Dr Who nerds have been all aflutter this week after Peter Capaldi was named as the new 1000-year-old time-traveller. He’s renowned for his role as the potty-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the brilliant show The Thick of It. And this guy has decided to combine the two roles and create a trailer that gives fans a glimpse at what the upcoming series might be like (block your ears children, salty language ahoy).
EY, which until recently was Ernst & Young, has announced the finalists of this year’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards.
Kiwibank, Otago Uni and Telecom get a street parade in Hamilton this week.
Youth-targeted telco Skinny Mobile has found an inventive new way of reaching its customers, using mobile app Snapchat.
Neuroscience provides us with deeper insights into how consumers think, feel and make decisions than ever available before and these insights have the potential to revolutionise traditional marketing practice. But its application to this industry—something known as neuromarketing—is not always understood.
Fairfax’s new local chief, True launches new space division, APN staffers on the move, Checkpoint Charlie launches, Jason Gunn and TRN part company and Admission on the move.
If you managed to avoid Twitter over the weekend, you may not have realised that hyper-intellectual event Tedx was held in Auckland on Saturday.
He led the project to bring the National Bank and the ANZ together. And he led it bloody well. But now head of marketing Mike Cunnington is off for a new adventure within government.
Paper has had a pretty rough time of it recently, with big printing company closures, publishers haemorrhaging cash and direct mail struggling to get the same amount of attention that other ‘sexier’ channels like online or TV get, despite NZ Post’s recent study into its effectiveness. But advances in printing technology mean there are a number of creative possibilities now available, and a few recent Kiwi examples have caught our eye.
Brands tend to inflate their importance in people’s lives. And The Onion has showed this phenomenon in its inimitable fashion with a clip featuring “fans from all over the country flocking to see all of their favourite brands” at the Lollapalooza music festival.
Brian Sweeney is a man on a mission to rebrand New Zealand as something other than the land of hobbits and sheep.
Last week Vodafone took out the awkward ad placement award, and we’ve got a contender for this week’s edition, with an ad on Stuff promoting ‘beach fale fun in the sun’ in Samoa running alongside a story warning of a tsunami. Pesky news, always wreaking havoc with those commercial messages.
It’s not often you see an ad that mentions the brand’s competitors more than the brand that paid for it. But that’s exactly what Kiwibank and its new agency Assignment Group have done with its ‘Every revolution needs a leader’ campaign, which puts the spotlight on some of the 800,000 New Zealanders who have switched to the bank since it kicked off 11 years ago.
Most New Zealanders are only dabbling in digital, says JWT’s Simon Lendrum. And the ‘Hardcore Digital’ segment is very, very small. So when it comes to online advertising, it pays to target the many, not the few.
After a brief but rewarding fling with StopPress and Idealog, tech reporter/photographer/regional man of mystery Sim Ahmed finished up yesterday and is off to work for POS start-up Vend HQ. But we’re not letting him get away without mentioning a bit of copyright hilarity he was involved in on Twitter last week.
Snapper chief executive Miki Szikszai noticed an awkward ad placement on the New Zealand Herald’s website this morning.
Radio New Zealand’s recently redesigned website has received an international nod of approval.
While Telecom is currently focusing on the advertising of its major competitor, with proceedings lodged today in the High Court over aspects of what it believes are misleading claims in Vodafone’s recent SuperNet campaign, it will be focusing on its own advertising come Sunday night, because it’s launching a new campaign for its Business Hubs, the local (and often locally-owned) business-only locations offering services and products to SME customers.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
Carin Hercock swaps APN for Nielsen, the Red Bulletin takes a new approach, Sim Ahmed and Simon Pound join start-up Vend HQ, Damien Shatford signs with the Sweet Shop, Republik gets some Aussie biz, Big Mobile gets bigger, Rose Matafeo changes channels, Stefan Korn takes Creative HQ reins and APN Outdoor heads to Broadway.
You can stop arguing over the office radio now: internet radio service iHeartRadio has finally gone into open beta in New Zealand.
The Luddites among us may remember the pre-mobile age as a wonderful time when you didn’t feel obliged to check your work email before you went to bed and phubbing wasn’t a threat to the very fabric of society. Telco beast Qualcomm sees things a bit differently and, in an entertaining, pratfall-heavy online film that’s clocked up 2.3 million views in a few weeks, it’s attempted to show what the world would be like without mobile. Answer: violent and crazy.
Kiwi ‘post-punk revival’ band The Naked and Famous have recently been holed up in Los Angeles studio trying their best to overcome That Difficult Second Album Syndrome for In Rolling Waves (by the way, That Difficult Second Album would be a great name for a debut album). And the band has once again called on Special Problems to direct the music video for its new single ‘Hearts Like Ours’.
Work for insurance giant lands digital agency SpaceStation a gong from Yahoo.
Academic advertising isn’t typically renowned for its creativity and often tends to focus on the facilities or the wonderous achievements of its students. The University of Otago certainly does a bit of that, but it’s also continuing to push the uniqueness of the southern student experience and, after a big research project to see if it was still on the right track with its ‘Take your place in the World’ campaign, Zephyr has given it a refresh.
A new, two-day expo focused around “digital entertainment” – that’s “video games” for the layperson – will be held by Auckland’s Vector Arena over the weekend of 28-29 September.
After a competitive pitch, Flight Centre has chosen DraftFCB Media as its new agency.
The great Kiwi campervan adventure is a right of passage as old as time itself. New Zealand-based camper rental Jucy is giving New Zealanders (and our Australian and American cousins) the chance to haggle down the price by tweeting.
As this news report shows, being able to read an entire newspaper—aside from ‘the pictures, ads or comics’—on a computer was a giant technological leap back in 1981. While this development has certainly been good for the readers, it hasn’t been too beneficial for newspapers. And you can see where it started to go wrong. As David Cole from the San Francisco Examiner says in the clip: “This is an experiment … We’re not in it to make money.” Some might say the same strategy holds true 34 years later.
Long gone are the days when writing a ‘to do’ list involved a piece of paper, a pen, and not much else. Toodledo is just one of many iOS apps that allows you to not just create a task, but to detail every intricacy of it.