The Story of New Zealand's Internet

Transcription

Duncan Blair – Digital Strategist, &some

“It had been kicking around for a while that we really wanted to do a really nice product demonstration – of broadband and the great stuff you can do with broadband. This seed of an idea of working with a rock star to recreate something with New Zealand just using broadband was great. And we really couldn’t say no to it so that’s how we ended up working with Special. Indies or smaller agencies were probably over-represented in the XXXXXXXXXX (0:38) but we also had big agencies and there we were deliberately going out saying we needed to work with a smaller agency. But it just happened that Special had what we felt was the best idea and it felt like we could do the best work with them. So that’s really where the Iggy idea was born. It came together really quickly over the next six weeks following that. Probably four weeks after the initial pitch we were sitting there with Iggy on Skype just arranging the details of how the whole thing was going to play out. So it did move very quickly and it was an amazing project to work on.

There was a shortlist of people. It was quite a short list! We had some very particular criteria. It needed to be someone who was instantly recognisable, someone who had real star power and charisma and cross-generational appeal as well so your mum and even your grandma might recognise him. So that was really our criteria. We put together a shortlist and Iggy was actually at the top of it for that reason and we already knew that he had done some campaign stuff in other countries so he was obviously open to working with companies on this kind of thing. Then we had people like Anthony Kiedis and Chris Martin from Coldplay... There was probably half a dozen people on there. It wasn’t a huge list. The other criteria was they had to be international. We didn’t feel like even a really well-known Kiwi was going to cut it, not because they were New Zealanders but because New Zealanders have that bizarre thing that they don’t recognise how big things are until they are recognised overseas so we needed someone who was huge internationally to really lead the campaign.

So the Iggy campaign has been really well-recognised locally, the Axis awards where we more or less cleaned up taking home nine golds; I think the biggest one really for us as the client was taking home Creative Business of the Year which was awesome recognition for being brave enough to go with the idea. That’s something I think about a little bit. If this had been one of the bigger, older telcos, I think this would have been a really hard idea to get through. There were so many things that could have gone wrong and even on the day of the event, there was a power cut on the North Shore and it was really, really lucky that we didn’t have any of our nine musicians based on the North Shore because we wouldn’t have got any footage from them. So that was real recognition. And then the Cannes thing was great. We never expected to win it. We were really happy with the campaign, the results had been outstanding and Axis people were obviously pretty pumped up about the campaign. To get that kind of recognition – to take on and beat the world was great. And that really launched for us another phase of coverage and people locally said, “I remember that campaign”. We obviously got great coverage out of it. It was fantastic for us.”