Hudson has released its latest salary and employment insights document for 2012. And, with modest optimistic hiring intentions across the sales, marketing and communications (SMC) profession in both Australia and New Zealand, it’s picking plenty of competition in the quest for talent this year.
“The review will be completed by mid-October 2011.” Those were the words used in a statement sent by Vodafone in late July last year after it decided to shift from its agency of four years Colenso and move the troops up the road to .99 during the RFP process. Now, almost seven months later, and after a pitch was held in December, no decision has been made. So what gives?
After successfully completing initial projects through the year, BCG2 has been awarded the Canon New Zealand consumer business, which includes cameras, lenses, printers and printing consumables. It replaces Ballantyne Taylor, which maintains its role as Canon’s B2B agency.
Kiwi director Taika Waititi is currently trying to drum up some cash in order to get Boy shown in the US. And, after being nominated for an Oscar, directing a couple of Flight of the Conchords episodes and starring in The Green Lantern, his star keeps rising, as evidenced by this big musical number he directed for NBC that showed before its superbowl coverage.
Saatchi & Saatchi Auckland released a cheeky Valentine’s Day stunt for Tui today that allowed blokes to create DIY roses from an ad in the New Zealand Herald, and, at the exact opposite end of the Valentine’s Day advertising spectrum, the Wellington office has launched a subversive campaign for Women’s Refuge that hopes to get people thinking about what love means for some women, bring domestic abuse into the open and encourage New Zealanders to take a second glance if they suspect something isn’t right in a relationship.
Tui-drinkers are widely renowned as hopeless romantics. But some of them obviously need a bit of help to grease the wheels of love. So Tui and Saatchi & Saatchi have come to their aid by finding another use for the newspaper and creating a gift to help impress the missus (or the mister). Much like the alternative strip for Tuatara by Y&R Wellington last year, a bunch of foldable DIY roses is included in every edition of today’s New Zealand Herald, which means these sensitive new age guys “can keep [their] dosh for a dozen of another kind.”
When we found out Sky and TVNZ were building an Igloo together, we heard Barnes, Catmur & Friends and Sugar were the two agencies in the hunt for the account. And Sugar has come out victorious.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the way we watch TV is changing. Appointment viewing is still surprisingly popular and according to Nielsen’s new Unitam figures, which factor in time-shifted viewing, just three percent of total viewing last week was time-shifted and 97 percent was live. In homes with personal video recorders (PVRs), time-shifted programming made up about nine percent of total viewing and people with PVRs watched about seven percent more TV in peak time than those in homes without. Away from the living room, however, the ‘what you want, when you want it’ culture and more reliable streaming means Ondemand content is becoming increasingly popular in New Zealand. And to push its online viewing platform iSky, Sky and two of DDB’s up-and-coming creatives Jay Hunt and Pete Gosselin have created a very funny campaign about a woman spurning her old, decrepit and rather bitter old telly for a shiny, vibrant and cocky new laptop. And, just like ‘Your Happy Place’, the slogan ‘Cheat on your TV’ is spot on, too.
Meridian Energy has released some consistently good ads over the past couple of years and created a point of difference by loudly banging its renewable energy drum. And, following on from its quirky West Wind and Ross Island ads, which were conceived by Assignment Group and shot by Perendale, the team has sent Jeremy Wells on another entertaining journey in an effort to celebrate the country the company generates all of its energy from—and, of course, get more customers around New Zealand to “sign up to a better energy future”.
BCG2 Health appears to be revelling in its niche at the moment after a couple of good wins and it’s toasting to more good health because, after a competitive pitch, Fisher and Paykel Healthcare has shacked up with the agency to launch a digital consumer and trade campaign in the US, a key market for its range of sleep apnoea medical devices.
Once again, CAANZ and The Sweet Shop are set to send two young Kiwi creatives off to Thailand as part of its sponsorship of the Adfest Lotus Award. And another two Kiwis who have already shown their creative chops, the hot-to-trot directing collective Special Problems, have just signed up with The Sweet Shop for commercial and branded content work worldwide.
