Claudia Macdonald, managing director of Mango and founding member of the CAANZ Marcomms Leadership Group, was the first New Zealander to be a juror for the Cannes PR Lions in June. Here she reflects on the experience and what she learnt.
justONE gets its mitts on some prized goods, bcg2 grabs a coffee in Australia and Mango adds its name to Tourism Fiji’s growing agency roster.
Haystac has been selected as Tourism Victoria’s New Zealand PR agency after a rigorous competitive pitch process that began in March. Expressions of interest from over 30 agencies resulted in 11 tender submissions, six shortlisted hopefuls and finally, three pitch presentations.
Last year, we wrote a story about SodaStream’s The Cage, a global PR campaign that aimed to draw attention to the effects of packaged soft drinks on the environment. But the campaign has earned the ire of one of its targets, Coca-Cola, with the South African outpost issuing a cease and desist letter to SodaStream demanding its bottles be removed from The Cage at the Johannesburg airport because it claims to own the used bottles.
Kelly Bennett, the founder and managing partner of Eleven PR New Zealand, has been tapped on the shoulder and will lead the expansion of brand activation, experiential and PR services for the TBWA\ network throughout Asia Pacific.
Beer porn and students emerged as the big winners at the annual PRINZ awards over the weekend, with the Student Volunteer Army and the WilliamsWarn personal brewer—the best beer porn you’ll see all day—taking joint supreme honours.
At last, a handbook for PR at its best. Spin was turned into an art form by former Tony Blair acolyte, Alistair Campbell, during the second Gulf War. So it’s been a surprisingly long time before someone finally codified this essential PR discipline into a ‘best practice’ manual. And …
The Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) has announced the finalists in its annual industry awards, with category winners and the Supreme Award winner announced in Auckland on Friday May 11 following the close of the upcoming annual conference.
It’s a big bad dynamic media world out there, one in which it’s harder than ever to make a splash and those who put a step wrong are instantly pulled up. To that end, PRINZ is hosting Our Space Our Place – reshaping communities, a conference that’s all about communicating with shifting audiences on-the-ground and online.
All the talk about Westpac at the moment is centred on which agency/agencies it decides to work with. But it might not need too much help with the PR, because Westpac NZ’s media relations team walked away with the Gold Award for Campaign of the Year at the 2011 Asia-Pacific PR Awards for the ‘Richie McCaw Chopper Challenge’.
More than 190 people from across the marketing community heard from an impressive list of speakers about how creative PR ideas can achieve business goals during the International PR Forum put on by the CAANZ Marcomms Leadership Group in Auckland last Wednesday. So here’s a rundown on all the good stuff.
Last year, Droga5 launched an online trailer for a campaign created for Fiveight, the local distributor of Turtle Beach, a manufacturer of high-end headsets and gaming gear. The clip showed an avid—and fairly cocky—Kiwi gamer who had agreed to head to Iraq to see what a real warzone was like and a fair bit of controversy erupted after its launch, which meant most didn’t get a chance to see it reach its denouement. But the full version is out there—although now under the Fiveight name—and there’s an interesting twist to the tale of the Kiwi gamer known as StatiC.
Back in 2008, swarthy old seadogs Roger Holmes and Jamie Duff ditched their fancy London day jobs and returned to New Zealand to launch Stolen rum. Since then, the sugary nectar has won a few awards, added names like Peter Gordon, Nick Worthingon, Brent Smart and James Hurman to the investor list and, through a combination of savvy PR and branding and a good product, is now stocked in a number of classy bars, swanky restaurants and luxury lodges. And, to launch a new rum variety called SX9 that’s aimed squarely at the hospitality industry, it’s taken a leaf out of the 42 Below book with a potentially controversial campaign enlisting the services of local mules to help smuggle its illegal contraband into Australia.
After a one-year stint as executive director at Ogilvy, former National Party president and PR recruiter Michelle Boag has kicked off her newest venture, a strategic communications company with Cedric Allan, a former national president of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand, and Andrew Pirie, who worked as the strategic communications advisor for Auckland Airport and spent more than a decade overseas as the Asia Pacific head for global PR firm Weber Shandwick.
Global integrated PR and communications agency Hotwire has rebranded its New Zealand operation Creo to bring it under the family name.
