New Zealand musician Danny McCrum has lived a life immersed in music. It’s changed greatly since he first started, shaped by technology and an evolved (but not necessarily better) view on the art from society. He explores the value of music in a market where it’s infinitely available.
Most good ideas need a bit of money to get them going and ANZ Bank is positioning itself as the money lender to go to when inspiration strikes.
Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.
TV3 has lost the right to broadcast Aussie beach side soap opera Home and Away, a staple of its evening broadcast offering.
Since 2009 three dresses made from Kleenex Cottonelle toilet paper have been chosen by judges to walk the runways at New Zealand Fashion Week. And three more designs have made the finals in this year’s competition, although this time the stage isn’t a fashion catwalk, it’s a documentary-style series of television commercials and the pages of Next magazine.
iSite Media switches agencies, Ogilvy & Mather locks in a pair of creative directors, Andrew Sparrow goes it alone, Kraft New Zealand gets with the Mondelez International programme, Phil Clemas takes on Men’s Health Trust role and David Bell’s foray into writing.
Kiwi actor Robbie Magasiva took some time out of his busy schedule being a hunk to throw the Jono and Ben at Ten show a bone, pretending to be a checkout operator at Countdown.
Last night’s season premiere of The Almighty Johnsons started with a whiz and a bang, but the Johnson lads were unable to bring in the crowds to watch their godly antics.
There’s still plenty of debate about what actually constitutes craft beer, but the pundits can agree on one thing: consumption of it is on the rise, with an article on Stuff showing craft beer made up 13 percent of total beer sales over the past year at Foodstuffs, up from nine percent two years ago, and about ten percent of total beer sales at Countdown. And two of the country’s top booze chains, Super Liquor and Liquorland, both of which are fighting a battle against those supermarkets, can also see the dollar signs and have signed up to sponsor major events on the craft beer calendar.
For the past few years, a major pillar of Countdown’s advertising strategy has consisted of lathering up the nation with the soap that was The Colemans. It may not have been lauded by the industry, but it seemed to do the job on the public, and the many executions by Chris Dudman of Robber’s Dog earned regular spots in Colmar Brunton’s top ten ads list. But now the Progressive chain has said goodbye to the fictional family and embraced reality TV.
Independence Day is a marketing free-for-all in the US. And a whole range of brands aim to tap into the patriotic fervour. But this clip, from humour collective The Kids Table, gets to the nub of the modern, foolish, hypocritical and apathetic Western human condition better than any of them with a dose of humorous ‘truthiness’. As it says, “it’s pretty hard to care about wire taps, drone strikes, and the government eroding the rights we fought for centuries ago when you’ve got an ice cold beer in your hand”.
One of the world’s great slogans—Nike’s ‘Just Do it’—recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. Another similarly enduring slogan isn’t too far behind, with Dilmah’s ‘Do Try It’ coming up 20. But the catch phrase that is now used in 103 countries has a slightly surprising and little known New Zealand connection, with small Auckland agency Curtiss and Spence responsible for getting the owner of Dilmah, Merrill J Fernando, to utter the phrase on TV all those years ago.
Telecom has announced it’s an official telecommunications and technology partner for PremierLeaguePass.com, meaning it’s able to give discounts and special deals to football fans on its network.
Using a full page ad to poke fun at a Hell Pizza competitor with faux legal jargonry has won Barnes, Catmur & Friends the June Newspaper Ad of the Month award from News Works.
In one of the earlier seasons of The Simpsons, Homer discovers he has a long lost brother named Herb (voiced by Danny DeVito) – who just so happens to own a car company. Homer is invited to build the perfect car for Herb, but the design is so extravagant and unpopular it bankrupts Herb’s up to then successful company
Now a team entreating the 24 Hours of LeMons race in the US has brought Homer’s dream to life. We can’t help but imagine that this vehicle would be perfect for doing donuts in a New World carpark …. Mmmmm ….Donuts.
We speak to Resn’s business development director Matt Walsh about servicing the world from Wellington, the importance of self-drive in today’s digital creatives and where the digital agency’s future is.
Staring competitions are an immensely popular spectator sport in some nations, as this factual BBC report shows. And, to illustrate the fact that the Samsung Galaxy S4 knows when you’re looking at it, it concocted a challenge to see if passersby in a train station could ignore the numerous distractions and keep their eyes on the prize.
Marketers could be excused for thinking that not-for-profit sector brands learn from commercial consumer brands, not the other way around. But Insight’s Steven Giannoulis says developing a new brand for a long-established NFP organisation has been a salient reminder of the wider, strategic roles that a brand can play.
Tourism New Zealand’s newest app aims at putting a travel guide in the pocket of every visitor to New Zealand (at least those with iPhones and iPads, for now).
Honda’s ‘The Cog’ is renowned as one of the world’s great ads (in fact, it’s still getting love letters from ten-year-olds). And Wieden + Kennedy has done it again, with another amazing two-minute ad that shows off the full array of the Japanese company’s creations. Not a mountain road, smug looking driver or sweeping bend in sight.
Just four months since launching its first ecommerce site, Shane Bradley’s ShopHQ has sold half of the company to The Warehouse.
Fairfax Media New Zealand has kicked off its restructuring in earnest, starting with a shake up to its senior hierarchy and how different regions are handled.
Samsung’s latest range of hand and voice-activated Smart TVs were launched in New Zealand last month with a global campaign called ‘King of the TV City’, which features a heroic TV watcher placating an angry T-Rex with a mere pinch of his fingers. And Auckland agency Republik has come up with a clever way to leverage these international assets on local digital platforms.
Winter is time for breathing steam, and in New Zealand (and particularly in Dunedin flats) it often happens inside. But as this music video for Travis by Wriggles and Robbins shows, there are some pretty cool creative possibilities when you combine projections, humans and cold weather.
From the backs of legs to the front of movies, ad creep is increasingly pervasive. And, in a stunt reminiscent of All Good Bananas’ directional messaging in Kiwi supermarkets, advertisers have found a way to beam messages directly into tired travellers’ brains through a device attached to train windows. New media innovation? Or new media violation?
V’s latest campaign is all about adding some additional excitement to a “fairly mundane” sport. But the powers that be are also trying to enhance the sport’s perception, with a clip for the European Tour showing Rory McIlroy facing against a fast-talking golfing machine—literally—called Geoff and an ad for Nike featuring Tiger Woods that seems to be saying ‘shut up, golf IS a real sport’.
UK TV industry body Thinkbox has an on-going research project called TV nation, which tracks people’s attitudes towards different forms of advertising. This year it paired TV Nation with Ad Nation, a survey of people working in the advertising and media industries, and compared the two groups. And the results made for interesting, if not entirely surprising, reading.
Golf made interesting with death-sport twist and psychology experiments on children.
A slight hiccup from Fairfax Media in the twilight hours of its association with technology titles PC World, Computerworld, Reseller News and CIO Magazine.
Around two years ago, Nielsen, along with the three stakeholder groups in the Print Media Industry Research Review Group—magazines, newspapers and media agencies—were talking up the ‘Rolls Royce of measurement systems’. International guest Gary Yeo was too, saying its Consumer & Media Insights system was one of the best in the world. And now Nielsen has added a few new bells and whistles to give advertisers and media owners, as its tagline terms it, “an uncommon sense of the consumer”.