New Zealand’s Cannes Contenders: despite a lean year some big chances from our Kiwi cousins
How will NZ perform at Cannes this year? In the lead up to the Festival, Campaign Brief showcases the work we hope will impress the judges…
Publicis Mojo
On October 5, New Zealand suffered its worst ever maritime environmental disaster when the MV Rena cargo ship ran aground and spilled 350 tonnes of oil into the Bay of Plenty, killing 20,000 birds. The New Zealand government has opened its waters to foreign oil companies for deep sea oil prospecting. They promised that it would be safe and that they could control any environmental impact from an oil spill. But if they couldn’t control a small spill on the surface of the water, how could they ever hope to stop a massive spill 3kms below it?
Special Group
Smirnoff ran a campaign that asked NZ’ers to submit their best ideas for an extraordinary night out. They chose the best ones, put up the money and help but gave the winners just 1 week to pull the event off. Everything was filmed and turned into a TV series: The Smirnoff Night Project. The series was a critical hit (Sunday Star Times, The Listener and stuff.co.nz all had Smirnoff Night Project as ‘Pick of the Week’ ) and it doubled the TV station’s viewership when it aired.
Special Group
New Zealand is a rugby mad nation, and during the Rugby World Cup the game was everywhere – across nearly all New Zealand media, 24/7. To get over the fact that they had no rugby content on their schedule whatsoever, channel FOUR positioned themselves as ‘The Home of NOT Rugby’ – a destination where non-rugby lovers could enjoy the latest award winning TV shows. It worked, over the RWC every other mainstream channel lost share – whilst FOUR’s viewership grew by 10%.
DDB
Steinlager always believed the All Blacks would win the Rugby World Cup, although not being an official sponsor, they couldn’t actually mention RWC. All they had was a white can, but all Kiwis know its significance.
Colenso BBDO
Three new electric flavours. One extreme idea. A fully-functioning pinball machine you can skate. Become the ball in a world first skatepark, wired with sensors, sounds and lights, to score your run just like pinball. Enlisting the help of two kiwi skaters and a BMX rider, the campaign documents the build of the park leading up to the launch on 4 June 2011 with an invitational skate comp for 30 of New Zealand’s best skaters. The park was open to the public for 3 weeks until 26 June 2011.This integrated campaign also consists of a 30 sec TVC, a 30 min TV show, a website, a video blog and a “making of film” .
Colenso BBDO
By adapting the way 3D glasses work the agency was able to simultaneously project two entirely different films on the same screen. The groundbreaking project was created in partnership between FINCH and Colenso BBDO. Utilising the technology, Nic Finlayson shot two beautiful parallel stories – one of a mistreated dog who gets rescued, the other of the same dog who tragically never gets found. Before the movie cinema goers were faced with a choice: Donate and receive a yellow pair of glasses, or pay nothing and receive a red pair. That choice decided the fate of the dog on screen. The cinema experience created a powerful live demonstration of the power of a donation.
Colenso BBDO
Back in ’87 everything was big. Big hair, big sweaters and one big problem. Wine was in and beer was out. Kiwi guys pretended to like wine to fit in, but they never stopped thinking about beer. Luckily neither had Morton Coutts of DB Breweries. Morton figured if guys were drinking wine to appear more sophisticated, he’d brew a more sophisticated beer. A premium lager that was both crisp & refreshing, but still full of flavour. He called this beer Export Dry. 25 years later, guys can still say no to wine thanks to Export Dry.
Colenso BBDO
Monteith’s wanted drinkers to know that their cider contains fresh fruit, not concentrated fruit syrup like their competitors. So the agency slipped real apple tree twigs into Monteith’s cider boxes. Within a week, New Zealanders were asking for an explanation via facebook, radio and the Monteith’s call centre. After two weeks, the agency apologised for the ‘mistake’ through PR, press, patched billboards and on-pack stickers. Every apology spread the simple message: the fruit in Monteith’s cider comes from a tree, not a can.
Barnes Catmur & Friends
Hell Pizza lives up to its name in this campaign from Barnes, Catmur Auckland.
