Aah Christmas, what’s not to love? Parties, presents, yummy treats. But gifts aren’t always what you want, take reindeer sweaters, or singing fish ornaments for example. To make up for the bitter disappointment such gifts bring, we have two $50 gift cards to give away, for Subway and GrabOne.
The price wars between the supermarket behemoths Progressive Enterprises and Foodstuffs is heating up, with Foodstuffs winning the latest legal skirmish. A decision by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ruled Progressive Enterprises guilty of presenting an artificial advantage and breaching ethics guidelines.
BCG2 Health’s Pfizer ‘FACTORy’ programme, originally developed in New Zealand in collaboration with Spitfire, and then launched into Australia, has won a Pfizer Human Health global award for commercial excellence and innovation.
In our humble opinion, Powershop’s ‘Same Power, Different Attitude’ campaign is one of the best campaigns of the year. But we wondered aloud a couple of weeks ago whether its latest execution featuring Darth Vader prancing through a field like Julie Andrews crossed the IP line. Turns out it did, and the LucasFilm patent lawyers have been in touch telling them to cease and desist. They’ve done as asked, but, with a dose of challenger brand cheek, they’ve also taken a leaf out of 42 Below’s book and, with the help of its PR agency Sputnik, decided to have a bit of fun with the apology letter.
Simon Lendrum took over as the managing director of JWT in 2010 after a long stint at Ogilvy and, with solid campaigns for Ford and PlaceMakers this year, a freshly renovated office and a new creative director at the helm, there’s some excitement afoot. Here’s what he thought about 2011.
Stolen Rum is a New Zealand-based start-up rum company that wants to bring back the romanticism and history of rum to a contemporary audience. The rum itself has been judged world class, and it’s got the requisite feel good back-story, but an in-house cheeky guerrilla marketing campaign hopes to put Stolen Rum on everyone’s lips—including the spirit-making behemoth it’s competing with, Bacardi.
While all the talk in broadcasting land is about Sky and TVNZ’s Igloo, TVNZ has just announced the arrival of a new addition to its OnDemand family called Ad Hover, “a dynamic, customisable and fully interactive advertising opportunity” created in conjunction with DraftFCB that aims to give viewers a more engaging and immersive video experience and claims to significantly up the brand recall measures for advertisers.
A new free mobile application which helps make Christmas shopping easier has been a huge hit among iPhone users.
Jack Delmonte and Hadleigh Sinclair from Publicis Mojo take November’s ORCA for their ‘Low Fat’ Subway campaign, which was a real hit with the judges, and can be credited with inventing the phrase “hairy neck dumplings” as a euphemism for goatee adorned double chins.
Gamers usually like to escape reality. But, as part of a YouTube campaign for Turtle Beach, a company that designs, manufactures and markets high quality audio peripherals for video game consoles and personal computers, Droga5 NZ has reversed that scenario and taken a 24 year-old Kiwi gamer named StatiC (real name Phil) on a journey through a real warzone, Iraq.
When we asked TVNZ’s head of digital Eric Kearley in early November whether TVNZ was working with Sky and would launch a set-top box before the digital switchover, he flat out said no. But last night Sky and TVNZ brought out the big PR guns and officially launched “New Zealand’s worst kept secret”, Igloo, the mid-play TV network that offers both pay and free-to-air channels. And while there’s plenty to shout about with the new offer, there are still questions lingering about its modus operandi and whether MediaWorks will play nice.
There were a host of enthralling PR disasters this year. And, perhaps as a result of all the humans wandering the streets during the Rubber Wool Cup, there was also a noticeable increase in the number of brands using experiential marketing in their campaigns. So who better to spill the beans on 2011 than Claudia Macdonald, managing director of PR, events and experiential agency Mango and a founding member of the CAANZ Marcomms Leadership Group.
Much like That Difficult Second Album Syndrome, it’s very hard for companies to keep up the growth required to make it back onto the Deloitte Fast 50 list. But, perhaps not surprisingly considering it now works with big clients like IAG, ASB, Volkswagen, Frucor, NZ Lotteries and Vodafone, Auckland boutique The Research Agency managed to do that this year, ranked as the 42nd fastest growing company in New Zealand after taking 29th position in 2010. Here’s what tickled the fancies—and got the goats—of its two partners Andrew Lewis and Amber Coulter.
It’s that time of year again, the time when we’re so busy dreaming of sausages and sauvignon that, rather than write anything ourselves, we rope in some of the industry’s most vigorous cutters and dastardly thrusters to give us their $0.02 on the goods, bads and uglies of 2011. First up, TBWA\Tequila’s chief raconteur Dave Walden, whose agency has bounced back from a fairly tough ASB-related 2010 after getting its mitts on the ANZ and Tourism New Zealand accounts.
