Despite the ubiquitous nature of digital communications and millennials spreading their time across a range of screens, television remains a hugely valuable platform for delivering emotive content with the scale, impact and the effective frequency required to create meaningful business impact.
Colenso BBDO and Barnes, Catmur & Friends Dentsu had plenty to celebrate over the weekend after being included in APAC Effie Awards winners were announced. Both agencies received recognition on the international stage and ‘Brewtroleum’ stole the night by winning the coveted Grand Effie.
With winter around the corner and heaters creeping on, Meridian, with the help of Barnes, Catmur & Friends Dentsu, is making its bid for your power bill through a series of online videos and audio ads.
New Zealand creatives shone at this year’s APAC Effies with Colenso BBDO/Proximity leading the awards charge, picking up some gold metal alongside Barnes, Catmur & Friends Dentsu and Y&R.
It appears romance is key when it comes to relationships and newspaper advertising, with February’s Ad of the Month taken out by DDB for its Lion Red’s Valentines Day inspired ad.
Hell Pizza has gone free range, and to inform/attract hungry and ethically geared customers it’s enlisted Barnes, Catmur & Friends to roll out a new campaign, which includes a hint of Hell’s usual irreverent marketing style.
Southern Cross Health Society has gone the emotional route with its new campaign via Barnes, Catmur & Friends consisting of an ad narrated by an old man giving advice to his younger self along to a series of clips of his most significant life experiences and the lessons he’s learned.
Tower Insurance, 2degrees, LG and Burger King deserve a pat on the back this week.
When I was about six (after sneakily watching one-too-many scary movies) I thought I could turn myself into a cool vampire with a special potion made out of potato chips and juice that had been left on a window sill overnight to gain extra “power”. Turns out old Raro and soggy chicken chips only makes you spew, yet I still had the confidence and imagination to try. And that’s the message this new ad by Tower is getting across by asking children the rather odd question: “What would you do if a penguin stole your bike?”
Last year, Barnes Catmur and Friends finally ended Aussie dominance at the Campaign Asia Pacific Awards by becoming the first Kiwi agency to win the Australia/New Zealand Independent Agency of the Year category. In addition to this, the consistent indy team won the Battle of the Ad Bands, showing that its creative streak also extends into other disciplines. Given that the agency spent 2013 moving from strength to strength, it comes as no surprise that managing partner Daniel Barnes was positive, albeit laconic, in his assessment of the year.
After being denied at Axis, Steinlager’s ‘We Believe’ campaign rightly dominated last night with the grand Effie, and, with awards for Yellow Toolbox and more glory for Volkswagen after it won the supreme award at the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards, DDB made it a double by taking the crown as the year’s most effective agency.
The shots were downed at the door, the undies went flying onto the stage regularly and the screams were deafening last night as seven bands came together and rocked the hell out of the King’s Arms for the fifth annual Battle of the Ad Bands, a night that some jokingly—or not so jokingly—call the most important in advertising. And after being there or thereabouts in previous years, the worthy rock gods and goddess in Barnes, Catmur & Friend’s Friends Electric finally took the top prize, prying it from the cold dead hands of TBWA\, which had won it for the past two years but didn’t feature in this year’s festivities.
Of all the sabbaticals you could embark on, flying halfway round the world to New Zealand to work on crafting a new beer range surely has to be one of the most desirable. And that’s the precise task assigned to US brewmaster Brian “Spike” Buckowski thanks to a campaign run by Barnes, Catmur & Friends for Boundary Road Brewery. Utilising brewing sites around the world, the agency put the call out for a genius brewer, with a skill set that sits somewhere between genius and God-like, to “come down and do his stuff”.
The creative gang have had their fun at AXIS and Cannes, so the focus now shifts to effectiveness awards. And, in addition to the local call for entries for the 2012 Effies going live, Effie Worldwide have announced the results of its second ever effectiveness index, with Colenso BBDO, DraftFCB and DDB ranked in the top 20 most effective agencies in the world.
Who’s it for: Cadbury by DBB and Thick as Thieves
Why we like it: A bravura canine performance, a massive purple couch and a few patriotic sporting tingles that Cadbury can bask in the reflected glow of.
Who’s it for: Hell Pizza by Barnes …
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.
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.
RappTribal, part of the DDB Group NZ, win the November BollyAward for their client, SkyTV. The banner/takeover ad encouraged users to click to their hearts content with comments from the drill sergeant egging them on.