Barnes Catmur & Friends
With a small launch budget Barnes, Catmur & Friends Auckland decided that the best way of making some noise, and at the same time ensuring Boundary Road brewed a beer that people liked, was to involve consumers in the making of the beer itself. The agency ran press ads, billboard, reachblocks and online ads directing consumers to The ChosenOne.co.nz. There they would take a quick quiz to ensure that they had some knowledge of beer and, if successful, would go into the pool from which our 999 Beer tasters would be chosen. Successful applicants were couriered out a pack of three beers brewed in different styles. The tasters then entered their votes online and the beer judged the most popular is to be brewed and relea
sed as The Chosen One in August. All of the lucky Beer Tasters are to be thanked on a billboard at launch and one lucky one will receive a $6,000 micro-micro-brewery.
Clemenger BBDO
When partying down and chilling with your mates, the last thing you want to be is a killjoy. But once you consider the outcome of saying nothing to your drunken buddy who is about to drive, the grim truth unfolds. The Sweet Shop’s director Steve Ayson and Clemenger BBDO Wellington paint a charmingly real and funny image for NZTA of what it might be like to say nothing – making speaking up, the far better option.
Saatchi & Saatchi/AIM Proximity
To celebrate 60 years of Land Cruiser Toyota are launching the new FJ Cruiser in NZ. To do this they are taking the truck on an epic journey, from the top of New Zealand, to the bottom..Off Road.
Clemenger BBDO
Tired drivers are a big contributor to New Zealand road deaths, but most people think they aren’t at risk. Over New Zealand’s busiest holiday weekend, we secretly photographed each car boarding the ferry between our two main islands. During sailings, we used the photos to create personalised ads, left for people to find when they returned to their cars. As a result, thousands of people saw themselves in the ad, just as they started their road trips.
Whybin\TBWA
People donate and wear poppies as mark of respect and their contribution, influencing others contribute to. For a younger audience, social networks provided another social context for this scenario to play out. Instead of cash the agency also noted their comfort with mobile transactions thanks to the app economy. So for the 90th anniversary of the poppy, the agency proposed a something new. Just as ANZ sold poppies in-branch, why not sell virtual ones online? At anz.ac.nz users simply SMS’d their twitter names, making an instant donation donation and receiving a virtual poppy on their twitter avatar.
Whybin\TBWA
Christianity and Christmas should go together like fish and chips. But for many, the true meaning of Christmas has all but been forgotten. Whybin\TBWA was tasked with reacquainting people with this lost tradition. The agency’s solution was to create a piece of art. Resembling an oil painting, it shows The Virgin Mary at the exact moment the impossible happened. With pregnancy test in hand, she looks on in disbelieve as two small pink lines appear before her. In the true spirit of Christmas people shared the image, as did national TV networks and newspapers, spreading the story of Mary and her positive test far and wide. You can’t make people go to church, so TBWA took the church to the people.
Whybin\TBWA
To reinforce the idea that you can choose the life you want, the agency launched a campaign to embrace an active approach to life – with Sovereign as your life partner. They created an online interactive game called ‘Life’s Choice’, to allow people to explore how their lifestyle choices related to their happiness and health. A full complement of online display advertising utilizing real-time polling to allow Kiwis to discover what their choices say about them, their health and happiness, drove their audience to the site – with the added incentive of winning their share of $15,000 to spend on themselves or their family’s life. After playing the game people were able to compare scores, share their ‘achievement badges’, download their life-plans as screensavers and post their results across their social networks.
Whybin\TBWA
It’s hard for people who don’t live with MS to understand what the loss of feeling and control feels like. So the agency created a range of numbing soaps that allow people to get a feeling for what people living with MS potentially deal with on a daily basis. By adding a topical anesthetic to pH neutral soaps, we were able to replicate Parenthesis, a common numbing and tingling feeling in the hands that often accompanies the onset of more series MS symptoms. These special soap packs were sent to key media people around Auckland.
M&C Saatchi
The idea: Young people with cancer have to live with horrible memories everyday. Like the day they were diagnosed, undergoing surgery on the same night their friends were going to the school ball, or the moment they lost their best fr
iend, brother or sister. While the general public may not share the same difficulties as CanTeen members, they too have horrible memories that they’d rather not have. So M&C created a steam punk inspired Magnificent Memory Machine. One that swaps your bad memories for fantastic new ones.
M&C Saatchi
This ad shows that you can leave it too late to install smoke alarms, then asks the viewer if they could live with themselves in the same situation.