Rivet has taken the Asia Pacific region’s most prestigious interactive honours with two trophies at AWARD for ElectroCity, its website for Genesis Energy. ElectroCity won Gold for best Online and Mobile Game, and Silver for best Website. The game was created by Rivet’s Sydney-based Interactive Creative Director, Tom Markham.

Only eight Golds were given out at AWARD, the single most important regional advertising awards show. This is despite a record total of 360 Finalists — from not only Australia and New Zealand, but also countries as far afield as China, Malaysia, The Philippines and Singapore.

Rivet’s New Zealand office rounded off a hugely successful night with a Bronze in the Flat Direct Mail category for its Vodafone Welcome Pack mail piece, and also had a Finalist for the Roost Mini Mortgage Guide. As an added bonus, sister agency Lowe New Zealand had two AWARD Finalists — for the ‘They weren’t born to be worn’ campaign for SAFE (Save Animals From Exploitation). Lowe’s ‘Baby in the water’ commercial for Watersafety netted Film Construction three Bronzes — for Direction, Cinematography and Editing.

Well done to all the people that worked on these campaigns. Campaign Brief has more coverage of the awards.

Sydney agency Lowe Rivet has just launched the first integrated campaign for intelligent men’s magazine Dazed & Confused since the Australian version of the cult magazine was launched in early 2007.

Dazed & Confused – internationally regarded a champion of the alternative mainstream male consumer – is published by the Paper Tiger Media Group.

Group CEO of Lowe Australasia Stephen Pearson said the publisher’s brief was simple, yet complex – take the magazine’s philosophy ‘be the first to know’ and attract social influencers to the title, without necessarily using the ‘first to know’ proposition. Pearson adds Dazed & Confused’s publisher Rob Bergin gave Lowe Hunt complete creative licence with a request for ‘progressive work’. “The creative challenge was to explore this area of being the first to know and make itcome to life in an interesting and original way. To be cool without saying you’re cool is a precarious path for advertisers,” Pearson says.

Creative team: Ben Smith and Neil McGuirk

The world’s most influential marketing blogger, Joseph Jaffe, has reviewed our website Electrocity. He said “it’s a quality, quality site”. Tops!! Click here to hear the podcast.

Last Friday night our brand work for the launch of MTV NZ won two Promax awards. Including the Gold Promax Award - Best Television image campaign for a television channel in Australia and New Zealand and a Silver for Best Music Promo. WooHoo!! Check out the video reel.

Stella Artois and Lowe Worldwide have launched a new site that takes a trip back in time to meet up with an eclectic host of characters and challenges, will you risk thwarting the gods of thunder in 1366 – or take on the 9 step pouring ritual to produce the perfect virtual pint? Just don’t fall off the edge of the world! There is so much content which has been very nicely shot and designed that you will spend ages checking it all out.

You will discover the history, heritage and secrets behind the 650 years of quality brewing in Leuven – and indulge in challenges, games and a true cinematic experience. It’s a mash of flash, video and gaming which seems to work very nicely. I saved the beer from being stolen and was very happy with myself!

The site will officially launch to the public on Tuesday.

The A-League kicks off this week and to launch Season 3 we’ve produced a shiny new campaign which has received some great coverage over the last week.

Lowe Hunt CEO Stephen Pearson says the fans’ experiences provided a powerful proposition for the new campaign and the inspiration for its visually arresting and compelling creative, complete with new line: “90 minutes, 90 emotions”.

“This campaign for the third year of the Hyundai A-League is about celebrating the infectious atmosphere which comes from the fans’ collective experience and the emotional roller-coaster of highs and lows throughout 90 minutes of each and every game.

“It was vital that this was presented in a visually striking manner true to the brand, and we knew we needed to be true to the scale and youth appeal of the first two campaigns, showing the power and atmosphere in a fresh way – not how you might see a game broadcast,” Stephen says.

The “90 minutes, 90 emotions” brand and retail campaign will run across cinema, commercial and subscription TV, viral, web, print, radio and experiential.

Check out the TV on the A-League website.

We recently took on the challenge of how to get a positive message about a power company through to students. Using online gaming to cut through the clutter in an increasingly fragmented advertising market, the result was a sophisticated online educational game called ElectroCity.

After 18 months of intense creative, design and technical work, the game has already been overwhelming successful: there have been up to 55,000 daily visitor sessions on the www.electrocity.co.nz site, and the average length of a session is more than ten minutes. More than 7.6 million page views have been recorded in just over two months and over 370 schools have registered to play the game, which is designed for classroom use.

According to the game creator, Tom Markham, “ElectroCity is educational, but it’s also really fun to play. You start with a pristine New Zealand landscape of rivers, mountains and bush. Then it’s a case of deciding what you want to do with it. You can create a clean and green tourist town or a monstrous metropolis with millions of citizens. You can even do nothing.

“Unlike other building games, our scoring system does not force players to focus only on growth. But ElectroCity is still competitive and addictive. That’s the trick.”

Play it for yourself or watch the interactive case study or better still chat to Mark on how we can do a campaign for you.

Campaign Brief’s Videoblog was in action at last week’s AFA’s and has just posted a pretty comprehensive video report with vox pops from the event as well as insight into what excited the judges.

AIM’s ‘Don’t Torture Your Soul With The Wrong Career’

While it seems like there was some significant debate over the final winners, one thing that was clear from all the judges – they were overwhelmed by the detail to which agencies and clients had gone to demonstrate effectiveness and ROI. In picking up gold on our Football Federation of Australia campaign - Finalist Judge, James Sheffield of Commonwealth Bank said the campaign showed ‘good innovative thinking’.

Our work for the Australian Institute of Music - Fuelling Inspiration and Business – was the last of the bronze awards of the night. With an ROI of over 500% and 46% increase in revenue for AIM – the campaign demonstrates how approaching the education sector with innovative creative also let us achieve some great results.

Stella Screen have screened the classic horror film The Shining in Brisbane’s Old Museum, which was refitted to look like the film’s hellish Overlook Hotel. To create a genuine buzz around the event we extended the experiential theme by recreating the ghostly bar scene from the film. The bar was a meticulous recreation of the film’s Gold Room, complete with eerie 1920s barman Lloyd.

Groups of passers by were invited into the depths of The Stella Artois Gold Room by pale strangers dressed in coat and tails. Guests then followed the sound of 1920s ballroom music anticipating the buzz of a crowded bar only to be confronted by the lone bartender, Lloyd. The visitors were then directed to another room located down a dark corridor where they’d find other scary cues from the film. On entering room 237, another stranger would ask them to write their details in the guest register so they could be contacted.

The Brisbane locals that didn’t run out screaming left the bar with a mysterious invitation and code to enter a website - stellagoldroom.com.

Using their code, they could access the guest register on the website and confirm their booking details. The ticket was then emailed to them. The Stella Artois Gold Room achieved excellent word of mouth filling seats for the screening within days.

We created Stella Fight Club. A campaign to get people in to watch a special screening of the movie Fight Club, which was sponsored by Stella Artois.

We painted up barmen to look like they were in a massive fight and left the customers to ask what happened. The barmen would then slide a napkin across that had the url - www.fight-club.co.nz written on it - and that was all that was said. Customers registered on the website and were invited to the screening.