The Advertising Standards Authority has outlined two complaints it has received.
“The advert contains a song jingle and a depiction of a very fat person trying to get into a car,” says one complainant to the authority.
“The jingle also refers to the fat person. The issue I have with this advert is its context of fat-shaming.
“A significant percentage of Kiwis are classified as obese (circa 40%) and this advertisement is a major offensive slur on fat people, some of whom are overweight or obese through no fault of their own due to medical conditions.
“I have contacted the marketing manager at Turners Cars who refuted my concerns about fat shaming and the offensiveness it would cause to a lot of people, myself included. I believe that it would violate good taste and cause offence, most notably principle 1(c).”
That principle covers decency and offensiveness and states, “Advertisements must not contain anything that is indecent, or exploitative, or degrading, or likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offence, or give rise to hostility, contempt, abuse or ridicule.”
A second complainant told the authority: “There is part of the song that says ‘You got so fat, the seats don’t fit’. I feel it is wrong saying something like that.”
However, in its short decision released this week, the authority said it would not be proceeding with the complaints.
The chair of the ASA’s complaints board ruled the issue raised “does not reach the threshold to breach the relevant Advertising Standards Authority codes and therefore we will not take any further action”.
In January, Media Insider revealed some of the more interesting grizzles about advertisements over the past 12 months – from vibrators to burgers, skimpy togs, the way we drive, teenagers kissing and older people exercising. And, in one case, a nose-picker.
Fat-shaming complaints aside, Turners Automotive – which this week reported another record profit for the March year, despite challenging economic conditions – will be rapt with the response to the new “Tina’s Road Trip” ad.
It certainly highlights the power of creative marketing.
“We hope you enjoy the ad as much as we enjoyed making it,” the company told social media followers earlier this month.
“Travelling around New Zealand was great – visiting lots of cities, towns, beaches and even a few paddocks. Not everything made it into the ad, but there will be more to come.
“One of the best things was all the people that came up to us while we were filming. We knew Tina was popular but had no idea just how popular.
“From lots of people asking for selfies to people singing the ‘sell us your car’ song – or just yelling out ‘Cars! Cars! Cars!’.
“Wherever we went people came up and wanted to talk to Tina. She was pretty stoked and so were we.”
RNZ trust targets ‘too modest’
In our first episode of our new Media Insider podcast this week, Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith opens up on the performances of RNZ and TVNZ – and the Government’s expectations of the two publicly owned broadcasters.
A few hours after the podcast release on Thursday, the Treasury happened to release the two official letters of expectations delivered in early March to TVNZ chairman Alastair Carruthers and RNZ chairman Jim Mather.
In both letters, Goldsmith outlines his desire for the entities to build public trust.
“We are concerned that a variety of sources indicate the public’s trust in media is continuing to decline,” Goldsmith wrote.
“I also receive a significant volume of correspondence from the public expressing concern about accuracy, balance, fairness, and broadcasting standards.”
While not confined to TVNZ and RNZ, Goldsmith wrote, declining trust trends remained a “significant concern”.
Goldsmith told RNZ that its trust targets were “too modest”. The organisation had been striving to reach 55% as the percentage of people who rate it as an organisation they can trust by 2027.
“Reflecting the importance of RNZ’s role as a national broadcaster in maintaining trust, and the trend of declining trust, our continuing expectation is that RNZ has clear and ambitious targets for increasing the level of public trust in RNZ,” said Goldsmith.
In a press release this week, RNZ said its trust ranking had lifted by seven percentage points in six months.
“The growth in trust was captured in RNZ’s latest audience survey by Verian Research, which featured a larger sample of 2000 New Zealanders. In the survey, 56% agree RNZ is an organisation you can trust – up from 49% on the previous result.“
The statement quoted RNZ chief executive and editor-in-chief Paul Thompson, who said RNZ “had a strategic focus on lifting trust levels, so it was great to see the improvement”.
