At the end of 2012, in an effort to step out of the stuffy boardroom atmosphere that typifies the rigid corporate world, DDB’s management team instructed the agency’s then in-house interior designer Campbell Johnson (now owner of Campbell Johnson Design) to renovate the Auckland offices and make the space more inviting to visitors.
Creative types are restless and often entrepreneurial souls so, once they’ve finished harnessing their powers to sell more baked beans, they often head home to focus on their own projects. Here are three we’ve noticed recently from Cleve Cameron, Chris Williams and Jacqui Lockington.
Staff generally see more of a company’s advertising than its customers do. But even so, brands are often dropped on them from a long way up, without an explanation of the full story, or the thought process behind them. And that’s a waste of potential advocacy, says Goodfolk’s Michael Easton.
What is the sexiest vegetable you can think of? A cucumber? A succulent yellow capsicum? A plump aubergine maybe? Well how about broccoli?
About a week after APN opened the door to cross-channel collaboration across its media properties, MediaWorks announced the conflation of its radio and TV direct sales teams.The unified team will be led by Paul Hancox, who has been appointed to the newly created position of commercial director of MediaWorks Radio and TV. Hancox will also work closely with The Radio Bureau and their agency team, ensuring the Radio agency business is well aligned with its TV and interactive counterparts, led by Nicole Jones and Graeme Underwood, respectively. And while initial speculation suggested that this move came as a knee-jerk reaction to the moves made at APN, the MediaWorks TV director of sales and marketing Liz Fraser countered such claims.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
In the middle of last year, a new force officially arrived on the local automotive scene, with Fiat Chrysler NZ claiming it would soon be in the country’s top ten advertisers. And it has appointed OMD Auckland as its new strategic communications and media buying agency in New Zealand.
The All Blacks generally get a few views when they’re wheeled out by the sponsors. But it’s small fry compared to football stars. And Samsung’s got a galaxy of them for its latest campaign.
The Starship Foundation has appointed Freeman’s Bay-based indie agency Republik as its advertising, media and strategic comms agency. This move brings an end to the charity organisation’s creative partnership with Whybin\TBWA, which stretches back to 2010 when the agency won the account after a creative pitch.
Sony and FCB’s Bottled Walkman campaign has caught the eye of a few awards judges in recent months. But it’s also caught the eye of one of Sony’s competitors, which is currently thought to be threatening legal action over the use of footage in the original case study video.
If you hear Coldplay blasting from the offices of Colenso BBDO and FCB today, don’t be alarmed. They’re probably just celebrating the prestigious Yellow Pencils they won at the D&AD Awards last night.
Kiwi freestyle motocross madman Levi Sherwood is right up there—literally—on the world stage. He won the 2012 Red Bull X-Fighters World Tour, and he’s started well this year after winning the first stop of the series in Mexico City. And, as part of his association with Red Bull, Flying Fish director—and extreme sports specialist—Ryan Heron captured him in action at his compound in Palmerston North.
Last month, StopPress covered the ‘Beef with Bullies’ campaign that the Mad Butcher had launched in an effort to raise awareness about the blight of bullying in New Zealand schools. As part of the campaign, the Mad Butcher also launched a competition that invited New Zealand schools to send in video clips that relay an anti-bullying message. These entries have trickled in over the last few weeks, and the Mad Butcher’s social media team started posting them onto the company’s Facebook page this morning.
This is just a quick reminder that the entry window for the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards is almost closed. Although the call for entries deadline is 23 May, this date can be extended to 30 May upon application. Those interested in entering can still download an entry from the event website.
Colenso BBDO and Burger King are continuing their somewhat outrageous creative partnership with the introduction of Frank, a cockney geezer with a seeming inexhaustible resource of vernacular-laden phrases that even Guy Ritchie would battle to understand.
When Telecom unveiled ShowMeTV—a name that was ditched shortly afterwards—it was billed as the Netflix of online television in New Zealand. And now, in a seeming effort to create the Netflix of online gaming, the telco is launching a cloud-gaming streaming service called Aircade.
