Balinese spoof bloody Bingle ad to lure Aussies back
Maccas tweaks dinner campaign
Weak sales have prompted McDonald’s Australia to overhaul the advertising campaign for its four new dinner meals – lemon grass chicken, beef rending, beef bolognese and orange, lime and ginger chicken.
Chief executive Peter Bush said the initial ads for the meals, which McDonald’s started testing in 25 stores in the Newcastle and Hunter Valley region of NSW in late July, had “missed the mark”.
“People saw the ads and said, ‘That’s not really for me’,” Bush said.
“We changed the ads three weeks ago and since then sales have been on budget.”
Before the meals launch nationally in the second half of calendar 2007, McDonald’s will tinker with the products, decide if it needs to expand the range and tweak the advertising campaign.
The next big new product from McDonald’s is a Happy Meal Pasta Zoo, a healthier version of the Happy Meal for children.
McDonald’s spent three years developing the product, which was to launch nationally last month. It has appeared in a handful of stores but production problems forced the postponement of its national launch until late February.
Bush said the delayed launch of the new Happy Meal would hold McDonald’s sales growth in calendar 2006 to a low single-digit increase, compared with 5% last year and 11% in 2004. Neil Shoebridge, The Australian Financial Review
Victorian election campaign gets dirty
Victorian Premier Steve Bracks has defended a Labor ad campaign that personally attacks his rival, Liberal leader Ted Baillieu.
Television ads launched late last week accuse Baillieu of personally profiting through his real estate firm from the sell-off of schools under the Kennett Liberal government.
Under former premier Jeff Kennett, who remains close to Baillieu, hundreds of government schools were sold off to rescue the state from mounting debt.
Baillieu was the Liberal Party's state president at the time and also director of Baillieu Knight Frank, a real estate agency whose Victorian arm took a contract to sell some of the schools.
Bracks said he did not know how much Mr Baillieu would have benefited from the sales.
The Labor leader denied the ads were a grubby personal attack on Baillieu by dredging up events of 12 years ago.
Meanwhile, opposition treasury spokesman Robert Clark has accused Labor of blowing the budgets of 29 major projects by a total of $4.2bn over the past seven years.
The list includes a $2.2bn "blow-out" in the cost of a toll-way which the Labor government had promised to build toll-free. AAP
MasterCard launches global B2B campaign
In a bid to raise awareness for its new corporate identity and tagline—‘The Heart of Commerce’—MasterCard Worldwide has launched a new business-to-business campaign targeting customers, acquirers, issuers and merchants.
The new B2B campaign will run in the US, UK, Europe, Asia and Australia. It will also run in other markets from early 2007.
MasterCard said the campaign, which comprises five ads, collectively tells the MasterCard Worldwide corporate story.
The central theme is the connection people make with MasterCard: "A piece of plastic that lives in your wallet".
Once the connection is established, the plastic stretches into illustrations of the strategic capabilities MasterCard Worldwide offers, and depicts how MasterCard makes commerce more advanced, secure, intelligent and valuable to card-holders, customers and merchants.
Creative was handled by McCann Erickson, New York.
MasterCard will continue to run its global ‘Priceless’ campaign, which targets consumers. BusinessWorld
Balinese take a leaf out of bloody Oz campaign
First there was Tourism Australia’s $180m “Where the Bloody Hell Are You?” advertising campaign.
Now, a cheeky group of tourism operators in Bali have copied it.
Their “Where the Bali Hell Are You?” campaign, “shot by a mate who does wedding videos”, cost $3000.
The fledgling Little Bali Hotel and Resort Company enlisted a couple of Australian Bali tourism enthusiasts to make the viral advertisement, which can be seen at www.wherethebalihellareyou.com.
Spokesperson Mike Parker-Brown said the tongue-in-cheek “Where the Bali Hell Are You?” video clip was to draw Australian visitors back to Bali in the wake of terrorist bombings.
Other nationalities still were going to the Indonesian holiday island, he said, but there were not enough Australians.
Shot in Bali, the video has a local man telling Australians: “The Japanese are surfing your bloody waves; the Russians are in your bloody spas; the Dutch are wearing your bloody thongs; the Americans are doing all your bloody shopping; the Italians are drinking all your bloody beer; the French are eating in your bloody restaurants; and the Germans are laughing in your bloody pool bars.”
The video ends with a bikini-clad girl on a beach, reminiscent of the Lara Bingle scene in the Tourism Australia ad.
“Some might say we've taken a bit of a lend of a similar, multi-million dollar international tourism marketing campaign,” Parker-Brown said.
“That’s not the case. Our campaign cost millions of rupiah.”
Tourism Minister Fran Bailey said imitation was the highest form of flattery.
“The Balinese guy is no Lara Bingle but he does have a good sense of humour,” she said. Stuart Innes, The Advertiser
