Last night, following a story that had appeared in the Herald, Pepsi posted this note on the Facebook page: “Good debate guys! We understand Running with the Bulls isn’t for everyone. And we respect that many of you are bromitted to animal welfare. So here are some suggestions if ya want to make a stand against this (approx) 700 year-old festival: (a). Select one of the other fantastic (no bull) Bromitment experiences on offer. (b). Choose ‘Running with the Bulls’ and if you win… take your protest to Pamplona. (c). If you and ya mates win the ‘Running with Bulls’ prize but would rather donate the money to an animal welfare cause, we Pepsi Max, bromit to do that. Thanks for being passionate. And best of luck with whatever bromitment ya make.”

161 comments later, many of them claiming the company was shooting itself in the foot by endorsing a cruel pursuit like bull fighting, others saying it shouldn’t listen to the complaining wowsers, Aisha Daji Punga, Pepsi’s commercial director at Frucor New Zealand released this statement today.

At Frucor, we set ourselves the highest possible standards. We take social responsibility seriously. We’ve been running a promotion in New Zealand for Pepsi entitled “Bromitment” targeted at Kiwi guys. We were offering a chance to win an epic adventure, with one prize option being running with the bulls in Pamplona.

We now recognise that a proportion of our target market is offended by this type of activity, which they perceive as cruel to animals. For this we wholeheartedly apologise. Frucor and Pepsi in no way support animal cruelty.

We apologise unreservedly for our misjudgement. As a result we have pulled the option to run with the bulls completely from the competition.

We became increasingly aware of the issue via feedback from customers and via social media over the last few days. Our initial response yesterday evening via social media did not include withdrawing from the competition. We now recognise that withdrawing is the right thing to do.

No doubt the ghosts of social media firestorms past like Qantas and Cadbury were ringing. But, once again, it shows that the consumers are runnin’ tings. And if you get into social media, you’ve got to be prepared to take the good with the bad.

As a replacement prize, we suggest a trip to India, where the winners will be forced to revere the sacred rubbish-eating cows for days on end. And, in the spirit of tenuous connections, here’s a funny gaffe made recently by the Herald on Sunday.

Rust was given the task to find the best Christmas gifts by doing the shopping for a range of local celebs like Nick Dwyer, Colin Mathura-Jeffree, Hollie Smith and many others. You can get your voyeur on and search through all these gifts or hunt for gifts she’s chosen for family members, partners or friends. Gifts can be added to a Top 5 and plotted on a map for when you head into the city. You can also check out all the Christmassy events going on.

There’s also a social media competition where you can let friends know what you want for Christmas by choosing your favourite gifts, making your own wish list and sharing it on Facebook (five wish lists are worth $1000 each are up for grabs).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Credits

Steve Cochran  - Executive Creative Director

Dan Wright – Digital Creative Director

Zoe Hawkins – Writer

Kia Heinnen- Art Director

Raymond McKay – Art Director

Paul Headington – Technical Director

Craig MacGregor – Junior Developer

Craig Thompson – Digital Designer

Amanda Theobald – Digital Project Manager

James McMullan – Digital Producer

Marcelle Baker – Group Account Director

Dave Munn – Senior Account Manager

Patrick Rowley – Account Manager

Courtney Herbert – Account Executive

Rob Linkhorn – Producer

Michegro Chisholm – Senior Planner

Tias Somers – Mac Operator

Erin O’Connell – Studio

Duncan Innes – Photographer

Charlotte Rust – Gift Guru

Click here to view the embedded video.

Christchurch mayor Bob Parker says the award is great recognition of the work by council and its staff.

“Share an Idea was designed not only to collect and process the best ideas from our people, it was also designed to replace our sense of powerlessness in the face of the earthquakes that shattered our city. Our community’s vision provided all of us with a vision that gave us a reason to have hope; hope for ourselves and our descendants that we would again have a city that would sustain us and our descendants in a way that the city we had just lost had done.”

Chairman of the jury Jaco van Zijll Langhout says it established co-creation with the community in several ways and at several moments in time: an online platform to post ideas, a Community Expo, workshops and roadshows, to develop the city centre together.

