Patent publication is often the first sign of new technology initiatives. Patents are usually published well before the technology is commercialised. Searching intellectual property databases is an effective way of learning where others in your industry are heading. AJ Park patent experts Anton Blijlevens and Jillian Lim touch on some of the interesting patents to look out for on the shelves.
DDB Sydney’s ‘Welcome to the family’ campaign to celebrate VW’s 60th year in Australia kicked off this weekend with a TVC that showcases the full range of models on offer—and, with an ad hoc cricket match, a helium-breathing grandfather, a nana meeting Bradley’s ‘special friend’, tree peeing and copious tea drinking, it also showcases the diversity of modern Australian family life.
Fresh Up’s all-too-powerful thirst quenching, perception shifting from The Warehouse, more moving personalisation from NZ Police and NZ Golf’s entertaining coattail riding.
Fresh Up, the 51-year-old juice brand, has had its first makeover in nearly 10 years with new spots from Colenso BBDO. The two TVCs show Kiwi blokes in situations where roaring your appreciation over the drink’s thirst quenching properties are seriously inconvenient.
After her October 19 show, Beyonce was treated to a haka performed by a local crew. Rather than cowering in fear like an international rugby opponent, Beyonce enthusiastically joined in and even gave a great Miley Cyrus impersonation at the end.
Four thousand initial entries from across New Zealand have been stripped down to 20 finalists for this year’s Doodle 4 Google competition.
Once again, Nielsen’s latest readership results and the ABC’s circulation numbers don’t make for particularly pleasant reading for the magazine sector, with all weeklies charting declines deemed significant on the same time last year, plenty of other significant declines and a rare few increases. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the MPA and the various publishers are hoping to change the conversation from a one-dimensional discussion about quantity, to a multi-dimensional discussion about the quality of engagement across a number of platforms.
It’s lemon, Kiwis, but not as we know it. Saatchi & Saatchi has given the drink brand made famous with a giant bottle in Paeroa a twist by showing a new side that’s more fierce than fruity.
No longer afraid of having their masculinity questioned, modern Kiwi men are following the likes Gordon Ramsay, Manu Feildel and Michael Van de Elzen into the kitchen, and this has created a gap in the market that Cerebos Gregg’s hopes to exploit by giving their F. Whitlock & Sons range a distinctly masculine appeal.
Affinity ID kicked off in 2008 when Geoff Cooper and Angela Day took the agency into private ownership from the Clemenger Group. It began life with 27 staff and has grown to almost 80 digital specialists across a range of disciplines. And it has added two more big names to its board and senior management team, with Nigel Tutt joining as group general manager and Roger Shepherd joining as an independent director.
In a career full of successes, leading the transformation project that brought together the National Bank and ANZ was one of the sweetest for Mike Cunnington.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
Sometimes you just can’t escape lining up. The portaloo at the festival, the cashier at the supermarket, the coolest new bar. But no-one really likes doing it, so it is fairly hard to fathom why anyone would do it for a new phone. Plenty do, of course (even though they don’t actually know why). And the companies selling them go to great lengths to butter these strange tech fiends up and ensure they don’t get queue fatigue, as evidenced by Vodafone and Telecom’s launch festivities for the new iPhones.
New Zealand Rugby conducted something of an experiment last week when the Bledisloe Cup test between the All Blacks and Australia was streamed live and made available on-demand on www.youtube.com/allblacks to more than 45 countries where the digital rights hadn’t been allocated exclusively to a broadcaster. So how did it go? And should Sky be worried?
Following in the footsteps of some overseas entities like Wired and Volkswagen, ASB has opened the doors of its new North Wharf head office to the world by creating New Zealand’s largest commercial interior Google Street View tour.
Last night, in a big shed down on the docks of Auckland town, Jeremy Corbett and Hillary Barry helped launch MediaWorks new season line-up. And, with the return of most of its local shows, some big-rating new international numbers and a couple of new branded content initiatives, director of sales and marketing Liz Fraser is confident it can continue its solid run of form in 2013 next year.
Fairfax Media is celebrating a victory over its main rival APN after Nielsen numbers showed more Aucklanders are reading stuff.co.nz than any other site, with its unique audience for September in Auckland clocking in at 391,000 compared to the nzherald.co.nz’s 360,000.
Google is basically the nervous system of the modern world, and that’s best evidenced by the screen in the Googleplex showing the real-time search queries from around the world (minus the dirty ones, apparently). The auto-complete feature aims to predict what you’re going to ask about based on other popular searches and usually the results are either relevant or quite funny. But a new campaign for United Nations Women by Ogilvy & Mather Dubai has used this democratic online function to show how endemic sexism still is around the world.
Pizza boxes, bad clothes, poster-laden walls, staying up way too late mashing buttons and trying to clock games … Ahh, the memories. All of this—and much more—has been chronicled by Sony and Drum in an effort to chart the history of the PlayStation ahead of the launch of PlayStation 4 later this year.
Westpac has chosen three winning apps in a competition it launched to find ways of making banking processes faster. The Westpac App Challenge crowdsourcing contest pitted 120 entrants from around the country against each other, with seven finalists participating in a Dragon’s Den style showdown a few weeks ago at Westpac’s Auckland HQ.
BNZ’s rapid development of an online banking platform that ‘works like your brain does’, attracted the difficult to impress youth market to the brand.
As the Bacchanalian throng moshed to adland’s gods and goddess of rock at last week’s Battle of the Ad Bands, .99/justONE took the opportunity to shoulder tap—literally—some of those in attendance.
There’s been plenty of speculation about when Kiwi golfing phenom Lydia Ko would sign on the dotted line and start chasing the big bucks. But rather than having to deal with a traditional press conference and the obligatory banal questions from nosey parkers, she decided to announce her decision with an entertaining video that she posted to Twitter.
In These Difficult Times, the predictable response from traditional media is to flog their sales staff harder, argue the value of their channels and bitch about US companies that pay no tax and hollow out the industry. But Vincent Heeringa says the smarter option can be summed up in four points.
Auckland-based digital agency Union, which rebranded from Federation Media earlier this year, has announced a partnership with world-leading digital marketing and innovation learning organisation Hyper Island that will see it bring its Open Master Class programme to New Zealand.
The Warehouse has transformed its offering in recent times, allocating $430 million over five years to refit its stores, improve the customer experience, increase the number of staff on the floor, stock a better range of products and brands and communicate the offer more effectively with the market. That’s led to nine consecutive quarters of profit growth and an increase in sales to $1.55 billion. But while its regular customers were aware of all the improvements, those who had written it off years ago still had some engrained negative perceptions. So, with the help of DDB, it’s faced up to them with The Warehouse Challenge.
When it rains it pours, and new business is pouring all over Colenso BBDO at the moment, with the latest addition to its growing roster being George Weston Foods.
Sergeant Deanne Teao’s better work story is the latest in M&C Saatchi’s campaign to attract new police recruits. The story shows Teao talking a young man out of jumping from an overbridge by talking about his children and family.
An emotionally charged Duracell, a retro Tip Top and a modern Kiwirail get the nod this week.
