Table of contents for Issue 78 2024 in NZ Marketing

In 2024, Federation is an agency that’s leading transformation and defying downturn trends. One of New Zealand’s most wellestablished independent advertising agencies, it’s a company that’s built a reputation for continually zigging in a zagging industry. In recent months, it has announced a string of senior appointments, including awarded creative leader Brad Collett as Chief Creative Officer; internationally recognised Dan Bye, a double-global Effie winner, as Chief Strategy Officer; and the promotion of Cambridge University sustainability-qualified Olly Walker-Boden to the role of Managing Director. Federation views 2024 as the shake-out year for many brands and organisations – a year in which economic downturn intersects neatly with unprecedented opportunity via rapid strategy acceleration and transformational change that fully optimises future results. CEO Sharon Henderson says they know a thing or two…

There’s an indisputable trend towards New Zealand-owned creative agencies thriving, despite the dominance of global networks. Local agencies tend to be more agile and adaptable, allowing them to quickly respond to client needs and changing market trends. This is particularly valuable in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. “There’s been a definite trend over the past five to 10 years of larger clients moving their business to smaller, more integrated agencies,” Bastion Creative’s Managing Director at Bastion Shine, Toby Sellers, tells NZ Marketing. “There are several reasons for this, but the big one is diversity of thought and a more nimble approach to idea generation and delivery. “Indies aren’t bound by the same rigid processes and financial structures imposed by the global holding companies, and have been successful in attracting top talent…

In an age in which the validity of information is contested and scepticism runs high, the significance of factual accuracy has never been greater. Collaborating with global health leaders CEPI, Gavi, UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO), New Zealandbased creative and technology studio Daylight has launched an ambitious endeavour to document the lessons and revelations of the global pandemic. Named The Delivery, the initiative is a digital time capsule preserving the findings of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, continuing the progress of the world’s health systems and preparing future generations, should they face another global health threat. Having already been viewed in more than 176 countries, The Delivery offers an engaging journey through this vital data. It includes photo essays from the front line, insightful analyses and detailed case studies…

So how did TE&M come about? Martin Yeoman: Having long-standing careers in the local advertising industry, we’ve bumped into and worked with each other in different capacities over the years. We’ve partnered on numerous client projects and realised there was something special about our complementary skill sets, shared values as local indies and natural synergy in our approaches to client work. Initial collaborations yielded great results for clients, which drove us to develop a collaborative partnership we’re calling TE&M. We remain two independent businesses but join forces in partnership when required to leverage our combined expertise to offer clients a full-service creative and media offering. How do you see the cultural alignment between the two agencies playing a role in TE&M’s success? Yeoman: The bond between The Enthusiasts and Momentum…

These days, creativity alone just isn’t enough. Clients need to see ideas lined up alongside a commercial strategy, but not in the way some agencies are thinking. “Yeah, yeah,” they say, “the effectiveness guys are all over the ECD.” That sounds like a fast-track to disunity and a lack of cohesion, maybe best avoided. Multiplied was formed with a clear vision from day one: to be a commerce agency at which creativity works in unison with strategic effectiveness principles. They call it a ‘beautiful collision’, but this collision could be a train wreck were it not for the allimportant cohesive tack they take. It may be an uncommon approach, but it’s working for them – and it’s working for the local and international brands they partner with. Established in 2021,…

Headquartered in Hamilton, with more than 1,300 employees in 15 countries and selling to nearly 160, Gallagher Group is one of Aotearoa’s largest privately held companies. Ask the average New Zealander about it and they might mention the electric fence famously invented by its founder Bill Gallagher in the late 1930s. Gallagher Animal Management still does fencing (electric and virtual), along with a range of other on-farm tech solutions around farm management, animal health and water monitoring, but some Kiwis may not be aware there’s also Gallagher Security, a security systems specialist that accounts for about half of the Gallagher business and is growing rapidly. “We’ve been around for 85 years, and the security arm of Gallagher has been around for 35 of those,” says Gallagher Security Chief Marketing Officer,…

In the aftermath of Taylor Swift’s absence from New Zealand leaving fans disappointed, questions have arisen about whether the country possesses a collection of venues that are fit to host major events and concerts. Although Aotearoa boasts a rich sporting culture and vibrant arts and entertainment scene, the lack of concert venues with a capacity of 60,000 or more often leaves us overlooked by major international tours. We’ve successfully hosted events like the 2011 Rugby World Cup and the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, but the future of such events is uncertain here without larger stadiums. The debate over a new main stadium in Auckland has intensified, with a panel set up in September 2023 to evaluate long-term options and provide non-binding recommendations to the council. Initially, eight contenders were…

MARKETERS WITH LIMITED BUDGETS AND RESOURCES CAN OFTEN RULE THEMSELVES OUT OF ACCESSING GOOD STRATEGIC ADVICE, CREATIVE AND INEVITABLY GREAT RESULTS. HOW DOES GOOD GRAVY FILL THAT GAP? Caring too much about my clients’ businesses was the bane of my bigagency life. I’d been on the end of too many internal conversations about ‘over-servicing’ clients, but I’m sorry, I think that’s simply BS. I don’t believe you can get the best for your clients if you’re not 100 percent invested in their challenges, brands and budgets as if they were your own, so I decided to set up Good Gravy. At Good Gravy, we fill the gap by caring about our clients and their results. We place the marketer, their audience and their brand at the centre of our focus.…