“The response on this initiative was overwhelming: more than 106,000 ideas have been shared and more than 10,000 people visited the Expo. Next to developing the new city centre, the result of this co-creation is also a stronger community.”

The award will be presented to Parker next month when Jaco van Zijll Langhout visits New Zealand.

The results of the CMO study were presented at a breakfast before last week’s Marketing Today conference and there were some interesting results from the 54 CMOs interviewed in New Zealand that differed from the global findings.

For one, there’s a lack of marketing and IT alignment in New Zealand compared to global rates. And strangely, given the pressure on marketing budgets, the need to prove ROI, the desire for marketers to be taken seriously in the boardroom and the impact of technology on the marketing playing field, when asked what they needed to worry about to achieve personal success, Kiwi marketers didn’t feel they needed to worry about tech savviness, social media or finance skills (creative thinking topped the list for both chief executives and CMOs).

The global survey of 1734 chief marketing officers showed more than two-thirds saw a need to change the mix of skills within the marketing function to enhance analytic capabilities, invest in new tools and technologies and develop new strategies for managing big data.

With market and technology factors driving rapid change, the four areas they saw as game changers were social media, the data explosion, proliferation of channels and devices and shifting consumer demographics.

Few CMOs were exploiting the full power of the digital grapevine, with only a quarter tracking blogs, and less than half monitoring third-party reviews and consumer reviews.

While CMOs generally believed they were underprepared to take charge of the growing volume and variety of data, social networks can provide a rich source of information about customer sentiment with context that can help companies predict demand patterns.

Four out of five respondents anticipate high levels of complexity over the next five years but only half feel ready to take on the challenge.

Worryingly, despite the number of ways in which customers’ privacy can be compromised today, only 28 percent considered it necessary to take a second look at their privacy policies.

Given that privacy concerns are a huge issue for users, the study pointed out that CMOs might want to think about how they could inspire greater customer confidence as they consider the management of big data for their own purposes.

Most said proving the value of the marketing department to others was a hurdle and cited ROI as the primary measure of their effectiveness. But CMOs are struggling with providing hard numbers and plan to look outside of their companies for analytics.

Generally, while respondents said they had strong influence over promotional activities, they were lacking in the other three Ps of marketing—product, price and placement.

Most of Tourism New Zealand’s sizable marketing and comms budget now gets directed towards digital channels in an effort to get ‘active considerers’ on the plane. And its latest work via Contagion is trying to tempt the Gen Ys back for some backpacking with Storiesbeatstuff.com, something the agency believes is “possibly the largest social media campaign a New Zealand agency has produced”. 

The basic idea is to get people to upload a video or take a picture detailing what they’d swap—whether it be a partner, dad’s car, one of their kidneys or a “taxidermy squirrel called Murray”—for an epic experience in New Zealand.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“New Zealand used to be on top of people’s backpackers lists in the ’90s but is now under increasing pressure in recent years by markets such as South America opening up and backpackers flocking to Asia, and not making the trip down our way,” says Tourism New Zealand general manager of marketing communication’s Justin Watson. “This has been further exacerbated by the global recession with people now either staying at home or getting jobs in their gap years.”

But Contagion’s creative director Bridget Taylor says the the fact that backpackers reckon the best stories they have from their around-the-world trips came from New Zealand sparked the basis for the strategy and the idea.

“As one backpacker told us, ‘He or she who dies with the best stories wins’. With this in mind we came up with the campaign thought that ‘Stories Beat Stuff’ asking young people globally what they would trade to get here. Essentially, we’ve created a global trading centre that will run for the next year, offering two totally new, completely authentic $20,000 New Zealand experiences every two months.”

The campaign has been rolled out across the world through the Razorfish network, with specific up-weights in the USA, UK and Europe. And, in an effort to drum up more interest in the idea, it was launched with content from 100 influential bloggers from around the world.

