As a story on Sunday recently showed, there’s a big debate about the role of screens in kids’ lives and whether they’re helping or hindering development. But Apple is looking at it in a different way, with its latest ad showing how the iPhone can help parents assist with child-rearing, whether it’s keeping tabs, finding the dog, teaching them maths or controlling the lights.
True opened its doors in 2011 after a few senior protagonists from .99 felt the need to go it alone and break away from the nurturing bosom of The Clemenger Group. Like any new business, the first few years were tough going and it focused on growth rather than profit, but it’s gaining momentum, it’s working with big brands like Air New Zealand and Vodafone, it’s moving into areas outside traditional advertising and it currently employs 25 staff. Managing director Matt Dickinson spills the beans on its philosophy.
Last week, shortly after the release of Telecom’s Lightbox offering, Quickflix announced an agreement with South Pacific Pictures that gave the veteran in New Zealand’s SVOD market rights to over 120 hours of local content via Go Girls and Outrageous Fortune. And given that Lightbox’s head of programming and local content Maria Mahony admitted to StopPress that she was currently in talks with local film distributors to secure a deal to screen several local shows, this announcement by Quickflix will no doubt be competitive blow to the newcomer.
What makes people do Dry July? Screaming headaches and lowered IQ, greasy breakfasts with two days’ worth of calories, smartphone picture evidence of bad nudity ….and maybe even a goat inexplicably resident in the kitchen? Or is it because they want to see what they could achieve without a hangover?
Toybox, Clemenger BBDO and many freelancers have created the mesmerizing animation for the 2014 Dry July launch video.
Forest & Bird’s interactive print campaign continues to forge ahead, and this time readers will be graduated from using a $5 note and asked to reach for their $10 and $50 note, to put the whio or the kokako back into the illustrated scene. Meanwhile, the $5 campaign is forging into uncharted territory for Forest & Bird: the readers of New Idea.
The Football World Cup has made for some bloody good, exciting viewing. But in New Zealand, where playing rugby with a broken rib, a ruptured scrotum or a severe brain injury is practically demanded of our international players, many Kiwis seem to find all the rolling around in largely faux agony hard to swallow. Thankfully, The Wall St Journal has conducted an exhaustive study of the first 32 games to find the winners of the “first ever international soccer injury-embellishment awards”.
While wandering down the main street of Whakatane recently, we couldn’t help but notice this gift shop mascot and his unfortunate hand placement. And that got our immature minds thinking about other unintentional genitalia.
Mike Hosking is one of the country’s most popular broadcasters, and he’s renowned for his strongly voiced opinions on Newstalk ZB and Seven Sharp, where many believe his introduction as host along with Toni Street has been the catalyst for improving ratings this year. But not everyone agrees with his sometimes controversial views, with one Facebook commenter saying he’s a “bitter middle aged men with too much money and power”. So Jeremy Wells, breakfast co-host of Newstalk ZB’s sister station Radio Hauraki, has riffed on Hosking’s love of ranting with a series of brilliant impressions.
Damon Stapleton is fresh off the boat from Cannes and today is his first day as DDB NZ’s chief creative officer. Here’s his view on the importance of the world’s biggest festival of creativity.
Telecom has announced that it will emerge as Spark on 8 August. But the powers that be say the new name is just one aspect of the company’s transformation into “a confident, forward-looking technology company”. In an edited version of an article originally published in the May/June edition of NZ Marketing, Ben Fahy looks at the thinking behind one of the country’s biggest-ever—and most controversial—rebrands and the important role chief operating officer Jason Paris played in the process.
Following on from its Australian branch, DDB New Zealand has now also launched an in-house innovation lab called Shaper. Established with the bold goal to “solve real human problems and create new revenue streams”, the new addition to the DDB offering will aim to “own and monetise ideas developed in the lab”. In a release, DDB’s chief operating officer Chris Riley says that the creative skills available at the agency provide the potential of delivering more than just advertising. PLUS: find out why author Leif Abraham thinks ad agencies struggle to innovate.
Google. Firstly, let’s get one thing clear: I love Google. Well, one half of Google, the half that perfected the search engine, made email better, mapped…
The debate as to whether advertising is art isn’t new. The lines between these two disciplines are so blurred that Proctor and Gamble has donated over 5,000 of its advertisements (dating back to 1882) to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. And now, Y&R NZ has further contributed to the conflation of these disparate worlds by commissioning well-known and well-moustached LA artist Michael C Hsiung to illustrate the imagery for a new range of posters for a Blunt Umbrellas campaign.
