Earlier this month, prime minister John Key recently came out and said he’s not against gay marriage, following on from US president Barack Obama announcing his support for it. And last week the local marriage equality movement forged ahead with a punchy new campaign, known simply as WTF?
The …
The StopPress scanner is smeared with greasy fingerprints, but it’s not because we’re submitting files to Scanwiches or Cat Scans. It’s because we’re hitting go on the May round of The Glossies. But we need your vote. So get in there and choose your favourite.
IdeaWorks closed its New Zealand doors in 2009 and said goodbye to eight staff and all of its clients, including the big Warehouse Stationery account. But it was officially reborn in March this year with Y&R Group as the new owner. And after a solid campaign to launch the new FCO retail brand in New Zealand, it has also been appointed as creative agency for Beds R Us after a three way pitch.
The last time Nike and Wieden + Kennedy got together for a massive advertising push was for the Football World Cup and most would agree the end result, ‘Write the Future’, was one of the best sporting commercials of all time. But it’s taken things up a notch for the launch of the 2012 European Championship with the brilliant and multi-layered My Time is Now.
As the biggest lender to the rural sector, the National Bank knows more about how our agrarian warriors tick than most. And while this ad is an oldie that was made by DraftFCB and Robber’s Dog around the same time as the National Bank ‘For the Places you’ll Go’ campaign (we obviously we don’t watch enough Country Calendar and hadn’t seen it before), we reckon it’s a goodie.
One year after choosing to get rid of one of the world’s biggest brands and replace it with an “entirely Kiwi” identity, Z Energy says its commitment to the Shell-less strategy is already paying dividends and offering it a competitive advantage. And the new brand is tracking very well with New Zealanders.
The Westpac rescue helicopters have saved thousands of lives in New Zealand. But saving those lives doesn’t come cheap (in fact, it costs around $4 million a year to fund a three-crew 24/7 immediate-response team). And despite the ongoing support of principal sponsor Westpac and other partners, the assistance of the public is also crucial to help keep them flying, so this year’s fundraising campaign by .99 aims to remind Kiwis that every donation is valuable regardless of its size, just like the equipment inside each helicopter.
It really is quite amazing how much technology is being packed into our pockets at the moment. And Massey University and Assignment Group’s Wellington office have shown just how far things have come—and how ‘the engine of the new New Zealand’ is changing the lives of people here and around the world—by getting the University’s vice-chancellor Steve Maharey to film its new 30-second commercial on an iPhone, something the Commercial Approvals Bureau has confirmed is a New Zealand first.
According to a study commissioned by San Francisco-based advertising agency Heat, advertising and marketing types are pretty unique in their use of social media. Perhaps unsurprisingly, ad types are three times more likely to pay attention to brands on Facebook and Twitter. But—more interestingly—they’re also much more likely to do drugs (26 percent vs three percent of the general public), throw up from excessive drinking (37 percent vs nine percent) and hook up with a colleague (26 percent vs eight percent).
After launching earlier this year, Ogilvy’s shopper marketing division OgilvyAction picked up the NZ Pork account and released a campaign starring Simon Gault. And it has put another sticker on the wall after winning the Griffin’s Foods below-the-line account in a three way competitive pitch thought to have involved Energi and the incumbent Apollo.
According to a recent Commerce Commission report into the telco industry, the number of broadband connections in New Zealand has more than doubled in the past five years and Telecom has around half of the total residential ISP market. But it’s aiming to increase that, sweeten the deal its for existing customers and get more people streaming by doubling the amount of data for all Total Home broadband packages for no extra charge. And, as the new ‘Why Not?’ campaign from Saatchi & Saatchi shows, that means you can download and share to your heart’s content.
Ogilvy’s Adam Barnes and Hywel James have taken out the March/April round of the new ORCA year after judges Karl Fleet (Campaign Palace), Lachlan McPherson (Publicis Mojo), Harriet Crampton (The Radio Network) and Chris Schofield (DDB) chose their KFC ads ‘Poor Old $5’ and ‘Ginga Note’ as the best of the bunch.
When we interviewed Andy Fackrell, DDB’s new executive creative director, in the latest edition of NZ Marketing, he said we could probably expect fewer gags and more visual storytelling to come out of the agency in the next few months. And its impressive campaign to promote the Olympic coverage on Sky, a brand that’s well-renowned for taking a humorous approach to its marketing efforts, ticks both of those boxes.
After a pitch involving a rumoured list of TBWA\ and the incumbent McCann, it’s thought DDB has managed to get a foot in the door with Coca-Cola after winning the Lift Plus account.
Per capita, more Subarus are sold in New Zealand than anywhere else in the world. And it’s not entirely surprising, as one in every three kilometres of New Zealand road is unsealed and there’s no telling when you’ll need to haul some golf clubs/diving gear/surfboards/groceries/kai moana/compost/children/dogs/drugs harvests in the back of your steed. So, to showcase the fleet-footed Legacy in its natural habitat, Barnes, Catmur & Friends has given a nod to the taxonomists of yore—and to the Department of Conservation—with its ‘Great Wagons of New Zealand’ spot.
