Who it’s for: Pams by Barnes, Catmur & Friends
Why we like it: Quirky, cute and catchy, this rhyming foody animation tells the tale of Pams and manages to bring a dose of personality to a brand that many assumed was of the ‘house’ variety. Neither Tim Burton …
On 21 May we floated Plankton IPO for a meagre $10 a share in the effort to raise enough cash to get us to Cannes. Against all odds and with the help of more than 70 investors from across the globe we actually made it. 30 odd hours and more than a few B-grade movies later and we’re here, eating croissants, dodging scooters and paying through the nose for everything.
The finalist announcements have been made for the Press, Outdoor, Media and Radio categories at Cannes. And the Kiwis have continued their good run.
It’s not just the grizzled old leaders of the advertising pack that can be found wandering the halls and corridors of the Palais des Festivals. Slinking along in their shadows, sniffing the air for any sign of weakness are the Young Lions. Our maan in Cannes (or, depending on your pronunciation, our mans in Cannes), Martin Bell risks his personal safety in pursuit of Leonine quarry.
“Let’s take a ride and see what’s mine” sang Iggy Pop on his seminal 1977 track ‘The Passenger’. For Special Group, who co-opted the track and the man himself for their ‘Orcon + Iggy’ campaign, what’s theirs is a Grand Prix Award in the Direct Category at the 2010 Cannes Lions Festival.
Diana: pipped
At last, a rival to match the spectacular unifying experience that was Diana’s funeral: All Whites v Slovakia.
The ink, sweat and tears of New Zealand’s print industry were honoured on Friday night at the Pride in Print awards held at Sky City in Auckland. And Fonterra Canpac of Hamilton was judged the best of the best, taking out the most prestigious award for a metal baby food can.
The 57th Annual Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival is underway with the announcement of the first three shortlists in the Direct Lions, Promo & Activation Lions and PR Lions categories. And, in keeping with the theme de jour (that’s French, don’t you know), the Kiwi contingent are off to a flying start, with 13 campaigns making the grade. Choosing another similar long skinny country as a random point of comparison, Italy has nine campaigns shortlisted in the same categories.
There is often great creative work found coming from charity and social messaging. It may have to do with the fact that often the only measure of success is if it gets people talking. Also, it is often done for free, so there are fewer pressures put on creativity by clients asking to ‘improve’ ideas. And perhaps ad creatives believe in the product more than if they were flogging toilet cleaner. Whatever the reason, there is plenty of good stuff to be found.
Setting up and maintaining a server for your business can be a costly and time consuming affair—not so with Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server. From email to shared calendars and contacts, or file-sharing to online collaboration, Apple’s Snow Leopard Server can deliver immediate tangible benefits with no fuss. Come and see why it’s [warning obvious cat pun ahead] purr-fect for the job at 4pm, Thursday 24 June at the Stardome Observatory. And you could also take home an iPod touch just for coming along.
Pressure, as they say, makes diamonds (it also makes heart attacks and oil spills, but in this case, let’s stick with diamonds). And the pressure is on to get your entries in for the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards, with the gates officially closing at 5pm today. But, if you require an extension, break glass, call Sylvia Devlin on 361 7763 or email [email protected] and plead your case.
Ah New Zealand, what an egalatarian paradise you are, a place where you can shake hands with the Prime Minister without fear of being tackled by secret service agents, where anyone can play golf, squash or tennis without being harrassed by bogans for being an aristocrat and where an All Black can deliver your mail and make you a cup of tea.
MEC is first cab off the rank in Yahoo!Xtra’s new quarterly Digital Strategy Award, taking the inaugural trophy for its Caltex with Techron online campaign. And, in other digi-news, the Interactive Advertising Bureau is on the hunt for Bolly Award entries and has also secured the services of a couple of digital gurus to discuss the importance of online advertising in the automotive industry.
As The Day Today so famously said: “Facts times importance equals news”. Here’s some now, and this time it’s about various industry comings, goings, movings, shakings, to-ings and fro-ings.
Harrington’s small goods is setting out to spread the meaty truth and destroy the sausagey lies with New Zealand’s first official Sausage Awareness Week. Of course, every week is unofficial sausage week in New Zealand, but the real one will run from 5-10 July and aims “to help Kiwis recognise that ‘what goes into the sausage goes into you'”.