As part of its efforts to push the barrow of ideas-led PR and discuss its impact on business in the modern world, the CAANZ Marcomms Leadership Group is putting on the Re-imagining PR event in Auckland on 21 March and bringing the brains behind the Cannes 2011 PR Grand Prix winning NAB Break Up campaign and the PR Gold Lion winning Bundaberg Watermark campaign, as well as Lynne Anne Davis from Asia Pacific PR agency of the year, Fleishman Hillard Asia Pacific, to New Zealand. We know it’s easy to come up with examples of PR gone wrong, but if you post an example of good PR that has helped a business or person, you could get yourself a ticket to the event worth $290.
The Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) has opened its annual awards competition by announcing a newly named award after long-standing chief executive Paul Dryden, who passed away in March 2011.
The conversation economy just keeps getting bigger—and, as the regular social media fails show, scarier. So to help marketers benefit from it rather than get slapped by it, the CAANZ Marcomms Leadership Group (MLG) is following up the sell-out New Rules of Brand Engagement event last year with Re-Imagining PR: How ideas-led PR can help business, a forum featuring the brains behind the Cannes 2011 PR Grand Prix winner National Australia Bank’s Break Up campaign, PR Gold Lion winner Bundaberg’s Watermark, as well as Lynne Anne Davis from Asia Pacific PR agency of the year, Fleishman Hillard Asia Pacific.
There’s been a bit happening in the aviation scene lately: Air New Zealand has shifted to DraftFCB (and Saatchi’s), the nation’s alpha chief executive Rob Fyfe is hanging up his captain’s uniform in December, there are rumours of Emirates changes afoot and Qantas has just announced the appointment of Mango as its public relations agency in New Zealand after a competitive pitch.
As brands try to rise above the rabble and somehow etch themselves into the minds of consumers in a positive fashion, experiential marketing—and the associated brand generosity—is becoming much more prevalent. And, as the multi-faceted Great Pascall Road Trip campaign shows, these experiential elements are increasingly becoming the glue that helps bind major promotions together.
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.
As we’ve seen in the lead-up up to the Rugby World Cup, PR is very important—and, at times, very tough to control. But it’s not just about crisis management or pushing products. So in an effort to show what PR is actually all about—and how it can be used effectively—the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) has released the first ever New Zealand Public Relations Case Studies eBook, which tells the tales of 26 PRINZ Award winners and entrants from 2011.
First Orcon and DraftFCB got a serve from HeyDay for getting the date the internet was born in New Zealand wrong in its recent TVC. And now it’s in the eye of a social media storm after its new Genius all-in-one broadband/home phone product proved too popular for its own good, leading to a host of jilted customers venting their displeasure with the telco.
As we’ve seen recently, a dose of bad PR can bring big brands to their knees fairly quickly. But when used for good rather than evil, it can add momentum to marketing, as Claudia Macdonald wrote last week. And to show the best examples of PR-led campaigns from around the world, the CAANZ Marcomms Leadership Group (MLG) has chosen its top ten from the past two years.
Journalism is dying a slow and painful death. At least, that was the argument put forward by award-winning UK reporter Nick Davies in his 2009 book, Flat Earth News. Well, I disagree entirely.
It’s taken a while but the penny finally seems to have dropped. Advertising/marketing campaigns work much better if you aim to get good public relations from the get go. Not just for the brand/product but also for the campaign itself.
The New Zealand office of Haystac opened for business in 2009 and two years on things are going rather swimmingly for the Aegis-owned PR agency, with TelstraClear, Jetstar, Sonos Electronics, Motorola and Next Generation Clubs recently joining SEEK, DB, GlaxoSmithKline, Mattel and Beehive and Premier bacon on its client list. They grow up so fast.
Last year the PR and Experiential industry—and many from outside it—got into a rather heated debate about the merits of campaign measurement and, specifically, the controversial role of AVE (advertising value equivalents) in PR measurement. Now, after running a local survey, studying global trends and listening to a range of opinions, the CAANZ Marcomms Leadership Group has developed a guideline that sets out some clear parameters for measurement and offers a list of metrics for consideration, including our old friend AVE.
In an effort to ramp up the experiential side of its comms, 2degrees recently put its PR account up for pitch. And Spark Activate came out on top, beating out a suspected list of Pead, Mango, Eleven and the incumbent Bullet.
More than 240 agency staff and marketers came together to hear the ‘New Rules of Brand Engagement’ from an impressive list of speakers in Auckland on Tuesday. And with marketers increasingly trying to create memorable experiences for consumers and get the humans talking about their brands, PR and experiential are increasingly being employed to achieve those goals, as the results of the CAANZ Marcomms Leadership Group survey shows.