Marque my words

The days of plastering a logo on everything and expecting a return for your sponsorship investment are long gone.

How often have we seen that one-dimensional approach for sponsorships; a logo on a team shirt, a media backdrop or on the side of a car? And frequently in the company of other brands. Brand sponsorship in this form is lazy and doesn't make your competitor’s job harder. Coca-Cola GB marketing director Bobby Brittain made this comment when looking at Coke’s sponsorship of the Olympics.

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This interview is reproduced with permission from Louise Lawton from the Creative Store. 

The Creative Store is one of New Zealand's premier recruitment agencies, specialising in the Advertising, Digital, Design, Marketing and Communication industries.

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Last week we spoke about the emergence of eSports and why brands need to be involved.

eSports is competitive online gaming and its reach is massive. People can compete from their living room and fill stadiums with people who buy tickets to watch two sets of teams compete in video games against each other. Madness you say? Many of us believe Donald Trump should be committed, but that hasn’t stopped him from getting within spitting distance of the White House.

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It was thirty years ago when I got into my first computer game, but it wasn’t until I picked up a Play Station controller 10 years later that I began to understand the potential of video games.

WipeOut was the first game to use in-game advertising. Redbull was embedded into the game while The Prodigy provided the soundtrack.

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Auckland street parking is set to reach $45 per day. But there's hope yet!

Auckland is going through an infrastructure transformation that will go on for the next five years. While the future looks good, the current gridlock problems are so dire they are actually becoming world famous.

The word on the street is that Auckland City Council is about to increase the maximum daily parking limit from $15 to $45. Some may call this greedy, while others view it as a necessity. But the smart ones will see this as an opportunity to offer something new and exciting.

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Has DDB's campaign for Sky TV to promote Game of Thrones been unfairly misinterpreted as spam?

Without fail, if we’re not fast forwarding through the ads my wife and I are racing to grab the remote to mute the damn things. This morning we were discussing whether the broadcaster can measure how often ads are muted. If they knew perhaps Emily from 2 Cheap Autos would have been muzzled a long time ago.

While I wouldn’t call these sorts of ads spam, I do call them noise and visual pollution. Fortunately, unlike spam, we have the power to turn them off.

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When it comes to getting the pulse racing, the financial sector doesn’t quite cut it. Nothing says boring more than a bank trying to get me to spend money.

Whether we like to admit it or not, money makes the world go round and in terms of control, banks rule the market. But change is coming.

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New Zealand Posts business model has been sinking slowly over the past 10 years.

The drop off in letters and dwindling numbers of visitors to their retail stores has been like watching a roaring waterfall become a mere trickle.

Since the creation of Kiwibank, NZ Post’s profits have slowly eroded because of the shrinking market for Post’s offering and as they’ve poured money into their subsidiary.

But the cost to NZ Post has been greater as it has failed to redirect resources to create a culture of innovation in response to the very real threat of digital disruption.

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Peer-to-peer vs Banks: who innovates the most?

The following is a true story, it dates back a few years and I still haven't found a solution.

I'm meeting with a staffer at the ASB bank. “Do you have an application that will automatically track my spending habits and place them in predefined buckets so I can see where, what and when I’m spending my money?”

“No, but that’s a great idea. You should get in touch with our innovation team.”

I don't know if ASB ever developed this type of product, because I switched banks when they wouldn't renegotiate my mortgage rates – but that’s another story. Plus, it would be unfair to suggest all banks lack innovation, because they don't.

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Have all the good business names been taken?

When thinking about brand strategy, naming is essential. It will help establish your brand identity and help ensure you are not confused with your competitors. But have all the good business names been taken?

This selection would suggest they have.

• A1 Solutions

• Instant Solutions

• DHP Solutions

• New Solutions

• Solutions Consulting

• Solution Partners

• IT Solutions

We’ve all seen names like this before. A bit clichéd, pretty unmemorable and falling short of differentiating the brand from the competition.

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Today the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is due to be signed and with it the largest regional trade deal in history. What's it all about and why are so many people against it?

Redditor, thimblefullofdespair, gives a fantastic explanation about what the TPP is all about.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a multi-layered deal whose particulars have just been agreed upon by the twelve participating countries. Its stated purpose is to reduce tariffs - taxes on bringing your goods into a country or sending them out - and therefore encourage industry by making it cheaper for importers and exporters to conduct business between these countries. Its other stated goal is to create a set of easy rules that businesses can live by when dealing between these countries.

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By the time it takes you to sift through the Netflix library and decide what to watch, you could be three quarters the way through an episode of The Man in the High Castle (hint: watch this show - amazing). There’s too much content to look at and too few ways of helping us to decide what to watch.

IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic use aggregated user ratings to help us make decisions, if only Netflix and other streaming services such as Amazon Prime and Hulu tried to incorporate these powerful tools. Well now there is.

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Earlier in the week New Zealanders were outraged when two workers were caught kicking and bludgeoning bobby calves as they loaded them into trucks. In a country that relies so heavily on beef and dairy exports, this sort of behaviour is bizarre, intolerable and thankfully not the norm.

We did a little bit of research and found an article published in 2013 by academic journal Anthrozoos. Scientists from Newcastle University found that by giving a cow a name and treating her as an individual they increased yields by 3.5%.

Today we learnt (TWL) that if we treat our animals with dignity and care, they'll produce better results? Incredible, who would have thought!

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Zagga, New Zealand's first peer to peer lender specialising in secured loans launched on December 1 2015. While only a 'soft launch', Zagga has already funded over $630,000.

According to chief executive Marcus Morrison a large number of enquiries have come from borrowers interested in its capacity to broker home loans.

Zagga is able to operate outside the loan-to-value restrictions that require banks to limit the amount of lending they do to borrowers with a deposit of less than 20 per cent.

Today we have a chat with Marcus about where he's come from, where he wants to go and what makes Zagga different to other peer to peer lenders.

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• There’s a gap between common sense and justice

• You can be found not guilty and still receive a life sentence

• We prejudge people’s opinions, negatively or positively, based on our perceptions of them

• There’s a level of interconnectedness between events, media, organisations and people that at times is frightening

• There’s no hiding

• Organisations, people and institutions are more visible and accessible than ever

• Scrutiny can be severe and social media unforgiving

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A closer look at this iconic logo reveals that the negative space between the ‘e’ and the ‘x’ creates an arrow.

If you haven’t seen it before you have now. Designed by Lindon Leader at Landor Associates in 1994, it has won over 40 awards worldwide and was ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the eight best logos of the past thirty-five years.

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