Tag: Australia

Sydney, Australia – Independent media agency Nunn Media has announced five new hires for its Sydney office, led by Richard McCosker as the new group account director.

McCosker joins from fellow independent media and marketing agency Frontier Australia where he worked as senior account director. Prior to that, he was communications planning director at multinational agency PHD for four years, tasked with leading the planning and strategy across a diverse portfolio including SC Johnson and Ferrero.

In his new role at Nunn Media Sydney, he brings with him over 20 years’ experience which includes time spent on both the client and publisher sides, giving him a unique perspective on both client needs and the customer landscape.

Speaking about his appointment, McCosker said, “The decision to join was a simple one – Nunn Media are extremely well respected by their clients, media partners and among peers. To be part of this next growth phase, helping their clients to succeed, was a brilliant opportunity for me.”

The agency has also appointed Melanie Otuhouma as channel planning director, James Rigby as digital manager, as well as Ashleigh Lord and Lien Tran as account executives.

Chris Walton, managing director at Nunn Media, said, “As our business continues to expand we have made a string of new hires across all levels to ensure we continue delivering for our clients. Rich joining us is a key part of this expansion and means we can bring to bear a fantastic depth and breadth of experience at a senior level to help our clients grow. I welcome him, Melanie, James, Ashleigh and Lien to Nunn Media ahead of what’s going to be a big year for the agency.”

The appointments follow Nunn Media’s win of Silversea Cruises and global children’s entertainment company Spin Master for its portfolio of brands including Bakugan, PAW Patrol, Hatchimals, Kinetic Sand and Air Hogs.

Sydney, Australia – Australian state democratic administrative authority of New South Wales, NSW Government, has launched its new advertising campaign, designed to reach all audiences, targets everyone 16 years and older encouraging them to get their COVID-19 booster shot.

Developed in partnership with media agency UM, the new campaign expands on the NSW Government’s original ‘Let’s Do This’ campaign released last August and reinforces the importance of getting a COVID-19 booster to reduce the risk of severe illness and help protect communities.

Moreover, it includes ads in 19 languages, including Arabic, Cantonese, Greek, Hindi, and Italian, amongst others, as well as advertising for the Aboriginal community, which appears in the Koori Mail, on radio, social media, and digital display, as well as video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCnVa9Y84f8

Isobel Scouler, NSW Government’s director of brand and campaigns for Department of Customer Services, noted that it is imperative the whole NSW community, no matter their language or cultural background, receives accurate and timely information about how important it is to receive a booster shot in their fight against COVID-19. 

“The campaign commences with broad reach channels and will be continually optimised to target populations that may be dropping behind in booster uptake, to ensure we are encouraging all people to have a booster to protect them and their family,” said Scouler.

Meanwhile, Andrew Clift, UM’s senior account director, shared that the campaign with such a relevant message needed a media strategy to reach all members of the NSW community but could also speak to the individual motivations and barriers of key segments. 

“At such a critical juncture in the NSW Government’s vaccine campaign we needed a major media campaign, strategically planned to engage with key audience segments across NSW, including regional NSW, Youth, CALD communities and Aboriginal audiences,” said Clift.

The campaign will run until April 2022 across print, television, radio, outdoor, and digital, as well as social media.

Australia — Bastion Amplify, an integrated PR and social media agency, following several high-profile national client wins, has announced a series of key senior appointments to its PR team namely Nancy Mcdonald as group business director, Georgia Comensoli as the agency’s first media director, and Susana Liu as business director in Melbourne. 

McDonald was previously the head of PR and content for Petbarn and Greencross Vets. Prior to joining Bastion Amplify, she also spent 13 years working in PR, marketing and journalism in Australia, working across clients including Hungry Jack’s, Kraft Heinz, Honda, Hyundai, Access Corporate Group, and as a journalist and presenter for NewsCorp. In her new role as group business director, she is responsible for client growth in NSW.

Comensoli holds extensive experience in journalism previously working for Channel 7 as a journalist and chief of staff in the Channel 7 Newsroom, filing for multiple national bulletins including Sunrise, Morning News, and The Latest. She also has experience in the 3AW Newsroom and regional television including WIN News. 

Alongside journalism, she has experience in content and brand creation freelancing for global firm Goldeneye Media and crisis management experience with Melbourne firm Crisis Shield. As the agency’s first media director, she is expected to bolster the team’s media success for clients and drive innovation through an owned news platform for clients.

Meanwhile, Liu has worked with companies across different industries namely property, financial services, and tech sectors to deliver strategic communications and integrated campaigns. Previous clients include Charter Hall, Frasers Property, Architectus, ME Bank and MessageMedia. Most recently she was an account director at Keep Left. In her new role as business director in Melbourne, she is tasked with leading Bastion’s B2B portfolio comprising a range of leading property brands including Jinding, Australia 108, and Melbourne Square.

