It opened with a bright young thing and closed with a grumpy old curmudgeon, and inbetween Semi-Permanent once again delivered a host of designy inspiration. Thankfully, for those unfortunate enough not to have been exposed to all this inspiration in the flesh, our friends at Design Daily picked the brains of the stars of the show, a couple of whom had some very wise words for Kiwi marcommers.
The TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards are taking place next Thursday at the glorious Langham Hotel. But it’s still not too late to come along and hobnob it with the marketing glitterati. So book your last-minute tickets here. And all those who buy within the next hour will receive a free Nelson Mandela.*
Forget your EFFIEs and Axis Awards, this was the one that really counted: the 2010 Battle of the Ad Bands.
We love statistics here at StopPress. And, given our heritage, we’re also fairly big fans of magazines. So imagine our immense cerebral delight when we were sent ‘The 20 truths about magazines in New Zealand’, a compilation of statistics that clearly shows how potent a media force magazines are in this country.
Air New Zealand and Fly Buys have snuggled up together with a new mutually beneficial partnership that creates a range of benefits for members of both the Air New Zealand Airpoints programme and Fly Buys loyalty programme, which together adds up well over half of the country’s population.
The big agencies all seem to be talking about killing off their digital silos and moving them closer to the central nervous system. Yet there are still plenty of new, small digital shops offering their specialist services. And now there’s another new player on the local digital marketing scene after Market United (MU) announced its arrival on Auckland soil, adding to its offices in Sydney and Perth.
A host of students, creative marcomms boffins and not-for-profit community groups gathered at the floating pavilion at Auckland’s Viaduct last night as the yMedia Challenge gongs were handed out. And Massey University’s ‘Designasaurs’ took home the $5,000 prize after its work with Natural Health Practitioners New Zealand was awarded top honours.
Given the fact that well over six million humans watched Air New Zealand’s ‘The Bare Essentials of Safety’ video on YouTube, it was always going to be a tough act to follow. But the new safety video, which launched today on its branded YouTube channel and aims to show how crazy the airline is about rugby in the lead-up to next year’s Rugby World Cup, certainly doesn’t seem to be suffering from second album syndrome.
Our obviously extremely wealthy, remarkably tech savvy and very trendy stablemate DesignDaily is giving away a fancy new Apple Jabscreen (slightly more commonly known as an iPad) to one of its lucky readers. So simply sign up (with your real name and email address) here to receive the weekly email newsletter from New Zealand’s new design and architecture blog and you’ll go into the draw. And if you’re already a subscriber, tell your friends and family to sign up and, if they win, demand custody of the marvellous device in the weekends.
The yMedia awards are set to be dished out tonight. And Simon Pound is fighting the good fight on the frontlines.
Sue Worthington announced her departure from the helm of creative talent representation company The Pond a few weeks back. Now she’s made another announcement, and this time it’s about the structure of new “collaborative boutique agency” Indiego, which she will run alongside strategist/project manager Rose Cron and design/brand developer Mikkel Johannessen.
Matt Bale, self-proclaimed media junkie, digital zealot, part-time fictional gangster and general manager at OMD Wellington, has confirmed he will be leaving the agency in September to take on “new challenges, etc.”
Twelve days, three countries, several stomach bugs, one sand-burned foot, sweaty pits and an encounter with Indian riot police aren’t events you’d usually associate with a TVC about New Zealand’s dairy industry. But the new spot for Dairy NZ, which chronicles the epic journey of an agrarian Kiwi warrior riding his trusty steed around the world, included all these things. And plenty more by the sounds of it.
In this edition of Michael Carney’s Marketing Week: How marketers in restricted categories can use social media and still meet their regulatory obligations The Consumer Guarantees Act gets a spruce up as it gets with the digital auction programme Google TV: another paradigm shift? The fibre optic cult: does the investment actually pay dividends? Digital goes legit at the Brainy Breakfast
Who it’s for: Sanitarium Up & Go by Ogilvy.