If they haven’t been washed away by the flash floods, six lucky New Zealand bastards are currently swanning about in the South of France. Of course, business is being mixed with pleasure: they are there in a professional capacity as judges for the Cannes Advertising Festival awards, which, as the world’s biggest and best advertising event, invites the world’s biggest and best advertising brains along to do the deciding. So here’s to them.
As someone (it’s usually Einstein) may have once said, perception is nine tenths of the marketing law. And the results of the third Attitude New Zealand survey, which delved into the strange and mysterious world of the Kiwi psyche, have shed some light on the perceptions around the nation’s brands, as well as revealing plenty of other interesting consumer and social trends that may have implications for marketers.
Entries for the 2010 EFFIES are now open. And categories A through P might just have your name on them.
yMedia, a social enterprise that aims to solve some of the digital communications issues faced by not-for-profit organisations through the power of creative collaboration, has just kicked off. And this time round, twenty student teams, a host of industry professionals and their respective community groups will all be going head to head in the annual new media competition.
Winston Reid is currently New Zealand’s favourite son. And, following DDB’s recent print ad, Dr Peter Richmond from the John Street Family Health Centre is probably a close second.
In this installment of Michael Carney’s Marketing Week: What’s the frequency, Kenneth? Big corporates to social media: ‘Hey, you can actually make us money’. So how can New Zealand businesses tap into it? Virtually possible: eWestfield on the cards. Rupert Murdoch begins his paid content experiment in earnest as the timesonline.co.uk closes its doors. Close enough is not good enough when it comes to advertising, as one Christchurch car yard recently found out. Google plans its next assault. This time, music.
Fairfax Media is harnessing the raw power of the crowd to try and weed out a few more dodgy financial dealings from our elected officials, giving the public the chance to trawl through the thousands of pages of credit card transactions and receipts from 2003 to 2010 that were collated by The Department of Internal Affairs and review them online.
After the stunning All Whites victory last night, which 593,800 Kiwis watched on TV One and 150,500 watched on Sky, FIFA’s worst nightmare, a New Zealand vs South Africa final, is still on the cards. And while a range of lying geeks pull numbers out of the air in an attempt to quantify how much the “lost productivity” will cost the nation, stunning new research by StopPress reveals the victory has actually made the nation more than $45 million in terms of increased patriotism (text received after final whistle: “I am having kittens. I have died and gone to heaven. I love sports.”) and vuvuzela sales. Anyway, everyone knows the result of the match (apparently we’re part of Australasia now). But who’s winning the World Cup brand wars?
On a high after its big Qantas Media Award wins, APN New Zealand’s advertising rates are heading in the upwards direction as well.
Who it’s for: Rascals
Why we like it: Slim pickings for TVCs this week, so instead we’ve chosen this, a video that details the lengths some agencies will go to in order to create the perfect billboard. As you can see, this billboard is slightly more …
It wasn’t too long ago that Designworks – and, possibly, the entire design community – was celebrating a big win at the recent 2010 Vero Excellence in Business Support Awards. And now it’s got some more positive news to crow about, with a new branch set to open in Christchurch.
The results for the most complained about ads in 2009 have been released by the Advertising Standards Authority. And the lucky winners are…
It seems Kiwis have found plenty to grumble about, well, when it comes to advertisements anyway. The folks at the Advertising Standards Authority have been kept very busy according to their 2009 Annual Report, receiving complaints about 829 advertisements (up from 703 in 2008), with 1339 total complaints.
This week on Ads@6, various commercial entities try to sell things through the power of free-to-air television. Of note this week, not much, although soup month is finally upon us. And it should be a worthy follow up to 2008’s international year of the potato.
It’s fairly standard practice for publishers to beat their editorial chests after the Qantas Media Awards are dished out. Of course, victory is always in the eye of the beholder (and, given the number of awards handed out and the size of the New Zealand market, there always seem to be plenty of beholders). But this year APN has nabbed the big ones: the Herald on Sunday was judged to be New Zealand’s Best Weekly and Best Overall newspaper for the second time in its five year history and The New Zealand Herald took the award as the country’s best daily newspaper.