A New Zealand media company for New Zealanders

 

APN News & Media had an array of thriving and well-established sub-brands, but there was a massive disconnect between its media businesses and the company as a whole – which incidentally stood for The Australian Publishing Network and thus afforded little connection back to New Zealand. As part of the impending IPO and sharemarket float, the company was already primed to realign itself and asked Designworks to help them on their journey.

 

We researched the changing global media landscape, drawing inspiration from the new breed of companies redefining the media. We also conducted a series of ‘speedshops’ with the senior exec team and separately with representatives from the different businesses – both the older generation and younger digital natives – to glean insights. We discovered the perception of APN News and Media (both internally and externally) was “New Zealand’s largest media company that nobody had heard of”. For us, this presented the best opportunity to create a new agile and actively involved parent brand: NZME.

Functionally, NZME stands for New Zealand Media and Entertainment, but the ‘ME’ – reflects the nature of a brand that talks to New Zealanders in different ways, always authentic and relevant to their lives. The driving idea behind the brand identity was ‘At The Centre of New Zealand Connections’. By putting the consumer at the centre of how they want to customize content, as well as being in tune with what New Zealanders want, we bring back local relevance and flavour. This helped inform the brand architecture as well, moving away from what had been a traditional top down and hierarchical structure, to a more active structure, with NZME always at the heart of its powerbrands. The NZME brand is fuelled by creativity and originality. We designed a system that would frame the amazing content – not lie over the top like a corporate badge – but actively sit in the centre, letting the content flourish. One brand with many expressions, alive and teeming with content.

 

To simplify access to content, we created three portals, a new way of consuming the content, aggregating News, Sports and Entertainment across all the brands. Thinking about the brand’s role as an inspiring connector we ensured it would be super easy and simple to access content – one destination to find everything easily.

 

The project, which included brand and creative strategy, signage, wayfinding and environmental graphics, a new website as well as a brand film, brought together the full breadth of Designworks’ capabilities, from strategy and design, through to spatial, motion and digital.