Auckland has seen an influx of digital outdoor advertising over the course of the last year, and the nation’s brands are queuing in order to get their messaging on these glowing rectangles. And while APN Outdoor’s billboard on Queen Street certainly isn’t diminutive with a height of 3×9 metres, it is but a tinny when compared to the advertising battleship that is about to be steered into New York City’s Times Square.
Steinlager’s latest ambassador is freediver William Trubridge, whose upcoming world record attempt in the Bahamas is being screened on Breakfast on December 3. At the launch of the new campaign, senior brand manager Michael Taylor said there were plenty of creative suggestions about how to promote the event and he even mentioned the possibility of a 102m high billboard. We haven’t noticed any of those around as yet, and they probably don’t come cheap, but we did notice a clever media idea that has put a lift in the Auckland CBD to good use.
Since the beginning of the week, Men’s Health has been causing people across Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch to do some serious double takes, thanks to a controversial set of posters that are designed to encourage men to talk about their health issues. But Men’s Health isn’t the only organisation making Kiwis gawk. Love Your Condom has continued its risque approach to raising awareness about condom usage among the nation’s gay men with a new campaign that features the chiseled body of poster boy James Luck.
Much in the same way that client demand has driven the search for more granular audience insights, the outdoor industry has also been making moves to meet the growing expectation of digital solutions. APN Outdoor was first to that large-format party with its digital billboard network in Auckland and now it’s set to switch on New Zealand’s largest high-resolution digital billboard at Auckland Airport in December. PLUS: Two new screens coming to ASB Showgrounds.
APN Outdoor recently commissioned research consultancy Millward Brown to undertake what has been called the “largest outdoor media study” of its kind in the Australasian market. Millward Brown found that outdoor and television advertising were the best performers in terms of ad recall, with 82 percent of respondents saying they recalled seeing ads in these channels.
While the rest of the world is intent on trying to come to grips with what the digital world offers, Ikea seems satisfied in sticking with the comfort of the conventional. This was seen recently when the high-end furniture company re-imagined its annual catalogue as a state-of-the art bookbook. But working in a conventional channel doesn’t always imply simplicity. Recently, in an effort to celebrate the opening of its 30th store in France, Ikea constructed a nine-metre-high climbing wall in Clermont-Ferrand.
Out-of-home (OOH) advertising providers Big Picture, Go Outdoor and Bacbou have consolidated their billboard and bus assets to form a new company called Go Media.
Vodafone has collaborated with Image Centre-owned* digital media agency Ngage and APN Outdoor to launch a series of interactive LED billboards that members of the public will be able to engage with via their mobile phones. The content displayed on each of the three billboards, currently on display in Ponsonby, Eden Terrace and Parnell, is delivered in real time via Vodafone’s machine-to-machine technology, which negates the need for additional cabling and infrastructure.
It seems that unconventionality extends beyond the title of iSite Media’s head of freshness Rupert Fenton. To celebrate the company’s update of its ‘Highly Targeted Outdoor’ offering, Fenton took the bizarre step of undergoing a Botox treatment in a quirky move that coincides with the announcement that the company has recently added the latest census data to its award-winning tool.
As part of the ‘History Will Be Made’ campaign in the lead up to the Commonwealth Games, Sky TV and DDB have fully customised a container to house an actual running track where punters can measure themselves against past glories.
The Outdoor Media Association of NZ (OMANZ) has reported another period of growth for the Out of Home industry, with gross media revenue for Q1 increasing by 2.3 percent over the same period in 2013, reaching $15.8 million for the quarter. Plus: the industry’s steps to solve the measurement problem.
New Zealand enjoyed a 60 percent success rate in the Outdoor category at Cannes as three of the five entries shortlisted picked up awards at the festival. DDB’s ‘#BringDowntheKing’, FCB’s ‘Bottled Walkman’ and Colenso BBDO’s ‘Smartphone Line’ all won the approval of the judging panel—leaving the Kiwi contingent with smiles and a trio of bronze lions.
Five Kiwi entries from five different agencies have made it through to the shortlist stage in the outdoor category at Cannes this year, with FCB, Whybin\TBWA, DDB, Saatchi & Saatchi/ApolloNation and Colenso BBDO all still in contention for Lions.
The billboard seems to be a growing darling of marketing and this year, for the first time ever, outdoor entries at the Cannes Lions overtook the number of press submissions (5660 outdoor entries vs. 5007 press entries). And while the majority are still static and passive, some of the more progressive outdoor executions aim to inspire more interactivity, both in real life and, increasingly, online. And Saatchi & Saatchi has gone down this road, setting a manuka billboard on fire to launch Sealord’s new hot-smoked salmon.
