By mobilising apathetic New Zealanders to see if they could get a better deal on their power, the What’s My Number campaign changed the electricity retail landscape.
Based on the nugget that Kiwis wanted homemade desserts without having to make them at home, Dollop has found a sweet niche. And, on the smell of an oily rag and with a good sprinkling of intuition, it has quickly become a nationally recognised brand and doubled its sales in the past year.
54 percent of Kiwi online shoppers now own a smartphone, according to PwC. And thanks to the search engines in their pockets they are likely to know things about your market before you do. This should put the mobile customer experience near the top of the to-do list for many companies and the MA’s September Brainy Breakfast, which, for the first time in several years will also be held in Wellington, focuses on five key mobile experience trends that will help get you up with the play.
Gravity Coffee’s week-long intern experiment, Sky’s awkward dead air, Orcon’s new feline ambassadors, Cool Charm’s street cred and Ogilvy’s Shopping Channel clasp the TVC of the Week trophy to their bosoms this week.
TVNZ and BrandWorld sent their new The Extra Mile masthead into the wild this week, and promptly apologised for hosting the advertorial segment on its news website. And MediaWorks is playing in the masthead sandpit as well after launching a new integrated advertising platform called Focus TV late last month. And, in what it sees as branded content—and what others might see as another example of commerce encroaching further on editorial integrity—the host and TV3’s ex weather presenter Toni Marsh is being called a ‘reporter’.
The Promax BDA awards aim to celebrate the world’s best brand, creative and marketing initiatives within the television industry—and the agencies and network creative departments responsible for them. And TVNZ and Spicer & Martin, Sky and Brandspank, and MediaWorks all returned home from the Australia/New Zealand ceremony last week in Sydney with a few gongs between them.
The cut-off looms for this year’s Maggies, a competition that lets the great unwashed decide on New Zealand’s best magazine covers. So, esteemed publishers, editors and minions, enter your covers immediately.
Following on from its win in the Yahoo! New Zealand Digital Strategy Award for its LiptonSlide campaign, PHDiQ has taken out the latest edition of the competition for its launch of the Samsung Galaxy III on behalf of Vodafone.
Given New Zealand’s feverish excitement during the Olympics when our gold medal tally was greater than that of the usually better performing Australian Olympic team, there’s still a fairly healthy dose of ‘friendly’ rivalry between the two nations. Over the years there’s been a bit of talk about New Zealand becoming the seventh state (and it happened briefly during the Games when, for the first time since 1912, the two nations came together as a rogue state known as Aus Zealand) and, from a marketing perspective, plenty of companies have decided to take care of business in New Zealand from Australia. But subtleties and local nuances are important when it comes to communications, as TVNZ-NZ Marketing Award winners Volkswagen and Z Energy can attest, and some things that work in other markets might not work here. And that’s the card British American Tobacco has played in the latest instalment of G2 Sydney’s animated Agree Disagree campaign, which taps into New Zealand’s patriotic, independent, Aussie-hating streak and questions the wisdom of following Australia’s lead on plain packaging legislation.
Don’t waste people’s time with babble, says Anna St George. Use great content to get customers to know, like, and trust you.
Sponsorship is less about logos on hoardings and more about activation these days (although ANZ might disagree after its logo-fest at The Cloud for Valerie Adams’ gold medal ceremony last week). In fact, some believe the old ratio of three dollars for every one spent on the sponsorship should now be upped to five. So in an effort to offer some added value to All Blacks fans, Adidas and Carat have unveiled Game Day, a Facebook application that lets them follow live commentary, comment on the game, track up-to-the-minute stats, access player and team profiles, weigh in on referee calls, vote for man of the match, and buy Adidas gear.
There is perhaps no greater force in the online world than cat videos. Wired recently delved into what it called the online cat-industrial complex, ad agency John St spoofed the feline fascination brilliantly with the world’s first cat advertising agency, and a recent cat video film festival in the US drew 10,000 people (it was won by Henri 2: paw de deux). Now Orcon is embracing the zeitgeist with a new campaign starring animated cats Daisy and Gav.
Just Juice has Antonia Prebble, Symbio has Lorraine Downes and now Cool Charm is aiming to up its street cred by launching a campaign starring its new ambassador: Kiwi electropopper Zowie.
As the old idiom goes, bad news travels fast. And, in a world where the ‘corporate fail’ is prime social media—and, increasingly, mainstream media—fodder, spreading the good news is becoming increasingly difficult. So, in an effort to balance the ledger somewhat, TVNZ and BrandWorld set up a new platform called The Extra Mile—almost like the commercial equivalent of One News’ Good Sorts segment—to bring more attention to some of those positive tales. And the inaugural episode was broadcast last night on TV One.
