BNZ - Find Your Start

What a delightful treat to stumble upon Friday evening.

There in Aotea Square was a tasty projection for BNZ and a short story competition thingee (Literacy Awards) that they are running called findyourstart.co.nz.

Unfortunately it wasn't a perfect evening for such a fantastic ambient piece, but I still thought it was rad.

Projected on the wall was this:

and if you continued to watch, you got the start of a short story already written for you (also, there were people coasting around the square handing out cards and story starters on them).

The BEST part of all of this? The story starters which were projected onto the wall were being written off the cuff by a couple of creatives in a van:

Who, from what I can tell, were writing from about 6.30pm to 11pm. That's a lot of off-the-cuff writing.

In case you all missed it and want to check it out, I even took a video. You're going to have to excuse my laugh half way though. It seems as though the guys in the van were drawing inspiration from people who were walking past, which was awesome when it was the people obviously coming out of an evening at the Civic, but when they were talking about the crew I was with... even more hilarious.

So nice work BNZ. What a wonderful promotion (people don't know how to use their words anymore, it's great to be encouraging it) and fabulously executed. I love interesting and different ambient ideas. Totally my favourites.

Legs Eleven

Interesting little promotion that welcomed me as I walked down Queen Street to work the other day. Pair upon pair of legs attached to trees. Attached to lamp posts. To walls.

Being the curious lass I am, I went in for a closer look:

So, it would seem they were looking for Facebook fans. I picked up a pair of discarded legs that were lying on High Street and took them back to work (I knew the boys would enjoy them) to find out what this was all about.

Now, at this point, the legs with stockings on them called "Queen Of..." my guess was that this promotion was either something to so with stockings OR there was a new 'Queen' bar opening up on Queen Street. Either makes sense to me.

In actual fact, however, it was seem that Queen Of... has something to do with razors and shaving apparatus. When I followed the instructions and went to 'Like' their Facebook page, they had a grand total of about 30 fans. The instructions on the legs were to then post the unique number onto their wall to win get prize.

So, there are 2 problems that I can see with this campaign.

1. That's totally against all of Facebook's rules on how you run a competition. Posting on a wall to win a prize or competition, big Facebook no no. You need an app for that sort of thing kids!

2. Not sure if the promotion really worked:

It seems like a lot of work for only 100 additional fans. The stockings alone would have cost a decent amount of money, let alone the man power to dress the legs and place them around town. Not sure this exercise will have paid off for them, considering the investment for the promotion and then what they gave away:

Of course I claimed my free razor. Yes please. But how many did they give away? Obviously no more than 100, but still.

It will be interesting to see if the product is any good. If I saw this sitting in the supermarket next to a Venus, I will go for the 'feel like a goddess' line every time, not the razor for a 'Queen'. I just think that there is something a little off with the packaging and marketing on this product.

Beautify Your City

There have been a few nice little ambient promotions done recently.

This was lovely:

All about not littering, I believe. Well, the sign reads "Please Don't Dump Your Rubbish Illegally" so I can only assume that this is something to do with the city council?

They actually built the planter boxes and installed them around Auckland. Well, this was up from High St and I saw one in Vulcan Lane also.
Only problem with ambient is that you can't control what people do in public spaces. When I went to take a photo of this promotion, this is actually what I found:
Illegally dumped rubbish. Not so beautiful.

Otherwise though, very cool idea.

Remember my name

I'm gonna live forever, I'm gonna learn how to fly, high!

Total cross blog post, but too bad. This lives between 2 of my favourite worlds, advertising and street art.

So I am a bit of a sucker for the first version of this film, so I am interested to see what the remake is like. What I think they have done very well while promoting this film is their mix of mediums used to push the film. They're doing some pretty serious promotion both in cinema, Readings Courtenay Central is overtaken with promo material, and considering the movies on at the moment (Dance Flick, I love you Beth Cooper, The Ugly Truth) the are talking directly to their audience right there. As well as cinema they are also doing some nice work in the outdoor space. They have used ambient media, and it has been done very nicely. I walked past this street stencil the other night:

and right up the road was the AdShel:Really nice complementary mediums, and great placement too, right outside Massey University.

For movie promoters this must be second hand, but as we move into this kind of promotion I am noticing it more and more, and am more and more intrigued.