“We consulted with Facebook and Google/YouTube, both here and overseas and found that people are much more likely to enter into a community if they can see other influencers have already done so,”  says Contagion’s social influence director and ex-Air New Zealand social media man Tom Bates says. “This clearly pointed the way to a smarter socially integrated launch strategy, including a large multi-national Facebook media campaign run from New Zealand. Translating much of the work to German was interesting to say the least.”

The winners and their best mate get to come to New Zealand, blog and post about their trip and then announce the next experience up for grabs. But they also have to hold up their end of the bargain and make the trade mentioned in their video to a charity.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s no David on Demand or Twitchiking, but, with more than 6,800 activity suggestions received, it shows how social media is increasingly important when it comes to interacting with potential travellers.

The hub, which ties in nicely to Saatchi & Saatchi’s latest mobile push and the ‘from here we can do anything’ tagline, encompasses blogs, video and other creative editorial content from the likes of Huffer founder Steve Dunstan, hairstylist Richard Kavanagh, Idealog co-founder David Macgregor, Sweet Shoppers Mark & Louis, fashion photographer David Shields, DJ and TV show host Nick Dwyer (his latest project, Beats in our Backyard, was created as part of the network) and up-and-coming musicians Junica and Zowie.

There’s no blatant Telecom branding on display. It simply aims to bask in the reflected glow of the contributors’ creativity and awesomeness, as well as trying to show that smarter, faster mobile technology brings people together, connects communities and allows these Kiwis to do more and more of what they are good at.

The idea was devised by Post Creative, which is made up of ex M&C Saatchi chief executive Nick Baylis, ex-Meares Taine managing director Mike Watkins and Adam Bryce, a Kiwi who has been working in the US for years. The agency has been in operation for around seven months but, as Baylis says, they don’t make ads. Their model is to communicate with influencers, either online or offline, by creating editorial content.

“Basically we tell clients they don’t need to pay for media and they quite like that,” he says.

While he wasn’t too keen on discussing its client list, he says they’re “doing some fairly major stuff with some fairly major clients”.

InGame director and NZ Game Developers Association chair Stephen Knightly, who spoke at a gamification event organised by the Social Media Club Auckland this week, says “shallow” gamification has become popular, with points, badges and leaderboards being added aimlessly onto all kinds of campaigns.

There’s plenty of “detailed, intelligent” IP behind game designers, but he says too many marketers are simplistically copying elements of gamification and doing a poor job of it.

“One of the traps that I see gamification people falling into is that they forget the audience,” he says. ”Different people play games for different reasons and in lots of different ways. If you put lots of points on something that’s going to be great for hyper-competitive people. If you put on sharing and gift giving that’s going to be great for social people but it’s not going to be great for someone who want to beat someone else and kill someone else.”

According to Hidden Variable Studios cofounder Charley Price, there’s a major debate on the merits of intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards.

Some believe the quality of a gaming experience is dependent upon the promise of ‘goods’ (real, virtual, or otherwise) provided to the player as a reward while others argue the focus should be on making high quality games first, with tangible rewards secondary.

“To properly ‘gamify’ something, the process should ideally have something inherently compelling about it to begin with, and then your gamification layer should amplify and celebrate that facet of the experience. Too often, I think gamification is executed by slapping points onto a process and expecting people to engage,” he says. ”Making a compelling, large-scale, asynchronous multiplayer game is hard, but if you don’t approach it with that challenge in mind, you run the risk of making an experience so shallow, unfocused, or – even worse – commonplace, that no one will really invest.”

Mitch Olson, co-founder of social game SmallWorlds, says there is an inherent element of psychology at work.

Gamification is ultimately about using game concepts to build engagement with an audience and reward them for certain behaviours, he says. And while UX designers might be more inclined to remove elements from a screen, Knightly says game developers are just as likely to add more buttons and gizmos.

These give users more reason to engage and to spend more time on a game, he says.

“Complexity can be your friend.”

This post originally appeared on idealog.co.nz.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While Grandstand, which aims to “bring fans together during every live match broadcast, no matter where they are or how they watch games”, doesn’t seem particularly pioneering in the sense that Twitter already does a similar job of categorising content with the use of hashtags, Tequila\’s creative director Ross Howard says it is arguably the first web-based application in the country to feature tailored versions for three different device types (computers and notebooks, iPad and mobiles such as iPhone and Android). And, by drawing upon and including conversations from various social networks, any user can join in and post through Grandstand to their own social media accounts.

