Sometimes smoking is cool on TV and in movies, sometimes it’s not, and brands move with the trend. Action for Smoking and Health (with the cunning acronym ASH) is on a mission to find out if teens think their peers are hotter with a cigarette in their hand and dating app Tinder is the tool of choice.
ASB is hunting an edge in attracting and keeping corporate banking talent with its Work For ASB app. The app is part of the Growth story initiative and has an augmented reality functionality developed by trans-Tasman agency One Fat Sheep.
Little Giant has produced a new website for family-run wholesaler and distributor Marlborough Wines. The image-rich site has a CMS that allows staff to add new wines, brands and staff details.
Domino’s has continued its bid to boost online sales as a proportion of overall purchases to 80 percent in the next couple of years with a new orders app. It’s designed to replace paper vouchers and lets users views deals from their local store or those in the vicinity.
AT&T is showing it has a sense of humour and a personality with its recent parody of the drama True Detective. Matthew McConaughey’s character Rust Cohle is the one to get a spoof, complete with drawl, a juice box and a group of kindergarten kids.
British brand McVitie’s has declared all out war on cookies and not just the baked things that come out of the oven. It’s released a Chrome plugin that will detect cookies on your computer, the data that tracks internet visitors, and blow them into oblivion.
Ogilvy has launched the global Neo network in New Zealand with a new digital division. Led by Eddy Whatt, Ogilvy’s digital media director since 2010, Neo will get five new staff, bringing its total to 10 by June.
Spilt rabbit, self-deprecation and schadenfreude catch our attention this week.
Brother Design has done New Zealand proud by walking away with four golds and the coveted ‘Best of Show’ gong at the Vertex Awards, an annual international awards show dedicated exclusively to packaging design for private label (home brand) product ranges.
Trustpower has been offering phone and broadband services for eight years under a standalone brand, but its name naturally prompts an association with electricity. The company is out to change that with a campaign that reveals a full kit of services.
At an ad-hoc conference held this morning at Ponsonby Central, TRN announced several significant changes to its offering. The key announcements, delivered via TRN’s chief executive Jane Hastings, chief content officer Dean Buchanan and commercial director Laura Maxwell-Hansen, were presented as part of the overarching ‘Change is Now’ campaign, which will serve to promote all the updates over coming months. In addition to rebranding Classic Hits, TRN has also invested in a multimedia studio and shuffled its staff.
Would you take a job that asked you to work 135 hours or more a week, have degrees in medicine, finance and the culinary arts while not receiving any holidays whatsoever? That’s what one interviewer asked for recently.
Sky’s chief executive John Fellet likes to keep a fairly-low profile. But he’s decided to play his part for a skit on The Crowd Goes Wild that indicates life at Sky is akin to The Office and shows Fellet giving Mark Richardson and “that other guy” a good (fake) bollocking for telling fans on-air that Kiwi fighter Brice Ritani-Coe could get a wild-card entry into Sky Arena’s Super 8 event.
The Herald on Sunday ran a story over the weekend that detailed All Black Aaron Smith’s romantic dalliances. And we couldn’t help but notice a strange bit of brand advocacy in among the sordid revelations.
One of the benefits of social media is that, when used well, it can get punters to do something, unlike the vast majority of typically one-way commercial messages. And, as Simon Veksner wrote recently, “it’s well known that getting people to do something makes them more likely to buy”. To launch season four of Game of Thrones, Sky and DDB asked fans to tweet #bringdowntheking and help topple a seven-metre statue of the despised King Joffrey that was constructed in Aotea Square by Finch. And, judging by the big numbers, it would have to rank as one of the country’s most engaging social campaigns in recent memory.
If, as suggested in the media recently, New Zealand is set to be one of the world’s ‘rock star economies’, then Xero would have to be the rightful lead singer. General manager of marketing Jonathan Allan talks about ‘doing beautiful business’.
Whether it’s trips to Cuba or brands and businesses, memory trumps experience in the human brain, says Andrew Lewis. So you need to design your services with that in mind.
In an effort to maximise exposure of the fact that statistics collated by ACARS indicated that it was the nation’s most punctual domestic airline in 2013, Jetstar last week hosted an online game that gave players a chance to win $200 flight vouchers. PLUS: see the self-deprecating ad that Jetstar has released featuring the voice of 7 Days comedian Jeremy Elwood.
Following last month’s announcement that Vodafone was undergoing the process of reviewing its global media account (worth about US$950 million), it has now been reported that WPP’s MEC has won the final round of pitching, which was contested between MEC and Carat (part of the Dentsu Aegis network). So what does this mean from a New Zealand perspective?
The insight that kids are clever is nothing new, but Michael Goldthorpe’s experience at his son’s ‘take Dad to work day’ showed just how fearlessly they come up with new ideas. If you’re looking for genius, unlearn what you know.
The moment TNS New Zealand releases its radio survey results, the media industry generally buzzes in competitive chaos as everyone vies to get the often confusing statistics published as quickly as possible. Given that we all know that the storm is coming, this one of the few times when interviews are scheduled weeks in advance, questions are emailed pre-emptively and past results are collated in an anticipatory move. This year did not disappoint, and we were again given a fair dose of chaos. So without further ado, here’s a breakdown of some of the key trends recorded in the latest results.
Some say that print is dead, but maybe advertisers just need to start using the medium in new, more creative ways? And no, we are not talking about QR codes or even any kind of clever digital tie-in.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
We’ve seen see-through billboards, exploding billboards and bleeding billboards. And now we’ve got an animal-skin billboard, with Hell and Barnes, Catmur & Friends celebrating today’s launch of the new smoked rabbit pizza with an outdoor execution (perhaps quite literally) made entirely out of leftover rabbit skins.
Vodafone is making sure it doesn’t miss out on its share of sales of Samsung’s latest generation Galaxy smartphone, the S5, with a hint of gold fever. It negotiated to offer the gold variant of the device and is putting up a bunch of swag to enthusiasts who can’t resist being first to get the new tech.
Auckland Transport has rolled out the superlatives in a campaign for its new range of electric trains, which will start running in the Super City from 28 April. Developed by creative agency Work Communications in conjunction the production company Useful Films, the ‘Smarter, Better, Quieter’ campaign gives New Zealanders a sneak peek at the culmination of the $500 million project to electrify the city’s rail system.
Creativity is all-important in this industry. But it’s also messy and difficult, as this simple yet quite accurate diagram shows.
The modern human condition tends to be one of constant connection and, in many cases, slight addiction. But JWT and Sacred Hill are jumping on the mindfulness bandwagon and aiming to inspire a different, more classical version of connection with a beautifully-crafted new print campaign.
The search has begun for the next 26 winners keen to etch their names in the nation’s marketing history, with the call for entries for the 2014 TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards now open.
Sadly, a lot of the time content marketing is terrible. Marketers trying their damnedest to make something that will ‘go viral’ often miss the mark by a long shot. But when a brand gets it right, it’s awesome.