NZ Marketing March 2017

Editor In 2010, three-time World Champion surfer Andy Irons was found dead in a hotel room and news quickly spread that he had succumbed to Dengue fever. The problem with this coverage was that the reason given for his death wasn’t even remotely true; it was simply a convenient sugar-coating sent out to specialinterest journalists in a press release by Irons’ main sponsor, Billabong. Months later, the toxicology report would reveal cardiac arrest as the primary cause of death, and “acute mixed drug ingestion” as the secondary. At this point, it would be fair to wonder what relevance a seven-year-old story about the surf industry has to do with a trade magazine focused on the marketing niche. Well, as it turns out, every industry has a fair few Billabongs that…

FREDDIE COLTART Swedish flavour New Zealanders love getting outside with a backyard game, and Colenso BBDO senior creative Freddie Coltart and his brothers are injecting some Swedish culture into the action with their Kubb Brothers business. How did Kubb Brothers come about? My brother George was at music festival in Europe and saw some Swedes playing a game of kubb and he asked if he could join in. When he came back to Hawke’s Bay for Christmas, he introduced it to myself, my other brother Sam, and my father Andy. So, we built our own set in Andy’s woodworking shed. Out of curiosity we googled to see what a professional, quality kubb set looks like. It seemed it didn’t exist. So we figured we’d love to be the ones to…

When and where did you work in advertising? In South Africa I worked for Caxton Newspaper Group as its advertising manager for twelve years. When I moved to NZ I first worked for Ogilvy for exactly a year and then got approached by Y&R to go work there, which I did for three years before being made redundant during the recession. Then I contracted to Twenty for six weeks, before leaving advertising completely (hopefully!) for comedy. How did this turn into a career in comedy? When I worked at Ogilvy, we worked very long hours, we always used to have such a good laugh that my colleagues used to say; ‘you should do comedy!’ and I thought they were out of their fucking minds. But when I left to go…

Where did the idea to create the TV ad come from? We couldn’t escape the constant stream of news surrounding the (then) upcoming American election. It was hard to take, sitting on the sidelines. The fate of the world was up in the air and the world didn’t have a say. Without our own vote to cast, or without telling people who to vote for, there was only one thing we could do: remind Americans how important their vote was. It seemed like a fitting goal. In the 2012 U.S. election, 32.8 percent of eligible adult voters didn’t vote. The idea was to run a TV ad completely free from bias—paid for by the world—encouraging Americans to vote. Can you explain the crowdsourcing process? The plan was for the crowdfunding…

How did High Road come about? Around 2006 I wanted to find out if I could write a TV show. So I knocked up a six x 22-minute show called High Road which involved a few story lines, and one of those story lines was about a DJ called Terry Huffer. Fast-forward to 2012 and I watched a web series called High Maintenance from New York, which inspired me to try this new fancy thing called digital media. So I pulled a couple of scenes out of the big script and Mark (Mitchinson) and I and some awesome techies went down to the Piha campground and shot them. That become the first episode. Everyone who worked on it loved it, so I pulled the rest of the Terry Huffer scenes…

STOPPRESS COMMENTS The best of the bunch The second month of the year may be the shortest, but by no means was it any less eventful. DB’s latest initiative to take empty beer bottles and turn them into sand caused quite a debate on the idea’s creativity (or lack thereof). We pick out some of the best comments from the thread: “I’m glad I’m not a brand these days. How are you meant to save the world, stop child hunger, cure disease, end poverty and even make soap? Tough times. Leonardo DiCaprio needn’t worry…We’ve got this. ” - HIGHER PURPOSE “Steps to winning an award 1. Have an idea that has a ridiculous PR headline 2. Have the online media pick it up even though it doesn’t work in reality…