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.
Is branded entertainment just a fad, a trend, a nice-to-have? Or is it a crucial change necessary for advertising’s relevancy in the future? Nic Winslade argues that advertisers need to get permission from consumers in order to engage with them. Plus: come up with a idea to integrate your brand into StopPress and we’ll choose the best and/or most entertaining effort and make it happen.
There’s a bit of an arms race when it comes of offices at the moment, and particularly when it comes to tech companies, which appear to have a desire to out-cool each other with their massive HQs and quirky additions (check out this Vanity Fair story about what Apple, Facebook, Google and others are doing in Silicon Valley and San Fran at the moment). But New York-based digital creative shop The Barbarian Group has upped the stakes by showing off what is undoubtedly the coolest desk ever created.
Back in October last year, stuff.co.nz knocked nzherald.co.nz off the top spot in Auckland for the first time. Fairfax saw it as a big win, but NZ Herald editor Tim Murphy tweeted that a response to our story saying it was merely a blip after it climbed back on top soon after. Now, Nielsen online ratings for January show volatility in APN’s numbers since then and a steady rise for Fairfax, which has once again claimed the top spot by the smallest of margins.
Vodafone is giving Snapchat a baptism of fire among students at Canterbury and Otago University orientation weeks. It’s a targeted test that will decide whether the telco uses the messaging platform for future promotions.
Coca-Cola shows it really does have a sense of humour — and is about more than sugar and caffeine — with a new video suggesting devices usually used for dogs could cure our social media compulsions.
Augview’s augmented reality app opens a whole new view of utility infrastructure under our city streets, but the makers also see big possibilities for creative marketers and outdoor games. The company has already has interest in virtual universes in outdoor spaces.
What is Big Data? Well, if you believe a quote that’s been doing the rounds for a few years now and seems to be popular on the conference circuit, it’s exactly like teenage sex.
APN News & Media Limited today announced in a release that it will acquire full ownership of The Radio Network (TRN) and Australian Radio Network (ARN) from US-based Clear Channel Communications for $246.5 million. This move will give APN 100 percent control of what it claims is the largest network of radio stations across the trans-Tasman region.
Following the decision of the two big Aussie supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, to remove New Zealand-produced goods from their house brand labels and Shane Jones’ request for a Commerce Commission investigation into the way Progressive Enterprises treats its suppliers (and the inevitable Facebook campaign asking Kiwis to boycott the company), Foodstuffs has taken the opportunity to remind the nation that the big brands under its umbrella—Pak ‘n Save and New World—are full-blown Kiwi.
In November last year, Leukaemia and Blood Cancer New Zealand (LBC) got 12 celebrities to silently stare at a camera as part of the ‘silent treatment’ campaign. And now, only three months later, that silence is being broken with the stories of Kiwis who have decided to shave for cure. The integrated campaign, once again developed by .99 and brought to life by Blockhead Visual Effects, aims to spread awareness for the annual ‘Shave Week’ appeal that runs from 17 to 23 March.
Birdseye UK is set to create food madness with the very social Mashtags, potatoes transformed into @ symbols, smiley emoticons and hashtags. Seems the humble french fry was just too straight (or crinkled) for the discerning digital generation.
BNZ is capitalising on the increasing blur between professional and personal use of social media, arming staff to get social on its behalf. That’s evident in its current bid to promote the YouMoney tool with a road trip to university campuses.
Google has awarded Kiwi AdWords partner Localist for AdWords quality in a category open to its group of premier small and medium business Premier AdWords partners on both sides of the Tasman. The quality score measures how relevant ads are to users.
Bullseye’s Moments campaign, which sees Auckland Airport arrival and departure experiences shared in photo and video, played a part in its business director securing a Sitecore award for digital strategy.
If you’ve ever run into a fellow mall shopper because you or they are staring down at their mobile phone, you’ll appreciate US brand Caribou Coffee’s efforts to make a show of what its users are posting on Pinterest.
Pure SEO founder Richard Conway has a formula for recovering if you’re hit with a Google Penalty, the tech giant’s punishment for link spam. He warns it’s a delicate and lengthy exercise.
A crazy mash of retro style game graphics and actual bobsled footage is the Jamaica Tourist Board’s attempt to get fans during the Sochi Olympics. We can’t help but point the finger at Cool Runnings.
If the TVC for this Chinese online dating service is anything to go by, the country seems to prefer luring lonely hearts with guilt than the prospect of a happy relationship. So why not throw in a grandmother desperate to see her granddaughter at the altar?
The creator of the Android app Caller Ads, currently being piloted, is targeting telcos and advertisers that have messages to push to prepay mobile users. The cloud-based service’s first iteration is like an audio pre-roll subscribers opt to take before a call.
BBDO New York tapped into the boundless imagination of a child to create a spot that oozes creativity while simultaneously applauding the awesomeness of mums (or moms) who work for GE. Every scene in the slick ad brings an absurd idea of a child to life, and thereby shows that the extent of possibility is directly proportional to how far the imagination can stretch.
The ad industry often seems like a young man’s game. But there’s no substitute for experience, as renowned copywriter Paul Burke wrote recently. And, if you’re wondering when you’ll come up with that brilliant product innovation, that revolutionary campaign idea or perhaps that long-awaited solution to the world’s energy needs, turns out you might have to wait a while.