery – and they’re hoping it’s going to net them a record week of sales. A campaign offering a fireworks delivery along with your pizza kicked off last week with the company opening a fireworks preorder for the Guy Fawkes period.
In a bid to get Spark connected with young Aucklanders, a group it struggled to reach in the Telecom days, the company is partnering with Kiwi NBA player Steven Adams and the Auckland council to bring five high-tech basketball courts to the city.
Artist Sarah Larnach has lent her creative talents to winemaker Whitecliff for a new branding campaign that prominently features the company’s tree silhouette in the artwork.
Garden emperors, tomorrow’s basketball stars, Hobbit pilots, and regular Kiwis make an appearance in the latest edition of the weekly TVC rundown.
FCB New Zealand’s work for the National Depression Initiative has won plenty of industry accolades. And it’s now won one of the rarest: a gold and best international prize at the prestigious IPA Effectiveness Awards in the UK.
Ikea Singapore is not afraid to scare the crap out of its customers with a tongue-in-cheek ad out just in time for Halloween. PLUS: a few other branded tricks and treats.
Over the weekend, Fairfax distributed a revamp of Sunday, the magazine insert included on a weekly basis with the Sunday Star-Times. The new version features an updated portrait layout, more pages and a combination of new content and the return of various favourites that have thus far appeared in the pages of the magazine over the last ten years. To incorporate the new design elements, Fairfax brought in art director Delaney Tabron to work closely with Sunday editor Rebecca Kamm, who joined the publication in January.
Whether it’s booking flights, deciding where to stay or finding your way when you’re on holiday, the internet era has turned the travel industry on its head. Jessy Edwards looks at how some of the traditional businesses like Destinations, For the Love of Travel and House of Travel are transitioning and how new businesses are profiting.
New World, Colenso BBDO and Finch recently shot an ad illustrating just how far—or not—the supermarket would go to support netball and mixed in a bit of sponsorship-based madness to add to its brilliantly bonkers brand ads. And here’s a behind-the-scenes clip that shows how it all came together.
OK Go has produced some phenomenally creative music videos, from treadmills to Rube Goldberg machines to visual trickery (that Apple seems to have been ‘inspired’ by). And its latest effort adds to that ouevre.
The elusive Honey-billed William is like catnip to brands (and media). And after he announced his return to rugby earlier this year, Adidas swooped in and signed him up as an ambassador in May. Now it’s released a short clip telling his story as part of its #leaveyourmark campaign. PLUS: exciting jersey-related news.
ANZ holds around one third of the country’s home loan market and it’s made a concerted push to retain that—and presumably improve that—recently with a new campaign showing the frisson of buying property at auction. Last year it put its name beside TVNZ’s Art of the Architect and now it’s backing the other team, signing on as a production partner for the upcoming New Zealand version of Grand Designs New Zealand.
Like beards and Jennifer Lawrence, customer centricity is having a bit of a ‘moment’ currently. But in this rapidly changing nation, we’re not listening hard enough to what customers actually want, says Andrew Lewis.
In times of crisis, the media is meant to serve as helpful tool in keeping the public informed. However, with the recent increase in the number of ebola cases around the world, some arms of the American media have seemingly lost their minds and resorted to blatant fear mongering instead. Here’s what a few comedians think about the ebola madness going on at the moment.
We live in increasingly visual times. And no-one’s got time to read those pesky words anymore. So every week we’ll choose a few of our favourite graphs. In honour of the heated discussion around magazines on these pages in recent days, here’s a couple that show what’s been happening to magazine circulation in New Zealand over the past ten years.