Econsultancy’s first Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing for 2014 shows a strong appetite for digital risk in spite of a lack of support from the top and squeezed budgets. Content, targeting, social media engagement and mobile optimisation were high on the agenda of surveyed companies.
A new clip for Sony’s Playstation Plus subscription service is out to explode the stereotype that gamers are a lonely bunch. It takes us on a ride through a series of experiences that could only happen in our imagination, or a game, and shows how these things are better done together. Or, using multiplayer.
First it was Coke telling us how it could cure our social media addiction, now a Brazillian beer maker has a solution that would make it impossible for drinkers to communicate using their cellphones. It proposes a cooler that would block connectivity and make bar dwellers very lonely indeed.
Tequila brand Jose Cuervo is celebrating its 150th year in style with a new website that spans five pages. Each is a different take on tequila through the ages, showing off the ad style of the day from an old parchment to post-war chic.
Powershop wins the prize for best use of the doge meme on Trade Me with an ad that’s drawing the eyeballs. Hunting a Ruby on Rails developer, the ad secured 22,000 views in a day, well over the average 200 views the company’s job ads normally get.
To attract South American students (and the unsubsidised fees that come with them), Education New Zealand has arranged for Otago Polytechnic to host a pair of popular Brazilian bloggers for several weeks. Caio Komatsu and Luana Mazotti, both from Sao Paolo, are the founders of the blogs Fail Wars and Puro Veneno, which are said to reach a combined audience of approximately five million people. And the organisers of the campaign believe that the pair’s keyboard-tapping hobby could help to spread Latin American awareness of New Zealand, not only as a tourist destination but also as a great place to study.
The tenth and final Axis love letter has been released ahead of the show on March 6, and it’s another doozy, with DDB’s Mark Lorrigan harnessing the immense power of song to showcase his intense and probably illegal devotion to Y&R in ‘It ain’t stalking if I love you’.
Social media has given normal humans the chance to bypass the gatekeepers and hear directly from sports stars, actors and others in the public eye. It’s also given them the chance to hurl some extremely harsh online abuse, which means having thick skin is nigh-on essential. And, in a similar style to Jimmy Kimmel’s Celebrities Read Mean Tweets (and Y&R’s love letter to DDB), a few TVNZ reporters and presenters have taken to film in an effort to draw attention to online bullying by reading out some of the bile that gets directed at them.
The corporate wheel continues to turn this week at Foodstuffs, Tourism NZ, BMW, Pursuit PR, LiveSport, Ubiquity, Image Centre and the Vodafone Warriors.
It’s a car that claims to get your heart racing. So Holden and Ogilvy have dangled a carrot to those who reckon they can do the opposite with a new digitally-led campaign aimed at changing the perception of the Barina.
Clink your glasses for Holden’s heart racing, Vodafone’s period drama, Hallenstein’s kaleidoscope and Whittaker’s chocolate art.
Local mobile advertising spend made the biggest leap among the categories the IAB reports on in its quarterly figures and this time it achieved a 73 percent jump. However, mobile remains a small part of the overall spending mix.
After around six years at the helm of the NZ Marketing Association, and with a number of big accomplishments under her belt, chief executive Sue McCarty has announced her resignation.
In this series, we talk to Kiwi keyboard tappers that have managed to shift from the personal realm of blogging to create online media brands that are widely read (and in some cases profitable). In the latest segment, we chat to Lynn Prentice, the founder of The Standard.
As the sale of WhatsApp and many other tech companies shows, audiences are assets. And, as Lynda Brendish writes, it pays to develop them if you hope to succeed in the realm of content marketing.
A complaint levelled at a Hellers TVC that features comedian Leigh Hart barbecuing on the back of a moving ute has been upheld by the ASA for not abiding by the New Zealand Road Code. In the ad, Hart, who has been the face of the Hellers since 2006, gives another one of the ludicrous barbecuing tips that have have typified the ‘Hellers BBQ masters’ campaign.
Last Thursday, Jenene Crossan, the founder of nzgirl, flossie and BloggersClub, was invited to speak at the MPA Magazine Sales Conference for 2014. Of all the notable speakers on the list, Crossan’s speech was arguably the most divisive of the day. Her insights on the role of content in the digital age raised quite a few eyebrows around the room and became a major talking point at the end of the day. So, in order to take this debate a little further, we have decided to publish a transcript of Crossan’s speech.
In what could be described as one of the boldest advertising stunts in quite some time, DHL managed to get employees of its competitors to deliver packages that said ‘DHL is faster.’
London-based Wieden + Kennedy combined a trifecta of advertising superpowers in the form of an adorable girl, a viral-worthy cat and a fist-pumping rock anthem from the 1980s. And in doing so, they’ve created the type of ad that most would be keen to be a part of – which is convenient, because that’s exactly what they are inviting viewers to do.
Unsurprisingly, last week’s news that Telecom would be changing its name to Spark led to much opining, some of it based around the fact that the rebrand is estimated to cost $20 million. And MacGregor Media has taken the opportunity to point out its cost-effectiveness, just in case they decide to do it again in a few years.
APN NZ has extended the entry deadline for the inaugural Herald Advertising Challenge, an annual competition that aims to inspire and celebrate the very best creative and media work within Herald environments. And there are some pretty impressive prizes up for grabs.
To get Kiwis excited about the New Zealand Festival season of Power Plant, Contact Energy, one of the annual event’s sponsors, has added thousands of lights to the Wellington cable car tunnel.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
Yesterday, APN released a new campaign to promote the addition of OPTA, a rugby analytics tool, to its recently launched rugby portal, which serves as a discrete hub for anything related to the sport. In the campaign, titled ‘Talk like a rugby pro,’ the laconic observations of a rugby novice are juxtaposed to the in-depth analyses of a fan who has access to extra rugby intel (possibly thanks to the information available on the Herald). PLUS: read about which agency lost APN’s creative account.
January’s Nielsen online ratings showed audience numbers generally going up for both nzherald.co.nz and stuff.co.nz, with Fairfax reclaiming the top spot in Auckland. So is that growth reflected in online ad spend? Not according to SMI data, which showed that both APN and Fairfax Media went in the wrong direction last year.
The creative oneupmanship is in full effect for the Axis ‘Share the Love’ campaign, with some very entertaining inter-agency love letters being sent. And the penultimate clip from Y&R, which takes a leaf out of Jimmy Kimmel’s Celebrities Read Mean Tweets by getting DDB staff to read mean blog posts about their work—followed by some nice ones at the end—has just been released.
Just as the intertubes lit up with opinions when Telecom launched its spark logo back in 2009, so the intertubes are again abuzz with today’s news that Telecom was planning on changing its name change to Spark. Here’s what chief operating officer Jason Paris had to say about it.
Using the premise that the high five is the veritable Rosetta stone of celebratory language, DDB’s new Lotto NZ ad takes a likeable Kiwi Everyman on an international journey, during which he only speaks in palm slaps.
Ever since Telecom did the splits back in 2011, there have been rumours that the ‘New Telecom’ might not stick with its name, which carries with it a fair bit of equity but also a fair bit of monopolistic baggage. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire, because Telecom has announced that it will change its name to Spark later in the year.
Crowd Goes Wild is inviting viewers of the show to pimp up their rides as part of a competition that offers an all-expenses-paid trip to Melbourne to watch the 2014 Formula 1 race to be held in the city between 13 and 16 March.