Saatchi and Saatchi: Creating Meaning through Marketing

In the context of promotion, advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi believe that “Nothing is Impossible”. The agency has helped countless businesses with advertising their respective brands to desired target markets all over the globe. Today, I was fortunate enough to visit Saatchi and Saatchi’s impressive office in Auckland (as seen above). More captivating than its physical aesthetic appeal were the examples of messages presented to us by our key speaker, Dane. Dane provided us numerous advertisements communicated by video that focused on marketing in sport. By far the most creative, interesting, and seemingly successful campaign they ran was for Tui beer, that truly engaged fans in the sport of cricket. The premise of the promotion is that fans buy Tui beer and receive an orange t-shirt, which then makes them eligible to win a part of NZ$1 million by catching a “six” (ball hit outside boundary equaling 6 “runs”) with one hand. Dane then introduced us to some of the work they have done to appeal to the country as a whole by utilizing nationally known athletes in an attempt to unify New Zealand through sports. This is where I found myself internalizing and questioning the media before me, rather than feeling inspired or impressed by the creativity they employed with corporate sponsors….

The first of these advertisements was made for ANZ Bank prior to the Commonwealth Games and featured three New Zealand athletes: Shot Putter Tom Walsh, Cyclist Sam Webster, and Netball player Katrina Rore. The video showed athletes partaking in their respective sports, with examples of supportive social media posts coming from New Zealanders floating in the background. Immediately, I thought this advertisement was a means of showing how the games and athletes in particular bring the nation together. Then it occurred to me that each athlete appeared to be representative of the Pakeha population. It was reminiscent of reading I had done surrounding Dave Gallaher and his rise from rugby player to national hero where the embodiment of his person formed a sort of national identity for New Zealand. Then again, this is an advertising agency attempting to appeal to a certain target audience for ANZ Bank where those athletes may have been chosen for more specified marketing reasons. On another yet related note, we viewed some of their work with NBA player Steven Adams and his promotion of PowerAde. Aside from being the only active NBA player from New Zealand, to me Adams persona and background truly is a unifying example of sport in the nation. His father was a massive (6’11) Englishman and his mother from a small country called Tonga in Oceania. Steven Adams is a known figure in sports, but formerly unknown to me was that he is a fusion of the Paheka and Polynesian cultures that have split the New Zealand population throughout history. Each time the behemoth Englishman steps on the court for the Thunder, his sleeve of tribal tattoos encompassing his middle name, “Funaki”, remind us of his roots in the indigenous Maori culture.  

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