From the start, Ecostore has had social and environmental responsibility at its core. And even though it has undergone a complete marketing transformation over the past three years, its ethical DNA remains firmly in tact.
By thinking big, creating conversations and tailoring its approach to the local market, Frucor hit the jackpot with Mountain Dew Skate Pinball.
Changes afoot for ZenithOptimedia, Vivaki takes flight, local McDonald’s man receives top burger honour, Firebrand skims The Pond, The Press announces its new editor, George Mackenzie gets an international call-up, Waitemata smells the roses, the downlowconcept gets it Phil, The Sweet Shop nabs a New Yorker, Spikes Asia entries on the upward trajectory, We Can Create announces its line-up, and the end of an era for TVNZ.
Well-established indie players like Special Group, Barnes, Catmur & Friends, Shine, Federation, Affinity ID, justONE, Sugar and a few others have been around for a while now, but there haven’t been too many newcomers in recent years. Well, John McCabe and Mel Turkington have added their names to the list by opening the doors of Einstein’s Hairdresser, an Auckland-based “creative consultancy” with a slogan that says: “You’re the genius; we just make you look good.”
The news that Andrew Stone had departed his post at Droga5 came a few weeks back, with consultancy, fishing and family time taking precedence over his position with agency he helped set up with Mike O’Sullivan and Jose Alomajan in 2010. And his consultancy work has taken him back to a client he knows very well from his time as chief executive at Saatchi & Saatchi: Telecom.
A few months back Air New Zealand announced its partnership with the Department of Conservation, which is in keeping with the need DoC now has to align itself with the corporate sector and fill the financial void from ongoing budget cuts, and in keeping with Air New Zealand’s continuing environmental push. And now it’s launched a new website and video to be played on selected flights that implores Kiwis to head outside and take in some of New Zealand’s Great Walks, which the airline is the sole sponsor of.
All-you-can-eat broadband packages are common overseas, though local ISPs are slowly ratcheting up their data offerings. But Flip, which launched a few weeks back as part of the Callplus/Slingshot network, is playing down at the other end of the spectrum, targeting students and casual users with a small 5GB and home line plan for under $50 a month. And it’s ventured to Eastern Europe in an effort to show Kiwis they’re paying too much.
Genesis Energy has put out an RFP for advertising and media buying services and, given Nielsen AIS figures show it’s the biggest spender in the electricity sector, with ratecard spend of $4.4 million in the past 12 months, there will presumably be plenty of interest from the major players.
According to marketing nerds, content isn’t king, engagement is. And much of the engagement between brands and consumers is taking place on Facebook these days. So, Socialbakers, a global social media and digital analytics company, has come up with a formula, crunched a few numbers and compiled a list of New Zealand’s top ten Facebook pages by size and engagement, although a few big names are missing.
New Zealand Weddings claims to be the country’s most stylish bridal magazine. And it backed up what it says on the tin last week—and showed that magazines can and should be much bigger than the paper they’re printed on—by putting on two shows for eight designers at New Zealand Fashion Week, with each show drawing upwards of 1000 people.
Jack Daniel’s recently launched its new Tennessee Honey variety and gave bar-goers the opportunity to stick their hand in a ‘hive’ to celebrate (and it was also recently applauded for sending a more human cease and desist letter). We’ve got a couple of bottles of the new elixir to give away, so tell us a moderately entertaining story involving bees and you might get the goods.
A plethora of televisual commercial messages that caught our attention this week, with New World, TAB, New Zealand Herald, Alzheimers New Zealand, Freeview and Max all receiving a metaphorical $20 meatpack.
When Special Group took the Gravity Coffee business off Shine last year, the first problem it set out to solve was the packaging. And with that taken care of, as well as a new website courtesy of Fracture, it’s ramped things up a bit with an ambitious intern ambush.
We’ve already written a fair bit about the strangely unusual approach of DraftFCB, that rare breed of advertising agency that actually advertises. And the agency behind APN’s campaign to launch the new compact Herald took an opportunity to put itself out there once again with another good full-page print ad in the ‘collector’s edition’ yesterday. And, not one to miss an opportunity for a few laffs, Pak’n’Save’s spokestick Stickman also got involved with the relaunch and featured in three contextual ads, which were also created by DraftFCB.
Despite the fact the paper was smaller, the launch of the compact New Zealand Herald and its redesigned website was pretty hard to miss yesterday (and not surprisingly, given the ratecard value of the campaign was around $4 million). So how has it gone down with punters, staff and media agencies?
