Ah the swings and roundabouts of local branding with multinational companies. Johnson & Jonson Pacific Ltd has been quietly reviewing its New Zealand organisational structure in light of changing business conditions in the local industry, and the entire marketing department is the first casualty.
A partnership between Y&R and Ocean Design has been appointed by ACC. The pair tendered jointly for brand, advertising and direct elements in the recent ACC Marketing Communications RFP process, after successfully implementing a number of campaigns together in recent years, from both the public and private sectors.
Sky and Television New Zealand have confirmed they are indeed launching a joint pay TV service. Not wanting to say we told you so or anything, but we predicted this weeks ago. TVNZ will be taking 49 percent of a new pay TV platform called Igloo – with Sky holding the majority 51 percent, effectively freezing out the competition.
Editor of The New Zealand Herald for the past ten years Tim Murphy has been promoted to the new position of editor-in-chief of Herald titles.
Collaborations between musicians and artists have brought us some of the most memorable pop culture images of the last 50 years. Think iconic images such as the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen, or The Velvet Underground and Andy Warholʼs famous collaboration. And now Beck’s is looking do the same by revamping a series of limited edition labels with the help of local talent.
For the first time in IBM’s C-suite surveys, chief marketing officers were included in the mix. And the results show many of them feel unprepared to deal with the volume and complexity of information available through social platforms.
Powershop’s ‘Same Power, Different Attitude’ campaign by DoubleFish was well-received by the StopPressers when it was launched in July. And, while some offense and distress led to the images of Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein being removed from the campaign, it’s continued down a similar creative path with its follow-up ads. But we received an email from a reader wondering if its latest effort had also gone a bit too far.
The WLG pop-up restaurant in Fitzroy, Melbourne, is now into its second week and it’s proving fairly popular with the locals, just as the first incarnation did in Sydney. And Air New Zealand has jumped on the bandwagon by getting a few of its cabin crew to perform an in-restaurant safety video and dishing out free return flights to Welly to 60 lucky diners.
Voting is now open for the inaugural Glossies. See this month’s entries below and cast your vote for your favourite magazine ad (see multi-page entries in the gallery here). And remember, there’s just one vote per computer.
Much like DraftFCB and The National Bank, the industry has been waiting patiently to see what Colenso and Westpac would come up with after the account shifted from Saatchi & Saatchi last year. It’s already created the Impulse Saver app and a home loan spot and, while the new animated ad explaining the financial perils of the modern world that launched last night isn’t being seen as the big reveal, it is the first time the bank’s new tagline ‘help is what we do’ has been seen in the wild.
Companies are having a creative dig at themselves in their bid to win $250,000 worth of business software and services in Greentree’s Game On competition.
JWT announces a new creative force, Pead PR adds to its brand and digital arsenal, Haystac launches a new events division, DDB gives Adschool pair a leg up, Adi Staite is lured away from self-employment by Synovate, Crossmark opens its Kiwi office, and The Sweet Shop picks a US boss.
Who’s it for: Westpac by Colenso BBDO and Assembly
Why we like it: Aside from the quirky Impulse Saver app and a spot about how easy it is to buy a house, Colenso and Westpac seem to have been pretty quiet since they shacked up last year …
It’s fair to assume most of us have experienced that horrible feeling when you push send on an email and realise it’s gone to the wrong person. It’s a peril of the modern world and, in many cases, the email chain that ends up going public usually offers up a healthy dose of schadenfreude. So, in an effort to drum up some interest in the end of year graduation show for AWARD school tonight, DDB, Colenso and a couple of AWARD School students conducted something of an experiment with a ‘leaked email’ that showed up the industry’s insatiable desire for whoopsies.
Orcon has appointed M&C Saatchi as its advertising agency. Taryn Hamilton, general manager retail at Orcon, says M&C Saatchi was chosen on the merit of the team’s creative thinking and strong team focus.