Droga5 has signed with one of New Zealand’s leading gaming businesses Fiveight. The New Zealand-owned and operated company represents SEGA, Turtle Beach, Ubisoft and Warner Bros. There were no incumbents, as the company was only formed last year.
It’s nearly Christmas so we thought we’d lighten things up a bit with a look at some of the more, ahem, misguided marketing attempts.
Forget half an hour of current affairs – instead a new comedy show, to be hosted by Paul Henry, is planned for Sunday nights on TV3. Henry will host Would I Lie To You?, a comedy panel show featuring two teams and guest celebrities.
After a successful pitch for Maritime New Zealand’s business earlier this year, feast your eyes on the first ad produced by DraftFCB for the Maritime NZ: ‘Don’t be a clown, wear a lifejacket’.
It’s tough finding the perfect gift. And time is running out to find it before Christmas. But Colenso and Heart of the City have joined forces to make it slightly easier—and to promote the shopping districts of the Auckland CBD—with the launch of the Gift Guru, a festive addition to the Big Little City website that offers hints and tips from “super stylist and shopping extraordinaire” Charlotte Rust.
Who’s it for: Paper Plus by Hyde and Toybox
Why we like it: Everyone loves origami. And pop-up books. So, as part of its big rebrand, Paper Plus has embraced both of them in these quirky, cutesy campaign.
Who’s it for: Vend …
Mega stores have changed the face of home retailing, and MSN is hoping to recreate that same success online with Homes NZ. The new website appears to be pushing all the right buttons, attracting 36,000 page views in its first two days.
When local tech start-up (and winner of the supreme honour at the New Zealand Innovator’s Awards) Vend HQ launched www.welovepos.com, a website for sharing point of sale horror stories and celebrating great technology and design, it purchased a clunky, obsolete old cash register named Steve with one purpose in mind: trashing him. So they went to the customers and asked them whether he should meet his maker via firing squad, hammers, dynamite, or by ‘falling’ off a tall building. Then, as the votes started coming in, they thought, why not all of the above?
DDB’s Dave Brady heads to Australia, Mark Addy joins GPY&R, The Listener appoints another deputy editor, Independent Liquor bolsters its marketing team, CAANZ DLG adds a few new digi-boffins, and Rhema Broadasting Group’s chief executive steps down.
GrabOne, New Zealand’s leading daily deal website, is partnering up with Kidsline, a free peer counselling service for children under 14. Today GrabOne launches their Kidsline donation campaign on their website where customers can donate to the charity.
Apollo Marketing has capped off a year of strong growth and multiple awards by winning B&T’s Promotional Agency of the Year for 2011. This is the second year running that the trans-Tasman agency has won this award, beating fierce competition from other Australian and New Zealand agencies.
Colenso’s last campaign for Frucor’s PepsiMax, MaxIt Jobs, went down a treat with the young, mostly male, sugary drink-loving target audience and was a finalist for the FMCG category at the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards and took home a silver Effie as a result of the sales lift. And it’s followed that up with a similarly masculine campaign/competition called Bromitment, “a pledge, promise, obligation to be there with your boys, to participate in any and all shenanigans that may go down”.
As we wrote last week, publishers—and other media owners—are being forced to come up with creative solutions to get brands to sign on the dotted line. This means advertorial and brand-funded content is becoming an increasingly important element of the magazine sector’s revenue and the half magazine, half cookbook called Everyday Dish that’s just been released by Tangible in association with LG is a very good example of that evolution.
ACC has appointed DraftFCB for its advertising, marketing and design services. The incumbents were Clemenger and AIM Proximity.
Christmas is rapidly approaching and we all know what that means: it’s going to rain. So what better way to survive a Kiwi summer than with a Blunt umbrella, the Kiwi invention developed by Greig Brebner that’s designed to stand up to Wellington-esque conditions, won’t poke anyone’s eyes out and has been coveted by the likes of Wired and Men’s Health. We’ve got two of the virtually unbreakable XL numbers in blue valued at $110 to give away to a couple of lucky StopPressers and, because New Zealanders love nothing more than talking about the weather, all you have to do is tell us about an occasion when a bad dose of it ruined something, be it a wedding, a shoot, a bar mitzvah or maybe even a base jump.
Local comedy 7 Days, and 3 News’ election coverage highlight a strong month of growth for TV3, which saw significant gains in the key 25-54 demographic, while TV One continued to lose ground.