We’ve seen plenty of manvertising in recent times, with the likes of Mammoth, Lion Red, Speight’s Summit and NZTA all taking the over-the-top masculine approach to appeal to the guys (and, often, the girls). Obviously, the next logical step in this creative evolution was manchildvertising, so, to launch Arnott’s Shapes Roadies in the New Zealand market, Y&R Auckland and Finch director Alex Roberts constructed an oversized carseat, embraced the green screen and filmed “three manchildren on a roadtrip behaving like manchildren on a roadtrip” as part of its rather absurd but quite funny ‘Feed the Manchild’ campaign.
The booze laws are in for a bit of a tune-up this year, with a yet-to-be-announced, Government appointed panel set to bang heads over things like the role of alcohol sponsorship, price controls and industry self-regulation of advertising. Of all the beer brands, Tui is probably the one most often singled out for pushing the envelope, both for its controversial, long-running, PC-busting billboards and for supposedly using sex to sell beer with the Tui brewery girls. But the numerous complainers haven’t stopped it from continuing to use cheekiness and humour in its ads and, carrying on the popular tradition of using brewery raids, elaborate disguises and gnomes—Saatchi & Saatchi and The Sweet Shop have launched another entertaining brand ad for Tui Blond lager.
Advertising is a very competitive business. Accounts are coveted, staff are constantly being poached and awards are hotly contested. And it seems that competitive streak also applies to extra-curricular activities, as evidenced by events that took place at the Colenso towers this week.
Judging by this expensive-looking new epic for the launch of the Subaru XV, the Australian arm of the business isn’t afraid to spend money on big ads. And while it’s fair to assume New Zealand doesn’t have access to those sort of budgets, it does have Barnes, Catmur & Friends on its side, and, just like its contextual number celebrating the Great Auckland Snow last year, this smart print ad showcasing the reversing cameras that now come as standard in the Legacy and Outback models also hits the spot.
It’s not just Whitcoulls, with its very public financial struggle and consequent sale in mid-last year, that is being affected by the slow sales of books in New Zealand. With literacy levels dropping year on year, the lack of trading is also keeping our country’s authors downtrodden and many of our stories untold. But the New Zealand Book Council, just like other separate entities like NZ Book Month, which won the not-for-profit gong at the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards last year for trying to put a book in the hands of every Kiwi, is out to change this. And it’s latest ad, which was made by Colenso BBDO and follows up from the haunting and very well-awarded Going West with some more engaging paper artistry, aims to show the printed word can shape and inspire.
After a few years of quiet on the Y&R NZ front, it’s been pretty much all good news recently, with a host of new accounts locked in and some big creative hires to brag about. And it’s continued down that positive track by naming Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington’s associate creative director Scott Henderson as its creative director in Wellington.
In what will be a big loss for both Colenso BBDO and the New Zealand marcomms community, planning director, talented author, effectiveness evangelist and well-liked bearded brain box James Hurman has accepted the role of planning partner at Ogilvy Shanghai, bringing an end to four very successful years on College Hill.
Burger King has been selling its tiny burgers overseas for a couple of years now (check out the “horniest, most boobstatic Burger King ad ever” from the US). And it’s just launched the seemingly lady-friendly products in New Zealand, with Colenso BBDO and Flying Fish getting together to create a new, fairly strange TVC that features some sweet electro funk, some fairly cool effects and some forced rhyming.
Barnes, Catmur & Friends won the Tourism Fiji account in mid-2009 and set out on its mission to grow New Zealand visitor arrivals from 100,000 per year to 120,000 by 2011. Since it took over, and despite the ongoing political uncertainty, arrivals have gone up 18 percent on the back of some good creative comms, including an enticing TVC, a billboard that showed how hot it was in Fiji during the New Zealand winter and a well-received Adshel promotion that ‘Fiji’ed’ a few hundred locals. But, despite these local results, Tourism Fiji has decided the best approach to “ensure the best possible return on the Fiji Government’s significant annual investment in marketing Fiji to the world and to effectively position Fiji competitively into the future” is to find a lead global advertising agency to develop and implement a new global masterbrand strategy.