Why we like it: Like farts, double rainbows and men getting hit in the groin, that slurping noise you get near the end of a drink will never stop being funny, especially when it involves the All Blacks. Good …
Dave Walker, TVNZ’s well-regarded head of advertising sales, has resigned and will effectively be replaced by new sales and marketing boss Paul Maher.
If you were reading the papers over the weekend, you may have noticed a few column inches were devoted to illustrating how well the publication in front of you had done in the latest Nielsen Readership Survey. Whether the readership changes were statistically significant or not doesn’t seem to matter, because every quarter you can guarantee the big players will be focusing on the silver linings in the print media cloud.
Members of the marcomms fraternity will be descending on Auckland’s Rendezvous Hotel next month for the Annual Association of New Zealand Advertisers (ANZA) Speakers Summit. And the focus of this year’s event will be on consumer engagement and communication effectiveness in a fast-changing world.
Kiwi charity Sustainable Coastlines has revealed its latest Adshel campaign. And it’s intended to shock Kiwis into thinking about the unexpected places our rubbish could end up.
It’s all about the people. Hey, look, here are a few who have just got fancy new jobs.
Of course, the main reason for holidays is to inspire jealousy, so family, friends and, if you’re feeling so inclined, your arch enemies, can now be sent a personalised greeting card at the push of a few buttons thanks to the launch of Send a Card for iPhone by New Zealand Post.
I do a lot of those ‘standing up the front, waving my arms around with slide presentation’ things. People are generally quite nice and give you a little clap at the end and then you get cheese and wine. It’s all very pleasant. However, my sensibilities were a little bit shaken the other day when a well-meaning smug suit stood up at the end of my presentation, addressed the audience and said: “Everything Courtney said is just a suggestion. There’s no best way really.” How very post-modern. And undermining. Punk.
Banner ads are often criticised for being boring, cheesy, annoying, intrusive or a combination of all four. David McGregor, writing in Idealog, went as far as calling online promotional activity “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of the advertising business”. But Orcon, Special Group, Exposure and Salt Interactive have joined forces to show that very good things can happen when the utility of the digital space is combined with the ideas of agency land.
The magazine industry will be feeling somewhat chuffed and maybe a little relieved because, despite predictions to the contrary, in many cases magazine readership and circulation have grown over the last year, according to Nielsen’s year on year comparative results.
In this edition of Wammo Pound and Mash, Mr Pound chats about the work of Cindy Gallop, advertising genius turned charitable mistress, on www.makelovenotporn.com and www.ifwerantheworld.com.
The wide-rimmed black glasses are being buffed, the new trainers that actually look old are being purchased and the designy/markety/techy fanboy tingles are increasing rapidly in the lead up to next week’s design wet dream they call Semi-Permanent. And the generous folk behind it (check out the interview with main brain Anna Cameron on Design Daily here) have handed us one of their precious golden tickets to give away. God we’re good to you.
A veritable smorgasbord of Kiwi magazine industry hot shots have been roped in to impose their harsh judgements for the inaugural New Zealand edition of The Maggies, the popular UK award show that’s been shipped down to the southern hemisphere to honour the year’s best magazine covers.
Subjects were canvassed, numbers were crunched and insights that have guided strategy and communications were delivered. And the research companies that have followed this path and impacted on the fortunes of their clients have been recognised with the announcement of the finalists for the Market Research Effectiveness Awards.
Hey, look, it’s almost Fathers’ Day, which means a host of companies will soon start guilting consumers into buying socks, booze and other trinkets in order to show their patriarchal love. And nothing says fatherly love like Chivas Regal, some of which you can win if you’re cool and entertaining enough.
Pizza and horror movies have always gone pretty well together. And while there have been plenty of classic zombie flicks over the years, not one of them has featured pizza in the movie itself. Hell Pizza and Christchurch-based filmmakers Little Sister Films decided to change that by creating Deliver Me to Hell, supposedly the world’s first ‘pick a path’ interactive Zombie movie and now a mid-level YouTube sensation.