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.
The newly rebranded Sugar & Partners announced the addition of Dave Nash as a creative partner a couple of days ago. And it has just launched a new campaign for the TAB that has continued on from last year’s successful ‘Your Call’ campaign (which included the best example of psychic poultry the world may have ever seen) with a new effort that aims to show the ‘weekend’s for calls’.
One of the major themes of the presentations given by Finlay Macdonald, Peter Thomson and Tim Pankhurst at the Newspaper Advertising Awards on Tuesday night was the power of journalism and the ability newspapers have to see stories through. Of course, there were some huge stories to tell in New Zealand last year, and to show how important and relevant newspapers still are, News Works NZ’s agency Special Group compiled a couple of clips using content from the country’s news organisations, one showing the carnage and courage in Christchurch and the other telling the tale of the Rugby World Cup from the French perspective.
Ze Germans are coming. Nine Entertainment Network has sold ACP Media to privately-owned German publishing house Bauer for a reported $500 million.
Last night at the Aotea centre, newspaper folk from across the land gathered to show off their wares to media and creative agencies and guest speaker Peter Thomson presented a fairly convincing case for the future viability of newspapers. And this year, the newspaper expo was topped off by the announcement of the newly rejigged Newspaper Advertising Awards, with Saatchi & Saatchi walking away with the $10,000 prize and the ad of the year honour for its very practical Valentines Day ad for Tui.
When Todd McLeay shifted from NZ Lotteries to the role of chief operating officer at APN NZ, one of the first things he did was go and talk with a bunch of ad agencies and media buyers to see what their feelings were about newspapers. The general consensus was that there was a lot of sparkle about digital but there wasn’t too much love for print, mainly because “no-one was making a good case for it”. And so the campaign to launch the compact version of the NZ Herald and redesign the website was born, and with the big launch day on Monday, the piece de resistance, a TVC by DraftFCB that shows the important role the paper has played in New Zealand’s history, goes live tonight.
The newly renamed and rebranded Sugar & Partners has added to its haul of Ogilvy employees, enlisting creative director Dave Nash as its new creative partner, where he will partner with recently appointed creative partner Damon O’Leary.
Plenty of newness to choose from last week, but a solitary place for Vodafone this week.
Whittaker’s has a history of innovation, both in terms of its new products and its approach to marketing. We were big fans of its amazing chocolate website, which may or may not have provided some inspiration for Cadbury’s Google+ page. And while it doesn’t seem to be an official production (yet), a few chocolate lovers decided to turn something else usually deemed inedible into something much more enticing by screenprinting Whittaker’s chocolate designs onto wafer paper.
A few months back, .99 was awarded the Sunday Star Times business after a competitive pitch that involved Simpatico and Y&R Auckland. But that decision doesn’t seem to have gone down too well with Y&R, which has decided to resign the Fairfax Network trade account it held.
Publicis Mojo’s Spread the Warmth campaign for the Auckland City Mission Winter Appeal, which pitted Auckland neighbourhoods against each other to see who was the most generous, has won the IABNZ Online Creative Award for August 2012.
As lovers of high quality drama, awkward scenes involving gratuitous product placement and those who are famous for no apparent reason, StopPress is delighted to hear The Ridges are coming to New Zealand TV. And, much to the joy of MediaWorks, which, judging by the promo clip, is revelling in all the negative publicity the reality show has already generated, it’s even being mentioned in other ad campaigns.
In just 18 months, Jasmine Griffin has helped turn Whittaker’s from a fairly traditional FMCG marketer into a company lauded for its digital and social media savviness.
TVNZ’s balance sheet took a hit last year after the ill-fated TiVo investment was written off. But, despite an almost $4 million decrease in underlying earnings, the bottom line is looking healthier, with after tax profit for the year ended 30 June 2012 increasing from $2.1 million in 2011 to $14.2 million this year. PLUS: new chief executive Kevin Kenrick’s speech at the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards.
One of New Zealand’s perennial entertainment bugbears is the fact we have to wait a bit longer for our content than many other markets. It certainly doesn’t seem quite as bad as it once was, but, due to the big spoiler known as the internet, the delay is still bad enough to get Coro St fans riled up. And you don’t want to see Coro St fans when they’re angry. So, to try and remedy this national sense of FOMO (and perhaps limit the associated pirating), MediaWorks has unveiled a new sub-brand called Fast Four that trumpets the fact Kiwis will be able to watch some of their favourite shows on-air within a week of their world premiere.
The ‘new Telecom’ carries with it a fair bit of baggage, some of it well-deserved and based on its legacy, some of it based on misperceptions and a general lack of understanding about the oft-confusing telco realm. And in an effort to address some of those issues, Telecom has taken the fairly brave step of opening itself up to the masses and launching a new website called www.whytelecom.co.co.nz that’s part PR campaign, part customer service innovation and part public service announcement. And, in quintessential Telecom fashion, it’s gone heavy on the animals.
From product and price to advertising and loyalty, Air New Zealand is customer-centric at every point of the experience and marketing-led at every point of the business. And its consistency over the past three years makes it a worthy winner of the inaugural Marketing Excellence award.
It is a scientifically proven fact (or will be, once somebody gets around to studying it) that the internet favours extremes. Trolls (like spammers) are inescapable. And as senior advisor for innovation to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Alec Ross said in his keynote address to the Project Revolution conference last week, moderation and compromise tend to get punished in the process.
For all you effectiveness sponges out there, Red Spider Network’s Charlie Robertson, a world leading strategic planner in brand strategy and communications and the international guest judge for this year’s Effie Awards, will be spreading the good word tomorrow night at at a function hosted by CAANZ, TVNZ and AUT Business School.
Despite the almost audible industry sigh whenever another campaign is released with a focus on New Zealandness—and there’s been a few of them recently—the fact remains that New Zealanders are quite interested in themselves and their culture. And Tasti and Contagion have taken that to the nth degree with a campaign that hopes to find ‘New Zealand’s Kiwiest Kiwi’.
Following on from its performance in the recent APMA Star Awards, marketing and promotional agency Belowtheline has won big at this year’s APPA Awards, taking home five awards including a gold, two silvers and two bronzes.