There’s perhaps no item more symbolic of an owner’s personality than the car they drive. Creative types seem pretty keen on interesting cars. So every few weeks we ask someone in the biz to tell us about their steed. Last time it was TBWA\’s chief creative officer Toby Talbot and his Volvo P1800 and this time it’s DraftFCB Media’s general manager Simon Teagle and his 1966 Ford Mustang GT.
Conveniently enough, there are more than a few creative types who tend to believe the best ideas happen outside of work. Ben Crawford, past The Block NZ winner, co-owner of ad agency Libby & Ben, Herald design columnist and committed coffee drinker is one of them, so he decided to write a book—Built for Caffeine—that tells the design stories behind 20 of New Zealand’s coolest cafes.
Google has commemorated the 50th anniversary of Dr Who by creating a doodle in honour of the popular television show. In addition to featuring cartoon versions of 11 of the characters, the doodle also has an interactive element in the form of a vintage video game.
It’s been a busy week for Air New Zealand with asset sales and a dip in shares value. But somewhere in all that chaos, the airline still managed to find time to release a commercial that aims to remind everyone that the company has a distinctly Kiwi flavour. The TVC forms part of the ‘Middle-earth is closer than you think’ campaign, which also includes a competition that gives entrants a chance of winning a trip to Los Angeles to watch the premiere of The Hobbit: the desolation of Smaug. PLUS: Google also gets in on the Hobbit action with an interactive journey through Middle-earth.
Vodafone’s new music app, launched to capitalise on hype around its sponsored New Zealand Music Awards event last night, offers Kiwi music fans a subscription model for getting new tracks. The app offers a constantly updated Official Top 40, emerging songs, a playlist of top 10 Kiwi artists and other event-specific playlists.
Music videos have shifted onto the next step of their evolutionary progression to give us a new interactive experience. Earlier this week, Interlude’s Bob Dylan video was making the rounds, and now attention has shifted to Pharrell Williams’ 24 Hours of Happy.
BMW’s promotion of the new X5 is a case study in why there’s no substitute for local — and for getting hands on in our country air, complete with a whiff of dung.
This is the story of Lee Reid, a neuroscientist who overcame a debilitating pain disorder to write an app that makes it easier for people to compose music. Following on from the success of this original app, he has once again defied the odds by releasing a pro version that offers a range of new features.
BrandWorld’s Mike O’Sullivan pioneered the masthead format in New Zealand, he’s been inducted into the TVNZ Marketing Hall of Fame and, as this video created by his loving team shows, it turns out he’s also a dead ringer for Peter Griffin.
Localist has refreshed its business and consumer platforms with a new window on business performance and lists of likeable things to make and share.
Redwood Cider Co, which was purchased by DB Breweries last year, recently approached Running with Scissors to assist in the creation of a new product for the premium cider market, which is growing like topsy at the moment. And it responded to this challenge by creating the branding for Orchard Thieves, a fruit cider that’s available in either mandarin and lime or raspberry and vanilla. PLUS: is Rekorderlig actually a cider?
Orcon is bidding for awesome with a new dashboard that stitches together what it thinks are the internet’s most fun, frivolous and factual things. The Awesome dashboard was the winning idea out of several from Auckland digital and social agency Us and Co.
Potato chips and penguins are not a particularly natural partnership. But the power of advertising has made it so. And now, in Bluebird’s 60th year, our Antarctic friends are back in a rehashed ad to promote a co-branding initiative with Tegel and Wattie’s that sees the release of some new ‘Kiwi As’ flavours.
TVNZ’s loss is Orion Health’s gain as Annemarie Browne moves on, more changes at Fairfax, Aegis welcomes a new digital media guru, Octane rekindles old flame, 19-year-old entrepreneurial hot shot heads to the US and Iain Nealie shacks up with Google.
Forty-seven years after Bob Dylan’s song Like A Rolling Stone was released, it’s got a video to go with it. The clever work by digital media specialists Interlude in the US means viewers of the video can skip between channels as the song continues.
Directories group Yellow’s first foray into augmented reality in its app is all about entertainment, but it has plans to get serious with the technology as part of its transition from print to digital.
While the newspaper industry is currently facing up to a range of concerning statistics, one of the positive consequences of the digital era is that newspaper brands and media companies have been forced to innovate and experiment with new forms of storytelling. APN NZ did a great job of bringing all of the various strands of its modern business together for its 150th birthday celebrations last week, from the printed paper to the special editorial projects to the parallax scrolling website to the live blog of the newsroom to Dick Frizzell’s commissioned artworks of Kiwi legends to the 15-day promotion. And at the cocktail function at the Auckland Art Gallery, they showed a clip created by Leon Sefton of Perendale Productions that showed what the current crop of editors and journalists thought about the milestone—and what the company will need to do if it hopes to be around for the next 150 years.
Dodge has been getting a lot of mileage, if you’ll excuse the pun, out of Ron Burgundy and the upcoming Anchorman sequel. After several TVCs, it’s going online with a contest that lets you touch Ron (in a virtual sense) to try to win a Dodge Durango.
Metro magazine has its own shiny new iPad app, which stands alone outside the MagShop app previously used by the title.
Kiwibank has centralised some of the key details about the property market in a new app that’s designed to enable prospective homebuyers to access all the information they need in one place. The app can be used to obtain pre-loan approval, peruse available houses, track the number of sunshine hours a home receives and check which homes are available in a neighbourhood.
If you’re filled with the Christmas spirit, Coke Zero has just the site for you. It’s the Sweater Generator, where you can create yourself a jersey that will be the envy of yuletide nerds everywhere.
While things have certainly calmed down a bit since the ’80s, this industry still has an undoubted penchant for lunching—and especially so over the silly season. It also has the skills required to draw attention to things and DineAid, a charity that helps feed the homeless and hungry, is joining forces with Pead PR and StopPress to combine these two elements into one competition, with creative Kiwi types being asked to produce a short video that tells the DineAid story.
PlayStation’s latest console is coming here this month and hype has reached frenzied heights worldwide. In Europe Sony is celebrating with a tribute to the players who will no doubt be ringing cash registers once the PS4 is out.
An AUT researcher and developers who graduated from the university have created an app to find out if you’re at risk of having a stroke or developing other major health problems.
As part of The Project 2013, which was delivered by AUT, the US Embassy Wellington and Social Media NZ, media/tech expert Dr Jeffrey Cole spoke to an audience of around 200 people about the death of laptops, how Amazon might soon rule the world and why online communities are like nightclubs.
Fedex USA and BBDO NY have embraced the Christmas spirit by showing what Santa Claus does to those who are naughty rather than nice. PLUS: see what special package Mr Scrooge can expect this year.
Saatchi & Saatchi’s crowd-sourced action shots, Cirkus’ fantastical motorbike mission, Kiwibank’s take on box living and safe.org.nz’s star studded PSA wear the crown this week.
The second instalment of Lindauer’s “national girls’ night out” took place on 15 November at various nightspots across the country. And to ensure that the blokes didn’t feel too abandoned on this night of feminine revelry, Lindauer and BBD arranged a few celebrity man-sitters to entertain the sullen couch dwellers at home.
They say anyone who lives inside glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. But what would ‘they’ know. So, in honour of petty pedants everywhere—and with a healthy dose of there but for the grace of God go us—here are a few entertaining/head smacking typos we’ve noticed recently.
Ad awards season is pretty much over for another year, but there were a few more announcements over the weekend, and once again Kiwi agencies and clients did very well, with DraftFCB’s Driving Dogs taking Best in Show at the Caples and Colenso BBDO taking most awarded agency at both Caples and Digital Asia Awrds.