New Zealand advertisers’ love affair with digital continued in this quarter, with the total in Q2 2012 hitting $91 million, up 16 percent from Q1. But as more local eyeballs head to international sites and more ad spend heads overseas with them, is the level of digital expenditure actually being underestimated?
Word-of-mouth agency Soup launches in New Zealand (and, appropriately enough, starts with a campaign for cat broth), Steve Tindall sleeps with the enemy, two for Tangible as Primary shacks up with PGG Wrightson, Clemenger Group opens up the Young Talent Programme for 2013, greener pastures for Fenella Humphreys, Jessica Mathias joins Pead and Hayden Hare joins Flava.
Six teams teams of young media and creative agency whippersnappers were named as place getter in last night’s inaugural Fairfax Media Young Spikes Media and Integrated Competitions, but it was the Whybin \ TBWA and OMD teams that took out the winning spots, and each will now represent New Zealand at the Young Spikes competition held in Singapore in September.
Yahoo! New Zealand’s inaugural Digital Stars Awards have been on the hunt for the country’s best emerging digital media talent and, after scrutinising 18 savvy entries, the list has been narrowed down and the five finalists revealed, representing a decent cross-section of Kiwi agencies.
There’s Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, and our very own David Tua. Sure, the boxing world has been graced by many a talent over the decades, but Adshel reckons the pool of knockout talent isn’t the exclusive domain of athletes. Its newly launched Knockout campaign is an intercontinental battle where the best Adshel campaigns from the previous quarter are pitted against each other, with the ultimate power falling into the hands of you, the discerning industry player, to cast your vote.
Kiwi agencies have added to the Cannes Lions haul, with two silvers and two bronzes in Media. Clemenger BBDO/OMD Wellington picked up two silvers, one for Dulux ‘What’s your Dulux colour of New Zealand‘ in best use of integrated media and the other for Tranz Scenic ‘See more of New Zealand by train’ in best use of print. Saatchi & Saatchi NZ/AIM Proximity Wellington/Starcom took bronze for Toyota FJ Cruiser ‘Top to Bottom‘ in best use of social media marketing, as did Colenso BBDO for Monteith’s ‘Sorry about the twigs, folks’ in FMCG.
After a competitive pitch, Running With Scissors has won some project work with Heinz Wattie’s, beating out JWT for the spoils and leading to a few questions about the role of DDB.
In front of an almost capacity Langham conference centre young MC Oliver Driver had to shout to get attention. That’s becasue the 800-odd media and agency flunkies were riotessly celebrating their efforts last night at the CAANZ Media Awards.
And the big winner? Well it was linked to the halting of interest and inflation rates last year, it forced the electricity industry to drop its pants and it has already won a host of the country’s big awards. And DraftFCB continued its golden run by following up from the last two year’s efforts and taking the Best in Show title for its work on Electricity Authority’s What’s My Number? campaign.
As Marshall McLuhan famously said, the medium is the message, “creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived”. Very rarely does the medium get the message across and also have the ability to soak up grease, but OMD’s novel campaign for Fly Buys Visa that will see deep fried goods up and down New Zealand being wrapped in branded paper has managed to do exactly that.
The judges have done the hard yards sorting the wheat from the media chaff and the finalists of the CAANZ Media Awards have now been announced, with OMD and SparkPHD leading the pack on 20 nods each.
Social media means friends appear to have turned into a commodity to be crowed about these days. And, thanks to an original 1974 Volkswagen Kombi van, Fly Buys managed to increase its Facebook fan base ten-fold in December, with a total of 55,000 likes in three weeks (up from 5,500) through its ‘Dream Machine’ promotion, a finalist in the 2012 CAANZ Media Awards.
The NZTA, Clemenger BBDO and OMD’s short, sharp mass media blitz to educate all Kiwi road users about two changes to the country’s give way rules that kick in on March 25 at 5am probably won’t win any Gold Axis awards. But the $1.2 million campaign could certainly help save a few insurance claims and/or hospital stays.
Success is fairly subjective in adland. Depending on who you’re talking to, it can be about the cash earned, growth rates achieved, accounts gained or creative plaudits won. And while DDB Group hasn’t quite had the run of things when it comes to awards of late, its “exceptional” business performance over the past year was enough to win it the 2012 Fairfax AdMedia Supreme Agency of the Year last night at the Imperial Lane Bar & Restaurant, adding to the agency of the year titles it has recently been awarded by the NBR, Campaign Brief and Campaign Asia Pacific. DraftFCB was a close runner-up, justONE won specialist agency of the year and OMD took the media title.
