There’s been a range of brands playing the absurd advertising card in recent years, from Old Spice to Skittles to HTC. And Aussie loan company Nimble has joined that club and pushed the boat a long way out with three weird—and weirdly compelling—ads from Clemenger BBDO Brisbane and The Sweet Shop’s Steve Ayson.
While the major topic of conversation in agency land today will presumably be last night’s Effie results, the Cannes Lions have released their report on the 2013 festival. And it makes for pretty good reading from a New Zealand perspective.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
Spark’s casting of comedic pranksters Jono and Ben for the local versions of Heineken Dropped have paid off in YouTube views and effective Kiwi-fying of the international franchise.
DDB and DraftFCB continued their winning ways at the Effie Awards last night, with DDB holding on to the most effective agency crown and DraftFCB taking the supreme Effie for its work on the Health Promotion Agency’s depression initiative.
Air New Zealand has created an expectation that its safety videos won’t be boring. But travellers can only handle seeing a fake plastic fish bouncing around in Bear Grylls’ backpack, Lord of the Rings gags, or a lycra-clad maniac so many times before the novelty wears off. So Air New Zealand and True have launched another new—but old—safety video starring ex-Golden Girl Betty White and a cast of oldies.
It’s often said people browsing the web have little appetite for long videos, but Tui’s proved that wrong with its viral beer prank. The beer plumber stunt created by Saatchi and Saatchi, featuring a builder and his tradie mates launched on 17 September. The 90 second version has had about 2.65 million views while the seven minute version has had more than 3.5 million.
Recruitment company Hays says a growing number of offshore marketing professionals are being pulled in to roles in New Zealand and Australia that require specialist digital skills, with particular gaps in the skill base for analysing big data to generate revenue.
A tweet that queried the horsepower of one horse was enough for Dodge to make a nice sequel to its campaign featuring fictional newsman Ron Burgundy. A talking horse that calculates its own horsepower? No, really.
Samsung has given Lorde’s hit Royals its ad debut in a new TVC for the recently-released Note 3 and Galaxy Gear smartwatch. It’s hard to tell how they’ve interpreted the song, but it seems homeless children have been freed to “live that fantasy” or get the “different kind of buzz” they crave thanks to the company’s tech.
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week, and this year it’s themed around the idea of ‘Connecting’. It’s when some of the smartest people in our industry do amazing work to help us better understand mental illness. But when it comes to understanding, the real heavy lifting is usually achieved through conversation. So, as someone who’s lucky enough to be relatively successful in spite of mental illness, Michael Goldthorpe has decided to open up in an attempt to kick-start some chatter.
Social media channels based around images are getting our attention faster than others, a recent research snapshot by Colmar Brunton shows. That’s partly because of channel fragmentation, but also because pictures put us in touch with our feelings, the company reckons.
We wonder if someone who hangs out in gyms too much dreamed up this video for Gillette that puts training moves to music. In any case the experiment for the company’s Clear Gel deodorant created a catchy number.
Kiwis are getting their own version of a 24 hour online event designed to whip shoppers into a frenzy, modelled on a day that kicked off in the US in 2005. The organisers are targetting a Kiwi-sized proportion of the sales results a similiar day achieved on debut in Australia despite that site crashing under the weight of web traffic.
Colenso BBDO has formalised its relationship with Samsung and will be the agency of record for all its various divisions, making it one of the few markets in the world where the Korean behemoth isn’t aligned with a Leo Burnett agency. But it means the agency has had to say goodbye to a long-time client, Haier-owned Fisher & Paykel.
The radio survey results always make for entertaining/confusing reading. There’s certainly no shortage of self-aggrandisement (‘We’re number one* in shemales^ aged 48-49# between 10pm and 10:15pm!’) and MediaWorks Radio was pretty chuffed with its performance in this round. So, to showcase the network’s galaxy of stars and its ability to reach Kiwi audiences, it created an entertaining and very self-deprecating clip showing its DJs swapping stations and attempting to appeal to very different demographics than they’re accustomed to. Mark Leishman reprezent biatches!
Vodafone is carrying on its tradition of releasing apps designed to help more Kiwis use technology – this time it’s one for senior smartphone newbies.
We’ve seen a few companies turn their back on traditional staff recruitment lately, and now Aussie tech firm Big Commerce has done the same thing, in an even geekier way. In its search for engineers, it put posters up in Sydney with tear off strips traditionally reserved for phone numbers, But instead of a phone number there was a complex code candidates had to crack.
Samsung’s Smartwatch is among a raft of new timepiece tech to hit the market of late, but it’s not the only clever watch to be celebrated in popular culture. Samsung is celebrating its place in history with a new video, A Long Time Coming.
GE’s resource maximising machines are the star of a new USS Enterprise Crew – the cast of a BBDO New York campaign for GE.
Kiwi internet users continue to fuel the growth of global heavyweight websites like Google and Facebook and homegrown successes like Trade Me. Horizon Research’s latest numbers show Google is the country’s most used website.
Labour’s broadcasting spokesperson Kris Faafoi and associate ICT spokesperson Clare Curran have labelled the warning given to Sky TV by the Commerce Commission over its contracts with content deliverers as a slap with a wet bus ticket.
Another week of quality Kiwi TV work, with DB Export, Sky, Steinlager, Trade Me and Telecom getting special ribbons to wear on their blazers.
In Movings/Shakings this week, Martins markets Kordia, Burger King serves up new marketing GM James Woodbridge, call Stephen England-Hall loyal, Heard’s the one for Trio, Borgman joins Robber’s Dog pack and Tim McFarlane is on the map at GeoOp.
DraftFCB’s Analy Tigers took the win at Adshel’s Creative Challenge last week. And here’s what pressurised creativity looks like.
60 creatives turned up at Generator in Britomart last week to eat, drink, be merry and spend one hour devising an outdoor campaign for Surf Life Saving New Zealand (SLSNZ) as part of the Adshel Creative Challenge. And it was the team from DraftFCB—Kevin Walker, Ant Bell and Adam Taylor, AKA team ‘Analy Tigers’—that took the win.
Chapel Bar and Bistro is risking more religious ire with two new executions in its Seven Years of Almighty Nights campaign. The series kicked off last year to celebrate the bar’s seventh birthday and showed Jesus and Mary in compromising poses after a hard night.
How do you give a show that’s been running for 25 seasons some extra life? You get a director like Guillermo del Toro on board and set him loose on the couch gag. Plus: some other guest-directed couch gags.
Celebrity news anchor Ron Burgundy, aka actor Will Ferrell, has made his screen comeback in a new series of spots for the Dodge Durango. It’s classic Burgundy as the vehicles features are explained – it comfortably fits two turkey sandwiches, or 70 packs of gum and a glovebox that “goes on for inches”.
Vice has gained a reputation as an arbiter of cool, with its gonzo reporting, its humorous and fiercely sarcastic opinion pieces and its focus on bacchanalian excess. Plenty of brands looking to ride on these youthful, alternative coat-tails are employing their services through native advertising and branded content. And its stories have also inspired a brilliant fake Twitter account @Vice_Is_Hip.