More than 700,000 New Zealanders tuned in to say their final farewell to Outrageous Fortune—and to the much loved West family—last night, with TV3 nabbing a 51.5 percent share in 18-49 demographic and a 24.8 rating for the last ever episode of what was New Zealand’s favourite drama.
In what could only be classified as a tease, Derek Handley, mobile marketing pioneer and the co-founder of recently acquired Hyperfactory, will be announcing a unique global opportunity for New Zealand’s leading marketing entrepreneurs at the Marketing Association’s Marketing Forum 2010 on 29 November in Auckland. But you have to be there to find out what it is.
In a sordid tale of intrigue, subterfuge, poaching and skullduggery that could be worthy of a cover story in itself, ACP has made an already uber-competitive sector even more competitive by signing up Women’s Weekly editor Sido Kitchin as the new editor of what was not too long ago her avowed enemy, Woman’s Day, and also bringing Weekly’s deputy editor Fiona Fraser into the fold.
The entire PlaceMakers advertising business has gone up for pitch and while no-one will confirm who’s in the running, Ogilvy’s managing director Greg Partington says it certainly won’t be his agency, which has had the account since 2008.
There was an impressive haka, there was cheese (literally and, with Pippa Wetzell and some guy in orange overalls to open proceedings, figuratively), there were 560 RSVPs and there was a solid dose of market leader mentality on display as the national broadcaster launched its New Season 2011 line up for ONE and TV2 last night.
Who’s it for: Interislander by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington and The Sweet Shop.
Why we like it: Take the romance of the ferry, some classic New Zealand summer imagery and a surprisingly uncringeworthy ukelele version of the classic Interislander jingle, and you’ve got yourself an ad that …
Yellow has won plenty of awards for its advertising. But it’s still in dire financial straights and it’s not faring so well against its rather powerful directories adversary Google. One of the big reasons for that is its poor user interface and search platform. But Yellow New Zealand has announced a new partnership with Yahoo!7, one of Australia and New Zealand’s leading online media companies, and will use its digital resources to “power and bring to life Yellow’s search and content experiences”—and, in return, Yahoo users will have access to Yellow pages business data.
There’s nothing more beautiful than seeing a man at his most natural and a new spot for Speight’s Summit lager by Publicis Mojo that was directed by The Sweet Shop’s Steve Ayson has got all the required elements to become a new contender for beer ad of the early summer (ie man standing in river, man growing luxurious beard, man hurling rock, man yelling from mountaintop, man chasing deer, man punching boar and, of course, man drinking beer). It’s certainly much better—and much easier to understand—than man being teleported and running around the Savannah being chased by a Lion.
More stunning moves than Kasparov versus Deep Blue.
After purchasing the former Pinto plant in Tauranga, signing a big distribution deal in the UK and welcoming former Fisher Funds Management chief investment officer Warren Couillault into the shareholding fold this year, Kiwi-based VnC Cocktails is well and truly beefing up and planning on tripling its already impressive sales next year. And winning a highly competitive global tender to supply its premium pre-mixed cocktails to Etihad Airways’ First Class services is certainly a pretty good start.
The November/December edition of NZ Marketing magazine is out. And, as you’d expect from a title with such a name, it’s filled to the brim with what experts refer to as ‘essential marketing intelligence’, including the cover feature/call-to-arms that was written by three academics from the University of Waikato who detail why they feel the discipline is currently suffering from a ‘worldwide identity crisis’.
Our chums at Idealog couldn’t help but laugh (at their own expense) when they laid eyes on a bit of a whoopsie inside iSubscribe’s Christmas subscription promotion recently.
Republik recently achieved a fairly rare feat within Kiwi agency land when it was appointed to run the Asia Pacific business of Rentokil Initial. And it’s nabbed another piece of business (with some more to be announced soon, apparently) after being named as Kiwi-owned optometry group Visique’s new brand agency, beating out Interbrand/DDB Shop and Religion in a pitch and taking over from the incumbent Radiation, which had the business for five years but chose not to pitch.
In November last year L’Oréal announced it would be parting ways with its media agency ZenithOptimedia after three years together and that a new agency would be announced in May this year. Zenith had inherited the business after L’Oréal’s agency Universal McCann ran into trouble in New Zealand a few years back, but although it was invited to pitch for the business, it declined. Since then, the business has been floating around and Zenith remained in place during the tendering process (some insiders feel the delay is because no-one actually wanted the account due to low margins and L’Oréal’s reputation as a fairly difficult client). But Universal McCann is now back in the fold and will take up the role as media agency in the Australia/New Zealand region.
You know you’ve done something right (or wrong) if you get a concerned call from Bill Ralston after posting a story. And that’s what happened when we found out Pauline Hanton had resigned from her sales director position at Adshel to take up a role with a retail/instore media outfit supposedly linked to Ogilvy. Turns out the rumours were true and now Hanton, along with Paul Kenny and Suzi Hood in sales, have officially set their new, fully integrated in-store media channel and shopper marketing specialist Hypermedia into the wild, with Countdown as the flagship client.
This week on the telly, the battle of the supermarkets heats up, with Countdown still gobbling up all of ONE’s weekday 6.10pm news spots and New World: the musical going live. Also of note, an amazing spot (and an amazing lead man) for Blind Week, the Interislander gets summery, Hyundai revs up a new one, Nescafe starts up a new rewards programme, New Zealand Post toys with the emotions to get the people primed for Christmas, and the latest feelgood instalment of TelstraClear’s nationwide journey hits the screens.
The RAPP team consisting of creative director Jason Hall, copywriter Kathy Riley, designer Asher Hutchings and Rachel Street on production duties has taken victory in the latest round of New Zealand Post’s Art of the Envelope awards for ‘Look Smart’, a piece to celebrate the launch of the National Bank’s Visa Debit card.
