DDB may have a bit less work on with Wattie’s, but it’s getting geared up for the arrival of Westpac in about three months, and it’s announced a few of the anticipated hires, with three experienced campaigners joining the team: art director Toby Morris, planning director Rupert Price and group account director Cath Bosson.
We wrote about Brother’s plans to promote its naming rights sponsorship of the brrmm brrmms a few weeks back. And the multi-channel campaign went live this week, led by a cool new TVC created by Raydar and SPG/Kaleidoscope that’s about as far away as you could get from the Japanese company’s previous TV efforts and links its technology with rally driving by bringing a print out of a car to life.
After a competitive pitch, Running With Scissors has won some project work with Heinz Wattie’s, beating out JWT for the spoils and leading to a few questions about the role of DDB.
Four years after McCann Worldgroup New Zealand re-opened its Auckland office, it has more or less pulled the blinds and locked the door. As a result of the consolidation, its clients will now be serviced from the much larger Australian operation.
Depending on how you look at it, second screening is either breathing new life into live broadcasts and showing TV is about shared experiences, or offering proof that viewers aren’t really paying full attention to what’s on the box. Either way, it’s proving fairly popular in New Zealand, with a new survey of 482 smartphone users released by IABNZ and 3DI showing that 63 percent of them are simultaneously using their smartphones and watching TV.
Les Mills International (LMI) is one of the country’s biggest under-the-radar business success stories, and its fitness products can be found in more than 14,000 gyms in 80 countries. And to help keep in touch with them all—and reach some fairly ambitious goals for growth—it has appointed Contagion as its new global media social media partner, effective immediately.
We know you marcomms folk like to wine and dine from time to time. And the Lewisham Foundation Awards rewarded the best in the Auckland scene recently, so here’s some food—and drink—for thought if you’re planning to impress.
A total of 225 entries were received across 13 categories for the 2012 edition of the Magazine Awards. And after the judges had their wicked way with them all, they ended up choosing 144 finalists. Some category finalists will be announced at the Gala Awards Dinner on June 28.
A record 34,301 entries from 87 countries have been submitted to the Cannes Lions 59th International Festival of Creativity, an overall increase of 19 percent versus last year. And, after a total of 347 entries from New Zealand across almost all of the 15 categories, the Kiwi contingent will be aiming to improve on its rather slim takings last year when things kick off in ten days.
Maggie Christie integrates herself into Clems, Stefan Lepionka steps down as head juicer at Charlie’s, Heartland agency upgrades its Tracta, Newstalk ZB wins gold in New York, 8com cuts the ribbon at new Auckland office, Craig Franklin swaps Oz for New Zealand, and Tony Bozzard joins KMS Data.
It’s all go in the local broadcasting world at the moment. Sky’s content deals with ISPs have been put under the microscope, Freeview has started its final push before the digital switchover and announced some impressive technological additions, streaming service Quickflix has given Kiwis another (legal) way to watch, and, as Igloo’s 15-second teaser ad by Sugar shows, the “new kid in town”, with it’s colourful blobby mascots, is getting set to launch after the joint venture between Sky and TVNZ was recently cleared by the ComCom.
Photo: Paul Statham
Wendy Rayner, head of marketing at NZ Lotteries and reigning Marketer of the Year, has resigned after around nine years with the organisation and seven years in the top marketing role.
Kelly Bennett, the founder and managing partner of Eleven PR New Zealand, has been tapped on the shoulder and will lead the expansion of brand activation, experiential and PR services for the TBWA\ network throughout Asia Pacific.
After NZ Lotteries’ big rehash of Instant Kiwi, DDB launched the much-loved, much-awarded and completely OTT ‘It Can All Change in an Instant’ musical number in 2010. And while the humour is still there in the follow-up ‘It Pays to Push your Luck’, they have taken a slightly more complicated approach this time round.
The old adage says reputations take a lifetime to build and only 15 minutes to destroy. And with the emergence of social media and online reviews, never has this saying rung truer for our travel and hospitality industries.
We let out a wee chortle—and felt a wave of ‘there but for the grace of God go us’—yesterday when we received the run-down for this week’s edition of Media7, which was to discuss the proposal by Fairfax to outsource some of its Australian sub-editing requirements to New Zealand. But, slightly ironically, given the episode’s focus on the loss of local knowledge and errors of fact slipping through unnoticed as a result of such decisions, it probably could have done with a sub.
Amateurs regularly seem to think they can foot it with the big boys. Usually they can’t, but technology is helping even things up a bit and Panasonic and Auckland digital shop Tango have launched a cool interactive campaign/social experiment to see if the new Lumix cameras do as they claim and allow anyone to shoot like a pro.