When it comes to dairy products, there’s a perception they’re all basically the same. So how do you convince 13 different markets in the Pacific to choose your brand? Fonterra aimed for their hearts—and, in doing so, tried to make those hearts a bit healthier.
State’s ‘With You in the Water’ programme has found the sponsorship sweet spot and improved its standing in the eyes of New Zealanders by helping to keep them and their families safe.
Subcard, the customer loyalty programme of Subway in New Zealand, is one of the most progressive loyalty schemes in the country. And, as it turns out, it’s also one of the most progressive loyalty schemes in the world, because it has been named as a winner of the third annual Colloquy Loyalty Awards, an event presented by LoyaltyOne and Visa in the United States to honour groundbreaking innovations in loyalty.
TBWA’s ‘The Mission Continues’ for 2degrees took the annual Colmar Brunton Ad Impact award, and it’s continued its winning streak by claiming victory in the August round for its 100% Middle-earth campaign for Tourism New Zealand.
Back in 2007, a man by the name of Mike Orange decided he needed to start looking after himself a bit better. In the realm of male cosmetics, there were plenty of hand me downs from corporate monsters used to producing feminine products, but nothing that “promised quality at a reasonable price without the made up words and fake science”. So DirtyMan skincare was born—and, rather appropriately, it was born in a dingey bathroom on a building site. So, for all those men questioning themselves after watching the latest Lindaeur ad, or all those women who want their men to be more manly, we’ve got a couple of prize packs to give away and all you have to do is tell us a dirty joke.
The Greg Partington-owned Shopping Channel launches on 1 October on Sky and Freeview channel 18. And, along with a series of ads featuring some of the hosts imploring Kiwi businesses to sell their stuff on the box, plenty of giveaways on Facebook and a fair bit of social media activity, Ogilvy and Robber’s Dog have also released a new TVC, one of the first projects new executive creative director Angus Hennah got stuck into after he arrived at the agency in July.
Campbell Arnott’s New Zealand has formalised its relationship with marketing agency Belowtheline after six months of competitive pitching on a project-by-project basis, putting the agency in control of “through-the-line marketing” across in-store activation, consumer promotional work and select television work for the company.
Jon Ramage moves into PR, DDB feels like four, Nicky Bell joins the new Kea board, Paul Kenny launches a new media company, and PriceMe wins a big Asia Pacific accolade.
You may have seen Samsung’s feisty print ad dissing the features of the soon-to-launch iPhone 5. Now Samsung has launched a TVC in the US that once again takes aim at the lemming-like Apple fans by trying to show that the tech company du jour is, in fact, a bit behind the eight ball and its products—block your ears Apple lovers—are so mainstream they’re even popular with parents.
Last week, Chris Tremain, the minister of internal affairs, announced the launch of the cross-government Common Web Services initiative, which aims to streamline the tender processes for central and local government agencies to save time and money. And 42 providers across seven categories have made the cut.
Switching banks is such a hassle almost nobody bothers. But by triggering change to the system and then creating a category-breaking campaign to let everyone know how easy it was to do it, new customers came flooding in to Kiwibank.
A premium brand launching entry-level products is a risky strategy. But where there’s risk, there’s often reward, and that was certainly the case for Red Witch Analog Pedals and the Seven Sisters.
The fourth Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity in Singapore saw close to 5,000 pieces of work submitted from 22 countries across 16 categories. Eleven PR’s managing partner Kelly Bennett participated as a juror in the PR category and shares his thoughts on some of the work and the judging process.
Air New Zealand recently started showing a video on selected domestic flights to promote its relationship with the Department of Conservation and, specifically, the nine walking wonders of New Zealand. Saatchi & Saatchi was behind that one and it’s back again with a nice little online campaign to promote the airline’s Above & Beyond business loyalty scheme by showing what some travellers will do to get into the Koru Lounge.
A few weeks back I ventured to Turners Auctions with a friend who was on the hunt for a new steed. If a car caught our eye, we’d kick the tyres, push a few buttons inside, lift the bonnet, check the oil, and stand back and say ‘yep, she looks pretty good’. The engine could have been inserted upside down and we probably still would’ve said that, so, given this complete lack of mechanical knowledge, it was perhaps slightly ironic that a few days later I was invited to venture to Central Otago to take some beefy new BMWs for a few frosty donuts in the snow. But, as a freeloading journalist with a rich boganic Invercargill heritage, it was an offer too good to refuse.
As expected, there’s been a fair bit of discussion about Lindauer’s new campaign on StopPress, some quite enjoying the gender-based hyperbole, some feeling it’s a little too abstract and/or sexist. We couldn’t get hold of DDB’s managing director Justin Mowday last week for a chat when it launched. But we caught up with him yesterday. So what’s the deal? And what else have they got up their sleeves?