Meanwhile, Goldsmith told TVNZ: “We appreciate TVNZ is consistently considered one of New Zealand’s most trusted media organisations, supported by editorial and operational independence arrangements.
“This position is why we expect TVNZ to play a stronger role as a national broadcaster, strengthening its own performance in earning trust, and sharing insights and experience to strengthen the public’s trust in the media sector. As a Crown-owned media company, we, and the public, expect TVNZ to lead by example.”
Just don’t call it a merger
The letters of expectation also outline the Government’s expectation that TVNZ and RNZ will work more closely together.
“To support TVNZ’s ability to deliver public media outcomes over the long term, we expect TVNZ to identify opportunities to work with Radio New Zealand Limited, where feasible, to enhance audience reach and delivery of local content, as well as to minimise duplication of investment, including in digital infrastructure,” wrote Goldsmith.
He told RNZ the same thing.
The two organisations will have a golden opportunity to show they’re listening to the Government when RNZ moves in with TVNZ in Auckland later this year.
A small town’s media war
A somewhat fraught media battle is unfolding in a small New Zealand town, where the publishers of two free community newspapers can agree on only one thing: one of the papers is unlikely to survive.
Where London might be considered a more likely backdrop for a newspaper war, this particular battle is playing out in Levin, the small Horowhenua town with a population of about 20,000.
Late last year, it looked likely that residents in Levin and surrounding towns would lose their sole, free local paper, with NZME’s decision to close the Horowhenua Chronicle, which was first published in 1893.
The final edition of the Chronicle, under NZME ownership, rolled off the presses on December 20.
But two things happened in relatively quick time.
Firstly, Ian Carson – a former senior news and sub-editor at The Evening Post in Wellington and publisher of the Ōtaki Today website and monthly newspaper – moved in by establishing a new, free community newspaper, Horowhenua Star.
And in a relatively late move, the Horowhenua Chronicle was saved, after sales rep Richard Christie bought the title from NZME for a nominal $1.
The first edition of the Chronicle under Christie’s directorship appeared on January 17 and now appears every Thursday.
The Star’s first edition was published two weeks later on January 31; it appears every Friday.
By the time it launched, the new newspaper had already snapped up two of the Chronicle’s former journalists, Paul Williams as editor and Janine Baalbergen, as well as a sales rep, Pip Hakaraia.
Christie, meantime, has a mix of five fulltime and part-time staff, including himself and a new editor Ashleigh Collis.
There is no love lost between the publishers.
Over the past two weeks, Christie has published articles, under the headline “Reasons to support the Horowhenua Chronicle”, with some not-so-subtle digs at the Star, by saying the Chronicle had not received any advertisements from the council and “we don’t do disguised advertising in the form of business profiles”.
“We have formed the perfect team,” Christie wrote.
“Our opposition claimed to have the ‘best journalists’. But they were wrong. They underestimated our fierceness, our willingness to go to great lengths to get the best shot.”
In a social media post, Carson described the article as “wrong on so many counts”.
He told Media Insider, after the appearance of the article for a second time yesterday: “He’s just packaged it as an advertorial this week, pretty well the same stuff, accusing us of bias and all the rest of it.
“He has done everything he can to undermine us and try to get rid of us as quickly as possible and we’re still here.”
The Star says it distributes about 15,000 copies each week; the Chronicle says it distributes about 14,280.
“It makes life difficult when somebody is spreading rumours about you and you get an ad, you feel confident and he just sees it in the paper and offers it for half price,” said Carson.
“We’re not used to dealing with competitors like that. In our day, of course, [at The Evening Post], we’d be fiercely competitive with The Dominion but we’d still go down to the pub and have a beer, talk about it and then have another go the next day.”
Carson says it’s taken a while, but the new Star, which generally runs at 24 pages, is making money. But he doesn’t think, long-term, there is room for two papers.
