TV ratings are a lot like politics: whether you’re winning or losing, the other side is always doing it wrong and, even in the worst situations, you can always try and spin things to make it look more positive than it really is.
As interactions and events rather than the old school spray and pray approach are increasingly being utilised to rise above the rabble and capture the jaded consumer’s attention, experiential marketing’s star continues to rise. And the good news keeps coming for local experiential agency AmbientX: after its double medal haul at this year’s Australasian Promotional Marketing Association Star Awards for the Arnott’s Velish campaign, it has managed to pick up a couple more significant client wins recently.
Who’s it for: State by Colenso BBDO
Why we like it: We may be slightly biased, but State’s ‘My 3 Things’ campaign, which taps into our insatiable love of objects and plays on the fear that we might actually lose them, is a good’un. The …
Designers, animators, advertisers, marketers and possibly even a few hip accountants don’t have too long to wait until the 2010 edition of Semi-Permanent starts squeezing some creative juice. And Nicolas Roope, an all round digital and design ideas guy from the UK who set up Poke London, retro phone company Hulger and this cool t-shirt blog, is venturing to New Zealand to speak at the event. He took time out from his busy schedule of coming up with awesome things (and from being the UK’s Webby ambassador, a member of the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and a member of the UK Coolbrands board) to have an e-chat with StopPress.
Five years after co-founding creative talent representation business The Pond, Sue Worthington has sold her shareholding and set up another small specialist creative agency, Indiego. And The Pondʼs other co-founder, Leighton Howl, has bought Worthington’s half of the business (with a second silent investor) and is looking for further investment to fuel expansion of the Pond model into Australian and Asian markets.
So many things to read about, see, enter and attend, so little time.
I often write about new campaigns. But I don’t often write about new campaigns that are directly connected to me. So let me get out my literary quick unpick and unweave the tapestry of advertising life as I tell you a tale that involves a series of moderately interesting things and events including, but not limited to, printed words, photography, nuptials, skybeasts, gifts, awesome art and a giant billboard.
It may be a relatively unsexy side of the digital marketing world. But there’s no doubt email is powerful (read this if you don’t believe it). And the Jericho Email Marketing Metrics Report for 2010, which crunched tens of millions of permission-based commercial emails in New Zealand, has shown that email drives massive readership and clicks—especially on Mondays.
Some companies just seem to have unending revenue streams. And as Trade Me stretches its tentacles into the services area and starts competing with Yellow and Google (for the full round-up, scroll down to near the bottom of this story), it’s also finding a bit of a niche as an online display advertising team for other websites, the latest of which is metservice.com.
While all the talk in DDB land is about the big merge between Rapp and Tribal DDB, Mango Communications continues to blaze a rather successful trail and has managed to get hold of a wee beauty: the public relations account for Icebreaker in the New Zealand market.
New Zealand loves comparing its performance with other nations. And typically we always do well on a per capita basis. But the YoungGuns Top 10 rankings of the most Awarded Countries of the past decade shows that we’re flat out better than almost all of our foreign rivals when it comes to the quality of our creative advertising whippersnappers (turns out the old folk aren’t too bad either).
You might have noticed that digital is not an ‘other’ anymore. And while a number of the larger agencies have been operating separate digital factions for some time, many of them now appear to be moving digital back to the centre of the agency offering. TBWA\ recently brought Ross Howard in as creative director of Tequila to sit beside executive creative director Andy Blood, Saatchi & Saatchi closed its digital outfit SaatchiDGS this year, and DDB is the latest to head in this digi-direction after merging its direct arm Rapp and its digital arm Tribal DDB, into one, Popeye-esque arm they’re calling Rapp/Tribal.
The New Zealand Marketing Association has launched two flashy new advisory services, PR and Word of Mouth, bringing the total number of resources aimed at developing specialist areas of marketing to 18.
In this collection of searing Michael Carney-created insights from Marketing Week: New Zealand media by the numbers Jericho crunches the email numbers and tells us when we should send them Too much discounting? Trade Me takes on Yellow (and Google) Social media and the jobseeker New revenue ideas for the small screen
Westpac has gracefully declined to provide Saatchi & Saatchi with its advertising business and in a competitive pitch the account for the creative work has gone to Colenso.