Two winning campaigns from the same agency fold this month, with Ogilvy Wellington’s Nigel Richardson & Steve Cooper scaring the bejesus out of the judges—James Mok and Regan Grafton from DraftFCB, Phil Yule from Voicebox and Kate Humphries from Media Design School—with their Consumer NZ campaign ‘Appliance Nightmares’ and Adam Barnes & James O’Sullivan taking the merit for their KFC ‘Facebook/Double Down’ campaign, which was written at Ogilvy just before they popped over to join DDB.
As Deep Throat said in All The President’s Men: “Follow the money”. And by doing that back in 2010 when MediaWorks relaunched its underperforming niche youth channel C4 as an edgy, mainstream entertainment channel called Four, now the money is following it.
Buy the assets of one of the world’s most respected brands. Then throw that brand equity on the scrapheap and start from scratch. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, but for Z energy, the decision to create a new, more localised, customer-centric brand was a master-stroke.
Vodafone was fined $960,000 today on 21 charges brought by the Commerce Commission over marketing campaigns that breached the Fair Trading act and this figure adds to fines of almost $500,000 imposed in 2011 for six other Fair Trading Act charges, making it the highest total imposed on a single defendant under the act.
Colenso BBDO and .99’s impressive ‘Every Day a New World’ brand campaign received a bit of international attention when it was released and was even used in an opinion piece in Mumbrella to prove that New Zealand’s advertising was better than Australia’s. And now, to celebrate its love of sport—from its sponsorship of the Silver Ferns to its support of a range of local sports teams around the country—and show that it’s the place to go to feed the troops, it’s released another good one called ‘Game Day’. And it may be the only supermarket ad ever made that references the nervous sporting poo.
Coming at a cost of $3.2 million, TVNZ and NZ on Air, along with major sponsor Toyota, have invested heavily in New Zealand’s Got Talent. And after the first episode of the international format show aired last night, that investment looks set to pay off, as it was the highest launch for a New Zealand entertainment/reality show in the past seven years.
Peter Thomson, founder of media agency M2M International, ventured to New Zealand to present the keynote address at the New Zealand newspaper industry’s biggest night, the newspaper advertising awards. And given newspapers have survived the advent of radio in the 1930s, cinema news in the ‘40s and TV in the ‘50s, he believes there is no reason to believe they won’t prosper in the digital age.
In property mad New Zealand, The Block NZ was paying pretty low odds to be a ratings winner—and, due to all the opportunities for sponsor integration into the show—some of it comically gratuitous—a commercial winner as well. And while MediaWorks is remaining coy about the ad and partnership revenue the show has brought in, the first season did as expected and drew plenty of Kiwi eyeballs, with last night’s final, which saw siblings Ben and Libby Crawford walk away with a tidy $237,000 profit, gaining an average 5+ audience of 491,600, up from 389,000 in the first episode.
He’s regarded as a great marketer, a great leader and a great guy. And, in difficult times for the finance sector, Ian Moody’s steadying hand and unrelenting focus on the customer helped Westpac shine. PLUS: check out the extended interview.
A humane possum trap and a power company that taught people to like them are among the seven finalists in the inaugural Best Effect award to be announced at the Best Design Awards on 5 October.
Judging by the opinions we’ve heard from industry chinstrokers about Telecom and Saatchi & Saatchi’s new Tommy & Boris campaign, you’re either in the ‘awwwwww, turtles and a cute kid’ camp, or the ‘pfffff, turtles and a cute kid?’ camp. But who cares what they think, because the hoi polloi are quite taken with the new duo and it was voted the country’s favourite advertisement in August in an online Colmar Brunton poll of 1000 Kiwis.
As we wrote last week, British American Tobacco has taken the unusual step of launching an ad campaign to state its case against the plain packaging proposal. And now it has launched the next phase of its campaign, which focuses on the issues it believes plain packaging could create for other New Zealand export industries. But Plain Packs NZ has followed the lead of the UK with a clip that shows the appeal of the packaging to kids. PLUS: the agency and production house behind the Agree Disagree campaign confirmed.
Sometimes the best form of attack is defence. And that was certainly the case for Pfizer’s brave, innovative and hugely successful launch of Avigra into the local market to combat the effects of generic knock-offs.
Gutters. They’re certainly not the sexiest product in the world. And they’re not renowned for inspiring great advertising. But Tenfold Creative and Flying Fish’s Greg Page and Kerin Casey have added some class with an ad to launch Marley’s new Stratus design range of premium spouting and downpipes.
News that giant German publisher Bauer had purchased ACP Media surfaced last night. And ACP chief executive Paul Dykzeul is pretty bloody happy about it.