There’s an element of ‘back to the future’ in the growth of New Zealand’s Out of Home (OOH) market in 2024. In a world of pop-up ads, AIgenerated content and a vast array of social media platforms, the old-fashioned stick-an-ad-where-people-willsee-it approach is once again coming into its own. In a year that saw many media channels experience a decline in revenue, OOH maintained its growth trajectory, with the Out of Home Media Association of Aotearoa (OOHMAA) announcing that its members’ 2023 revenue grew by 9.4 percent year on year to $179m. There’s much more to it these days than just your traditional signs and posters. OOH might take the form of roadside billboards and street furniture, advertising on public transport and at airports, or on display screens in shopping malls.…

THE CASE FOR CONTENT-FIRST THINKING Content Director at Digitas New Zealand, Chris Brunner, addresses the power of content-first thinking in the era of information technology. Content has long been the engine powering businesses to succeed in the information age. As we enter the ‘intelligence age’, heralded by democratised, generative AI, content quality and structure are more important than ever. By putting content at the forefront of the creative process, brands can ensure substance is built into every marketing effort. Because content is everywhere and required by all, content-first thinking unifies stakeholders around tangible outputs. Brands and their agency partners often take a channel-by-channel approach to content; one group thinks about advertising, another thinks about the website, another thinks about customer communications. We have a habit of rushing to the outputs…

HOW ARE YOU FEELING ABOUT THE NEXT CHAPTER FOR INDEPENDENT AGENCIES? I feel positive about the opportunities that’ll be presented to agencies like Charm in the coming months. Charm continues to remain steadfast in its dedication to excellence for our clients, and each other. We’re not unique in the challenges we face as a business, but when things get tough, we double down for our clients. Recently, this has included stepping into a marketing support role for our client Kora. When a key team member went on maternity leave, we immediately picked up this role. The handover was seamless and a relief to their CEO because of our deep understanding of the business. We really are ready to support our clients in any way they need. WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED…

The quest for growth is not easy. Markets are mature, customers are fickle, competition is fierce and new entrants can be more innovative and have a lower cost to entry. Retail is essentially everywhere. To win in it is to create a memorable customer experience that anticipates their needs and behavioural shifts. Failure to adapt leads to loss of customers or loss of margin. Whether you’re talking the convergence of the physical to digital, brand identity to product management, or creative ideation to operational optimisation, it all means retailers are faced with everyday challenges that many are struggling to solve. That’s where RX Group comes in. Previously known as RetailX, RX is a multidisciplinary retail practice that works alongside businesses that want to re-energise and reframe their business to grow.…

Instagram is dead! Zucks has killed Meta. These were the comments coming in everywhere in late 2021, after Mark announced Facebook would be renamed Meta. Its stock price plummeted and confidence in its ability to turn things around was waning. At the same time, TikTok was on a meteoric rise, gaining popularity in all areas of society and no longer just an app for young people to dance to. Realising this was the future, companies like ours started doubling down into TikTok. Short-form, vertical video wasn’t going anywhere and we needed to capitalise on it. Every company on the planet was trying to figure out how to show up on TikTok and stopped looking at how they did the same on Instagram. For millennials, it was the hardest. Instagram was…

How would you describe your creative process when coming up with fresh ideas for clients? Nothing beats the excitement of a new brief, because you’re about to embark on a mini act of discovery, but you need to be clear on the problem, level of ambition and any ‘watch-outs’ first – clarity you only gain from open discussions. That’s where you get all the good clues. Then I’m free to go away and make a complete mess. I usually fill pages and pages with half-thoughts, insights, scribbles, lines and scenarios for a few days, and try to exhaust every possible angle. Most of it’s complete rubbish, of course, but that’s the point, really. After that, I go back and start editing to find out what’s worth building on, but it’s…

TREND 1: IT’S TIME TO BE REAL Having grown up with the internet, Gen Zers are considered digital natives, unfamiliar with a world before the world wide web. Since they were born into this environment, they know social media typically involves the sharing of the highest highs but never the lowest lows. After years of being exposed to picture-perfect Instagram feeds, Gen Z is flipping the switch and using social media as a place in which to be their most authentic. BeReal took off in 2023, and as its name suggests, is all about being real. More than 20 million users get a random notification from the app every day, prompting them to take a picture in the following two minutes of themselves ‘being real’. “As Gen Z, we have…

