Tui Beer Plumber via Saatchi & Saatchi NZ takes Grand Prix at Yahoo! NZ Digital Strategy Awards

The ‘Tui Beer Plumber‘ campaign via Saatchi & Saatchi NZ, has delivered top digital honours for PHDiQ in the 2013 Yahoo! New Zealand Digital Strategy Awards.

The campaign saw the ultimate prank played on an unsuspecting Tui drinker – when his entire house was re-plumbed so that only Tui beer came out of all the taps – with hilarious but compelling bottom-line results.

Judges said the campaign’s success was grounded in a great idea with which PHDiQ then expertly harnessed the power of digital to achieve an online groundswell of support in both New Zealand and overseas.

The campaign was developed by a cross-agency team consisting of members from Saatchi & Saatchi, Spark PHD, PHDiQ and Porter Novelli. Digital provided the perfect launch platform and what followed was a carefully orchestrated and extensive digital seeding strategy targeting key influencers both locally and internationally.

PHDiQ utilised bespoke video and social plug-ins to enable fans to quickly share the Tui Plumber story across their networks. YouTube in particular, was used to great effect to infiltrate online and mobile screens, with the campaign eventually becoming the most watched piece of New Zealand content of 2013 within the key core demographic.

And, with genuinely authentic content that resonated with the target demographic, consumers were quick to organically endorse it and pass it on to their mates.

Says Alisa Higgins, Yahoo! Digital Strategy Award judge and general manager of the Interactive Advertising Bureau: “The viral component of the campaign was cleverly planned and executed with PHDiQ utilising data gained throughout the campaign to continue the momentum of the video.

“This well staged digital roll-out combined subtle branding with strong storytelling, gaining an impressive 1.5 million views within 24 hours, and creating the foundations for on-going targeted niche marketing and significant mainstream media coverage.”

Yahoo! Digital Strategy Award first half year winner and Auckland agency Spacestation’s ‘Need2Know’ campaign for insurance company, IAG New Zealand, was runner-up campaign of the year.

Says Louis Niven, Yahoo! New Zealand general manager sales: “The Digital Strategy Awards are all about recognising and rewarding smart digital thinking. They are a vehicle to showcase the role that digital media strategy, often the unsung hero, plays in the success of campaigns and in delivering outstanding results against business objectives for the advertiser.

“The standard of digital advertising in New Zealand is among the best in the world and the calibre of entries into the Yahoo! Digital Strategy Awards over the course of 2013 is evidence of this. We congratulate the winners on their brilliant work.”

The 2012 Yahoo! Digital Strategy Grand Prix award was won by DraftFCB Media for its ‘MINI Driving Dogs’ campaign.