By 2020 the number of things connected to the internet is expected to be around 40 billion and less than 20 percent of those will be smartphones, tablets or PCs. The data those things gather aims to make our lives easier or, in the case of a company like Nest, more efficient. And Cisco has shown that the internet of things can also be applied to outdoor advertising.
Humans can’t seem to resist pushing buttons. And Beck’s and Shine’s Playable Posters, created as part of the brand’s sponsorship of NZ Music Month, tapped into that with a great example of old and new coming together to create some interactivity in the real world. And it’s just released a clip showing some of the reactions and remixes.
It has been talked about for years—and experimented with from time to time—but, in what could be seen as the opposite of pull my finger, mall wanderers who push a button on a billboard will get to sample the smell of homemade cooking as part of a new campaign by oOh! Media and TVNZ to promote the new season of My Kitchen Rules Australia. PLUS: the numbers for the show’s first week.
Last year, Beck’s and Shine created the playable Edison bottle—and they were nominated for a One Show pencil in the Intellectual Property and Products category for their trouble. And, to celebrate NZ Music Month and the Lion brand’s sponsorship of it, they’ve taken that idea one step further with what they’re calling “the world’s first Playable Posters”.
There are plenty of rules around the advertising of cigarettes in New Zealand. And this one breaks them all. At least it would if it was a real ad and not a joke based on a fellatio pun.
APN is extending its network of digital billboards with four new sites around inner city Auckland to launch in August. It’s also got big plans for new options at Auckland International Airport when it takes over those sites in November.
New Zealand is in line for a 1500-strong network of out of home mobile interactive sites thanks to Adshel and joint venture partner Clear Channel Outdoor. The sites, to include bus stops and free standing units in metropolitan centres, let mobile users get interactive brand messages via near field communication or QR code.
The ASA’s 2013 ad spend figures showed that while TV continues to reign supreme, its time at the top might be coming to an end as the interactive category continues its trend of strong year-on-year growth. Updated with comments from OMANZ, MediaWorks Radio and NZ post.
Guy Williams has literally become the (disembodied) face of responsible drinking in New Zealand as part the second stage of DraftFCB’s ‘Say Yeah, Nah’ campaign from last year. Updated with comments from Guy Williams on why he decided to participate in the campaign.
The creative agency True has collaborated with Adshel and the mobile application business StQry (pronounced story) to turn Britomart concourse into an ad-hoc gallery for World of WearableArt (WOW) by putting up 22 large, photographic artworks, which have been carefully chosen from ‘WearableArt,’ a new book that celebrates the WOW Awards Show.
Christchurch Airport is no longer the sole airport listed in APN Outdoor New Zealand’s ledger, because the company has just announced that it has won the Auckland Airport account.
Adshel has unveiled a new summer appeal poster based on Colenso BBDO’s idea that won the Creative Challenge in 2012. The new poster was initially meant to employ DraftFCB’s winning concept from last year’s competition, but the agency could not complete the poster in time for the summer appeal. Fortunately, Running with Scissors (the agency that currently holds the Surf Life Saving account) stepped in to update Colenso’s concept.
Quarterly statistics released by the Outdoor Media Association of New Zealand indicate strong revenue growth figures for the out-of-home advertising category. And APN Outdoor will be hoping it grows further, because it has just launched a new, smaller billboard package that will enable brands to book ad space at ten prime locations for two weeks at a time.
Some saw BNZ’s EmotionScan campaign as a cynical marketing gimmick. Others saw it as smart and relatively interesting marketing ploy to get Kiwis thinking about their money. And others still thought it was a bit of both. But whatever your thoughts, there’s no doubt the technology has caught the attention of plenty of punters and no more so than in Britomart, where a special Adshel with an interactive LCD touch screen programmed with the special software saw more than 5,000 humans front up for a financial face-reading, one of the highest levels of interaction seen for an Adshel Ignite campaigns.
Digital screens and mobile technology offer a range of new creative opportunities for the outdoor industry and Johnson & Johnson-owned brand Neutrogena has employed the services of a special hi-tech Adshel in Auckland that takes photos of punters, does a bit of whizzbangery and spits out an image that makes them look younger.
iSite recently launched its new highly targeted outdoor media planning service. And in an effort to show it off to media agencies and marketing professionals, its new agency The Business took a very literal approach to the concept of shooting an ad.