The new hires follow a number of new client wins for the Bastion Amplify team with the signing of European luxe camping brand Dometic, fintech disruptor Tiiik Money, Unilever and international developer SPG Land.

Richard Chapman, CEO of Bastion Amplify, said the key hires came off a strong 2021 during which Amplify rebranded from Bastion Effect as part of the Bastion network’s new Think Wide positioning, and it oversaw one of the most important campaigns of the agency’s 20-plus years’ the Million Dollar Vax.

“Bastion Amplify continues to innovate and grow in the market with a number of terrific new clients and strong strategic partnerships in place with our long-term client family. We’re delighted to have Nancy, Georgia and Susana join, all of whom bring a wealth of experience, new ways of working and process into the team and specialist expertise. It has been heartening to see throughout the pandemic how our teams have risen to the challenge, delivering truly integrated campaigns, and working with our clients to demonstrate the value of PR, whether it be in media, or with influencers on social,” Chapman said.

Sydney, Australia – Despite privacy becoming a crucial part of the business in the marketing and advertising industry, new data from programmatic advertising partner Blis shows that 50% of media planners in Australia are still not seeing privacy-first solutions as a key priority during 2022.

This is despite 33% of the respondent media planners citing privacy-first solutions as one of their biggest challenges this year. According to the data, media planners are still skeptical, or even confused, about how to tackle this challenge.

In terms of media planners’ views about current privacy-first solutions in the market, just one in three media planners feels they have good privacy-first solutions in place to reach their audiences. 

For specifics, 36% of media agencies are considering a mixture of contextual targeting, unique identifier (UID) 2.0 and FloC. In-house planners seem to be more skeptical, with 36% of them still saying they wouldn’t consider any of the current solutions as ideal to overcome privacy concerns.

The data also noted that CTV gained planners’ attention during the pandemic and will continue to do so in 2022, with 52% of media agency planners expecting to spend more than 50% of their overall digital media campaigns on CTV. Similarly, in-house media planners expect to spend 33% of their budget on CTV, a much lower but still significant part of their budgets.

In addition, media planners are also preparing to increase in-app advertising budgets as in-app spending is expected to account for 44% of total media spending by 2026. 

For Aaron McKee, CTO at Blis, the new data shows his research highlights on some key areas that media planners, and the industry as a whole, need to be aware of and plan for, if they’re not already.

“Many media planners are already missing half their web audience and 80% of their most valuable in-app audience and challenges around reach, relevance and measurement will only get worse with the Chrome third-party cookie changes coming shortly. This is the year to try new approaches to reaching wide audiences in a way that demonstrably performs,” McKee said.

He added, “The approaches that stand the test of time will be rooted in privacy and respect for personal data. Finding trusted privacy-first partners will help make their lives much easier – and their campaigns more effective – in the long run.”

Australia – Functional food and beverage (F&B) company, My Muscle Chef (MYMC) in Australia, has launched a new brand campaign, aimed at expanding on the company’s new tagline ‘Every Body, Every Goal’ and redefining what it means ‘to be fit’ and strong. 

MYMC specialises in protein-rich fresh ready-made meals, drinks and snacks across all meal occasions. It also observes the consumers’ goals as calorie control, performance, and building muscle.

According to MYMC, the past two years highlighted that feeling good and living healthy every day is more than just training physical muscles, it is also about exercising mental and emotional fitness, which defines this holistic concept as ‘Total Self Fitness’, which is the inspiration for the new campaign and brand sentiment.

The new campaign, which was created in collaboration with advertising agency TBWA\Sydney, aims to show Australians that nutrient-dense, protein-packed products do not just help with physical strength, but give the body all kinds of strength, for all kinds of situations, including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual strength. 

Titled ‘Strong Like This’, the new campaign is a playful and uplifting creative, depicting everyday strength through everyday challenging moments. The first narrative looks at how one woman has seemingly forgotten her friend’s name after a fitness session, but after enjoying her MYMC protein smoothie, she has the mental clarity to remember her friend’s name. Meanwhile, the second spot explores a father’s struggle between answering text messages from mates and playtime with his daughter. After savouring his protein-rich MYMC meal, he resists the temptation to answer his messages in order to spend quality time with his daughter.

Liam Loan-Lack, MYMC’s head of marketing, shared that they are launching a new platform to unify the entire business more closely to the modern consumer sentiment around what it means to be ‘healthy’ and ‘fit’ – that it’s not just about looking good but feeling good holistically. 

“‘Strong Like This’ is the consumer-facing expression of how we are fundamentally living up to this sentiment. To us at My Muscle Chef, it is a new, more responsible narrative around health and wellbeing,” said Loan-Lack. 

Meanwhile, Evan Roberts, TBWA\Sydney’s chief creative officer, said, “It’s not every day you get to be involved with such a disruptive brand at such a critical juncture in their growth. We hope the ‘Strong Like This’ platform can create another defining moment in the My Muscle Chef story.” 