“It’s been really satisfying for me to work with TVNZ again and continue the relationship we established through our joint development of the TVNZ OnDemand offer for the PS3,” says Howard. “Both Tequila\ and TVNZ agree digital is an increasingly important space for their commercial clients.”

“TVNZ is committed to connecting New Zealanders with compelling content that can be accessed through any screen so it’s been exciting to work with Tequila\ in delivering an entirely new digital platform to make that even more of a reality and supplement our traditional television offering,” says Tom Cotter, TVNZ’s general manager of of digital media.

On the analog side of things, Maori TV is sitting pretty in the RWC broadcasting cluster ruck, with the biggest cumulative audience of the free-to-air broadcasters.

Credits:

Tequila\

Geoff Deevereux, Managing Director

Ross Howard – Creative Director

Sarah Crosswell – Executive Producer

Henson Tan – Senior Producer

Anil Reddy – Senior Designer

Ee Venn Soh – Designer

Simon Betton – Front-end Developer

Patrick Li – Developer

TVNZ:

Tom Cotter – General Manager, Digital Media

Sarah Pritchett, Digital Media Product Manager

ENDS

According to the social media monitoring tool Meltwater Buzz, the All Blacks have dominated online conversation since Sunday October 9, receiving 71 percent of mentions, in comparison to the Wallabies 29 percent.

“The most talked about footy team is not necessarily going to be the one that wins, but it’s really exciting to see which team is the most talked about in the lead up to the game,” says Alicia Kennedy, area director of Meltwater Australia and New Zealand. ”This type of metric could be of interest to sponsors seeking to gain an element of insight into how their brand is associated with hype. It also shows how our social media monitoring tool can be used in a fun way to tap into what the public is really thinking.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the first epic episode, Holt knows her Parmco washing machine can handle her snowboarding socks and television pants, but can it withstand the ultimate test: Mikey Havoc’s man-panties after enduring the rigours of Rambos 1 through 3?  And the hideous twist… will his dude-smugglers pass the taste test? Warning, viewers with sensitive stomachs may find this disturbing.

Five episodes have been shot and will be rolled out online over the next two months. Campaign director Mike Reihana expands on the concept. “It’s like Top Gear meets the Peter Jackson classic ‘Bad Taste’ – we take kitchen appliances put them into some surreal settings, use extreme hyperbole, and throw in loads of guns and grenades to show how good the Parmco gear is. It was a blast to make – both literally and figuratively.”

Lead ‘product demonstrator’ Mikey Havoc agrees. “It’s not often you get a script that comes this far out of left field and includes explosions, Hayley Holt chasing you with a machine guns, and the fight to the death with a Spartan warrior.”

Holt puts the appliances, as well as the odd AK-47 assault rifle to the test. Not an easy task when your co-host is Havoc and his band of idiotic, gun-crazed, crash test dummies. Despite being no stranger to unusual co-stars from her time on the ‘Crowd Goes Wild’ and ‘Dancing With Stars’, Holt found the campaign a refreshingly new experience, both getting into Havo’s undies, and getting her puppies out.  “I have a lot of fun on Crowd Goes Wild but the Parmco Challenge stepped things up with a special effects and pyrotechnics. I’m getting my agent to find me some roles in action flicks.”

The first episode ‘Rambo’s Undies’ launches online today with the following four episodes (Parmco Sucks, Cold Beer in a Power Cut, Hob-Knobbing with a Spartan, and Hayley’s Puppies) rolling out across September and October at Parmco.co.nz. The brains behind the campaign is Aaron Taylor, former general manager of TBWA, whose slogan “We don’t just push the boat out, we burn down the wharf” has never rung more true.

The campaign is supported online using various social media channels, cinema, and TV advertising. Plus Parmco is giving away piles of weekly prizes, and the chance to win the big one – $10,000 worth of appliances.

“Take a seat little poppet.  I insist you stay for dinner…”