Continuing Tangible Media’s strategy of special issues and brand extensions seen with the likes of NZ Weddings Planner, Everyday Dish and NZ Rugby World’s First XV, next in line is the hunting market.
Who’s it for: Freeview by True and Flying Fish
Why we like it: In the final promotional push before the digital switchover begins in four months, the free-ness of Freeview is being hammered home once again, this time with some great animation and a nostalgic and patriotic …
With customers embracing the internet and social media in ever-increasing numbers (the Banking Ombudsman has just released a new guide for online banking), Canstar has embarked on its first review of the New Zealand online banking market and ASB, a bank renowned for its digital chops and social focus, has been named the best of the lot.
It’s getting to the business end of the digital switchover and there’s just four months to go until the first two regions—the West Coast and Hawke’s Bay—pull the plug on New Zealand’s analogue TV signal. So Freeview has launched a campaign with its new agency True starring Pio Terei that aims to capture the 16 percent of homes still to make the leap to digital–and to convince them to choose the newly pimped out Freeview platform rather than its nearest competitor, the soon-to-launch Sky/TVNZ joint venture Igloo.
Penis graffiti is immature—and almost always funny. This effort in Hamilton was able to be seen from space, this effort on the Liteiny Bridge in St Petersberg had some serious scale to it, this one came to life to stop STDs, and then there was the recent effort in Australia where a long-time magazine designer went out with a bang by sneakily putting some cockinballs on the cover of Beat. Now our neck of the woods is abuzz with cartoon genital-related scandal after some unseemly goings on at DDB.
According to Nielsen’s Online Retail Report, the number of online shoppers in New Zealand has now reached over 1.6 million (49 percent of the total population aged 18+), an increase of 122,000 on the previous year and more than double since 2004.
After seeing this classic ad for Hudson Toffee Pops as a young chap at some stage in the early ’90s, I, like many of the nation’s children, instantly developed a crippling fear of red couches and watching it now brings back extremely painful memories. That’s not true, but reliable informants have reliably informed us that the rather artistic male lead is an ad man of some repute. So the first person to tell us who it is will get a copy of Martin Lindstrom’s Brandwashed.
With the recent opening of New World and Countdown Metro in Auckland’s CBD, it seems New Zealand supermarkets are following in the footsteps of their overseas counterparts. While I can’t hide my excitement in having convenience re-enter my life, I do wonder if this may be the start of a slippery slope. Once the supermarket giant shows its face, it’s only a matter of time before the own brand phenomenon takes hold, a development that could mean the bounty of boutique food producers that currently grace our shelves may be squeezed out.
JWT’s Angus Hennah comes home, Rachel Ellerm kicks off her new female-centric strategic consultancy Frock, Pluk continues to grow, Orcon puts its weight behind CanTeen, The PR Shop pulls a deuce, and 2degrees and TBWA\ put their Ad Impact gloves on.
Not surprisingly, Fairfax’s proposal to outsource 66 Australian editorial jobs, including some sub-editing, to New Zealand didn’t go down too well with its staff or the national journalists’ union and led to a 36 hour unprotected strike among staff from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review, The Sunday Age, The Sun Herald, the Canberra Times, the Newcastle Herald and Wollongong Illawarra Mercury that finished this morning. News Ltd also recently announced the possibility of up to 400 editorial jobs getting the chop and while the local industry reported some pretty solid numbers recently, some of the big Aussie mastheads are thought to have had their biggest ever drops in circulation in March, so it’s obviously a tough time to be in the newspaper game, both for journos and for publishers. But as if all this wasn’t enough, an article we read recently in Wired shows editorial staff might have another fight on their hands due to the rise of robot reporters, which the chief of pretty frickin’ amazing US company Narrative Science has predicted will be writing 90 percent of the news in 15 years. Let’s hope Gina Rinehart doesn’t get wind of this technology. We demand another strike. Hasn’t anyone seen I, Robot?
Cadbury’s new global brand campaign Joyville got underway with a big TVC about the secret chocolate ecosystem. And the local branch has launched the first New Zealand iteration of that campaign, something Cadbury’s general manager of marketing Iaan Buchanan calls chapter one of a multi-chapter story that will be told this year.
After officially winning the Vodafone account at the end of February, DraftFCB has sent some of its first work into the wild, with one simple retail ad for “the nakedest ever broadband deal” and another slightly more out-there idea—quite literally—for the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S III.
New Zealand is one of the only markets in the world where Red Bull isn’t the number one energy drink. That title is held by Frucor’s V, and it got there through a combination of savvy NPD and a series of brilliant campaigns. Given what’s come before, it’s always going to be a challenge to raise the bar creatively, but Colenso BBDO and Frucor have given it a good nudge with their latest effort, the V Motion Project.