Breakfast, as the old idiom goes, is the most important meal of the day. Burger King NZ obviously didn’t get the memo and left that segment of the fast-food market to competitors like McDonald’s and Wendys. But, as a new campaign by Colenso BBDO that spans TV, radio, press, online, sampling and PR states, it’s now “woken up to a whole new time”.
It’s tough out there in charity land at the moment. There are lots of organisations fighting for funding, consumers are still counting their pennies and in EFTPOS-loving New Zealand the cashless society is a very real thing, which means the traditional street appeal doesn’t work quite as well as it once did. So to get around this and drive donations in the lead up to Daffodil Day on 31 August, the Cancer Society and &some have called on the ubiquity of the mobile phone to help smooth the process.
When Colenso BBDO’s head of planning James Hurman decided to expand his horizons and take a role as planning partner at Ogilvy Shangahi, he said he’d probably be back in the homeland eventually. But he’s returned much sooner than expected, with the bearded one cutting short his OE to take up the role of managing director at Y&R, where he will be working alongside one of his old cohorts Josh Moore.
Readers of New Zealand building industry magazine Build can look forward to a new contemporary design in October as part of enhancements that will soon include digital delivery and better access to back articles. And island lovers have also got something to look forward to with the launch of the inaugural Island Destinations annual.
September is shaping up to be a watershed month for APN NZ—and, more broadly, New Zealand’s newspaper publishing sector. The New Zealand Herald is set to reveal its new compact weekday edition on 10 September and the newly redesigned nzherald.co.nz site will go live around the same time. There’s also a new Newspaper Inserted Magazine (NIM) on Mondays about food, health and well-being and readers will also be treated to a one-off premium glossy magazine on launch day called, appropriately enough, The Magazine. But what exactly is a magazine? Why are NIMs so appealing for newspaper publishers? And why is ACP’s Paul Dykzeul so fired up?
The Commerce Commission has warned fruit importer Dole it may be in breach of the Fair Trading Act on three separate counts relating to the company’s Ethical Choice marketing scheme. However, only a court can decide if there has actually been a breach of the Fair Trading Act, with convicted companies liable for fines of up to $200,000.
It’s been a difficult 18 or so months for AMI, which required government assistance to stay afloat after the quakes and was eventually bought by IAG. But it isn’t taking the negativity surrounding it lying down and it has launched a new campaign from DDB and Flying Fish that focuses on the fact that its staff are still committed to the cause.
As Sir Peter Blake often said, if it’s not hard, it’s not worth doing. And there’s no doubt trying to get a bunch of young kids to stick to a script is fairly difficult. But one of the major pay-offs of working with children is that you might get to release an out-takes video, like this very entertaining behind-the-scenes number for Z’s latest campaign by Assignment Group and Exposure’s Kevin Denholm.
Back in May, Mercury Energy sent its experimental ‘Good Energy Taxi’ onto the streets of Auckland. At the time, Tequila’s main brains Ross Howard said the motorised version of a karma bank was a bit of a double whammee, with the experiential element meaning a range of Kiwis came into contact with the taxi—either in person or via social media—and the footage taken from inside the cab being made into a short documentary that captured some of the Kiwi good sorts. And now you can check that documentary out.
ASB has earned a reputation as one of the world’s most innovative banks, as evidenced by its inclusion on the Financial Brand’s list of ten brands to watch, the Top 35 Banks on Facebook and Top 35 Banks on Twitter. It was the first to launch internet banking in New Zealand in 1997, its virtual ‘Facebranch’ was an award-winning world-first, and its latest development has followed that trajectory by letting users pay Facebook friends through its updated mobile app. So is it digital gimmickry? Or is ASB adhering to its slogan and creating the future? We chat with general manager, brand experience and digital channels Anna Curzon.
The digital age is changing the way we live and work. And whatever your industry or interest, you’re part of the wave, like it or not. And digital media conference The Project, described as “a collision of thought on social media and digital communication”, is your chance to figure out how to ride it.
After a bit of a rough patch, the newly rebranded ‘global boutique’ Y&R NZ has been slowly getting back on the good foot, with some nice work for the likes of HRV, Shapes Roadies and ACC, and some big names being added to the staff roster, among them Josh Moore as executive creative director, Ross Goldsack returning as non-executive director and Scott Henderson manning the fort in Wellington. And now there’s another big change to announce, with the chief executive of seven years Jon Ramage stepping down and being replaced by Moore.
Back in the day, as a young lad living with a flat full of horrible men in Dunedin, we (mostly jokingly) discussed the idea of investing in a flat sheep because it was such a versatile animal, providing warmth, a footstool, lawnmowing services, fertiliser, ‘comfort’ (for the Southlanders) and, eventually, food. And Cavalier Bremworth is equally fond of the humble sheep’s versatility, because they’ve launched a new campaign to remind Kiwis that wool is the best choice for carpet as it has already passed the toughest tests when it was on the beast’s back.
Straight from the starter’s pistol, The Block NZ became TV3’s biggest show of the year. So has it maintained that momentum? How are those cheeky Pluk-ers doing with their mobile app? And what’s TVNZ got in store?