The One Club’s Creative Week in New York has come to an end, and the world’s best creative advertising ideas have been acknowledged. But it was fairly slim pickings for the Kiwi contenders, with Colenso BBDO winning a rare Gold Pencil for the Levi’s ‘Rear View Girls’ web film at One Show Interactive and Publicis Mojo taking a Silver Pencil for the Greenpeace ‘Oil on Canvas’ campaign in the integrated branding – public service campaign category at The One Show.
Countdown has been going hammer and tong on the marketing front recently. But New World has come steaming back into view. And its new brand campaign is about as far as you can get from animated shopping baskets and fruit and vegetable musicals.
Colenso was named as TVNZ’s ‘agency of choice’ in October 2009, when the Brent Smart/Jason Paris agency-client combo was in effect. But, judging by some of the national broadcaster’s recent projects, that doesn’t appear to be the case any more.
Public broadcasting is getting a pretty rough ride at the moment. Radio New Zealand has had its funding frozen for five years, TVNZ6 has been axed and TVNZ7 is on the chopping block, while The GC, New Zealand’s Got Talent and possibly even Sally and Jaime Ridge get the government’s cash. But there is a group doing its best to ensure there remains an appropriate balance between commercial and public broadcasting in New Zealand and Save 7 is hoping to enlist some creative assistance from those in the marcomms community who believe in the cause and can help spread the message about the need for a government U-turn.
FMG has been on a mission to cement its place as a key player in the rural insurance sector. And it’s hoping a new print campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington that launched over the weekend will help raise the awareness even further—and tell the FMG story to even more New Zealanders.
Cadbury’s been fairly busy lately. It recently launched a new global campaign out of Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney called Joyville and it has followed up the ” class=”oembed” >”>first spot (hmmm, where have we seen the ‘lots of funny looking people making chocolate in a secretive factory’ thing before?) with a TVC currently running in Australia announcing the arrival of its new ” class=”oembed” >”>Marvellous Creations bar. But, closer to home, as part of its sponsorship of the New Zealand Olympic Team, it has also launched an ad showing its support for the athletes—and the supporters of those athletes.
An Auckland start-up is combining digital advertising and charitable causes to help improve the world—one desktop at a time. And the founders of DonateYourDesktop.co.nz hope they can soon put the screens of many millions of computers around the world to better use.
There are many differences between New Zealand and Italy. We’re more likely to have milk with our coffee, our menfolk generally only wear budgie smugglers at the beach if they’re triathletes or surf lifesavers, and our prime minister’s parties are pretty tame in comparison to Silvio’s. But as Publicis Mojo’s latest campaign for Subway’s Italiana range shows, there are a few similarities between the two laid-back countries, including a striking upside down geographical resemblance.
Ogilvy has retained the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority account, beating out regular Wellington combatants Saatchi & Saatchi and Clemenger BBDO for the spoils.
Many of the world’s award shows require client approval, the dates campaigns ran and minimum media spend to ensure scam ads aren’t honoured. But The Chip Shop Awards are “about fostering and recognising creativity with no boundaries and no rules”. The work does not need to have been broadcast, printed or mailed, the clients don’t have to be yours, and you can even make up your own categories. So, since its launch in 2002, the website claims the awards “have produced some of the cleverest, funniest, worst taste advertising and design ever seen”. Some, like M&C Saatchi’s Dave King think they’re grubby and worthless; a blight on the industry. Others like Leo Burnett’s John Jessup embrace the unrestrained creativity on display. Here’s a collection of this year’s finalists (including .99’s Safe Distance), so you can make up your own mind.
The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that a church billboard proclaiming “Jesus Heals Cancer” that was erected by the Equippers’ Church in Napier and an ad for Waikato Draught that linked itself with the Chiefs in a Waikato Times supplement have crossed the line.
When it comes to challenger brands in the financial space, the ‘watch out for those big greedy, sneaky banks’ theme is a fairly common one. Kiwibank has been on that buzz since ages ago, NZCU launched its get your bank off your back campaign last year and now RaboDirect and Shine have taken a similar approach with the ‘Greedy Banks’ campaign.
TSB has a stellar record when it comes to customer service and customer satisfaction, and it is, as its advertising says, New Zealand’s most recommended bank. And its latest innovation aims to enhance the banking experience even further with an impressive—and significant—new mobile banking app called {my}bank that was more than one year in the planning, comes complete with Bump technology and employed the branding and design services of Special Group.
POS material for the new campaign
There’s a long history of using animals in advertising, from Saatchi & Saatchi’s geese, to Telecom’s meerkats to Toyota’s Bugger to Cravendale’s Cats with Thumbs and thousands of others inbetween. And Visique and Republik are tapping into that rich vein—and aiming to inject some light-hearted relief into the somewhat clinical New Zealand optometry sector—by launching a new advertising campaign using bespectacled animals to encourage people to look after their eyes.
A new study by McKinsey & Company has confirmed advertising is a driver of economic growth. And while this is not anything that hasn’t been reported before (specifically the 2007 seminal report by Maximilien Nayaradou that found that ad spend was a driver of growth), what is of interest in this report is its specific research and reporting on the contribution of digital marketing towards GDP.