The online realm is a rather fluid and exciting space at the moment. Companies large and small are chopping, changing and innovating in the quest to find the most effective model and close the gap between eyeball numbers and ad dollars. And MSN, with its parent company ninemsn, is set to embark on some big changes, with a new corporate umbrella brand called Mi9 that will encompass all of its brands, new ad exchange technology that basically creates a stock-market for online inventory, an increased focus on behaviourial targeting and a renewed effort to bump up online news numbers with a portal overhaul.
Businesses are wasting time and money trying to reach people online without realising many resent brands invading their social space. This is according to findings from TNS’s Digital Life study, the most comprehensive view of online consumer behaviour available today, surveying more than 72,000 consumers in 60 countries, including over a thousand New Zealanders.
Christmas is fast approaching and The Warehouse, Noel Leemimg, Farmers, Whitcoulls and DTR all jump on the red and green Christmas bandwagon. Already red, The Labour Party solicits themselves. Gin Wigmore and Hayley Westenra sing their own praises, and dog whisperer Cesar Milan wants to show us how to be the leader of the pack.
Things are heating up in the election race. And the comms are coming thick and fast. So here’s a rundown of what the parties have been up to on the campaign front in the final week of hand-shaking, baby-kissing and tongue-wagging.
You may have seen the worm on telly last night, when up to 1600 people from all over New Zealand gave their second-by-second reactions to the Leaders’ Debate on TV3 with Roy Morgan’s Mobile Reactor, an app downloadable to smartphones. TV3 compared that worm with the one provided by their studio audience of 65 undecided voters. But can the technology assist in the advertising realm?
New Zealanders often have to wait for a bit longer than everyone else for the newest iPhone, hit TV shows and, occasionally, the latest blockbuster movie. And, as a new ad for Kia featuring three hip-hop hamsters that’s about to be launched on Kiwi screens attests, the same is occasionally true for commercials.
Hamilton company Print House has won the rights to introduce technology into New Zealand that allows a video screen to be placed within printed material.
Fastway Couriers is targeting the online retail industry with the nationwide rollout of its simpler, more modern, logo, which replaces a logo that was almost thirty years old.
Stolen Rum has managed to gain a fair bit of attention in its short life through a combination of a good product, good branding and good PR. And it’s set up a cheeky wee competition with the help of its newish agency Pead PR that is judged by well-known columnist Steve Braunias.
Like most media outlets, we get sent a lot of press releases. But because journalists are so busy destroying the lies, discovering the truth, inadvertently recording conversations and farewelling colleagues who move into PR, it’s increasingly difficult to get their attention. So we certainly appreciated this rather creative—and honest—approach to attention getting in a release one of our colleagues received recently.
Ad agency Sugar and online DVD rental company Fatso are capitalising on paranoia about new video piracy rules with a clever new campaign. As record companies sent out warnings for people found making illegal downloads, they sent out phony warning letters with the fictitious logo of the New Zealand Copyright Authority and the message “notice of breach”.
Despite tough times for print, newspapers remain close to Kiwis hearts, even when they’re overseas. Special Group has followed up its Kiwis Together campaign with a full page ad encouraging readers to fold up the newspaper, pop a message on it, and send it to a Kiwi overseas – so they could read enjoy it just as if they were back home in NZ. Alternatively it could be sent to an Aussie mate.
The orange guy has been trying to get apathetic Kiwis to enrol to vote for a while now, as has comedian Guy Williams on TV3.co.nz’s homepage. And now controversial Auckland church St Matthew in the City and TBWA\ have invoked the spirit of Kate Sheppard to try and get the modern folk to embrace the joys of democracy next weekend with a billboard that says: ‘Vote: there was a time when you couldn’t’. It’s almost the opposite of St Matthew of the Ridge’s billboard for Car Fe.
The Marketing Association’s 2011 “Marketing Today” Conference held at The Langham Auckland began with an apt quote from William Gibson. “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” And, as well as an update on all on traditional the marketing concepts like market research, direct marketing, brand management, the conference also provided fresh insight into ‘new-age’ marketing concepts like closer integration of marketing with IT, gamification and social media marketing.