Who’s it for: The Women’s Refuge 2010 appeal by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington.
Why we like it: Powerful, tense and beautifully made. And the treading on eggshells metaphor (as well as that chilling hand on the armchair shot) really gets across how psychologically damaging it can be …
DraftFCB recently announced a raft of new hires, and it might have to add a few more names to the list after Stella Travel Services, the international company behind the United Travel and Harvey World Travel brands, and Sony Electronics signed up with DraftFCB Media.
Special Group’s print ad for ecostore ended up sparking off a rather heated discussion about the exciting realm of PH levels in washing powder when we wrote a story about the whole malarkey a few weeks back. And the swift response obviously tickled the fancies of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau’s Newspaper Ad of the Month judges, because it’s been awarded the gong for the July round.
For your viewing and critiquing pleasure, the kind folk at Adshel have assembled all the entries from last week’s Creative Challenge. And, with teams given just one hour to come up with a static poster campaign for next year’s Auckland Fringe, the collection of ideas certainly makes for an interesting study of the creative process.
The TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards, to be held on August 26 at Auckland’s Langham Hotel, is promisng to shock guests with an announcement similar in magnitude to the devaluation of the currency in 1984, the resignation of Prime Minister David Lange in 1989 and the arrival of Doritos in 2010.
PR is the new marketing and customer service is the new marketing and Paul The Octopus is the new marketing and purple is the new black (thanks to Justin Bieber). Fads, they come and go, but back when I was a young ‘un, we talked about something called the 4Ps.
Lemonade Design has won a competitive pitch to overhaul the Eden Park brand and rebuild its website, with both projects due for completion before the new stand is opened in the next few months. But there appears to be bit of confusion in the Eden Park ranks as to whether or not the cat should have been let out of the bag so early.
Performance-based remuneration or payment by results (PBR) is an increasing component of many agency remuneration deals. But in most cases, agencies and clients will tell you it doesn’t actually work.
The judges had their opportunity to judge harshly at Adshel’s Creative Challenge a few nights ago and, while it was a pretty tight race, they eventually decided that the thought behind Publicis Mojo’s campaign was the best (read all about the one hour-long pressure cooker creative escapade here). But what would the stupid judges know? See if you agree with their decisions and impose your own judgements on these, the top three entries.
This week on Ads@6, Sunsweet ‘Amazins’ go high on the crapometer; Mt Ruapehu forks out for serious prime time; the Campbells stock spots tickle a fancy or two; Toyota and Saatchi continue the current trend for paper-based ads; Wattie’s tries to sell chicken in a can by making cans into chickens; and two of the best campaigns on TV at the moment, Kiwi Bank and 2degrees, keep delivering the goods.
Come with us now as we tap into the unending desire for flagrant industry-related people watching.
Lürzer’s Archive is considered to be one of the most prominent and influential voices in the world of advertising and design. And with four issues of the bi-annual 200 Best Ad Photographers worldwide and three issues of 200 Best Illustrators worldwide under its belt, it’s now added the 200 Best Packaging Design worldwide 2010/2011 to the list. And we’ve got some Lürzer’s goodies to give away.
Matt Shirtcliffe from recently born agency Shirtcliffe & Co and Darryl Wong and Kenton Osmond from RAPP, will be the guest speakers for the New Zealand Post Targeted Communications’ hugely popular and completely free direct marketing workshops. So get in quick if you want to hear their numerous pearls of wisdom.
Bloomsberry calls itself the inventor of the world’s most fashionable chocolate. And the Kiwi-founded, London-based company is living up to that reputation: its trendy, chocolatey wares are now being stocked in selected outlets of one of the UK’s most fashionable High St clothing chains, Top Shop.
There were beautiful flowery turds, a range of moderately offensive slogans and even a picture of a woman smoking a baby in a pipe. But only one idea could take home the $125,000 prize on offer at Adshel’s inaugural Creative Challenge last night and, in the end, it was Publicis Mojo’s campaign ‘Leave with more questions than answers’ for the Auckland Fringe festival that was chosen as the best.