Special Group managed to take home 4 Caxton awards in 2011 for its Orcon Business banner, including the Quinlivan Black Best in Show, and it’s kept its name in the hat for the next round after winning the Oct/Nov ‘Could be a Caxton’ award for its ‘Send a Newspaper’ ad for the Newspaper Publishers’ Association.
It was not without a sigh and a grunt that agencies with relaxation on their minds received a notice from the Treasury on December 15 asking for interested parties to put their hands up if they wanted to work on the ‘extension of the mixed ownership model’ account. They obviously don’t know Christmas is a time of reflection for the marcomms industry. But it seems the biggest live pitch at the moment (aside from the decision on Vodafone, which is still thought to be in the hands of the global bods), is now down to the shortlist stage.
In what will be a big blow to incumbent agency .99, Air New Zealand has chosen DrafFCB to be its lead agency after a competitive pitch, starting in March. But there is still some mystery surrounding the set-up of the account because Saatchi & Saatchi, which a few industry big mouths had thought was looking good to take the win, has also been included on the airline’s agency roster.
It may be the new kid on the ice block, but Tip Top’s campaign for the Ice Bar Co., which was created by Colenso BBDO, overshadowed the rest of the competition to win the November round of Colmar Brunton’s Ad Impact Award. And, judging by sales, the products are proving popular with the slightly wrinklier target market.
Last year the token Kiwi at Special Group did the campaign for our Axis Awards, revealing to us that we’d won “the most Cannes Lions per capita of any country in the world in 2010 – one Lion per 155,989 people. Sweden was second with one Lion per 202,173 residents. The ‘we invented advertising’ UK? A sorry 4th with one Lion per 849,886 people. The creative powerhouse of the USA? 8th buddy, 8th! with just one Lion per 2,287,003 people. Yesiree.” So, as another of the tiny handful of New Zealanders working in New Zealand advertising, I felt a sense of duty to follow in Tony Bradbourne’s footsteps when Patrick Collister, editor of Directory magazine and The Big Won Creative Rankings, sent me his 2011 data.
Who’s it for: Unitec by Special Group and Film Construction
Why we like it: The final set of 60-second ads in this year-long reality-advertising series showed just how much students can change if they put their mind to it. It was a risky …
Tip Top launched its new range of Ice Bar Co. ice blocks last year and, slightly unusually, aimed them directly at the grown-ups. Typically, ice blocks were something for the kids to get all over their faces, and their popularity with this demographic meant such treats were always in jeopardy if the stash happened to be discovered in the freezer. But thankfully, Colenso BBDO has come up with an ingenious product that aims to keep the goods safe from the greedy little thieving parasites (or from curious flatmates): a frozen pea packet camouflage system that uses the threat of vegetables and phrases like ‘now extra bland’ and ‘eight fewer flavours than ever before’ to put mischievous kids off the scent. Get yours for free here.
Christmas is a time to celebrate enduring traditions. Trees, mistletoe, binge eating, rampant consumerism. But in adland one of the most enduring traditions is seeing what progressive Auckland church St Matthew in the City puts on its billboard to celebrate the festive season and waiting for the angry response to ensue. Last year it was M&C Saatchi showing Mary and Joseph’s post-coital awkwardness and this year it’s the follow up from TBWA\: a billboard showing a shocked Mary looking at the results of her pregnancy test.
There was both joy and despair when Air New Zealand announced it had killed off Rico. And whether or not you liked the fur and fang, the digital trickery employed by .99 and the cute tie-in with Cluedo was a clever way of sending the non-specific spokebeast off. Now his murderer has been found and in a merging of mascots, Richard Simmons is back in front of the camera for Air New Zealand, along with the very talented puppeteer behind/inside Rico, Tyler Bunch.
It was a big year of rugby for adidas and TBWA\ was behind much of the work done to leverage its sponsorship of the All Blacks. ‘All In’ and Stand in Black were solid campaigns, but for many they were overshadowed by the PR shitstorm that ensued after the jersey price debacle. And as the global sports giant shifts its focus away from rugby and towards other sports, so the focus also shifts away from the New Zealand branch and towards the two agencies it uses in Australia.