As part of the prize for winning The Herald Advertising Challenge, a couple of FCBers got a trip to Rome to attend the Festival of Media Global. Here’s Kevin Walker’s take on the first day.
In an effort to overcome the colour discrimination that causes consumers to opt for black, white or grey apparel instead of experimenting with alternative options in the palette, AS Colour has launched an experiential campaign via FCB that encourages shoppers to diversify their wardrobes.
Last week, the Labour Party said the $15 million campaign that aimed to prompt consumers to check out different electricity suppliers and decrease their bills was a failure after a Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment report found it had not led to lower retail prices overall and didn’t increase competition. The Electricity Authority’s agency FCB won plenty of awards for the campaign, with 350,000 people visiting the sites and 70,000 people saving $16 million as a result of switching. But that relationship is now over, with Y&R thought to have won the business after FCB declined to pitch.
Moves and shakes at Porter Novelli, Anthem, Colenso BBDO, the Rock, Lego, and Beat Communications.
The Dominion Post and NZ Herald will contest this year’s Canon Media Award for Best Newspaper with circulation over 30,000, while Good, Home and The Listener are the finalists for Best Newsstand Magazine. In the new Best Blog category it’s Toby Manhire, Cameron Slater and Giovanni Tiso, with Best Website finalist placings handed to 3News, The Wireless and Yahoo NZ.
An email leaked to StopPress late Friday afternoon revealed that McDonald Vague, the receivers assigned to Mediaweb last month, found several anomalies when analysing the financial records of the struggling company. The message, written by McDonald Vague director Jared Booth, was initially intended only to be read by those involved in the tender process, and comes shortly after Mediaweb went into liquidation on 21 March.
Season four of Game of Thrones screens in the US today and on SoHo in New Zealand tonight. Sky and DDB have ensured Kiwis know about that with its very well-received, social-media fuelled campaign to bring down a statue of the much-despised King Joffrey. But HRV is also getting in on the act with a tactical spot called ‘Winter is Coming’ that’s set to run in the slot just before the premiere. Plus: Hell Pizza supports the bad guy and other entertaining parodies of the show.
Football fever (and football-related advertising fever) is ramping up as Brazil gets ready to host the World Cup in June. And there was a bit of fancy footwork in New Zealand last week when a selection of Auckland agencies put down their iPhones and laced up for the inaugural CAANZ soccer tournament. Plus: agencies also skive off to play basketball for TRN’s 3 on 3.
After establishing the New Zealand arm of Whybin\TBWA around 15 years ago, David Walden resigned from his post last year and made way for Todd McLeay. And now he has officially announced his first new role: chairman of The Family, the agency set up by ex-Ikon leaders Tom Davidson and Lee Parkinson.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
ZM, part of The Radio Network (TRN), has teamed up with ice cream franchise Pride & Joy to give a $30,000 franchise opportunity to a lucky New Zealander, who shows the drive and determination necessary to run a successful business. Pride and Joy co-founders James Coddington and Tony Balfour say that they are focused on providing opportunities for remarkable people among today’s unemployed and underemployed.
Mistubishi has just launched New Zealand’s first plug-in hybrid SUV. But, rather than trying to explain the complex technology in the new Outlander, Clemenger BBDO and Curious have kept it simple. Plus: lots more brmm-brmms and a new automotive sponsorship.
There’s no doubt that the Americans secretly feel relieved that their neighbours to the north also have an embarrassing politician, but the Canadians are aiming to wipe out the Rob Ford-shaped smudge on their otherwise respectable political track record. A new faux mayoral campaign, which has been launched by an online organisation dubbed No Ford Nation, presents a series of dishevelled men as viable alternatives to the current Toronto mayor.
To promote the release of Nymphomaniac, Lars von Trier’s two-part, four-hour journey into the psychology of sex, Flicks.co.nz has launched a campaign via Trigger Marketing that stays true to the film’s provocative, and sometimes humorous, narrative. Given that the promotional art for the film portrays the stars seemingly posing in moments of climactic ecstasy, Flicks.co.nz is now inviting its readers to send in snapshots of their own O-faces.
Just a few weeks after being named agency of the year at Axis, Colenso BBDO has picked up another agency of the year accolade, this time at the inaugural Asia Pacific Effie Awards.