There was a bit of chatter in Australia about viewer numbers for the opening ceremony being the lowest since OzTam ratings began in 1999. So what happened in New Zealand? And how did the numbers compare to Beijing in 2008? And what’s this about the Prime Underclass?
Wildfire, a social media marketing company started by Kiwi Victoria Ransom, has been bought by Google for a reported US$250 million.
The Marketing Association hosted yet another sell-out Brainy Breakfast event last week, with over 300 marketers filling the Crowne Plaza’s conference room ready to listen to international social media expert, Brian Giesen and Jennifer Duval-Smith, executive director at Social@Ogilvy in New Zealand, speak about Pinterest—and how to use it to leverage social media campaigns.
We broke the story about Andrew Stone leaving Droga5 on Friday to spend more time with his family and do some consultancy work. And that high-profile departure, combined with the recent loss of its foundation client ASB to Saatchi & Saatchi, led to a fair bit of speculation that Droga5 was in a bit of trouble. But Mike O’Sullivan, who has stepped up to fill the leadership role, says the doors are still well and truly open and, with a few new clients and a new management team, the agency is poised for growth.
Sorted’s shrinkage, RadioLive’s fly on the wall approach, ASB’s Facebook in real life tomfoolery and TV3’s Olympics promo take the TVC title this week.
It’s been featured in Wired, the Huffington Post (“a virtual reality explosion”), The Daily What (“a prototype for Skrillex’s inevitable 2017 Super Bowl half-time show) and a fair bit here on StopPress. And the V Motion Project has started its experiential journey into the public domain, with a surprise in-cinema activation showing the technology in effect on the big screen.
MediaWorks adds some more integration, Gordon Jon Thompson takes a gamble on Sky City, APN names Peter Hunt as its director and chairman of the board, and DB opens up its newly-renovated Monteith’s Brewery in Greymouth.
Last year’s PwC New Zealand entertainment and media outlook said conservatism needed to be shed if media businesses wanted to make hay in the rapidly changing modern era. And, according to the second edition, what previously looked like a wide gap between old and new operating models is now being bridged and the New Zealand market is finally starting to embrace the new ways in which punters consume content, with revenues in the sector growing four percent to $5.2 billion in 2011, PwC tipping an average of five percent percent growth throughout the 2012-2016 forecast period, and mobility seen as the biggest driving force of change.
During the Rugby World Cup, the off-field battles between sponsors—and, often, non-sponsors—made for fairly interesting viewing. And the same is certainly true with the Olympics. Thankfully, MediaCom has its finger on the pulse with its Twitter Tracker, which ranks sponsors by a unique Olympic Twitter Score that includes total volume of mentions, engagement and reach metrics and, importantly, positive or negative sentiment.
There’s plenty of debate about how to measure the value of social media, and, in some cases, whether sites like Facebook and Twitter are at ‘the heart of a fallacy’ around online advertising. But, according to a new study by McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the business and economics research arm of McKinsey & Company, social technologies have the potential to raise the productivity of knowledge workers by 20 to 25 percent, as information is made more accessible and searchable and communication streamlined.
Over the weekend, we received a message from Facebook’s account manager Adnan Khan asking us to consider adopting Facebook’s Social Plugin commenting system on StopPress, as it would increase the authenticity of the conversations and reduce the number of “faceless trolls” and offensive comments (if you’re so inclined, you can comment on StopPress stories through Facebook, Twitter or Google by logging-in to Disqus). So we couldn’t help but revel in the irony when ComputerWorld published an article yesterday about the fact that, according to social media management tool Status People, 94 percent of Khan’s almost 30,000 Twitter followers were fake.
L&P is a much-loved Kiwi brand. Many of its ads are classics, its Facebook page has over 184,000 likes and the recent Reader’s Digest survey listed L&P the seventh most trusted brand in New Zealand. But sales were simply not matching the affection and loyalty the brand enjoyed. So the packaging has been given a spruce up by brand design specialists Dow Design in an effort to make it more contemporary—and more compelling for the younger generation.
I remember when Michael Wolff was very bullish about the internet in the 1990s, so when he starts sounding warning bells, we had better take heed. And the way he paints Facebook—and a belief that its advertising model will eventually collapse for being so limited—is not unfamiliar to anyone who ever wondered, during the dot-com boom, just why those companies were worth that much.
The wise mouse from sorted.org.nz has been helping to enhance Kiwis’ money smarts for almost ten years now. But in March the campaign took a different tack by upping the engagement rather than just driving traffic to the website. And the second part of its three part financial education campaign aims to highlight the ways Kiwis can better manage their debt.
Back in the day, those with the ability to control fire were likely to be run out of town—or put in the old ‘let’s see if they’ll drown’ chair—for “being conversant in the dark arts”. But, as a new campaign for Rinnai by .99 shows, these days it’s something to put in your brochure.
According to CAANZ, one of the big challenges facing the communications industry is the way it is sometimes perceived by clients—and society more broadly. So, in an effort to address this and show that it is in fact what chief executive Paul Head calls a reputable and professional industry that adds value to businesses, the communications industry will be governed by a formal set of rules after CAANZ introduced its new ‘Code of Ethics, Practices, and Obligations of CAANZ Members’.