Like many businesses, the catalyst for reinvention at Bastion Shine came in 2020, when Covid shut down the country. Realising the post-pandemic world would look quite different to the one before it, successful indie ad agency Shine made some bets. Today, it’s clear those bets were the right ones. Back then, though, it was far less certain. “Our first conclusion was that things would be tighter than ever, from an advertising-budget perspective,” says Bastion Shine founder, Simon Curran. “We figured, as history shows, that ad budgets would be the first to be cut, despite all the evidence suggesting that was a bad move for business. In almost the same breath, though, we recognised that organisations would still be required by boards and shareholders to drive successful outcomes. In short, they’d…

In today’s hyperconnected world, consumers are hyper-discerning. For marketers, that means a key aim is to provide a holistic brand experience. To do this well, it’s crucial that brands and marketers understand and tap into consumer preferences when looking to craft better user experiences. To help gain a deeper understanding of consumer preferences leading into 2024, Merkle surveyed 2,100 consumers and 810 CX professionals from 18 countries across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific as part of this year’s CX Imperatives study, and found six crucial imperatives that are no less than money-making insights for marketers. What do they mean for businesses in Aotearoa, and how can we harness them to ensure we’re getting the right strategies in place in 2024? Let’s delve a little deeper. THE 3 CS For…

With the world at our fingertips, agencies across the motu are tasked with competing for people’s attention on not only a local level, but also a global scale. Today’s creatives must come up with innovations that are several steps ahead of the international playing field. Fortunately, Aaliyah Wattie has never been short of ideas. “I fell in love with being a creative because it’s creative and I’m creative,” she says. Wattie’s innate talent caught the eye of independent agency YoungShand, and now as their Junior Art Director, she serves as their Gen Z eyes and ears, providing new and unique ideas for their clients’ campaigns. Of the work she’s done since she began at YoungShand, she says she’s proudest of her contribution to the social media campaign for the Burnett…

WHAT IS INSIDERS? Insiders was founded by myself and Craig Whitehead, two of New Zealand’s most experienced advertising leaders, with an unparalleled specialism in the world of retail communications. Over our – ahem – 25-plus years in the industry, we’ve helped our clients create some of Aotearoa’s most-loved, effective and iconic work, all while building New Zealand’s most successful-ever retailspecialist strategic, creative and production agency. WHAT’S BEHIND IT? When we left the big agency world and the global network a few years back, we saw that the traditional model was broken. The CMOs we were speaking to were needing more collaboration, more in-depth understanding, more agility and speed, more retail and acquisition specialism, more savings and more flexible arrangements – all with no compromise on the quality of the strategic…

Between the action-packed gridiron and the halftime show, this year’s Super Bowl proved it’s the equivalent of the Oscars for brands and marketers. As fans cheered the Chiefs’ overtime victory and swooned over Taylor Swift’s fairytale moment with its player Travis Kelce, marketers were glued to a different game, one that was playing for eyeballs. With almost 125 million people watching, it’s no wonder a prized spot in the ‘big game’ is every marketer’s dream. Although an ad during the halftime show is out of reach for most brands (coming with a whopping US$7 million price tag), the Super Bowl is a goldmine of marketing strategies that can be adapted and scaled to suit even the leanest of budgets. IT’S GIVING CULTURAL RELEVANCE First and foremost is the importance of…

For many a young New Zealander, Rhythm & Vines is the highlight of the Kiwi summer. The three-day musical extravaganza held in a Gisborne vineyard attracts around 88,000 attendees each year. Unlike its contemporaries, Rhythm & Vines is seen as something of an It-festival, with many past attendees considering their experience unforgettable. Naturally, brands up and down the country flock to be associated with it. This involves more than just slapping a logo on the side of the stage and calling it a day, though – it’s about creating an experience that aligns with attendees through brand activations. But how effective are these activations exactly? Head of Marketing at Live Nation Entertainment and Rhythm & Vines, Kyle Bell, says what makes this festival unique is the time frame. “It’s a…

Warner Bros Discovery rocked the media industry in late February, when it announced that its news service Newshub is set to close as part of a proposed restructure of its free-to-air business in Aotearoa. The 6pm Newshub bulletin has been a nightly staple of New Zealand television for more than 30 years, since it began as Three News back in 1989. Days after the Newshub announcement, TVNZ dropped a bomb of its own. After reporting a net loss of $16.7 million for the six months to December 31, 2023, the broadcaster revealed plans to axe iconic consumer affairs show Fair Go and investigative current affairs show Sunday, along with the Midday and Tonight news bulletins. The core challenge faced by mainstream media companies is falling revenue from their traditional channels,…

Ad Net Zero launched in New Zealand in August last year with a five-point action plan designed to support the decarbonisation of developing, producing and running advertising in Aotearoa: 1. Reduce operational carbon emissions.2. Reduce emissions from advertising production.3. Reduce emissions from media planning and buying.4. Reduce emissions through awards and from events.5. Harness advertising’s power to support behaviour change. Ad Net Zero recently released an industry roadmap that outlines what will be done for each point. For the fifth action, behaviour change, one of the key components is around working with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) on updated greenwashing standards. Head of Sustainability at the Commercial Communications Council, Jennifer Gunn, says Ad Net Zero’s a collaborative process. “We’re getting the industry together to talk through greenwashing concerns, educate people…