“We’re just doing our own thing, trying to produce our best newspaper,” says Carson. “What the opposition does is up to them. I don’t think there’s room for two newspapers in the region.
“I think that two newspapers in any rural community is a hard push. It’s interesting and it makes it competitive and it keeps you on your toes, but the reality is that it’s hard to make money on it.”
Christie said the rivalry was “pretty intense”, but he also said – somewhat at odds with what’s unfolding – that the publishers had learned early on “that if we bad-mouthed each other, it looked bad for us individually”.
“We’re both just kind of focusing on building the best business that we can, focusing on sales and making sure that we have operating processes as done as well as possible.
“It’s not like I’ve got a dartboard in there on my wall with their faces on it or anything like that … but it is absolutely a battle because at the end of the day I do not believe, based on the financials that I’ve seen, that the advertising revenues in Horowhenua for print can really support two long-term businesses.”
He said the Chronicle had stripped out $100,000 in annual operating costs since he bought it from NZME. The business had a “fantastic” April but a “tough” May.
He said he had asked the council why it wasn’t yet advertising in the Chronicle and was awaiting a response.
The Star’s Carson said he had conversations with the local council after it was originally announced the Chronicle was closing.
“We were first off the block and they said, ‘yeah, we’d love to support you’. We were first in, before the Chronicle even announced that they were going to be reviving.”
Christie was hopeful the council would start advertising with him.
“They’re spending ratepayers’ money, so they can’t be simply unilaterally going with one advertising partner without doing a cost-benefit analysis.
“We tend to be a little bit more pugnacious, I think. We’re not afraid to throw a few punches at things, policies we don’t agree with at the council level, that sort of thing.”
Christie and Carson say they have not spoken with each other.
“I really think this is going to be a duke-em out situation,” says Christie. “I’m sorry to say it, but it’s turned out this way.”
One Good Poll
A costly PR exercise
A public relations conference in Auckland this week was expensive – $2499+GST for single tickets to the two-day conference in Auckland, or $1899+GST for multi-buy (two-plus) tickets.
The conference was timed so it ran alongside the Public Relations Institute of NZ’s (Prinz) annual awards evening, for which tickets were sold separately – they were priced separately, at more than $300 each.
“That might all be affordable for a metropolitan council with ratepayers’ money in its pocket, or a large agency charging $10k-plus monthly retainers,” one PR practitioner said on LinkedIn about the conference and awards costs.
“For a sole practitioner in the regions, and adding flights and accommodation on top, it’s completely out of scope.”
Many of the 500-plus people who reacted to her post agreed.
“Cash grabs are not cool and if that isn’t its intention, it needs to up its PR game,” said one respondent.
I thought it would be good, and interesting, to get a PR response to a PR practitioner’s concerns about the high cost of a PR conference.
Here then, is Prinz chief executive Susanne Martin’s emailed answers to my specific questions.
“As a membership organisation, providing value for members is at the heart of everything we do,” she said.
“Like all membership organisations, Prinz has faced significant financial challenges in a post-Covid environment.
“As a result, we made the decision not to manage the delivery of our own conference due to the anticipated costs and financial risk.
“We chose to co-locate our awards evening with the Brightstar conference so that members could make the most of professional development opportunities that coincided with our gala dinner.
“Our partnering with Brightstar is limited to this co-location and a discounted rate for Prinz members to attend the conference.
“We do not have control over costs for attendance at this conference and have no financial benefit from the conference. We are saddened to hear some of our members are unable to afford to attend and we understand the difficulties for them in this current environment.”
A perfect PR response, but not much consolation at the end of the day for those who couldn’t afford to go.
Martin said margins for the separate Prinz awards were “very small, with profits being used to ensure the future economic viability of Prinz”.
“We have taken all steps to minimise costs while still delivering an event that celebrates the best in our business.”
For a full list of the Prinz Award winners, see below.
