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.
Getty showcases New Zealand’s beauty in a compilation that could easily double as a tourism TVC.
See the world from the perspective of our feathered friends with Getty’s compilation of the best aerial footage from 2013.
Humans are simple creatures. Put their name on a Coke and they go crazy. Put their kid on the cover of a magazine and mums will clog up the internet. And now Unitec, Special Group, Open and Bauer are attempting to tap into that feverish narcissism once again with U Mag, a personalised magazine that doubles as a customised prospectus and is thought to be a world first.
To promote the global release of the new Xbox One console, the folk at Microsoft and Pead PR dropped one into the shark tank at Kelly Tarlton’s Aquarium. Until the official release date at midnight on 21 November, the highly coveted device will be protected by the ocean’s apex predator. And this publicity stunt continues a long tradition of using sharks in marketing.
The launch of Kickstarter in New Zealand has attracted a range of creative and kooky projects, including recreating a cooked onion and a retro game in which a drag queen apparently searched for her alien-abducted mother.
On 17 November, Saatchi & Saatchi NZ and Coca Cola Amatil (NZ) launched Pump’s ‘grab life by the bottle’ TVC, which showcased a host of Kiwis having a good time with a Pump bottle in hand. PLUS: read how adventurous Kiwis can send in entries to become part of the next commercial.
It’s not easy squeezing a life-size footballer into a web browser, but Wellington digital agency Resn and creative partner Wieden and Kennedy Amsterdam have done just that — in avatar form — to push EA Sports FIFA 14.
Kiwibank has released a new promotional video to show prospective homebuyers that they still have options in spite of the recent legislative limits that increased the minimum deposit to 20%. The hilarious video, which features a quirky script and home made out of cardboard boxes, could easily double as a parody of a Campbell Live case study.
There’s been plenty of pomp, ceremony and brio in recent weeks at the new season launch announcements for MediaWorks and TVNZ. But behind-the-scenes, all is not quite so rosy, with a sharp drop in TV viewership since the middle of the year creating some concern.
AUT Adschool students are getting ready to present their portfolios to prospective employers at the annual end-of-year show, which will be held on 19 November from 5.30 to 8.30pm.
What sorcery is this? Six of the country’s most experienced admen—Mike Hutcheson, Ross Goldsack, David Walden, Peter Cullinane, Sandy Moore and Roger MacDonnell—were spotted feasting at renowned advertising haunt Cibo on Friday. This gathering certainly wouldn’t have happened a few years back. So what’s brought them together? The only logical explanation is the launch of a new advertising agency.