Browsing: Moa
Your stereotypical beer ad often involves a man, seemingly dying of thirst, glugging down large mouthfuls of the bubbly, golden elixir. But, it turns out, women get thirsty too and are still largely underrepresented when it comes to beer advertising, despite the fact more affluent women started drinking beer last year than any other group.
Newspapers love big events, as brands hoping to show their tactical advertising flair tend to gravitate towards them. That was certainly the case after the 2011 Rugby World Cup win, as it was on Monday when the team backed that performance up by beating the Aussies. But we found a few more full-pagers in a special World Cup lift-out in the Herald this week, as well as some other rugby-related efforts.
Moa Beer launched its new pioneer-focused packaging late last year. And its latest marketing initiative continues down that patriotic road by trying to bind us together through the sharing of stories of everyday New Zealanders, something it’s calling ‘How to Brew a Country’.
There’s no better way to celebrate centuries of oppressive colonialism than with a series of sporting contests. Thankfully, we’ve got the Commonwealth Games for that. And while they might not be quite as prestigious (or popular) as the Olympics, official broadcaster Sky TV and NZ Olympic Committee sponsor ANZ are doing all they can to draw attention to the upcoming Glasgow games.
Turn up on Friday afternoon at Gladeye’s Parnell office and you’re likely to get a sausage as part of its weekly all-staff barbecue. Turn up at any other time during the week and you’re likely to get some of the best web design and digital thinking in the country. Founder and director Tarver Graham and account director Ben Glazewski talk turkey.
Recently, Tui put up a few Yeah Right billboards that said ‘My shout, I’ve got shares in Moa beer’, which was a jab at the fact that its stock price dropped by around 32 percent after it failed to meet its sales targets. And Moa has responded in typically comical fashion by showing how hard it is to get hold of Tui’s owners.
There’s plenty of excitement about craft beer at the moment. And plenty of debate about what that term actually means. But, after a big few days for the sector in Wellingtion, John Baker asks if it is the big boys making ‘faux craft’ or the new players making average product that are likely to do more damage.
DNA Design celebrated its 21st back in 2010 and it’s still doing quality work—both on pages and In Real Life—for the likes of Powershop, Icebreaker and the All Blacks. Grenville Main has been there from the start and here’s what he made of last year.
2011 wasn’t a particularly memorable year for Saatchi & Saatchi, with the pink fist debacle casting a major pall. But the new executive and creative team has shaken things up and, after winning ASB without a pitch earlier this year and releasing some of the best work of 2012, the confidence—and the quality—appears to have returned. Creative directors Corey Chalmers and Gus Roberts speak up.
Moa has its fair share of detractors, from threat-making Pakistanis to protective Frenchies to lesbians to those who disagreed with the imagery used in its, shall we say, unique prospectus. So it came as a shock to many when the trickster god of the Kiwi beer family was announced as a sponsor of the New Zealand Olympic team, a sponsorship we felt it did a fantastic job of leveraging online and in person at Kiwi house in London. And as part of its ‘Beer for Olympians’ campaign, it has had one complaint upheld and one not upheld by the ASA.
Annual reports are usually about as exciting as a packet of ready salted chips, so we were impressed with Z Energy’s interactive effort, which saw Assignment Group and Heyday add a few bells and whistles in an effort to get people to actually pay attention to it. Investment statements are also pretty staid, but Moa certainly isn’t, so as part of the company’s forthcoming IPO, Geoff Ross and co. have tried to create a document people will want to read—and keep. And, in what it believes is a world first, it also includes paid third party advertising for Aston Martin, Working Style, Partridge Jewellers, Ecoya and Beretta.
Of all the NZ Olympic sponsors, Moa is perhaps the most unlikely, given its oft-controversial approach to marketing and the fact that it’s, well, beer, a substance not particularly well-renowned for improving athletic performance. But even though the NZOC is an organisation renowned for taking things pretty seriously, Moa, which celebrated a solid medal haul of its own recently, has still been able to have a bit of fun with its sponsorship activity.
Moa recently caused a bit of a hubbub in the brewing community after pinning its craft beer manifesto to the wall. And it soon might be creating hubbubs in America after securing some big US distribution deals.
Moa has gained a reputation as the trickster god of the Kiwi beer fraternity with its cheeky, often controversial and, some might say, 42 Below-esque approach to marketing. Last year it gave the French the finger and became a slightly unexpected sponsor of the New Zealand Olympic team. And now it’s put the cat amongst the pigeons by kicking off a rather heated debate about what it calls ‘craftwashing’. Moa’s marketing manager Sunil Unka looks back on 2011.
Stolen Rum is a New Zealand-based start-up rum company that wants to bring back the romanticism and history of rum to a contemporary audience. The rum itself has been judged world class, and it’s got the requisite feel good back-story, but an in-house cheeky guerrilla marketing campaign hopes to put Stolen Rum on everyone’s lips—including the spirit-making behemoth it’s competing with, Bacardi.
Trouble’s a brewin’ in beersville with Monteith’s and Moa both claiming to be the first craft beer available duty free.
Snapr, a Kiwi-conceived free photo sharing and geo-tagging app has made a bit of name for itself after being given some cash by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, endorsed by Microsoft and used to show the glamour shots during New Zealand Fashion Week. Now it’s added a dose of the digital marketing term du jour—gamification—to the recipe with a photo sharing game called Capture the Flag that’s captured the attention of some major Kiwi brands.
It had to happen. And, in what many will see as the exact opposite of life, where sexual activity gets you beer, not the other way round, committed courter of controversy Moa has launched an anti-abstinence campaign.
Following on from the recent spate of trademark bullying, with DB winning the rights to use the generic term “radler” and Fonterra now trying to claim “vintage”, Moa, which announced its slightly surprising sponsorship of the New Zealand Olympic team last week, recently received a letter from Jean-Luc Barnier, the chief guardian of the Champagne region, telling the brand to cease and desist on the use of the word champagne on its website. As you can imagine, this request went down well with the always well-behaved Moa team, who felt the letter was a particularly French way of going about things. So they sent Jean-Luc a uniquely Kiwi response: a lovely postcard of the Rainbow Warrior with the Te Reo equivalent of “fuck off” written on the back.
Given Moa’s well-established reputation for marketing cheekiness and the involvement of Pead PR, Darryl Parsons and the lads behind 42 Below in the small but growing beer business, the StopPress cynics initially thought the announcement about the craft brewery signing on as a sponsor for the New Zealand Olympic Team had to be some kind of brazen stunt; another brave/foolish/possibly illegal attempt to gain attention at whatever cost. But, somewhat surprisingly, it’s all true, and Moa is now officially the ‘Beer for Olympians’, the first time a craft brewery has held this level of sponsorship in New Zealand or, as far as the Moans know, the world.