Back in June, Boundary Road Brewery, the newly rebranded Independent Liquor, launched a campaign to celebrate the launch of a ‘craft range’ that asked Kiwis to be the arbiter of taste and choose their favoured variety of beer, with the winning brew eventually released commercially. The print campaign asking for tasters took out the NAB ad of the month award and now it’s followed that up by acknowledging the 999 humans who tasted and chose the Chosen One beer with an ad in The New Zealand Herald that listed every one of them by name.
If you like The Onion’s hilarious horoscopes or the many varieties of alternative fortune cookies, then you’ll probably also like Barnes, Catmur & Friends new Mis-Fortune Cookies for Hell Pizza, which offer a slightly different take on the typically positive messages usually found inside the traditional Chinese versions and are being sold in all 66 stores around the country.
The cold snap in August that brought snow to much of the country—and brought many Aucklanders to the office windows as the first snow fell in the city for 72 years—proved a perfect topical foil for creatives. And two of them were acknowledged in the August round of the NAB’s Newspaper Ad of the Month, with Barnes, Catmur & Friends’ ‘Road Open’ ad for Subaru winning top spot and DDB’s Powerball ad receiving an Honourable Mention.
The masters of the contextual newspaper ad have done it again. The day after the first snow in Auckland for 72 years, Barnes, Catmur & Friends ran this national newspaper ad for Subaru to reassure concerned Aucklanders that, yes, the streets were still passable.
Out-of-home advertising aims to be where the most eyeballs are. But that’s often not quite enough these days and, increasingly, outdoor media owners and agencies are getting creative in an effort to get cut-through and consumer engagement, as evidenced by Barnes, Catmur & Friends’ recent ‘Fiji Me, Please’ Adshel campaign.
Greedy old Barnes, Catmur & Friends has followed up its May NAB Newspaper Advertisement of the Month win for Hell Pizza after taking victory in June’s Ad of the Month for their ‘Beer tasters Wanted’ ad for Independent Liquor’s Boundary Road Brewery. And, in a repeat of the May decision, the judges also gave another DDB Coastguard ad ‘Parachute Flare’ an honourable mention as runner up.
We all love the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). Oh wait, we don’t. But that’s the whole point behind a comic campaign launched by Barnes, Catmur & Friends on Monday on behalf of the ASA. To raise awareness and hopefully generate more funding via the ASA’s voluntary levy scheme, the team at Barnes, Catmur & Friends, led by creatives Matt Weavers and Jesse Stevens, created a mock website called the Department of Advertising Standards and Regulations (DASR).
We’re taking the politically correct NCEA approach today. So we’ve chosen four winners.
Who’s it for: NZTA by Clemenger BBDO and Film Construction
Why we like it: It’s funny because it’s true. Nice to see NZTA using a bit of humour to get …
Here’s the latest sprinkling of TVCs for your Friday afternoon delight. We’re quite impressed with NZTA’s latest humorous effort, and Bacardi pipes up with a fancy animated offering about togetherness. Pams meanwhile presents its latest human sausage offering for winter and the All Blacks sell more stuff, this time for Weet-bix.
When news of Osama bin Laden’s demise was beamed around the world, it didn’t take long for Hell Pizza to capitalise on the news in its typical controversial style, unveiling its ‘Come in, Osama, we’ve been expecting you’ ad. And the creative culprits behind the ad, Barnes, Catmur & Friends, have been rewarded for their efforts by taking out NAB’s May Newspaper Ad of the Month award.
A couple of weeks back, a group of ridiculously good looking, extremely important and intimidatingly intelligent advertising, marketing and media folk from Skyline Garages, Barnes, Catmur & Friends, ThinkTV and StopPress took a wee trip to the new and particularly classy Auckland Viaduct establishment Snapdragon to celebrate a famous, if slightly controversial, victory in the inaugural Think TV TVC of the Year competition with a good old-fashioned long and fairly wet lunch. We promised some photos of this auspicious event to inspire jealousy (and possibly even vitriolic comments), so fill your boots. And if you’re looking for a venue for your next event (or power lunch), we can assure you Snapdragon is a very good option.
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You can rely on the rather liberal St Matthew in the City church in Auckland to ruffle the feathers of the puritans and zealots with its ‘progressive’ billboards. And, as history has shown, you can also rely on Hell Pizza to stoke a few offensive coals with its advertising. Well, this Easter, the two of them have become surprising bedfellows.