The brand campaign will be available until 30 June 2022 across TV, broadcaster video on demand (BVOD), online video (OLV), and Out of Home (OOH), as well as social and search engine marketing (SEM).

Australia — Women for Election, a for-purpose and non-partisan organisation with a mission to inspire and equip more women to enter politics, has launched a new campaign entitled ‘Power Like You’ve Never Seen’ to combat gender disparity in opportunities and representation in the country.

The campaign, created in collaboration with BMF and supported by UN Women Australia, encourages Australians to rethink the face of power and support a new era of female political leadership by calling on Australians to question their ideas of what power looks like and to urge more women to become political representatives.

The campaign includes a hero 60-second TVC which features traditional and stereotypical ideas of what power has historically looked like including a name on a building, a title, a suit, a large desk, a spinning chair, and a statue with a plaque on it. The ad asks women to be part of the redefinition of power and change what power looks like by becoming part of it.

In addition, a series of digital out-of-home ads will air across billboards in Australia with the slogans ‘Power Like You’ve Never Seen’ and ‘If You Care, You’re Qualified’ as well as a print advertisement championing a new era in leadership. The TV, OOH and print are further supported by PR, Social & Influencer as well as a microsite. The campaign launches on 7 February on television, social and digital out-of-home around the nation.

Licia Heath, women for election CEO, commented, “Australians are ready for more women in office; in order to make that vision a reality in future elections, we need to change our idea of what power looks like in Australia. We’ve seen women reclaim it by marching in Canberra, and now we want them to exercise it by taking a seat in each of Australia’s political chambers, be that Council, State or Federal.”

Pia Chaudhuri, executive creative director at BMF, said that gender equality is 134 away in Australia, which means no one will ever see a gender-equal society. She continued that the fastest way to reduce this number is to get more women into public office – to give them a seat at the table where legislation is created, and major societal decisions are made. Chaudhuri said that with more women in power, the country can bring this number down to 10 years but the challenge is inspiring women to take up these positions in the first place.

“We realised the reason most women don’t enter politics is simply that, for centuries now, power has been branded as male. So, we decided the only way we’ll ever truly achieve our goal, is to rebrand power itself. To make familiar symbols of power outdated, making way for a more inclusive brand of power. This is obviously a huge ambition. That’s why this is the start of a 10-year campaign – one that will only finish when we’ve reached gender equality. Ultimately, we want both the platform and concept of ‘Power Like You’ve Never Seen’ to become redundant in the not-so-distant future,” Chaudhuri said.

Mandy Galmes, managing director and partner at Sefiani Communications Group, also shared her thoughts, saying, “Forget business-as-usual. Australians are turning their eyes to the future and want nothing as usual. As a nation, we are ready for a new era of gender equity in political leadership. To achieve this we need to reconsider what traditional power looks like and support women around the nation who have the leadership skills and experience to play an active part in our political future.”

“At Sefiani we pride ourselves on being agents of change, and that means doing work that matters for positive change-makers. We are excited to be working alongside Women for Election, BMF and Havas to advocate change for a better future,” Galmes said.

Australia – To reach a new generation of recruits and continue to land their ‘A Step Ahead’ positioning, the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the national and principal federal law enforcement agency of the Australian Government, has launched a new podcast series that takes listeners deep behind the scenes of some of the country’s most involved investigations.

The series, which was created in collaboration with creative agency Host/Havas and Australian podcast Casefile, opens the vault on some of the AFP’s most complex investigations, including interviews with the officers responsible for cracking the cases and some insight into the techniques used to unravel the crimes.

Titled ‘Crime Interrupted’, the podcast is supported by a 30-second trailer for the first episode, created in partnership with the Emmy Award-winning director of the True Detective main title sequence, Patrick Clair.

Host/Havas said that the series is a compelling alternative to creating stock standard police recruitment ads to engage the next generation of officers for the AFP, with a focus on women, people from diverse backgrounds, and First Nations people.

Marina Simoncini, Australian Federal Police’s manager of the culture and communications branch, believes that the podcast series created with Host/Havas takes an unexpected approach to recruitment. 

She further shared that the six hours of content will not only intrigue and entertain, but it will show potential recruits—people who may not have previously considered a career with the AFP—what they can expect.

“As we’ve shown through the podcast, we need people from all kinds of backgrounds with all kinds of skills to help keep us a step ahead,” said Simoncini.

Meanwhile, Jon Austin, Host/Havas’ executive creative director, shared that when it came to recruiting for the AFP, they didn’t need to hyperbolise or dramatise as the most compelling reasons come obviously with every case story heard from officers.

“What a privilege to be able to work not just with the officers behind these stories, but with the likes of Casefile and Patrick to bring them to life so powerfully,” said Austin.

The podcast series was launched last 4 February 2022, and is available on AFP’s YouTube.