Andrew Shaw, RIP
An outpouring of love and memories this week for one of New Zealand’s most adored television and production industry leaders.
Andrew Shaw died last week, at the age of 68, after a battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife and four children.
He made his name in the 1970s as the presenter of popular children’s TV programme Here’s Andy (later renamed Hey, Hey it’s Andy), before becoming a producer, director and programmer and, later, a renowned media leader and executive.
“You won’t find anybody like that in television again,” one experienced production industry leader told me this week.
“Here was a guy working in a factory who gets a gig fronting a kids’ TV show and becomes somebody that everybody who grew up in the 70s knows.
“And then he becomes one of the most accomplished executives and discerners of what the public wants to watch and helps create that.
“He made music videos, he made game shows, he oversaw drama. I saw a note that one of the Australian executives had written – he said this was the man who could solve any problem anywhere in the world.”
A TVNZ spokeswoman told 1 News this week: “Andrew spent much of his career here. Some of the biggest programmes in TVNZ’s archive carry Andrew’s name in the credits.
“Andrew’s final role with TVNZ was as our deputy director of content and he was a much-loved leader and mentor in our content team.
“Andrew would have dismissed attempts to describe his legacy with a witty retort that would have had everybody laughing, but his immense contribution to television in New Zealand cannot be overstated.
“He was a passionate advocate for the local production community, a loyal colleague and a great friend. We will miss him very much and our thoughts are with Andrew’s family.”
Prinz Award winners
The Pead PR team took out the supreme prize at the Prinz Awards this week for their work organising the successful world record haka event at Eden Park last year.
The BBC described it as one of the happiest stories of 2024.
Pead PR founder Deborah Pead said the supreme award win was “certainly a proud and joyful moment for the team at Pead”.
The Guinness World Record was reclaimed from the French on September 29, when more than 6500 people gathered at Eden Park.
The event also raised funds for the Raukatauri Music Therapy Trust.
“Staging the world’s largest haka at Eden Park was an expression of national pride and cultural identity – a nation-building celebration of New Zealand’s heritage,” said Pead.
The campaign, co-led by Dame Hinewehi Mohi and Deborah Pead, also sparked an important global conversation. After it, Guinness World Records undertook a review of its guidelines for records involving indigenous cultures.
“It never felt right for the French to hold this title, and this positive step reflects the impact of our team’s efforts to champion cultural integrity and ensure rightful recognition on the global stage,” said Pead.
Pead said the success of the campaign was made possible by a “remarkable coalition of collaborators” including Pead, Extended Whānau, BallyHoo Events, Cornerstore, UFO Rodeo, Inside Out Productions, Eden Park Trust, Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, and an army of volunteers.
All agencies involved donated their time.
Other Prinz Awards gold medal award winners
Best use of media relations
Special PR for KFC Gravy Train
Government relations and public affairs
Acumen for Advocating for Food Security: How Ingham’s secured a policy change for poultry farming in New Zealand
Internal communications
Great Scott for Connecting the dots to protect lives – Methanex’s process safety campaign
Community relations and engagement
Hamilton City Council for A rose amongst thorns – the challenging evolution of Hamilton Gardens
Marketing communication
Pead for Restoring Mana (prestige): The World’s Largest Haka for Raukatauri Music Therapy Trust
Sally Logan-Milne Young Practitioner of the Year Award
Winner: Fiann Blackham
Excellence in research, measurement & evaluation
Winner: Great Scott for Connecting the dots to protect lives – Methanex’s process safety campaign
PR In-house Team of the Year
ProCare
PR Consultancy of the Year – small to medium
Scope Communications
PR Consultancy of the Year – large
One Plus One Communications
PRINZ Supreme Award
Winner: Pead for Restoring Mana: The World’s Largest Haka for Raukatauri Music Therapy Trust
Watch Media Insider – The Podcast on YouTube, or listen to it on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor and has a small shareholding in NZME.