APN is extending its network of digital billboards with four new sites around inner city Auckland to launch in August. It’s also got big plans for new options at Auckland International Airport when it takes over those sites in November.
Fairfax, like many ‘traditional’ news businesses around the world, has had a fairly rough time of it lately, with declining circulation and ad revenue, ongoing cost cutting and the ensuing job losses. But a new management team is in place in the New Zealand market, there appears to be a bit of renewed optimism in the media (check out Pew Research Centre’s State of the Media 2014 for a great rundown of what’s happening), its digital numbers are strong and some believe the negative sentiment towards print is overcooked, in Australia at least. Despite the issues of recent years, Fairfax is still a big business and a big employer in this country, and it’s looking for a few new recruits, so its inhouse team has created a self-promotional video (how good is that voice?) aimed at selling those in the UK on the New Zealand lifestyle and the chance to work in the “innovative, integrated multi-media business”.
While some critics saw the Wolf of Wall Street as an indictment on the exorbitant habits of stockbrokers, this isn’t necessarily the only interpretation that could be used to understand Scorsese’s directorial decisions. There’s also a growing school of thought suggesting that the financial theme was actually a metaphor for the modern trend of websites becoming insanely popular despite offering nothing in terms of completely original content.
Sky and DDB have some good news for haters of King Joffrey, the most despised character from the SoHo-screened series Game of Thrones. As the fourth season looms, fans won’t actually be pushing down a seven-metre-tall replica of Joffrey, but they can use their social media voice to the same effect.
Turn up on Friday afternoon at Gladeye’s Parnell office and you’re likely to get a sausage as part of its weekly all-staff barbecue. Turn up at any other time during the week and you’re likely to get some of the best web design and digital thinking in the country. Founder and director Tarver Graham and account director Ben Glazewski talk turkey.
Val Morgan has announced the four ad hotshots that will be sent to the French Riviera to compete in the Young Lions competition at the 61st Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity being held between 15 and 21 June. This announcement comes after Val Morgan arranged a local competition, which gave young creative teams around the country the opportunity to enter in either the film or media categories.
Vodafone is bringing its own version of a global app to Warriors matches, letting fans zoom in on a 36-billion-pixel image to spot themselves in the crowd. It captured 1400 of the 22,000-strong crowd at an Auckland stadium last week and plans to offer the engagement tool at more upcoming matches.
A group led by Localist CEO Christina Domecq is taking the reins of the New Zealand Post subsidiary, buying the directories business for an undisclosed sum. New Zealand Post says Localist isn’t part of its future now its focusing on core sevices.
Although often applauded for featuring superior narratives based on the erudite observations of talented writers, indie film plot tropes don’t necessarily provide suitable content for bedtime stories. This fact, obvious to most, is used as the premise for a new spot for the Newport Beach Film Festival in which an indie-film-obsessed father tells his daughter a terrifying, albeit creative, bedtime story rather than just reading a storybook.
APN has replaced the Foodhub online brand with Bite, bringing the print liftout into alignment with the online presence. It’s also been working behind the scenes to make its recipe collections more searchable.
This morning, Susie Ferguson and Guyon Espiner hit the airwaves as the new co-presenters of Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report, and the start of their tenure coincided with the release of new theme music for the long-running show. Since 1970, each decade of the show’s history has been given its own theme tune, and the new version, which comes a day after Geoff Robinson’s last show, serves to usher in a new era for the radio show.
CAANZ chief executive Paul Head this morning announced that Simon Lendrum, managing director of JWT New Zealand, has been elected to the position of CAANZ president, which was vacated by DDB’s Sandy Moore after his recent resignation.
New research shows if all our businesses made more use of the internet, it could add $34 billion in productivity boosts to our economy. It’s hard to know where to start on this journey, but Google public policy manager Ross Young is urging companies to take the next steps.
Kiwi households with more than five, and even as many as 10, screens are becoming the norm, according to MediaWorks’ Lifestyle Survey for 2013. Mobile device ownership is growing exponentially in parallel with increasing social media use and online purchasing.
Massey University’s College of Creative Arts specialist studio Open Lab has finished what it says was an epic project: Land, Air, Water Aotearoa. The 18-month project brought together 16 councils nationwide, along with the Ministry for the Environment and the Cawthron Institute.