Westpac Australia recently raised the interest rate on its variable mortgages by nearly twice the level of the Reserve Bank’s increase, to the chagrin of many of its ever-poorer customers. So, it decided to release a patronising little animation entitled Cool Bananas to justify the decision.
DDB Group New Zealand has appointed Steve Kane to a newly created position of creative director, experiential, an appointment the agency claims is a first for a Kiwi ad agency.
Ian Audsley, formerly the chief operating officer of the Nine Network in Australia, has been announced as the executive director of television for MediaWorks NZ TV. He will join the board and commence work in January.
Michael Bay, the typically over the top director whose filmic style is probably best described as oversexed soap-operatic with explosions has taken it to a new level of cheese with his new Victoria’s Secret commercial, tongue and cheekily (we hope) referencing the teasing movie trailers he’s so adept at creating.
Is all that planet-killing commercial detritus getting you down this Christmas? Of course it is. You need some knowledgeable greenfingers to guide you through the environmental maze. And our sustainable cohorts at Good magazine have just launched the first edition of The Good Shopping Handbook to help you out.
When two worlds collide, bad/cringey/entertaining things usually happen, as the exclamation mark-laden, uber-tech geek Christmas message from HP and its PR agency Acumen Republic shows.
First there’s a press release from TV3: “November has seen Nightline pull away from its competitor TV ONE’s Tonight in all key demographics.”
Then there’s one from TVNZ: “The latest news numbers show Sunrise lost a quarter of its audience in November while NZI Business and Breakfast continued to edge ahead.”
The Newspaper Advertising Bureau’s ‘The Kiwi Consumer’ retail report for November 2009 shows how much consumer behaviour has changed since 2001 and how it has impacted on the retail and advertising sectors. And it makes for some rather interesting reading.
Rejoice anachronists! It’s 8 December, much more commonly known as pretend to be a time traveller day, so be not afraid if you happen to come across any Victorian gentlemen, dystopian warriors, robot butlers or maybe even workers flying home on their jetpacks this evening.
The latest glorious edition of our sister/brother/cousin publication (does it always have to be a sister publication?) Idealog is on the shelves soon. And woe betide any businessperson, inventor, entrepreneur or captain of industry who misses out on the nice surprise included within its extremely knowledgeable and good-looking pages.
The official release has been sent and no-one’s particularly surprised with its content: Clemenger Group has appointed Nick Garrett as managing director of Colenso BBDO, beginning 1 March 2010.
The 30th anniversary of the AXIS awards next year is sure to be a nostalgic shindig. But it will also be referencing the future.
Eighty Kiwi marketing heavyweights (and a few lowly journalists) ventured to the floating pavilion in Auckland yesterday for a cup of tea and numerous pearls of wisdom that were delivered by a host of marketing thought leaders as part of the Marketing Association’s inaugural marketing forum.
In this week’s Consumer Counsel:
Physical distance matters not. Digital tribes rule the roost. And KPMG International has put together a white paper that examines the need for marketers to target customers in a completely different way.
In this week’s Media Counsel: A new TV channel debuts and its, ahem, stablemate graciously moves over.
Who it’s for: New Zealand Book Council
Why we like it: Colenso and London’s Andersen M Studios worked for eight-months to bring Maurice Gee’s Going West to life in an attempt to promote more reading. Everything in the moody, beautiful film is hand-made/cut, the …
Festive season just got a little bit more festive for the greedy award-hoggers at Colenso BBDO after it added another notch to its recent accolades belt on Friday night and took out the Kiwi agency of the year gong at the B&T agency of the year awards.
In a year that’s presented its fair share of challenges, New Zealand marketers have worked determinedly to deliver campaigns that generate solid results. And, from a record number of entries, Marketing’s ‘Grand Masters’ have selected the finalists for the 2009 RSVP and Nexus Awards.
Carat New Zealand has delivered a digital media first in the New Zealand market by creating a new campaign for Tourism Australia entitled ‘Short Breaks’.
Ah, new stuff. How we love the way you always bring a little bit of excitement to our dull, repetitive, meaningless lives. Of course, new stuff is a big part of the marcomms industry, so what better way to disseminate some of this newness than by making a gigantic melange.
As we all know, ’tis been a season of flux and upheaval in adland. And the Colenso stable will have a distinctly different look to it in the new year.
Barry Colman, publisher of the National Business Review, has responded in an open letter to online critic and blogger Lance Wiggs.
And it’s surprisingly frank.
The Christmas ads were all-pervasive this week, with plenty of new, mostly terrible albums on the stocking stuffer ad agenda. And Coke’s summer campaign also kicked off. Big, dumb fun in the water, just like the old days. Look how much fun those virile, tanned young things are having splashing their sticky beverages over each other!
In our semi-non-regular (regular?) hexagonally-themed question and answer section devoted to helping you find out more about some of the Heppest Cats in the Kiwi marcomms industry, we go in for the probe with Nick Fracture.
Esquire magazine recently released its new ‘augmented reality’ December issue. Readers were implored to download an app and then hold their magazine up to a webcam to make Robert Downey Jr (an appropriate subject given his well-publicised penchant for reality augmentation in the past) come to over-excited life. There’s also a weather-dependent fashion portfolio, a time-sensitive updated Funny Joke from a Beautiful Woman and a few other slick features on offer.
Extreme sports aficionados, ravers, sugary-drink loving youngsters and other NZ Herald readers will soon be getting their mits on the The Red Bulletin, a self-styled “almost independent” monthly lifestyle magazine that covers music, art, culture, society and sport.
In this week’s edition of eBuzz: New promotional offerings from YouTube give Kiwi advertisers the chance to promote their videos.
Auckland film-maker and critic Lewis Bostock is aiming big by thinking small: he’s trying to create the largest collaborative film ever made.
In June last year there was a blaze of publicity surrounding Flossie.com, a female-centric masthead that brought together the ‘best of the best’ female focused websites. But the blaze has well and truly subsided, advertising reality has bitten and Flossie Media Group has now decided to turn its back on the display advertising model.
Our generous friends at Perceptive have developed a website that aims to provide “a growing hub of intelligence for Kiwi marketers”. And they’re offering StopPress readers a chance to get a free taste of the insightful action.