Black, “an international fashion, beauty, arts and culture magazine published from New Zealand for the people of the world”, has long featured beautiful people in its pages. And after launching a new responsive website and digital magazine, it can now do justice to those beautiful people online.
E-commerce is booming—and it’s becoming increasingly mobile. So domestic retailers will need to invest in this area if they hope to compete with international retailers, writes Geri Ellis.
The Health Promotion Agency (HPA) has launched a new website under the ‘Choice not Chance’ banner that helps people to recognise the early signs of harmful gambling. And, in an effort to draw attention to the latest addition to its anti-gambling arsenal, the government organisation has also released a new TVC via GSL Promotus.
Smartphones are great for ordering taxis, finding mates and detecting monsters. But Ubisoft and BETC Paris have attempted to show that they can control much more than that with a great stunt for the soon-to-be released hacker-themed game Watch Dogs.
Those in the persuasive arts are well-known for their love of the finer things in life. And there are very few beers finer than Emerson’s or magazines finer than Dish. Thankfully, the two of them are coming together for two very special five course dinners at Edesia in Christchurch and Logan Brown in Wellington and they’re inviting our food-loving, beer-swilling readers to come along.
Just as Amnesty International drew attention to the plight of those in other less tolerant parts of the world with Trial by Timeline and as NZTA drew attention to the danger of speed with Flash Driving, WWF New Zealand and Ogilvy & Mather are also using Facebook creatively to draw attention to the critically endangered Maui’s dolphin.
For a few years now, the tech behemoths have been at the top of the chain in terms of brand value. That trend has continued this year in the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands study, but there’s been a change at the top, with Google making an acquisition of a different kind—the number one spot ahead of Apple.
Rather than commissioning a group of actors to over-emphasise the refreshing sensation of sipping on a Coke, Wieden + Kennedy instead compiled a montage of regular people giving their best “ahhhhs” after a gulp of the sugary drink.
Using the unfortunate premise that dinnertime has become a sordid affair that often involves gobbling down a fast food meal while perusing the rectangular screen of a smartphone, Brazilian fast food chain Giraffas found an innovative way to tap into football fever ahead of the FIFA World Cup. The company commissioned the development of a football game app that converts the smartphone into an ad-hoc goal complete with a a goalkeeper. Once the app has been downloaded, the phone can be placed at the end of a football pitch-themed placemat, which comes with a perforated edge that can be torn off and crumpled into a crude ball.
In the past, Facebook stalkers could scroll through your images and posts to deduce if you were in a relationship, without ever letting you know who they were. But the good old days of stalker anonymity are over. A new feature, which could only have been created to facilitate a shortcut for the lazy stalker, allows Facebook users to ask their friends if they are in relationships.
As traditional boundaries around production and advertising start to blur, some of the more progressive companies are doing much more than just filming pretty pictures. Motion Sickness Studio, which kicked into gear in Dunedin around 18 months ago, could be placed in that category. And now it’s moved north to try and get a slice of the content creation market in Auckland. Co-founder Sam Stuchbury sits down for a chat.
In October last year, Getty Images entered into a partnership with BBC worldwide, which gave the stock image provider exclusive global distribution rights of the BBC Motion Gallery. And now, in an effort to illustrate what this means from a New Zealand perspective, Getty has a compiled a showreel of Kiwi footage that provides a glimpse at the nation’s cultural and historical inheritance.
While Telecom finds itself in identity limbo and as 2degrees makes its first foray into the high-value business-owner market, Vodafone continues to sit atop the Kiwi telco pile as the network with the most active users. So, following Sunday’s release of Vodafone’s bowl cut TVC featuring James Rolleston, StopPress had a quick chat with the red network’s consumer director Matt Williams on the company’s consistency in an increasingly diversified and competitive market.
David Abbott, the Abbott in what was Abbott Mead Vickers and what is now AMV BBDO, once said that “words for me are the servants of the argument and on the whole I like them to be plain, simple and familiar”. He abided by that belief throughout his career, and created some of the world’s best advertising. So after he died over the weekend at the age of 75, Droga5 Sydney paid tribute to him by riffing on one of his best-known pieces of work.