Lorenz Perry co-founded the small indie agency Splinter Group two years ago following stints with a few of the big boys. But he has decided bigger is actually better and started as the creative director at Interbrand this week, replacing Debbie Hyde.
… including Tui HQ’s gloating, a few more accusations of creative plagiarism, Dettol, Halloween chocolate, Kodak’s 20th anniversary, 42 Below taking the Glad Wrap approach, the Langham’s new twins, New World’s new data toy, sexy posters, amazing photographers, more Alt Group domination and practically everything else you can possibly imagine.
The third quarter ad revenue results for the major television broadcasters were released not long ago and showed things were slowly moving back to the level of the glory days. At the time, we couldn’t get hold of New Zealand Television Broadcaster’s Council chief exec Rick Friesen, but he called back and, while he wasn’t able to discuss results of specific broadcasters, he was able to shed some light on a few interesting sectoral trends.
Not Rick Friesen
The Auckland Chamber of Commerce has just released its 2010 salary survey and, given the economic events of the last few years, it’s not a huge surprise to find that Auckland business is still “running on lean” and—block your ears children—sales and marketing salaries have dropped. So check out the rates so you know whether you should cackle maniacally with Scrooge McDuck-esque glee as you roll about on your bed with wads of cash, or go crying to the boss about not getting paid enough.
Sick and tired of slaving away in your unsatisfying sweatshop? Well then, you’ve come to the right place if you’re looking for something better, because, after almost 31,000 employees from 245 organisations across the country gave confidential feedback to rate their employers for the JRA Workplace survey, 35 finalists across the four categories have been announced, with notable performances in the marcomms sphere from PR shop Porter Novelli, signage and display company DE Group, directories service Gopher and news portal Yahoo!Xtra.
Just as advertisers often need to push the boat out to capture the attention of modern consumers, the raft of awards ceremonies now competing for entries often need to do the same to capture the attention of the advertising world (recently, AWARD’s Ian sticks out). And, in an effort to compete with—and possibly confront—other events like Cannes Lions and the One Show, the English-based D&AD has gone with a multi-lingual presidential address from its president Simon Sankarayya, where he extols the virtues of creativity and ideas and attempts to speak to the world’s creatives in as many different languages as possible. If there isn’t one already, it can’t be long before someone starts handing out awards for the best call for entries campaigns.
With plastic bag hatred on the rise and new, more eco-friendly options now becoming more common, every single bag expert StopPress has talked agrees that it is now the golden age of the humble carrying device. And while their main role is still to make it easier to carry heavy loads, the bag makers (and marketers) of the future might want to take a look at this collection of creative bag executions from around the world courtesy of Bored Panda, “the only magazine for pandas”, apparently.
Like any new form of marketing, there was plenty of trepidation when social media began to go mainstream. And some senior executives still feel the jury is out when it comes to investing large chunks of budget in it. They want to know how it’s going to feed back into the business, and rightly so. So while the first phase of social media—the one where people jump online and create profiles—has already happened, companies are still figuring out how to make the central theory behind social media (conversation, not broadcast) relevant to the entire business.
It’s all go at MediaWorks TV at the moment. Demographic targets have been tweaked by the new puppetmaster Jason Paris, the Special Groupies are now turning their golden hands to channel rebrands and relaunches and the latest news is that MediaWorks TV has made yet another internal promotion, with Graeme Underwood (aka Woody) taking up the position of general manager, national sales, a role that was vacated by Linda Farrelly when she was promoted to director of sales.
With every new model released, mobile phones become less like mobile phones and more like computers. Data plans are slowly becoming more reasonable and, with Apple and Google already in on the action, mobile marketing is slated as one of the many next big things for the marcomms sector. As such, the demand for third-party metrics on mobile internet usage from advertisers and publishers in New Zealand is increasing, so Nielsen has responded to that demand with Mobile Market Intelligence (MI), something it claims is a world first in online audience measurement methodology.
Online niche retailer Natureshop isn’t particularly well known in New Zealand. But in these modern and increasingly environmentally-conscious economic times, that doesn’t necessarily matter, because through a combination of extensive online marketing, high quality e-commerce websites and a focus on sustainability, it was named New Zealand’s fastest growing exporter, fastest growing retail or consumer products business and second-fastest growing company at the 10th annual Deloitte Fast 50 index.
Those creatives grow up so fast these days don’t they? Soon enough they’ll be getting told to shut up by Devo for talking during speeches at the Axis awards (if they’re lucky enough to get jobs when they graduate). So if you want to see what the young whippersnappers from the AUT Adschool have been up to in 2010, make sure you head along to the end of year show on Tuesday 9 November at Film Construction, 22 Minnie St, Eden Terrace. It’s industry only from 5.30pm to 7pm, then the hoards of parents, pals and pets get to have a gander from 7-9pm. And, as is the custom during the burgeoning festive season, the drinks and nibbles will be plentiful. Here’s what some of the young’uns produced last year.
The Gruen Transfer, an Aussie TV show that screens on ABC and delves into the mysterious, manipulative and wonderful world of advertising, has been a surprising ratings success across the ditch. But who really wants those pesky moving images and sounds when you could have a book instead? Cue The Gruen Transfer, now in handy non-moving, literary form. You can win one of three copies of this very funny, good lookin’, highly entertaining, educational and quote-filled tome about what one academic described as the ‘poetry of capitalism’ and all you need to do is either tell us an amazing fact/quote/lie/myth/statistic/story about advertising. Or, if you’re struggling for inspiration, just go for the lowest common denominator and tell us your best Australian joke.