With only two things certain in life, death and taxes, accountants can count themselves lucky (geddit?) they’re in one of the few sectors with almost no need to advertise. As the late great Albert Einstein himself pointed out: “The hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax.” So, you know there must be a GFC happening when you see previously cloistered bean counters putting down their calculators and promoting their maths skills in a fancy-pants digital marketing campaign. The New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants (NZICA) has teamed up with Clemenger BBDO and OMD to launch its first advertising campaign in five years.
Tourism Australia has released a list of 100 ‘must-do’ activities to mark Australia Day in New Zealand, in a bid to get Kiwis enthused about crossing the Tasman on their next holiday.
…as BNZ makes some changes, OMD reels in a heavy-hitting English import, Affinity ID adds some digital grunt, and Yukfoo welcomes a stop-motion specialist.
There were 730 media folk in their gladrags, a couple of unfortunate but highly comical stage mishaps, some well-received self-deprecating humour from Martin Devlin, some cheeky on-stage planking hijinks and a large sumo wrestler dishing out gongs—quite literally—at the CAANZ Media Awards last night at the Langham in Auckland. And it was DraftFCB Media and OMD that left with the biggest smiles.
It’s not every day you get to test yourself on a Segway, wax your bum crack, jump off the Sky Tower, drive maniacally around Auckland searching for bus shelters, dress up as an inmate outside a prison, almost run over one of your co-workers, ride a mechanical bull and do tequila shots at 3pm. But that’s basically what around 80 industry folk had to do last Thursday as part of the Adshel Rally. And, as you can probably see in these pictures, they appeared to love every minute of it.
…as Total Media names its managing director (and Omnicom Media Group announces its new big cheese for Australia/NZ); 2degrees finds a multi-lingual comms manager; a marketing guru joins the academic ranks at Massey University; The Sweet Shop and CAANZ choose New Zealand’s reps for the Young Lotus competition at Adfest; Naked outgrows its villa and heads for K’Rd; Tribal Fusion launches in New Zealand with Brendan Muller at the helm; Crossmark restructures its management and is on the hunt for a managing director in New Zealand; and Cutting Edge promotes a veteran to top dog.
The lazy susan spins, bringing with it a couple of big creative departures at Rapp/Tribal, a few new arrivals at OMD, a promotion at nzherald.co.nz and a timely lesson in goat farming.
No sooner has the last staff merry-go-round post gone live than a host of other rotations come to light, including the departure of OMD Auckland’s managing partner Rosanne Robinson, a few big snafflings by the Clemenger gang, TVNZers heading to APN Online, a new NZRU comms gatekeeper and a fresh big cheese for PMP.
TVNZ has announced it will be reducing the January rate card by 11.1 percent from its 2010 rates to reflect the controversial drop in agency commission from 20 percent to 10 percent on 2 January 2011. So, according to mathematical sources who apparently know how to use calculators, that appears to be an overall rate increase of 0.1 percent.
M2M International, which falls under the Omnicom Media Group (OMG) umbrella, has confirmed its closure in New Zealand following the departure of several key clients in the past 12 months.
DHL announced its sponsorship of the Rugby World Cup today (and to celebrate Grant Fox kicked a rugby ball off the Skytower). And while the rules for the tournament’s official sponsors seem fairly clear, media owners, media buyers and the host of other companies that haven’t forked out but are hoping to jump on the RWC marketing bandwagon are still waiting to find out from the government how the Major Events Management Act (MEMA) could affect marketing activities, particularly when it comes to out-of-home media.
OMD Auckland and TVNZ have developed what they claim is a New Zealand first and almost certainly a world first: an ‘Ad on Pause’ for Fonterra’s Primo brand.
Matt Bale, self-proclaimed media junkie, digital zealot, part-time fictional gangster and general manager at OMD Wellington, has confirmed he will be leaving the agency in September to take on “new challenges, etc.”
OMD looks to the future and appoints its first tech-head, Dow’s designs come to fruition and The Pond shores up its arsenal south of the Bombays.
The excitement is growing steadily for next year’s Rugby World Cup. And for some, so is the confusion.
OMD New Zealand, standing tall and gazing across the country’s media landscape, is planning for the future, announcing a strengthened senior management team with the creation of a new managing director role in the Auckland agency that will be taken up by OMD’s director of digital, Chris Riley.
TVNZ has released its ratecard for the July – September 2010 period, with TV ONE rates rising by two percent and TV2 up six percent on the back of improved numbers. But not everyone appears to be on the same optimistic page as the national broadcaster, if the apparent stoush with media agency OMD is anything to go by.