When Hell launched its rabbit pizza a few months back, Barnes, Catmur & Friends created the world’s first rabbit skin billboard to promote it. That caught plenty of attention and helped generate some impressive sales stats and now Hell is back with its next wild pizza, the kangaroo-laced Boomer. And this time its marketing campaign consists of holding Australia to ransom.
Telecom-owned Skinny Mobile has had a fairly schizophrenic first few years, shifting from a youth brand with a big focus on events and social media to a value brand with more focus on traditional channels. It’s also had a few different big cheeses and launched a number of different brand campaigns through Saatchi & Saatchi and, most recently, Young & Shand. But now it’s appointed DNA as its lead brand and marketing agency after a “thorough review of its business and brand strategy”.
Now that the Cannes hangovers have subsided and that the lions have been placed on the mantles, attention can shift to the local awards scene, which is currently gearing up for the 23rd edition of the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards after last week’s announcement of the finalists.
From apps to native ads, design is championing reductionist principles. And that’s a good thing, writes Simon Lendrum.
The creative team behind The Edge TV were in the MediaWorks offices until the wee hours of Friday morning, putting together the final pieces for the Edge TV, a project that was first announced in April. PLUS: the network stoush continues.
This new PSA from American organisation Evolve puts a light hearted twist on a rather serious topic.
Finally, someone has done something about every surfer’s evil arch nemeses – Captain Chafe.
Advertising solely in English just doesn’t cut it anymore, Aucklanders. The city has the highest percentage of overseas-born residents in the country – 2013 census data says it’s a whopping 40 percent. Over 1 in 5 people are Asian in Auckland, and Hindi is now the fourth most common language in New Zealand, after English, Maori, and Samoan. And don’t breathe easy, Wellington – 25 percent of you were born overseas, too. That’s what Brandworld noticed, and so the content marketing company signed an agreement to work with ethnic media specialist Niche Media to get to work on this diverse audience.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
Before Antoine de Saint-Exupéry penned the widely loved novella The Little Prince, he worked as a pilot at the airline that would come to be known as Aerolíneas Argentinas. Using this fact as a premise, Buenos Aires-based creative agency Madre has created a poetic spot that’s driven by the actual words of the author, who is disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1944.
Earlier today, Fairfax Media Limited and APN News & Media Limited announced a proposed printing agreement that will see a consolidation of the pair’s printing processes in the upper North Island. Under the arrangement, APN will provide printing services to Fairfax in New Zealand for several newspapers at its Ellerslie facility, including the Waikato Times, Sunday Star-Times, Sunday News and other community titles. “The deal has not yet been finalised although the high-level terms have been approved,” says an APN spokesperson.
Industry happenings at The Sweet Shop, Thick as Thieves, Fairfax Media, TalentShop, Unilever and Warner Bros.
The #RePicture hashtag was in fullforce at the Cannes Lions 2014. It was Getty Images’ way of getting people re-thinking the way they look at the world, to let go of stereotyped visuals that are usually used to describe people and concepts. As Getty Images says, “It has often been said that if we can visualize it, we can create it, including a better world. And we can – using pictures, platforms, and influential channels such as media and advertising to ignite important cultural shifts.”
Last year, Skinny Mobile’s selfie-billboards and teen stock imagery were kicked to the curb, when the company rebranded itself to appeal to a wider (and more lucrative) audience than 16-25 year olds. A year in the making, Skinny has now also reskinned website – and, unlike a recent TVC, the new skin has a slick design and user experience journey.
In a 2008 paper, neuroscientists Siri Leknes and Irene Tracey concluded that pain and reward processing involves many of the same regions of the brain. And while this doesn’t necessarily make us all sadomasochists by biological obligation, the success of Hell Pizza’s ‘Angry Dragon’ campaign suggests that there certainly is some truth to this. Over the course of the campaign, a total of 3,526 pizzas were attempted in under two weeks, resulting in the use of 63.25 kilograms of ghost peppers, which measure one million Scoville heat units, and 87.1 litres of Dragon’s Fury Sauce.
Only a few days after picking up a few lions at Cannes, Saatchi & Saatchi’s creative director Corey Chalmers found himself among the winners at the Palm Springs Film Festival. Pitted against over 300 entrants from across the world, Chalmers’ film ‘Whisker’, which tells the story of man trying to win a beard-growing competition, walked away with the prestigious Future Filmmaker Award. The film was a collaborative effort, in the sense that it was written by Chalmers and then directed and produced by Steve Saussey and Yoland Dewey of Stuff and Nonsense Ltd.
