Farewell, Basil, and au revoir
Ogilvy ECD Basil Christensen has decided to pack it in in favour of retiring in the south of France. He’s the other half of Damon “Rock The Tutu” O’Leary – the pair have been jointly heading up the big O’s creative department since the departure of Jeremy Taine last year. “I’ve been making ads for over 25 years and the time’s come to do something different. I’m looking forward to doing bugger all for six months before I decide what to do next!” Mr Christensen said. Mr O’Leary: “I now have free holiday accommodation in France.” Excellent.
Ad Hoc Book Club – get your geek on
Speaking of Ogilvy, the winners of our giveaway last week of O-centric book The King of Madison Avenue are (in no particular order): Trent Emery, Daniel Barnes, Josh Lancaster, Fiona Woolley and Miles Gandy. You lot should’ve received your tome in the mail by now. If you are keen to read the title, you can join the inaugural Ad Hoc Book Club by emailing adhoc@nbr.co.nz and putting your name on the list to read my review copy. Book club, say wot! Terribly geeky, isn’t it? The venerable David MacGregor and I hatched the plan over a cheeky OJ at Media7 the other night. He’s first on the list for the book, but he assures me he’s a speedy reader. By the way, David, I don’t have your email address, or your postal address for that matter, so send forth an electronic communication at your convenience.
Milking it
Speaking of dairy products (we weren’t, actually, but did you see that? I just snuck it in there and you hardly noticed), Anchor has a new campaign courtesy of Colenso. View it here. There are online ads, TVCs, print and billboards, and it’s all pegged on the idea of speedy delivery: “Fastest is the freshest and the freshest tastes the best.”
Game on
Saatchi & Saatchi has done a TVC for Telecom, Pacman-style. View it here. ECD Dylan Harrison: “We wanted the idea to ignite customers’ imaginations and entertain the possibilities of what you could do with 2500 ½ cent texts. The Telecom network is really fast and because you can text any mobile network, we coordinated a real-life game of Pac Man. It’s a great little demo.”
Ease up on the drink!
A friend in the UK spotted DraftFCB’s ALAC campaign “Ease up on the drink” on Te Interweb the other day, and wants to know if Tui has done “the obvious.” Somehow I doubt it, but what a cheeky prospect.
Goldstein, you thief!
ASB stole Y&R’s pitch goodies, asserts creative head Vaughn Davis on his blog. “Earlier this year I was visited by a crowd from ASB,” Mr Davis writes. “They were looking for a new advertising agency at the time and as part of the presentation I showed them a few directions their brand could take. One of them included a couple of oddball ideas about social media. One that stuck in my mind was the thought that ASB should open a branch on Facebook. Which they did, yesterday. Clearly ASB is a better judge of personalities than ideas, because I never heard from them again about becoming their advertising agency. It’s nice to see the Facebook branch has gone ahead though, and overall I think they’ve done a pretty good job of it.”
Don't care, Foursquare
More on the writing front. Bullet PR ammunition consultant Alex Erasmus has penned a blog post about Twitter and how it’s going to save the world what PR consultants need to be aware of. “I don’t understand why people link their Twitter feed to their YouTube activities," Mr Erasmus writes. "I personally have zero interest in whether someone has ‘liked’ a YouTube video and don’t want it in my news feed. I also don’t want to know where people have just ‘checked in’ using Foursquare. And I really don’t care if they’ve just become the mayor, a ‘Super User’ or if they are there on their own, with two others or an army of 10,000 social media aficionados.” Hear, hair. I ran into a social media bloke while having a meeting with a couple of marketing folk recently. They spouted off this very emotion about the waste of space created by the aforementioned social media bloke and his Foursquare and YouTube whatsits. “Having an online debate around a topic in public is great, so long as people don’t use the virtual wall of their computer to be more vitriolic than is normally necessary," Mr Erasmus continues. "It’s an ongoing joke that social media, and Twitter in particular, is centered on people informing others about information like what they are having for lunch. Unfortunately, this is increasingly true. We should think about what we put online because it’s more permanent than what we say in real life. Also, the less we consider what we put online, the further social media moves away from actually making the world a better connected place.”
Designworks goes south
Designworks has opened an office in Christchurch for the first time after growth in its South Island business. The agency is known for masterminding Air New Zealand’s speedy check-in terminals, Skycouch, and work for Telecom (OK, who doesn’t? Is there anyone left in the country who isn’t working on Telecom? Speak up now!) and Monteith’s. It’ll open the office next month to service clients such as Silver Fern Farms and AMI Insurance.
Filthy rumour
On an almost final note, rumour has it that certain ad folk have paid me (or offered to pay me) to remove certain comments on certain blog posts. Not true. No cash has exchanged hands, thankyouverymuch, Ad Hoc cannot be bribed. (We can, however, be lured places with small morsels of chocolate brownie and peanut butter. Keep that in mind.)